Bunny

The Bunnies are the antagonists. They make Samantha feel left out and inferior. While the Bunnies are rich and beautiful, Samantha is simply tall. The Bunnies swoon over each other’s work and get along with Warren professors, but Samantha doesn’t have great relationships with the teachers. The Bunnies passively-aggressively insult her writing, like when one Bunny says its “[s]ort of in love with its own outsiderness” (29).

Although Samantha presents the Bunnies as her enemies, they’re not total antagonists. They invite her to the Smut Salon, and before that, Samantha hints that the Bunnies aren’t absolutely against her. Kira spoke to her at social gatherings, she feels like she could’ve been friends with Vignette, and they invited her for bento boxes. Samantha’s slippery sense of self makes it possible that she’s more antagonistic than the Bunnies. As Eleanor puts it, “I mean, you were just so invested in being too cool for everyone, in not being around us or even the poets or any actual people at all, you know” (294).

The Bunnies are mean girl characters. They bring the idea of the manipulative, exclusive high-school clique into graduate school. They’re a hybrid of cuteness, sexuality, and violence. They have separate identities, but Samantha regularly refers to them as a “blob” and Ava labels them a “cult.” The tension between their feminist rhetoric and their actions represents the shortcomings of contemporary liberal feminism, which prioritizes individual female success and choice over liberation and solidarity.

In Queen Bees and Wannabes, Rosalind Wiseman lists the roles in mean girl cliques: “queen bee, sidekick, banker, messenger, pleaser/wannabe, torn bystander, target, champion” (Wiseman 87). As individuals, the Bunnies don’t fit neatly into those roles. The Duchess’s aristocratic name seems to make her the leader, but she’s not in charge—no one is. Despite their totalitarian, tyrannical symbolism, the Bunnies are equals—no Bunny accepts a marginalized role. Even if they don’t want or always use it, each Bunny has agency, and they display it in the emergency workshop and over Max. There is no true sidekick, banker, or messenger. Creepy Doll is “the literal doll-pet of the other Bunnies” (34), but she’s not passive. When she feels like she’s doing too many of the beheadings, she speaks up, “I just feel like someone else should pull their weight for once” (119).

When Samantha is a Bunny, she fits into a stereotypical mean girl role. She’s the pleaser/wannabe, torn bystander, and target. Her abject position as a Bunny circles back to their antagonistic characterization. Eventually, Samantha confronts them. Through Max, she humbles them: They arrive at graduation with embarrassing injuries.

Ava is Samantha’s sidekick and foil. She’s her best friend and possesses traits that Samantha lacks. She has a stable identity; she’s a reliable rebel with “David Bowie eyes” (9). Bowie was an iconoclastic singer and actor, and one of his famous songs is “Rebel Rebel” (1974). She has a punk aesthetic, a partially shaved head, and wears a veil and black mesh gloves.

At the Demitasse, the Bunnies wave at Samantha, but Ava “continues to smoke and stare at them like they’re a four-headed beast. When at last I lower my hand, I turn to her. She’s looking at me like I’m something worse than a stranger” (12). Ava wants nothing to do with Bunnies, and her attitude, unlike Samantha’s, doesn’t shift. Ava’s firm contempt for the Bunnies causes conflict between the best friends. Ava claims she doesn’t care if Samantha hangs out with Bunnies, but her absence following Samantha’s attendance at Smut Salon suggests otherwise. Ava can be hard to read.

Although Ava appears to abandon her friend, she separates Samantha from the Bunnies and later helps her regain her identity. Ava is mostly a positive influence. She is a maternal figure, giving Samantha a home and a place to write. Even when Ava isn’t present, her voice rattles in Samantha’s head. Samantha hears her at Cheapo’s and during Fosco’s Christmas dinner. Willful and independent, Ava is the friend Samantha needs, which is why Samantha created her from the swan. Yet her death also helps Samantha. Instead of depending on external invention, she can internalize Ava’s traits and become a fuller, more self-reliant person.

Jonah, Max, and the countless Drafts are romantic interests, but only Jonah is a real person. Samantha calls Jonah her “social equivalent among the poets” (10). Like Samantha, he’s an outsider with few friends at school. Jonah tries to befriend Samantha. He compliments her work and asks her to hang out, but Samantha doesn’t seem too eager to hang out with him. The Bunnies call him “Psycho Jonah,” and their contempt for him appears to influence Samantha.

Nevertheless, Jonah drives Samantha around to look for Ava/her lost book and is affable at Fosco’s Christmas party. He battled drug addiction and appreciates the opportunity to write at Warren. As Jonah says, “[I]f I didn’t end up coming to Warren, I’d probably be passed out in the snow somewhere on schnapps or horse tranquilizers right now. Probably both” (204). Jonah can be intense, but he’s not “psycho.” He’s down-to-earth compared to the pretentious Warren atmosphere and the affected Bunnies. His character symbolizes reality; he’s a flawed but honest person. Samantha asks him to hang out after graduation, so she’s ready to interact with the real world and real people.

The Drafts have many other labels, including Hybrids and Darlings, but the boys they create are Drafts. They have names such as Rimbaud VI (the fourth draft of Rimbaud) and are the Bunnies’ attempts to make archetypal love interests for themselves. They symbolize the writing process–the number of drafts one must create and kill before creating something meaningful. The name “Darlings” hints at this, referring to the popular writing advice, “Kill your darlings.” The variety of Drafts—Scary Other to the American actor John Cusack—pokes fun at the number of male stereotypes in Western culture. The Drafts often sound ridiculous and sometimes, the Bunnies have trouble controlling them. The Rob Valencia Draft harangues Samantha, and Lancelot bites her. This alludes to another famous adage about writing from Anne Lamott about “shitty first drafts,” which stresses getting all one’s thoughts on paper and making each subsequent draft stronger. Later Drafts are more functional; Max concocts his plan without Samantha knowing and can have sex, and some Drafts find work around town. The Drafts have the potential to be independent people, so the Bunnies worry, mostly superficially, about the ethics and morals of killing them.

Max is not a real person, but he’s not a bunny boy either: Samantha invented him from a deer. He’s a possible romantic interest for Samantha, Ava’s boyfriend, and a keenly desirable heartthrob in the eyes of the Bunnies. He’s part mythological creature, part devilish Romantic poet, and part movie star. His trench coat suggests danger, possibly alluding to the trench coats worn by the Columbine killers, and the Bunnies exaggerate his menacing character when they say they thought he might rape them. Max doesn’t directly hurt anybody—though he somehow seduces the Bunnies and gets them to hurt themselves. As with Ava, Max is Samantha’s foil. He does what Samantha can’t: exact vengeance on the Bunnies. By killing Max, Samantha showcases agency and hurts the Bunnies: She destroys the man of their dreams.