Anna and Louise’s Mum is extremely controlling, as she will go to great lengths to manipulate or bully her family members into looking or acting a certain way. However, there’s one thing that Mum can’t control: the above-ground pool in the backyard, and her husband and daughters’ love for it. The pool is the one place where Anna, Louise, and Dad can feel autonomous and joyful. By exploring this tension between Mum and her family members over the pool, the story shows how Mum attempts to create harmony by controlling her family—but in actuality, her attempts only make her family members rebellious and unhappy.
Anna and her sister, Louise, live in fear of upsetting or contradicting Mum. Anna makes this clear when she recalls several times in the last few weeks when Mum forced the girls to agree with her disparaging assessments of Dad. It’s telling that neither Anna nor Louise say outright that they disagree with Mum; this implies that the girls don’t feel comfortable or safe speaking their mind. Instead, Anna shows readers that she does love and support her father by describing her compliant nods and smiles as “traitorous.” Agreeing with Mum may be the safest way to navigate the situation, but it won’t allow Anna to express herself or voice support for the one parent she does love and trust. Later, as Anna prepares for the Christmas photo, it’s also clear that she’s constantly fearful and anxious about upsetting Mum. Despite heeding Mum’s demands—like wearing an uncomfortable dress and sitting cross-legged on the floor for the photo—Anna still worries that she’ll set Mum off. With this, the story offers the possibility that there is no real way to please Mum. Even going along with what Mum wants is no guarantee of harmony or happiness.
There is one place where Mum doesn’t have total control: the pool in the backyard. Anna implies that Mum regularly tries to control how her family interacts with the pool. She notes that “Each morning of the school holidays, you feel a faint, smothered panic that the pool will sooner or later be the subject of attack.” But even though Mum regularly “attack[s]” the pool, she nevertheless fails to keep her husband or daughters from it. Thus, the pool becomes the one place where Anna, Louise, and Dad can enjoy a sense of agency. For instance, though Mum gripes about and seems ready to outright forbid the neighbor kids, Chris and Leanne, from knocking on the door to swim in the pool, Anna and Louise can—and regularly do—invite them to climb over the fence instead. Out in the pool, Anna and Louise can experiment with social groups of their own choosing and make choices about who they spend their time with. Dad also finds autonomy as he maintains the pool. Though Anna gives few clues about her parents’ relationship with each other aside from the implication that it’s not happy, Dad appears far happier and more relaxed when he’s either outside working on the pool or talking about the pool with his daughters. This suggests that he, too, suffers from Mum’s controlling nature. Dad’s constant maintenance also happens to undermine Mum’s power. He seems well aware that the pool is the one place where his daughters are happy and free—and it’s certainly no accident that he throws himself into keeping the pool clean and useable for them. In this way, even though he doesn’t stand up to Mum in more overt ways, Dad shows his daughters he cares about them and wants them to be as happy and free from Mum’s abuse as possible, given the circumstances.
For Anna, Louise, and Dad, the choice is obvious: spend as much time as possible in the pool so they can feel powerful and autonomous in at least one part of their lives. And while “Whirlpool” offers no solutions to this power struggle, the story does suggest that as long as Mum continues to try to control her family members, they will continue to find ways to subvert her—and the family as a whole will never achieve the happiness and harmony that Mum so desperately desires.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power, Control, and Freedom ThemeTracker
Power, Control, and Freedom 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.
Each morning of the school holidays, you feel a faint, smothered panic that the pool will sooner or later be the subject of attack. You try to stay casually offhand as you change into your bathers and escape out the back door. You can feel Louise doing the same, picking up her folded towel with studied nonchalance, as if the thought has just occurred to her. You slip through the house, expressionless and furtive, avoiding your mother on the way out.
You feel a surge of sly, teeth-gritted pleasure at his protests, his skinny, weak-limbed acquiescence. You watch the helpless ridge of his spine arching as he flounders, gasping, and your power is cool and blue and chemical. He has to learn. You girls eye each other, expressionless, as he staggers humbly to his feet afterwards, blinking and choking.
Your heart sinks at what’s lying ready for you on the bed. “The sundresses?”
“That’s what she said.”
Louise has hers on already. She’s thin, so it doesn’t look quite so ridiculous, but yours is tight under the arms, where it’s elasticised, then sack-like all the way down to mid-calf.
The dress is squeezed across the tingling, embarrassing swell of your chest, a nine-year-old’s dress. A few weeks ago, you’d tentatively said you wanted a training bra for Christmas.
“Oh, darling,” your mother replied, looking at you indulgently. “You’re barely twelve, you’re nowhere near old enough for that.” Her tenderness felt as treacherous and irresistible as a tide, something you leaned into, hypnotised, as it tugged you off your feet.
“Anna,” your mother smiled kindly, her voice low, “it’s normal for young girls to feel self-conscious about their weight, sweetie.”
She turns sunnily to your father. “We met them while we were on the cruise, didn’t we, darling?”
That word in your mother’s mouth, the way she looks your father in the face to say it, her touch on his arm as she goes past, makes something turn over in your stomach, cold and glassy. You shudder. You can’t help it.
“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.
You witness the opposing forces of charm and chill collide in your mother as she’s caught of guard. She hesitates, then says hurriedly, “Yes, yes, of course,” and there it is, you’re sure of it now; you glimpse in that moment her wire-tight thoughts running ahead, grim with the need to plot exile and allegiance, the constant undertow shift of churned, compliant water.
