Little Fires Everywhere: Exploring Motherhood, Class and Race

The Hello Sunshine produced new Hulu series, Little Fires Everywhere, is based on the best selling novel by Celeste Ng. The series in a 90's period piece that follows two families from different backgrounds of race and class. The series centers on the mothers Elena and Mia and the differences in what it means to be a mother by these two women.


Reese Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four in Shaker Height, Ohio. Her dreams of a career where tampered by motherhood so she is a part-time worker at the local newspaper and manages the rental property. She meets Mia Warren, a single mother art photographer, through the rental. Mia and Pearl are wanderers and are constantly on the move for Mia's art practice and her daughter Pearl is along for the ride. Elena offers Mia the rental as well as a job as a house manager for the Richardson family.


Little Fires Everywhere stresses the idea about motherhood and the conformity nature of suburbia through both the eyes of a white woman and a black woman. Mia doesn't want her daughter to assimilate into their new environment or have anything to do with the Richardsons. As Pearl becomes closer with Elena's kids she subjects herself to them using her for their own agenda of college essays and medical procedures.


This show is purely driven by its performances. Reese Witherspoon has entered her calling of playing a privileged white mother in the suburbs who doesn't understand the power of the color of her skin. Watching Witherspoon onscreen is infuriating as she is blind to what Mia and Pearl go through as well as the many definitions motherhood has. She is an uptight white suburbanite clueless of the real world. Some of the highlights of the show are the scenes between Mia and Pearl that show the anger and tenderness behind a relationship between a mother and her daughter.


The show is successful in not developing their characters but using them as representations of moral and cultural ideas. The series starts off with revealing the house fire and uses the events to not show the characters changing but the roles they played that eventually escalate to these actions. It is almost like they are in one big game and they are constantly moving around one another.