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Chapter 7
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Vox, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Action, Complacency, and Resistance
Language, Communication, and Power
Children, Indoctrination, and Acclimatization
Control, Religion, and Gender Essentialism
Choice and Personal Fulfillment
Summary
Analysis
Today is the first day Jean hasn’t been able to tell Sonia she loves her as she walks Sonia to the school bus. And when Jean blows Sonia a kiss and Sonia blows one back, Jean looks to the camera nearby and immediately regrets it. Back when the counters first went on, Jean regularly saw two young moms at the grocery store together. They’d chat using rudimentary sign language—until men in uniforms took the women and their babies away. They never returned.
Here, Jean details just how far the government is willing to go to keep women from communicating with one another. In her world, blowing one’s child kisses isn’t appropriate, and it seems women aren’t allowed basic human connections, either. Stifling their language thus destroys social bonds, both within families and in society at large. Subjecting women to such extreme social alienation makes it easier for the government to control them.
Active
Themes
Once Sonia is on the bus, Jean walks back toward the house. The mailman approaches her house, greeting her politely. He insists on putting the mail in the box, per the rules, when she holds out her hand to see what he’ll do. After telling her to have a nice day, the mailman blinks three times in an exaggerated manner. He says he has a wife and three daughters, and Jean remembers that his mother, Delilah Ray, was going to be the first human to get the anti-aphasia shot Jean was working on before the counters went on. If it worked, Mrs. Ray was going to be able to speak coherently for the first time since she had a stroke years ago. He quietly says they’ll speak again.
The mailman’s three blinks and his prior relationship to Jean are interesting details, though for now, they remain mostly unexplained. More importantly, Jean shares here what her work was before she lost her job: developing a cure for aphasia, or a condition that leaves a person unable to use language to communicate. While aphasia is caused by a brain injury of some sort in most cases, the government has induced a different sort of aphasia in women and girls through the counters. This continues to position Jean opposite the government: she wants everyone to be able to talk, but the government only wants to hear from a select few.
Active
Themes
Once the mailman is gone, Olivia King, Evan’s wife, heads for church. Olivia has fully bought into the new system; she was religious to begin with. Jean wasn’t, so when Steven brought home his AP Religious Studies textbook, Jean was shocked to discover that the book advocated for “extreme-right fundamentalism.” But when Jean asked Steven about it, he noted that his teacher had some good points, and he suggested maybe things would be better if women who “just wanna get out of the house and have some identity” stayed home to raise their kids instead. Though he insisted the class was “stupid,” he refused to drop it—it would help him get into college.
