56 pages • 1 hour read
Jane HamiltonThe Book of Ruth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
May’s Hands
May’s sore hands symbolize her difficult life and the way these difficulties have physically and mentally hardened her. The dysfunctionality and irritability that plagues Ruth’s relationship with her mother, May, lays the foundation for the events that unfold in the novel. Though May’s abuse is verbal and the antagonism between the mother and daughter pair does not extend to the physical realm, Ruth is on many occasions preoccupied by May’s hands. Ruth remembers that, when drawing as a child in art class, she “forgot to put hands on May,” claiming that “Her hands were just the things I didn’t want to think about” (22).
Ruth remarks that May’s hands are “the size of lobsters” attributes this condition to the fact that May had to do the washing for her large family when she was just a young child (35). Into her adulthood, May continues to do manual labor, specifically finishing fabrics at the Trim ‘N Tidy and canning vegetables at home. May’s hands have the power to elicit sympathy from Ruth. When she pleads with her mother to allow her to go on a vacation, she notices May’s “red, sore hands,” and claims that “there wasn’t anything in medicine that could ever straighten them out” (284). Ruth then supposes that “in real life, her hands were lily white and smooth, the way girls’ bodies are in fairy tales” (285), and that her vision of May’s hands was actually the result of a sort of drunken vision.
Literature
Literature is a motif in the novel that appears as both a sign of Ruth’s intelligence and as a symbol of hope for Ruth’s future at the end of the novel. Ruth’s job as a caregiver to the elderly Miss Pinn exposes her to a variety of canonical literary novels and their characters. This exposure is particularly transformative for Ruth given Ruth’s limited experiences in life. Ruth calls the books on tape that she listens to in the company of Miss Finch “blind tapes” (60). She notices how the novels help to characterize situations and people as either good or evil, and suspects (quite astutely, given her relatively young age) that the way in which the books act as a road map are what attracts people to literature.
Ruth first listens to Dickens, and afterwards wishes to meet Oliver Twist, claiming that “we’d have a million things to talk over” (60). As Ruth grows older, she becomes infatuated with the figure of Mr. Darcy. Particularly humorous moments in the narrative include when she likens Mr. Darcy to Ruby, though the comparison is admittedly ill-fitting: “when I conjured up Mr. Darcy, he looked almost exactly like Ruby. I wondered if Mr. Darcy had rotten teeth” (134). As Ruth’s relationship with Ruby develops further, she imagines Mr. Darcy “eating french fries” and “whacking on bird houses” (167). Elsewhere, Ruth admits that she felt like Emma Bovary “letting her bathrobe go” during her first sexual encounter with Ruby (122). Ruth admits to having checked out Flaubert’s Madame Bovary from the library unbeknownst to Miss Finch, who said it was inappropriate. Miss Finch awakens a thirst for literature in Ruth that stays with her throughout her life, and this literature in turn informs Ruth’s worldview during the events of the novel.
Birds
Birds figure broadly in the novel in several guises and with different purposes. For example, very early in the novel, Ruth alludes to “the worst day of her life” (which will be developed during the novel’s climax) on which she saw “a whole slew of birds on a telephone wire, hanging upside down by their feet. They were murdered by the current” (30).
Ruth is sensitive and attune to nature, and she has a special relationship with her hens. Some of her favorite childhood memories include playing in the yard with her hens, to whom she has given confirmation names such as “Prudence, Grace, and Mary Ellen Maria” (13). The hens provide company to Ruth, who is a rather awkward and slow child, always eclipsed by her high-achieving brother.
May suggests that Ruby tend to the chickens while he is unemployed, but Ruby is cripplingly afraid of them. Ruth encourages Ruby to overcome this fear, asserting that “the worst they do is give you a little peck” (159), but Ruby cries after being in the chicken coop for the first time. Ruby’s fear of getting bitten by the hens when May asks him to collect their eggs is a propos in this way; the hens are a symbol of protection for Ruth. Similarly, Ruby’s strangling of May’s favorite hen presages his fatal beating of May herself.
