67 pages • 2 hours read
Chloe GongOur Violent Ends
Fiction | Novel | YA | 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.
Symbols & Motifs
Fashion and Hairstyles
Fashion, particularly makeup and hairstyles, recurs as a motif in Our Violent Ends. Though sometimes considered frivolous, style functions for Juliette as a means of expressing her real self, often in opposition to what is expected of her, though not in a way that limits her potential as a dangerous gangster heir. In Chapter 5, for example, Lady Cai enters Juliette’s room to invite her daughter and Kathleen to go shopping for a new Chinese qipao—she doesn’t think that Juliette, who prefers American-style dresses, has enough traditional Chinese attire. Juliette demurs, and her mother leaves the cousins to their activity: Tracking worker strikes using cosmetics to hold maps in place and mark locations. “The fate of the city rests upon your lipstick. The irony is not lost on me, Juliette,” Kathleen comments (60). Our Violent Ends suggests there is no conflict between dressy, feminine style and skill in combat. Indeed, Chloe Gong suggests there is an overlap and that fashion can be used as a weapon itself. Femininity, for Juliette, is as much a matter of personal expression as personal defense. Throughout the book, she hides her identity when necessary and uses her reputation as someone who prefers American style to travel incognito. All that is required is to break from her usual way of dressing and doing her hair.
Beauty and brutality work together in the cousins’ fashion choices, but grooming can be a symbol of care at the same time. In Chapter 25, Juliette simultaneously offers her cousin support and a weapon: “Kathleen loosened her braid […] Quietly, Juliette pulled a thin, needlelike knife from her sleeve and offered it. Kathleen took it with a grateful look, then stuck it into her hair as a pin” (262). Doing someone else’s hair signifies caretaking. In Chapter 21, it shows the growing friendship between Marshall and Juliette. Marshall produces pomade, teasing Juliette for being unkempt. Juliette snorts and replies, “‘Please. Make me pretty again.’ In silence, Marshall scooped a clump of pomade and started to brush through her hair with his fingers. He made fast work of re-forming her curls” (215). It is a moment of peace between the once-enemies, a sign that though the blood feud may destine its participants for “violent ends,” there is platonic love to be found in the interim.
The dissolution of Juliette’s hairstyle also signifies the chaos of the final, rainy day in which Roma, Juliette, and Alisa cross Shanghai to get to freedom. As Juliette runs out of ways to escape the city’s violence and the civil war brewing within it, her sodden hair shows the dissolution of her armor, the disappearance of the version of Juliette that was the “princess of Shanghai”: “She hadn’t bothered with finger waves, so it was only black locks stuck to her face, not pomade running in a sticky mess” (421). Yet Juliette has not entirely forgone her sense of self through style; when she escapes the Scarlet Gang for the final time, she takes a hairpin and wears one of her beloved flapper dresses.
The Controlled Monsters
The infectious nature of the monsters and their “madness” in These Violent Delights parallels the contagion of violence. In Our Violent Ends, Gong develops this metaphor and adds complexity to it by making the monsters less central to the novel’s primary violent conflict. While the monsters, now five instead of one, still pose a very real threat to Shanghai, Dimitri controls them, which enables him to turn his monsters toward a particular political project. This suggests that monstrosity, no matter how inhuman it may seem, is ultimately human in origin.
The controlled monster as opposed to the uncontrolled, chaotic monster evokes a different type of terror in the populace. The controlled monster, which sometimes incites violence, sometimes incites fear, and sometimes forestalls violence, spreads a different sort of terror than the first book’s contagious “madness.” A disease may be deadly, but it is also indifferent and strikes victims according to pattern and circumstance, not intent. A monster wielded as a weapon, however, acts according to thought and strategy. Though a monster that spreads disease and “madness” is unpredictable due to the nation of contagion, the controlled monster is unpredictable because it acts differently, which implies a logic to its actions. When this logic is not understandable to the monster’s victims, the monster incites a fear of the unknown and what could happen next. The monster is thus not an unknown force but an unknown combatant, against which one always seems determined to lose due to its strength and deviousness.
The Vaccine
The vaccine against the monster’s bugs and the ensuing “madness” is a recurring motif in Our Violent Ends, serving as an object that the protagonists chase but whose promise never fully materializes. The vaccine often plays a role as a misdirect, an object that is sometimes, in discussions of narrative tropes, called a “MacGuffin”—an item that characters seek without it having any real effect on narrative progress. The vaccine disappears in the novel as quickly as it appears—Juliette and Roma acquire one dose in Kunshan, only to have it stolen quickly thereafter. They must take another trip to acquire a second dose, though the two separate trips do not offer a distinct narrative purpose. Though large doses are manufactured and subsequently stolen, the only person to take the vaccine in the novel is Roma—only for him to die moments later.
While there is a certain irony to the notion that the monsters are destroyed by the very substance that was intended to render them ineffective, albeit in a way very different from the vaccine’s original intention, the vaccine in Our Violent Ends is not as directly related to the novel’s critique as it was in These Violent Delights, in which the capitalist potential of selling the vaccine was the entire intent behind Paul Dexter’s decision to release the monster. By contrast, in Our Violent Ends, Dimitri’s desire to release the vaccine is more about personal glory. This quest for the vaccine as a perennially sought object does, however, hearken to a trope in zombie media, which aligns with the method by which the monsters kill: inflicting a “madness” that leads victims to claw at their own flesh and faces.
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