The Silent Wife

In the first chapter, Todd brings the “Rajput painting” home as a gift for Jodi that he hopes will make up in advance for the weekend trip he is about to take with Natasha—and for his lying about it. Like many of the restaurants and brand names in the novel, “Rajput” is not given any explanation; it is understood as another marker of class, intelligible to those who share the same social status. Interestingly, however, “Rajput” refers to a historical warrior and aristocratic caste in India. The visual description of the painting—a richly-clad woman in a sumptuous walled garden—hints at the aristocratic background. Moreover, though Jodi does not register it as such, the woman in the painting, seemingly free of all worries and content to remain within the garden walls, symbolizes her own situation as a modern, highly-educated woman still dependent on a male partner. While Todd goes away on the thinly-veiled “fishing trip,” Jodi has the painting framed in gold for display in their home, representing her tendency to maintain a beautiful household and personal appearance as a way of obfuscating the truth of their relationship. Later, however, the Rajput painting is one of the items Jodi sells to pay for Todd’s murder, suggesting that she no longer identifies, even implicitly, with the woman in the image.