70 pages • 2 hours read
Catriona WardThe Last House on Needless Street
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Dee’s Guilt: Snakes and Ophidiophobia
Both in the story that Dee constructs to relieve her of her guilt for her responsibility for Lulu’s death, and in the real version of events, Dee comes face to face with a family of snakes in the lake, imprinting a deep fear of snakes that plagues Dee and ultimately costs Dee her life. The clinical term for the fear of snakes is “ophidiophobia,” and for Dee, this fear can be debilitating. Dee’s ophidiophobia thematically represents her guilt. She is a “snake”—she betrays her sister’s trust, and metaphorically poisons her family. By not looking after Lulu out of spite, she could be considered not only partially responsible for her sister’s death, but also her parents’ marriage falling apart and her father’s death. She nearly murders Ted, which would be a grave injustice committed just to fit her own need for absolution. Her ophidiophobia is a manifestation of the cognitive dissonance she feels over her own actions, and snakes represent the poetic justice Dee receives by the end of the novel.
Dee’s fear of snakes prevents her from following Ted into the forest, and it presents itself whenever she comes into contact with nature. This is in stark contrast to Ted, who is able to move in harmony with nature: when he goes to move his gods from the birch grove, he reflects, “When I stop for a moment to catch my breath, a brown snake slides additional over the toe of my boot. I am part of the forest. It holds me in its heart” (142). In a parallel scene, Dee presumably encounters the same snake: “Dee is alone with whatever is coming through the dark. Soft, constant sound of a muscular body sliding. Dee opens her mouth wider, wider, until her jaw strains and cracks. She screams in silence” (148). Ted’s reaction to the snake indicates his innocence—he has nothing to fear because he has done nothing wrong. It is deeply ironic that a snakebite ends up killing Dee; in a way, this causes her story to come full circle, her lies catching up with her to devour her, as Detective Karen suggested it would, reminiscent of the image of the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. What Dee faces in the forest is less a rattlesnake than it is the long-coming consequences of her own actions, her guilt catching up with her. If Dee had looked after Lulu, or if she had told the truth about what happened to her at any point prior to tracking down Ted, she would not be in this position. In a final instance of poetic justice, Dee and Lulu switch places: While Lulu’s body is found, “[t[he thing that once was Dee lies far from any trail […]. What was Dee feeds the earth. Her scattered bones sink into the rich changing humus. No ghost walks under the spreading trees. What’s done is done” (283). Succumbing to the snake venom, Dee is now the missing person, with no one left to miss her.
Ted’s Gods, the Lord, and the Ankou
The creation, belief, and maintenance of gods is a prominent theme in The Last House on Needless Street, all stemming from Ted’s perception of the world via his mother’s influence. Ted’s gods initially appear to be a serial killer’s trophies from past kills—but this proves to be a red herring. Instead, they are relics of Ted’s mother, buried in the woods, representing the influence that the power of belief holds over one’s life. Mrs. Bannerman’s body and her possessions have no inherent power—just the power that Ted invests in them due to his continual belief in his mother’s influence on his life. Consequently, when the truth of his mother’s monstrous life is laid bare to him, Ted makes the choice to cease giving these “gods” power, and Mrs. Bannerman’s negative influence on him begins to fade.
Mrs. Bannerman came from Locronan, a small village in the Brittany region of France. Breton culture is distinct from Gallic French culture, derived from Celtic culture across the English Channel. Mrs. Bannerman and the people of her village believed in the Ankou, a spiritual figure akin to the Grim Reaper—a personification of death. According to Mrs. Bannerman, the Ankou followed her across the ocean to America; she tells Ted, “On the day he comes to me with open arms, wearing my face, I will be ready” (172). The protean nature of the Ankou, its ability to take on different forms and wear different faces, haunts Ted. It manifests itself in his fear of the personalities he locks in the attic, like the green boys, who are Ted’s deifications of the boys who have gone missing by the lake.
Olivia’s God—ostensibly the Christian God, but actually another personality in Ted’s head—is clearly derived from the Ankou. Early on, Olivia describes seeing the Lord for the first time: “He looked like everything. His face changed each moment. He looked like a yellow-beaked hawk, and then a maple lead, then a mosquito. I knew that my face was in there, too, somewhere among the many” (62). Olivia goes on to say, “I did not want to see it. I understood that would be the final thing. As I draw my last breath will show Himself and the face He wears will be mine” (62). This is directly drawn from Mrs. Bannerman’s belief about the Ankou; and, while Olivia remains pious toward her god, integrating with Night-time causes them to realize that the god that Olivia worships is not real. Night Olivia explains, “He’s a fragment of Ted’s imagination. Mommy talked so much about the ankou that the ankou came […]. That’s how gods travel, through minds” (312). The concept of the Ankou, but not the god itself, passed from Breton folklore, was filtered through Mrs. Bannerman’s interpretation and Ted’s misunderstanding, into Olivia’s world, where it became a personification of Olivia’s sense of duty toward Ted.
Trauma and Dissociative Identity Disorder
In the Afterward of The Last House on Needless Street, Ward writes, “Dissociative identity disorder may often be used as a horror device in fiction, but in my own small experience it is quite the opposite. Those who survive, and live with it, are always striving toward the good” (333). According to the bug man (and to real-life psychologists as well), DID is often thought of as a means for a child experiencing systematic abuse to cope with the trauma of their everyday life. Though DID is not revealed to be the causes of the many confusing moments in the novel until Chapter 33, Ward does heavily hint at it throughout the first half of the book. There are many discrepancies between Ted’s and Olivia’s narratives, indicating that one (or both) are unreliable narrators: the presence or absence of the Russian doll and the silver picture frame, the color of the rug in the living room, Lauren and Olivia being conspicuously unable to inhabit the house at the same time, and Olivia’s un-catlike behavior. As Lauren puts it, “What kind of cat can read? What kind of cat can talk?” (212). The presence of the bug man, too, indicates that all is not what it seems with Ted. Olivia is able to experience Ted’s sessions with the bug man; she hears him say things like “Everyone has a monster inside them” (137). In Ted, there are actually many personalities that exist to save him, not monsters. Here, the bug man represents the predation of the public on those with DID.
The bug man describes DID as “An intelligent child’s elegant solution to suffering” (227). He explains that there are two schools of thought on how to treat it: coconsciousness, finding a way to get the personalities to cohabit the body in harmony, and integration, in which “the alters are subsumed into the primary personality” (228). Ted has been ineffectually dealing with his personalities through cohabitation. He constructed the “weekend place,” his mentally constructed version of the house on Needless Street, for his personalities to live in. This proves an ineffective way of dealing with his trauma, causing conflict between his personalities. Lauren hates Olivia, who, in turn, does not like Lauren’s behavior. The green boys are locked in the attic and only addressed as objects of fear, as they are representations of those Ted fears his mother may have hurt at the lake. However, by the end of the novel, Ted learns to listen to his personalities, indicating that cohabitation will likely be his route for therapy.
