Bright Young Women

When Pamela thinks back to her time at the sorority house, she recalls an ongoing prank between the sorority sisters and their neighboring fraternity. The sorority and fraternity would send framed pieces of art from their respective houses back and forth, forcing the recipient to sneak it back to the originating house. Over the course of this prank, Pamela and Denise realized that while the art in the sorority house is framed using inexpensive and poor-quality materials, the art in the fraternity houses is framed using high-quality glass. Every time they receive and return a piece of art from the fraternity house, they return it with the glass having been swapped out, thus gradually giving the sorority house access to high quality materials for their art. The glass symbolizes discrepancy between the genders, masculine privilege, and the need for women to strategically assert themselves. The sorority house, and the young women who live in it, aren’t valued the same way that male students studying at the same campus are. The glass helps protect and preserve the art, making it more resilient over time, which symbolizes how the privilege afforded to the young men sets them up to have more successful and impactful lives.

Because Denise is the first to notice the subtle difference in the framing materials, and the members of the fraternity never catch on to the trick, the glass also symbolizes how women’s intelligence and competence is underestimated, while men are assumed competent or even brilliant. Pamela consistently portrays how The Defendant is revered, while young women like Denise go unrecognized for their many talents. Finally, because the glass is intended to be protective, the use of the cheaper and flimsier plexiglass on the art in the sorority house symbolizes how women’s lives and safety are less valued. Both before and after the attacks at the sorority house, women’s lives are cut short because systems of power and the men who occupy them focus on other priorities than keeping women safe.