The Lady in the Lake

An important motif that develops the theme of Identity and Deception is hair, specifically the hair color of women who live in southern California. There are many women with blond hair who can be mistaken for one another. In Kingsley’s life, his telephone operator is a “blonde,” and is only referred to by her hair color, and his wife Crystal is a blond. The Mildred/Muriel character has blond hair and is mistaken for Crystal. When Bill Chess and Marlowe discover the corpse in the lake, the only identifiable feature is the long, blond hair. Marlowe describes the moment of discovery: “I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again” (40). The blond hair moves around dramatically in the water, taking on a life of its own, while the body’s decomposition in the water has erased any other identifying features. The corpse’s “watersoaked blond hair like his wife’s hair and almost no recognizable face” (207) causes Chess to identify the corpse as Muriel, when it is actually Crystal. This image literalizes the sexist objectification of women that pervades the world of the novel, in which young, blond women are treated as interchangeable.