62 pages • 2 hours read
Monika KimThe Eyes Are the Best Part
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Gender Expectations and the Performance of Femininity
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, mental illness, graphic violence, death, and emotional abuse.
Through its examination of women navigating cultural and social pressures across generations, The Eyes Are the Best Part explores how society enforces a particular performance of femininity. Through its female characters’ responses to these pressures, the text reveals how adherence to expected roles can both protect and destroy women.
The weight of expectations placed on women is most clearly demonstrated through the character of Umma. As a child, she was placed into an impossible situation, forced to fend for herself after successive abandonments by her parents and her siblings. This established a pattern that extends into her adult relationships. Umma’s roles as a mother and as a wife are perpetually colored by these experiences, as she anticipates constant abandonment from her romantic partners and even from her daughters. The text shows how her performance of “feminine” patience and loyalty, initially a survival strategy, becomes a self-destructive pattern in her marriage when she struggles to come to grips with her husband’s departure. This behavior lingers into her next relationship, with her obsessive creation of 
