Prejudice in The House in the Cerulean Sea: How Fiction Mirrors Reality

By Daria Husni

In The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune weaves the story of a social worker, Linus Baker, who oversees the care of orphaned magical children. Through a special assignment from his organization, DICOMY, Linus comes face to face with his own prejudice, and begins to question his loyalties towards DICOMY and the system they’ve set in place. Klune uses cultural codes throughout his story to draw parallels between the struggles of magical people and the real life struggles of minorities.  In this way, Klune is able to point to the cruelty that minorities face, and how changes can be made to the system and people that oppress them.

In Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman writes that cultural codes “speak the familiar “truths” of the existing cultural order, repeat what has “always been already read, seen, done, experienced (Silverman, 242).” In The House in the Cerulean Sea, cultural coding tells us that the oppressed minority in this world is the groups of magical individuals that are ostracised and feared by the larger human population. Klune introduces this in more subtle ways—having the master of the first orphanage comment that no one comes to adopt the children, having her fear Linus’ involvement—but he uses more obvious allusions as well. The phrase, “see something, say something,” comes back again and again in the story as DICOMY-enforced propaganda. The idea in Klune’s world is that if non-magical people see an instance of magic, they should report it to the authorities. This draws direct parallels to the real life usage of “see something, say something,” which has been used by Homeland Security since the 1970s. While the idea of the phrase is to combat terrorism, it also enforces a system that encourages the fear of the “other” and often leads to “suspicous” people of color being reported by white citizens. But there are a lot of people in the majority who may never question the insidiousness of the “see something, say something” campaign, and who need to have their ideas challenged. Linus is one of those people.

While on the island, Linus is forced to face his own preconceptions and prejudices towards the children, and confront the structures in place that he’s never questioned before. In many ways Linus is like us—he has to learn to view the world around him critically, to not remain submissive to the laws and biases put in place by DICOMY.  This is achieved largely through his interactions with the children and with Arthur, who constantly challenge the rules Linus has never questioned. Arthur regularly expresses disgust for the rulebook that DICOMY uses—one magical people had no hand in creating. “Human experts,” he repeated. “Not a single magical person had any say in the creation of that tome. Every word came from the hand and mind of a human (Klune, 177).” This parallels our real-life legal system, which benefits the white majority, the same majority who wrote the laws in the first place. 

At a later point in the story, Linus is finally able to convince Arthur to take the children into the village. It was in the interactions with the villagers that I was able to make a direct connection to a real individual. I was reminded of a Tedx Talk I watched by a former white supremist and neo-nazi.  (My descent into America’s neo-Nazi movement & how I got out). Christian Picciolini described being indoctrinated into the hate group as a teen, and how it defined his life for so many years. What ended up deradicalizing him was incredibly simple: he finally talked to a person of color, and empathized over a shared source of pain. He could no longer justify his bigotry once he’d finally started to see the people he hated as people—a black teen who loved his dying mother, a gay couple who loved their son—and it changed him. He realized what he had been doing was monstrous, and he now spends most of his life trying to lead others to the same realization.

This is something we see in the story—while there are villagers who stick to their bigoted ways, many of the townspeople who had this image of the children built up in their head realized that they were wrong. The record store owner immediately accepts Lucy, and even though the bellhop is initially scared of the children he gives Chauncey his bellhop hat. Helen, the town mayor, also comes around to the children. There are many bigots, of course, who even come to the point where they form a protest against the magical children of the island. But even when he is showing the dangers of bigotry, Klune is careful to remind the audience that there is hope. A bigoted mother snatches her daughter away from one of the children, Talia, but the daughter was not afraid of Talia at all.  Talia comments that while the mother may teach her daughter to fear magical people, her daughter could grow up rejecting her mother’s beliefs.  Even the townspeople’s protest against the children, the most intense moment of discrimination in the book, ends with hope. Helen and Linus stand up for their magical friends, and Arthur is able to come to the children’s defense, proudly embracing his own identity. Klune is trying to remind his audience of the power they hold to change the minds of the people around them. He is trying to tell his audience that they need to look at people for who they truly are, not for who they think they might be. 

Ultimately it is the children, not the people around them, who can determine their own worth. Their power does not just lie in their magical powers, but in their (for a lack of a better word) humanity.  By being themselves, by being children, they are able to break down the bigotry around them.  Like Linus says at the end, they only needed someone to be their voice. When Helen and Linus are talking, she encourages him that people will accept the children eventually. “Change comes when people want it enough, Mr. Baker. And I do. I promise you that (280).” I truly believe that this is what Klune wants his audience to take away—that no matter how loud hate can be, love will always win in the end.