44 pages • 1 hour read
Adelaide: A Novel
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Character Analysis
Adelaide Williams
Content Warning: This section discusses death by suicide, sexual violence and abuse, and the complexities of living with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Adelaide is the protagonist of the novel. She is a complex, dynamic character who evolves over the course of the narrative. Before Adelaide meets Rory Hughes, she’s immersed in her personal life and goals. She is independent and making progress pursuing her professional goals through a graduate degree in London, England. She lives with friends, dates whoever she chooses, and imagines the future possibilities “of a secure job and a signing bonus so big she could swim in it” (18). These facets of Adelaide’s life are empowering and validating. At the same time, Adelaide’s constant busyness distracts her from her mental health conditions and inhibits her Journey Toward Self-Acceptance. She has a habit of filling her time with people and activities so that she doesn’t have to acknowledge her needs or confront her past hurts. When she starts seeing Rory, Adelaide redirects all of that energy toward their relationship rather than her future or well-being.
Adelaide’s early romantic experiences teach her that love requires sacrifice. Her high school relationship with Emory Evans and her years of casual dating cause her to associate intimacy with pain, abuse, and powerlessness, emphasizing the Complexities of Unrequited Love. Emory’s emotional and sexual abuse, in particular, cause trauma that lasts for years and lead her to keep men at arm’s length. However, her strong desire for deep romance is clear from her love of the romantic novel Call Me by Your Name and her associating Rory with a Disney prince. Rory is a manifestation of Adelaide’s childhood romantic fantasies. In deep emotional pain from her unacknowledged trauma and mental health conditions, Adelaide convinces herself that Rory’s love will make everything else better. He is different, she believes, and she can be different with him. For this reason, she fails to perceive Rory’s faults or confront him when he disappoints or hurts her. However, he disregards Adelaide’s feelings and consistently fails to value her. Because he doesn’t affirm Adelaide in the way she needs, Adelaide grows increasingly self-deprecating over the course of their relationship. Depending on Rory for her emotional fulfillment impedes Adelaide’s personal growth. After discovering Rory’s dating profile, Adelaide finally realizes that he is not her “Prince Charming” and finds the courage to articulate her feelings and hurts to Rory. She can then set important boundaries and pursue healing from her heartbreak.
After she ends her relationship with Rory, Adelaide begins the process of Confronting Mental Health Conditions she once feared to acknowledge. This is a crucial step on her journey toward self-acceptance and one she could not take while Rory distracted her. Still, the healing process is fraught for Adelaide. She wants to move past Rory but experiences suicidal ideation immediately after losing him because the pain of her trauma and untreated bipolar disorder remain. She feels mentally and emotionally unstable and doesn’t know where to direct her love without Rory in her life. She also struggles to see her own worth and thus to direct her energies toward herself. With the help of her friends, she pursues mental health treatment and finds the support that she needs. Through therapy, medication, and reconnecting with her family, particularly her sister with bipolar disorder, Adelaide comes to grips with her diagnosis. This allows her to take active steps to accept who she is and manage her condition. Through Adelaide’s journey to self-acceptance by confronting her mental health conditions, Wheeler provides a model for how readers might do the same. This model includes the potential for a happy, well-adjusted life. However, the author shows that Adelaide’s remade life is not without insecurities, fears, and doubts, despite her altered outlook. The difference is that Adelaide is now aware of and able to manage these negative thought processes. Reconciling with herself helps her settle into the surety of being “alive and loved” (290).
Rory Hughes
Rory is a primary character. He is Adelaide’s boyfriend throughout the majority of the novel and her foil in her Journey Toward Self-Acceptance. Rory’s hold over Adelaide is clear from their first meeting, several years before their first date: Adelaide approaches Rory on the street and tells him that he looks “like a Disney prince” (13). This event sets Rory up as a fairy-tale character in Adelaide’s mind, an archetype who will help her reach her romantic fantasies rather than a real person. When they start seeing each other in 2018, Rory’s charm reinforces this imagined persona, satisfying many of Adelaide’s romantic fantasies. She’s even more invested in their burgeoning dynamic when she discovers how much she and Rory have in common. Because Rory satisfies the stereotypical role of the attractive, enigmatic love interest in the romantic tales Adelaide loves, she falls quickly in love with him. His imagined perfection makes it difficult for Adelaide to recognize his faults. Letting him go would also mean “letting [the] whole mess of a fantasy go” (147). Rory, too, struggles with self-acceptance. The narrative offers flashbacks into his past, revealing that he behaved the same way in his relationship with Nathalie as he behaves with Adelaide. When a relationship becomes committed and intense, Rory backs out. Even though he knows that he loves Nathalie, for example, he cannot fulfill his promises to her. After he disappears on the day that he and Nathalie are supposed to move in together, he tells Natalie that he can’t. He offers Nathalie no explanation for his actions because he can’t explain his doubts to himself. He allows his personal confusion to bleed into his interpersonal relationships, frequently failing to perceive how his emotional withholding hurts others.
Rory’s inconsistency, selfishness, and confusion define his role in his relationship with Adelaide. The author suggests that this behavior stems from Rory not being in love with Adelaide, illustrating some of the Complexities of Unrequited Love. Rory’s inability to communicate and withdrawn nature make his relationship with Adelaide unsustainable and negatively impact Adelaide’s mental health. Instead of admitting his faults and attempting to change or breaking up with Adelaide so that she can move on, Rory retreats. He avoids difficult conversations with Adelaide and often accuses her of letting him down, rather than owning the ways he has disappointed Adelaide. These facets of Rory keep Adelaide from caring for herself and reinforce her negative beliefs about herself. Adelaide can’t put herself first until she stands up for herself to Rory and ends their relationship. Meanwhile, Rory doesn’t realize how much he cared for Adelaide until they break up. The distance between them gives him perspective and helps him to understand the flaws in their dynamic. The revelation of his marriage at the end of the novel suggests that he took these lessons to heart.
Brennan “Bubs” Uralla-Burke
Bubs is a secondary, static character. He is Rory’s foil, former coworker, and flatmate throughout the majority of the novel. Adelaide meets and gets to know Bubs when she starts spending time at Rory’s place, and though he is initially a peripheral character, he consistently appears at times when Adelaide needs sympathy. This both sets up his future relationship with her and echoes her dynamic with Rory, illustrating the Complexities of Unrequited Love. Though Bubs is kind and sympathetic, Adelaide doesn’t give him a lot of thought outside of occasional embarrassment for her emotional outbursts in front of him. This suggests that, like Rory, Adelaide is not yet capable of reciprocating love in a healthy way. Bubs gains increasing dimension in the latter half of the novel. Adelaide first notices his kindness when he offers her a ride home after Rory demands that she leave in the middle of a dark, rainy night. Bubs not only makes sure that Adelaide gets home safely but also comforts her when he sees that she’s upset. For example, in this scene from Chapter 19, when Bubs notices that Adelaide is upset, he has “the impulse to reach” out to her, “to smooth her hair and remind her that she [is] safe” (177). Bubs doesn’t overstep the boundaries of Adelaide and Rory’s relationship, but he does make himself available as a friend.
In the weeks before and after Adelaide’s relationship with Rory disintegrates, she starts running into Bubs. Each time they see each other, Bubs engages Adelaide, proving himself to be a consistent and genuine person. Though Bubs is not as handsome and charming as the “Disney prince” Rory, he and Adelaide forge a genuine connection based on empathy and care and build a life together. Through Bubs, Wheeler offers an alternative to the fairy-tale romance Adelaide once dreamed of while still giving her the fairy-tale ending she always wanted.
Nathalie Alban
Nathalie is a secondary character who symbolizes an imagined and unreachable ideal. She is Rory’s former girlfriend of five years, and Adelaide meets her by chance in the summer of 2018. Both Adelaide and Rory see Nathalie as representative of female perfection. Rory’s relationship with her begins with typically romantic language: “stolen glances, brushed fingers, flushed cheeks” (45). Years later, Adelaide is similarly overcome by feelings toward Nathalie. Though Adelaide isn’t attracted to her romantically, she is drawn to Nathalie. For example, when they bump into each other at a bookshop reading, Adelaide is enamored by Nathalie’s physical resemblance to Adelaide’s ideal appearance; Nathalie looks how Adelaide always wished she looked, herself. Adelaide is also drawn to Nathalie because of her job as a book editor at The New York Times, which Adelaide would like to do. Nathalie embodies the woman Adelaide has always wanted to be—bookish, beautiful, and beguiling—distracting Adelaide from the hard work of her own Journey Toward Self-Acceptance. Nathalie’s death symbolizes the death of both Adelaide’s and Rory’s fantasies of love, romance, and what a woman “should” be, leaving them grieving and adrift.
Nathalie’s death also disrupts Adelaide and Rory’s relationship, in part because their fantasy of fairy-tale romance is disrupted. Although Rory chose to end his relationship with Nathalie years before, her death plunges him into deep grief, and he begins to believe that he was meant to be with Nathalie. In an illustration of the Complexities of Unrequited Love, he stops investing in his relationship with Adelaide at all. Meanwhile, though she only spent time with Nathalie once, Adelaide grieves her, too. Over time, Adelaide begins to realize that her grief is begotten of her envy. She envies who Nathalie was, the way people mourn her, and the relief she got from death. Nathalie functions as a narrative device that reveals new tensions between Rory and Adelaide. She challenges Rory and Adelaide to self-reflect in new and important ways.
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