“Whirlpool” follows 12-year-old Anna as she prepares for her family’s Christmas photograph. Having the family professionally photographed was Anna’s Mum’s idea—Mum wants to include the photo in the Christmas cards that she sends to all of her international friends every year. To Mum, it’s extremely important to show these friends that her family is perfect—this is why she forces her husband and daughters, Anna and Louise, to wear their best clothes and then meticulously poses her family members around her, instructing them on how to smile. In the photo, the girls look prim, proper, and obedient, and the whole family looks polished, harmonious, and tight knit. But this veneer of perfection is just that—a front that’s masking the family’s dysfunction. By juxtaposing the family’s appearance in the Christmas photo (and the way Mum acts during the photo) with their day-to-day reality, Kennedy emphasizes that it’s impossible to judge a family’s functionality or happiness from the outside—a beautiful exterior can easily obscure dysfunction within.
The photo that Mum crafts paints the picture of a close, loving family. Mum makes her daughters wear matching sundresses, while Dad—who’s usually behind the camera and not in the shot—is in the frame in a neat shirt. Mum, for her part, is in a beautiful linen dress and arranges her family members around her. The resulting photograph portrays what might seem like a well-groomed and harmonious suburban family. Mum’s behavior also adds to this image. While the photographer is there to take the photo, Mum acts kind, courteous, and upbeat as she speaks to her husband and daughters, and she makes sure to broadcast that the Christmas photos will be received by a number of international friends. With this, Mum suggests that her family is well connected, too.
However, the story shows that Mum is anything but the perfect wife and mother. For one, Anna and Louise seem to live in fear of angering her. When Anna discovers that Mum wants her to wear a sundress for the photo, she’s distraught by the prospect (the dress is too small and isn’t flattering). But Anna doesn’t feel as though she has any power to push back; indeed, she consistently describes Mum as someone who frightens her and will dole out undescribed but presumably harsh punishments for voicing dissenting opinions. And while Anna and Louise seem to bear the brunt of this treatment, Dad suffers too. Dad mostly avoids Mum by spending as much time as possible working on the backyard swimming pool, which Mum hates on the grounds that her children should have an in-ground pool, not a temporary above-ground one. He also brings home what Mum refers to as a “dud” Christmas tree every year—and though there’s no indication he does this on purpose to upset Mum, it nevertheless feeds into Mum’s sense that her family is failing to achieve perfection.
In real life, Anna and Louise are also not the perfect little girls portrayed in the photo. Indeed, their interactions suggest that they’re almost constantly at odds—while Anna is entering puberty, making it clear that she’s no longer a child. The dresses themselves make it clear that Anna and Louise aren’t little girls anymore. On Anna, the dress is both childish and too small: it’s “tight under the arms” and “squeeze[s] across the tingling, embarrassing swell of [her] chest,” showing clearly that her body isn’t that of a prepubescent child anymore. Rather, her breasts are developing and she no longer fits into clothing designed for children. Louise’s matching dress “doesn’t look quite so ridiculous” because Louise is thin, but Anna nevertheless implies that the dress is just as inappropriate for her sister as it is for her. In this way, the dresses illustrate the disconnect between the perfect family Mum wants and the reality of what she has. Mum clearly wants to show off her adorable little girls in matching dresses to all her friends—and while Mum might be able to bully her daughters into wearing unflattering dresses that don’t fit, Anna thinks it’ll be clear to the photo’s recipients that she and Louise are far too old to be dressed and posed in this way.
Ultimately, Mum’s attempts to craft the perfect Christmas photo—and the perfect family—fail. Even aside from the fact that Anna and Louise refuse to smile happily, Anna suggests that it will be obvious to recipients that she and Louise are being forced to dress and pose like young children, not the budding adults they are. With this, Kennedy shows that Mum’s attempts are misguided in every way. Not only can Mum not bully her family into embodying her idea of perfection, she also can’t stop the dysfunction from showing through.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Appearances, and Dysfunction ThemeTracker
Family, Appearances, and Dysfunction Quotes in Whirlpool
The cream is not the color of skin but the strange pink-orange of a bandaid, or a doll.
You all waited, silent, braced for the rest.
“There isn’t a single shot,” she added with finality, “where we don’t all look dreadful.”
And you thought, all, seeing your mothered centred there in the pictures, gripping her two girls, your father nowhere—just a peripheral shadowy shape, stretched thin.
“It’s bad enough we haven’t even got a proper in-ground one and you girls have to put up with that stupid thing that should have been thrown out years ago,” she adds. She turns to you then, extending her arm to take you in, watching you. “He’s absolutely obsessed, isn’t he?”
You feel yourself nod and smile again; a sickly, traitorous smile of concurrence.
“I put the hose in the pool for you,” he says in a low voice. “We’ll let it fill up a bit more, eh? So it’s all ready.”
Your mother hears. “Robert, do you think we could forget about that dinky little pool just for five short minutes?” Her voice is almost breathless with forced breeziness.
It only takes a second, but you’re stunned to see her, at the exact same moment, looking back at you. Something passes between you. It’s like the reckless moment after running hard around the pool’s perimeter, when you eye one another, savage and panting, before launching Chris or yourselves into the stirring, threshing current of the whirlpool.
You let another dead, robot smile turn up the corners of your mouth. With your eyes you will your mother’s friends to understand, [...] seeing everything encoded there. They will see how stiffly you are sitting in this humiliating dress, cross-legged like a child, how heavy and proprietorial your mother’s hand is on your shoulder. They will imagine the weight of that hand. You understand, as the camera’s indifferent shutter clicks again, that the sundresses are about your mother, that what you’d seen in her face when you’d asked for the training bra was a tremor of terror, not scorn. All this blooms in you, too fast, the flash’s nebula blinding as phosphorus.
