The Marriage Of Opposites

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-11

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Colors

Hoffman uses colors throughout the novel to vividly describe the lush island landscape, as well as to symbolize emotion. In particular, blue often represents grief, and green represents bitterness. Often, blue is associated with Jestine, whose life is defined by loss, while green is associated with Rachel, whose life is defined by resentment. Just as St. Thomas is literally awash in a combination of these colors—“a small speck of land, little more than thirty square miles set in the blue-green sea” (3)—so too are Rachel and Jestine figuratively swimming in colors, isolated by their feelings of grief and bitterness.

Green is first connected to the Pomié family apple tree and its bitter fruit. The apple tree, which could produce delicious sweet fruit in a cool climate, instead produces inedible green apples in the St. Thomas heat. The apple tree symbolizes Rachel, who resents being trapped on the island. Rachel herself points out this color symbolism after a disagreement with her mother: “I didn’t understand that when I closed myself to her, I took a part of her bitterness inside me. It was green and unforgiving, and as it grew it made me more like her” (7). Later, when Rachel is denied the right to marry Frédéric, she feels that the “green bitterness growing inside me was a dangerous flower” (166). While the island of St. Thomas is a beautiful verdant paradise, Rachel associates this green island with being trapped—first by her mother and later by circumstance.

Most events associated with the kidnapping of Jestine’s daughter, Lyddie, are connected to the color blue. When Elise first writes Rachel regarding Lyddie, Rachel gives the letter to Jestine and “the ink she used was a shade of blue so dark it was almost purple” (92). When Jestine receives another letter regarding Lyddie, she burns it after reading and the “smoke was blue” (184). Both letters bring her grief because they remind her of the greatest loss of her life. On another occasion, when Camille is drawing Jestine, he “saw something in her face I hadn’t noticed before. All at once I saw that the color of grief was blue and that it radiated from her” (195).

Birds and Spiritualism

The island of St. Thomas hosts an eclectic mix of religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and various African religions. As a result, even though people may practice one specific religion, they often borrow ideas from other religions as well. Although Rachel is Jewish, she also believes in the Spiritualism that she learned from Adelle and others on the island. In particular, she believes she has the ability to contact the spirits of the deceased. Birds and winged creatures, like moths and bats, are often representative of this belief and either symbolize the presence of a deceased person’s spirit or act as an omen.

When Rachel sees a hummingbird as a young girl, she says, “The tiny creature was there and gone so quickly I wondered if I had imagined him. Perhaps he was another spirit. Then I noticed a feather on the floor. I picked it up and slipped it under my pillow. Such things were said to bring luck” (24). Here, the hummingbird represents both a potential spirit and the belief in luck and signs. Later, Rachel sees an Egret catching fish in the water, and she says it’s a “sign of good luck […] Egrets meant joy and happiness. I knew that much” (35). On another occasion, Rachel makes a blood promise to Jestine by biting her own hand, and “the blood formed into the shape of a bird” (61). Rachel takes this as an omen that she and Jestine will still go to France together one day.

Perhaps the strongest example of birds representing the spirits of the deceased occurs when Adelle is dying. Rachel thinks she “sounded like a bird, distant, breathy” when she talks. And after Adelle dies, a pelican follows Rachel home and she thinks, “Maybe it was the bird Adelle had become, a spirit now freed” (71). For Rachel and others, the belief that birds are the spirits of loved ones is tied to the birds’ ability to fly: just as birds move from place to place unattached, so too could a person’s spirit roam the earth unattached to a human body.

The belief in spirits is so strong that is permeates almost nearly every aspect of Rachel’s life. Although Rachel is Jewish and has been raised in the synagogue, she has as much faith in Adelle’s prophetic words as in God. She specifically says, “I chanted the prayers of my own faith, but I remained interested in the spirit world” (23). Before Adelle dies, she tells Rachel that Isaac won’t be her only husband. Rachel holds on to this belief like a religious doctrine that guides her steps. Similarly, when Rachel thinks she might die giving birth to her first child, she calls out to Isaac’s first wife, not God, to save her; Rachel promises that she will honor the dead woman for the rest of her life if the birth goes well, and then she does exactly that, religiously putting flamboyant branches on her grave.

Collective and Personal Stories

Stories play an important role both personally for Rachel and collectively for the island. St. Thomas has a rich cultural history that stems from the variety of people and religions that make up the island’s social infrastructure, and inherent to this collective culture are the stories that everyone shares. However, Rachel’s father points out that “There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of the story […] One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed” (11). He’s essentially saying that stories simultaneously strike an emotion and serve a purpose. For example, one story, created by the island’s slave holders to “frighten slaves from running away” holds that there are werewolves who “were said to reside on the old plantations” (11). This widespread story serves the nefarious purpose of keeping the enslaved from seeking their freedom, serving the slave owners’ intended purpose. This instance demonstrates the power of the collective story and how it can be used to influence for better or worse.

When Rachel is a little girl, an individual author’s narratives allow her to escape her environment. While reading fairy tales in her father’s library, she notices their “sting of truth. As I turned the pages, I felt as if there were bees on my fingertips, for I had never felt as alive as when reading. Monsieur Perrault’s stories explained my own world to me. I might not understand all I felt, but I knew a single one of his chapters was more enlightening than a hundred conversations with my mother” (6). Guided by the writing of a specific person rather than the folk tales that come out of a community, Rachel is empowered to see that there is a world beyond the small island of St. Thomas and what she perceives to be the small mind of her mother. Later, she transforms one kind of fairy tale into another, writing down the collective stories of the island, “small miracles common only in our country,” and becoming an individual teller of her own tales: “. For as long as I was trapped here, I would write down these stories, along with a list of the wondrous things I myself had seen. When I went to France, I would have dozens of tales to tell” (8). Writing these stories shows Rachel developing stories for her own purposes rather than simply accepting the communal intension behind them.