Bookish Community Book Club January Edition: The God of the Woods (continued)

Part II: Weaponized Class in The God of the Woods (Let's talk about Louise, JP, Annabelle, the Peters, Judy, and Vic)

Part II: Weaponized Class in The God of the Woods

An exploration of privilege, power, and leverage between the wealthy & the working class

The God of the Woods presented dizzying class discrepancies between the haves and the have nots, the monied, landed class and the town’s working class, the prized and the expendable. The rich demanded perfection in outward appearances, while the rot of pride, neglect, and control ate away at their private lives; the working class battled the onslaught of petty slights and the escalating implications and outright lies, leveled by the Van Laars and their ilk, that threatened working class families, livelihoods, and freedom.

Few relationships in The God of the Woods depict the fractious relations between the wealthy and the working class like the gaslighting, abuse, and disregard for human dignity displayed in the drawn out affair between John Paul (JP) McLellan and Louise Donnadieu.

Wealthy heir-apparent to the Van Laar banking empire, JP, claims to be in love with Louise, but treats her as a possession–one he finds expendable–from the start. He staked a claim on her two weeks into her (very short) tenure at Union College. Yet, after a year of dating, he has no idea she lives in the town next to his godparents’ estate and Camp Emerson. He doesn’t know because he hasn’t listened to stories about her life enough to make the connection. She doesn’t exist in his sphere of origin–only in the sphere he is trying to create to escape from the “responsibilities” of his station in life. 

Louise is conscious, when JP suggests that she apply for a counselor position at Camp Emerson, that none of the townspeople hold counselor rolls. Those are for wealthy camp alumni or college students looking for easy summer jobs. The townspeople employed on the Preserve hold jobs that require physical labor. They put their hands and their bodies behind their work, physically toiling for the Van Laars. This appears to be accepted as the natural order of things, one that none of the townspeople question in mixed company. 

Despite JP securing the job at Camp Emerson for Louise (TJ later confirms that Louise being hired was at the behest of “the family,” noting that she’d never been keen on doing JP any favors), Louise is never invited to meet the Van Laars. Even though she works on property a few hundred yards from where they spend summers. When Louise jokes (or prods) JP about sneaking her in to sleep on a soft bed (instead of a camp bunk), he is appalled, saying it would be “rude” to disrespect his hosts that way. 

The dichotomy between what appears “rude” to JP is telling. 

JP spends an entire week a stone’s throw from Camp Emerson (at the Van Laar Preserve) and only twice ventures down to see Louise. Instead of in a bed, they have sex on a towel thrown on the ground. A towel that, Louise notes, she’s always the one that remembers to bring. On the night of the camp dance, JP stumbles up to the campfire, drunk, as Lee Towsend and Louise drift toward each other. He immediately runs at Lee, who flattens JP with just a few punches. Despite staying away for the week (and, we discover later, having a relationship with Louise’s seventeen year old counselor in training), JP calls Louise a whore as he runs back into the woods toward the Van Laar Preserve busted up and bleeding. 

This slight, one that stings significantly less than the beating he’d leveled on Louise a few winters before, inflames JP’s ego enough to prompt him to ultimately attempt to frame Louise for the disappearance and murder of Barbara Van Laar. Or maybe his ego wasn’t inflamed at all. Maybe it was just easy to blame her. His rich (underage) girlfriend (Louise’s CIT) vouching for him, his lawyer father, and his wealth insulated him. After all, Louise had nothing but her word. Not even a lawyer, since she’d (inadvertently) refused a public defender thinking maybe she could enlist her “fiance’s” father in her defence. But JP’s father, in response to Louise’s plight, backs away slowly and physically shuts the door to her troubles. Neither JP nor his father is willing to help Louise once she steps out of line, challenging their position of authority and privilege. 

What JP felt for Louise wasn’t love. It was a loosening of the “real life” he was expected to lead after college. Louise was an escapist game for him. He drunkenly beat her for vocalizing her disdain for him–after he accused her of sleeping with someone in his college rooming house for no apparent reason at all–beat her so badly it took a week for her body to heal. And his concern, after that abusive rage, was that his mother would be so disappointed in him. 

Indeed. 

JP never produced an engagement ring for Louise–something they’d argued over multiple times. This “oversight” gave JP plausible deniability about a relationship with Louise, a tact that proved useful when he wanted to implicate her for murder. But Louise stayed–despite the lack of a ring, the abuse, the unpredictability of contact with JP. For years. In an unhappy, abusive relationship with a man who publicly refused to claim her. Why? She wanted his money. Not for flights of fancy, expensive clothes, trips around the world. She wanted his money because it was a clear path out of Shattuck. Money represented stability for Louise (and for her brother, Jesse). Money meant safety and escaping the bonds of poverty. Louise could not see a clear path out–and so she chose JP as her path, instead of betting on herself. 

It was a decision that almost cost her dearly.

Delphine, Alice Van Laar’s older sister, never came in contact with Louise; as a guest at the Van Laar’s Blackfly Good-by she wouldn’t have had any reason to know who Louise was at all (Louise wasn’t invited, which was probably best since JP was dating the underage daughter of another of the Van Laars’ family friends). But she knows the downfalls of the upper class: “People like them will seek a collective target almost automatically. People of our class, I mean. We were bred to do it. We’ve been doing it since birth” (111).

We see this kind of targeting time and time again. 

Annabelle (the CIT in Louise’s cabin) is willing not only to rat herself and Louise out for being away from the camp after curfew, but she’s willing to lie to say the bag of puke (ugh) and the joint brought in by law enforcement as evidence belonged solely to Louise. Annabelle also managed to include a bag of cocaine in the rounded up evidence, which ultimately landed Louise in jail. All of this, of course, was an outright lie, designed simply to save herself at the cost of sacrificing Louise–who is once again deemed expendable by the wealthy elite. 

Louise isn’t the only member of the working class targeted for derision. The guests at the Van Laar Preserve serve Investigator Judyta Lubtack a mixture of apathy and low-key contempt when she shows up to investigate Barbara’s disappearance. One woman laughs outright at Judy as she tries to interview her and her cohorts. The interview with Bear and Barbara’s grandfather (Peter Two) really ups the ante: he dismisses Judy outright, only acquiescing when he hears the “abasement” in her voice from a “please,” even though she is a law enforcement officer. And when, in the course of the interview, she mentions Bear’s name, Peter Two becomes immediately belligerent: “Rich people, thought Judy–she thought this then, and she thinks it now–generally become more enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs” (158). 

Peter Two, as it happens, has tallied a mighty  list of wrongs. He assisted his son in covering up the accidental drowning death of his grandson, Bear. In the process of obfuscating facts about Bear’s case, he drug two innocent men into the onslaught of deceit with him. 

Both suffered mightily.

Carl Stoddard, a landscaper at the Van Laar Preserve, had a close relationship with Bear, who was charming in his own right but who was also playing emotional surrogate for Carl’s son, Scotty, who’d recently died. Carl taught Bear basic wilderness survival skills. He taught Bear how to whittle. This kindness became pivotal in the investigation: the only clue found in Bear’s disappearance was a small whittled bear found near a path in the woods. The suspicion prompted by this find was only compounded by the fact that (allegedly) Carl was the last one to see Bear before he disappeared.

But Carl, who understands that at the very least Bear didn't’ like his grandfather (Peter Two) and might have actually feared him, tells his wife that he believes (correctly) that Peter Two had something to do with Bear’s disappearance. She begins to cry, and Carl mistakenly believes she thinks he hurt the boy. She replies, “‘I’m crying because I think you’re probably right,’ Her shoulders were hunched and miserable. Her head was down. ‘And because I think no one will believe you’” (200).

She is right. 

The Van Laars allow Carl to be implicated in Bear’s death (even after he dies of a heart attack in police custody), even though his involvement was never proven. The Van Laars are untouchable because of their wealth and their place in the town; they exploit that influence to create a version of the truth that preserves their reputation. The reputations of the working class be damned.

The Van Laars also coerce Vic Hewitt into participating in their subterfuge surrounding Bear’s death by playing on his attachment to Camp Emerson and the grounds of the Van Laar Preserve, on which he’d been raised as an adopted brother to Peter Two and where he and his daughter made their home. A home and land he was later denied his inheritance to by Peter Two, the executor of Peter One’s will. 

The year of Bear’s disappearance, Vic Hewitt attended the Blackfly Good-by as a laborer, instead of as a guest as he had when Peter One was alive. And it was in this capacity that he was approached after Peter Two found Bear drowned in the lake. As an expert guide, they needed Vic to help them hide the body of the beloved Bear. When Vic sees the emotion that Peter Two struggles with after the loss of his grandson, he reaches out to put his hand on Peter’s shoulder; his touch is shaken off immediately, Peter looking “imperious, appalled.”

Ultimately, it is not loyalty to the Van Laars or the desire for money that prompts Vic to disregard his moral compass and help bury Bear’s body. Instead, it is Vic’s devotion to his own daughter, who he wants to be able to have agency over her own choices and her own life–even if that life is “unconventional,” and his quest to provide a secure future for her that propels Vic to carry out the Van Laar’s plan.

The abysmal treatment of the working class by the wealthy Van Laars and their associates is predicated on privilege, power, and a lack of empathy (or extension of basic human goodness). The working class, to varying degrees, are willing to sustain a relationship with the wealthy because they are seeking security and stability–at the very least that is what drives  Louise and Vic’s continued affiliation with the Van Laars and their ilk. 

But in a moment of clarity, Judy offers a sage observation about the ability of the poor and working class to make their way in the world: “They’ll be fine. The Hewitts–like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even–don't’ need to rely on anyone but themselves. It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others” (453).