An Anonymous Girl: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide, in addition to strong psychological manipulation.

The nature of morality is a central theme that arises from the first page: “Perhaps you would also make a snap judgment about a woman who decides to reveal her innermost secrets to a stranger for money. But suspend your assumptions, at least for now. We all have reasons for our actions” (4). The authors thus invite readers to suspend their judgments of characters’ moral choices until they understand their whole stories, suggesting a subjective and nuanced view of morality best represented by Jessica’s character. From the beginning, Jessica admits to several morally questionable decisions, such as lying, cheating, and sleeping with married men. She soon admits that she also lied to her parents about the events leading up to her sister’s accident. In this way, Jessica is depicted as morally imperfect but (mostly) honest: She respects the integrity of the study, and she is motivated to make amends for an accident for which she feels responsible. Dr. Shields notes—with judgment—that Jessica’s behavior is often motivated by money, suggesting that Jessica is greedy, rather than trying to help her family and survive in an expensive city. Jessica judges herself the most harshly, however, and it is not until she reveals her secret to her parents that she realizes she never had to be so hard on herself. During the course of the experiment, Jessica also breaks into Dr. Shields’s home, lies to April’s mother, and manipulates Thomas to gain information, all of which is motivated by her drive to uncover Dr. Shields’s true intentions.

Dr. Shields, in contrast, displays a more absolute, black-and-white view of morality. In her notes, she writes, “There is a barricade that separates moral individuals from immoral ones” (347). She places herself clearly on the “moral” side of the barricade, despite making choices that violate the professional boundaries of her occupation and cause harm, including death. She considers herself above other people and believes that her choices have been made for the right reasons: namely, her love for Thomas. Even when looking back on her fatal decision to lock her sister out, she feels that it was somehow inevitable or deserved. When she reflects on April’s death, she defends herself, believing that she was defending her husband’s reputation. In this way, Dr. Shields believes that her manipulation—even when it has fatal results—is justified because she is motivated by love and sees herself as a fundamentally moral person.

An Anonymous Girl highlights the ways that “we are all forced to constantly make moral choices” through a series of morally ambiguous situations in which “right” and “wrong” are not clear-cut conclusions (269). In the end, Jessica makes one final moral choice when she extorts Thomas out of retribution, inviting readers to make a final judgment of her moral character now that they know the whole story.