The City We Became

by

N. K. Jemisin

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The City We Became makes teaching easy.

The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) Character Analysis

The central antagonist, the Woman in White is an entity from a parallel dimension seeking to destroy New York City and, ultimately, humanity. She fights New York City’s avatar, Manny, Bronca, Brooklyn, and Padmini but manipulates Aislyn into joining her cause. At the novel’s beginning, the Woman in White appears as a tentacled monster known as the Enemy who attacks New York City at its birth. When that attack fails, the Woman in White uses tendrils to infect New Yorkers and occasionally possess their bodies. The people—all white women—whom the Woman possesses transform into white-haired, white-clothed people. Disguised as a white woman, the Woman weaponizes white racial privilege to wage war against humanity from within. In human form, the Woman is chatty, off-kilter, and humorous, misusing English idioms and making pop culture references. She expresses affection and pity for humanity. She also develops a heartfelt if manipulative friendship with Aislyn and sympathizes with Bronca’s struggle as a marginalized person. Yet, the Woman also detests humanity for creating cities, which tear through parallel dimensions at their birth, destroying those dimensions and their inhabitants. Ironically, the novel eventually reveals that the Woman is herself an avatar of an alien city, R’lyeh (named after a city in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu”). The novel implies that an alien species from a parallel dimension created R’lyeh/the Woman in White to have a soldier against humanity and its cities who intimately understood them. At the novel’s end, the cities’ avatars defeat the Woman temporarily. However, the Woman infects Aislyn and Staten Island with her tendrils, successfully maintaining her foothold in humanity’s dimension. The Woman’s utilitarian embrace of evil methods to achieve what she believes to be good ends (preventing cities from destroying nearby dimensions) evokes the novel’s ethical perspective that a person’s ends cannot justify their means. Meanwhile, the Woman’s manipulation of human racism illustrates how malevolent outside forces can use prejudice to divide and conquer diverse communities.

The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) Quotes in The City We Became

The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) or refer to The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cities and Gentrification Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”

“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”

“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”

“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), Bel Nguyen (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.

Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Related Symbols: Police
Page Number: 124-125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Veneza (Jersey City)
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”

“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”

That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Veneza (Jersey City), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Tendrils
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.

Related Characters: The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Clyde Thomason, Jojo
Page Number: 220-221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx) (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Better New York Foundation
Page Number: 233
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Better New York Foundation—”

“Jesus, really?”

“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”

Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx) (speaker), Raul (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Better New York Foundation, Tendrils
Page Number: 240
Explanation and Analysis:

“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”

Related Characters: The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island)
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

[…]

Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Paolo (São Paolo), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Related Symbols: Tendrils, Better New York Foundation
Page Number: 281
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .

. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Related Symbols: Tendrils
Page Number: 333
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”

Related Characters: Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan
Related Symbols: Police
Page Number: 377-378
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Hong (Hong Kong), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”

Related Characters: Paolo (São Paolo) (speaker), Manny (Manhattan), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Veneza (Jersey City), New York City’s Avatar
Page Number: 425 
Explanation and Analysis:
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The City We Became PDF

The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) Quotes in The City We Became

The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) or refer to The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cities and Gentrification Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”

“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”

“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”

“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), Bel Nguyen (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.

Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh)
Related Symbols: Police
Page Number: 124-125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Veneza (Jersey City)
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”

“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”

That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan) (speaker), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Veneza (Jersey City), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Tendrils
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—

Related Characters: Manny (Manhattan), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.

Related Characters: The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Clyde Thomason, Jojo
Page Number: 220-221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx) (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Better New York Foundation
Page Number: 233
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Better New York Foundation—”

“Jesus, really?”

“Yes. Very well resourced, very private, and very dedicated to raising the city from its gritty image to the heights of prosperity and progress.”

Bronca actually pulls the receiver from her ear to glare at it for a moment. “I have never smelled a pile of bigger horseshit. That’s—” She shakes her head. “It’s gentrifier logic. Settler logic. They want the city without the ‘gritty’ people who make it what it is!”

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx) (speaker), Raul (speaker), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), New York City’s Avatar
Related Symbols: Better New York Foundation, Tendrils
Page Number: 240
Explanation and Analysis:

“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”

Related Characters: The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island)
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

[…]

Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Paolo (São Paolo), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Related Symbols: Tendrils, Better New York Foundation
Page Number: 281
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .

. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

Related Characters: Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Related Symbols: Tendrils
Page Number: 333
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”

Related Characters: Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn) (speaker), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Matthew Houlihan
Related Symbols: Police
Page Number: 377-378
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.

Related Characters: Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Hong (Hong Kong), Matthew Houlihan, Conall McGuiness
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”

Related Characters: Paolo (São Paolo) (speaker), Manny (Manhattan), Bronca Siwanoy (The Bronx), Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), The Woman in White (The Enemy) (R’lyeh), Brooklyn Thomason (Brooklyn), Padmini Prakash (Queens), Veneza (Jersey City), New York City’s Avatar
Page Number: 425 
Explanation and Analysis: