47 pages • 1 hour read
Alice HoffmanThe Invisible Hour
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A 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
Apples
Content Warning: This section discusses life in and escape from a cult and death.
Apples are directly symbolic of female power. They are associated with the biblical story of Eve, who chooses to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Initially, apples represent Joel’s control over Ivy, Mia, and the rest of the Community. Apple orchards are the setting of both Ivy’s initiation into the Community and her untimely death: Joel proposes to Ivy after talking with her in the apple orchard, and years later, she dies while harvesting apples. Because of this, Mia equates apples with the Community and her mother’s death and refuses to eat apples for most of her life. Joel uses apple tree leaves to maintain a constant threat to Mia after she leaves the Community, enhancing a sinister connotation with apples.
However, the meaning of apples shifts by the end of the novel as Nathaniel draws the connection between the apple and Eve not to exert control over Mia, as Joel did, but to convince her to overcome the fruit’s negative connotations in her life. After Mia finally eats an apple and relishes in its sweetness alongside the man she loves, the apple becomes a symbol of a woman’s power and capacity for understanding rather than a symbol of sin and immorality.
Library
The library is a motif that highlights The Liberating Power of Literature. Ivy’s father took her to the Boston Athenaeum when she was a child, and the experience of delving into the world of books comes back to her at her wedding to Joel. The memory rings alarm bells for Ivy, as she thinks of her father asking, “What sort of a world is a world without books?” (29). In marrying Joel and committing to the Community, Ivy gives up books for a sense of safety, and in doing so, she also sacrifices freedom.
While the library is for Ivy a reminder of the past she left behind, it becomes a liberating force for Mia. Ivy encourages Mia to secretly visit and explore the Blackwell Library. Sarah Mott, the librarian, is Mia’s haven when she escapes the Community. Constance, Sarah’s partner, is also a librarian and offers Mia direct protection from Joel on the steps of the Concord Library. Mia follows in her adopted mothers’ footsteps and gains financial freedom and independence with her career at the New York Public Library. When Mia realizes that libraries in the 19th century are neither public nor open to women, it cements her decision to raise her daughter in a world where she can access liberty through libraries.
Red Boots
The red boots that Joel gives Ivy are a symbol with meaning that shifts throughout the novel. Initially, the boots symbolize Joel’s guilt over Kayla and his willingness to bend the rules for his own pleasure. Even though colorful clothing is against the rules because it expresses vanity, Joel gives the boots to Ivy, arguing that they please him and therefore aren’t vain. When Mia takes the boots and hides them, Joel is again willing to bend the rules to allow her to express her love for her mother.
The boots grow to symbolize the connection between Mia and Ivy as Mia continues to wear the boots throughout her adolescence and adulthood, the only adornment to her otherwise plain appearance. They also symbolize how Mia is caught between her past and her future. Mia wears the boots when she escapes from the Community and wears them when she travels to 1837. Nathaniel sees the boots as an indication of magic, as witches in folklore often wear red shoes. The boots facilitate Nathaniel’s fascination with Mia, which leads to her ability to move beyond her mother and Joel and into a life that belongs to her.
Blackbirds and Sparrows
Birds in the novel symbolically connect Ivy with death and Nathaniel with freedom and protection.
Directly before Ivy’s accident, Mia and Ivy sit in an apple tree and talk about running away, but Ivy says that they aren’t birds and can’t chase that kind of freedom. Ironically, however, Ivy is symbolically associated with birds throughout the novel—albeit blackbirds, which are traditionally associated with death. This traditional association plays out when Ivy’s dark hair is compared to blackbird feathers as Joel cuts it in punishment for Mia’s book, foreshadowing her death. Blackbirds fly up from the field when the men carry Ivy’s body from the orchard after she dies. Ivy’s hair is also compared to black feathers after her death, and the children sing a song about blackbirds as part of the funeral service for Ivy.
By contrast, Nathaniel is directly connected with sparrows. Sparrows are traditionally symbolic of freedom and protection, which is what he represents to Mia. However, sparrows also become a symbol of the impossibility of their relationship and of Nathaniel’s struggles to write without a direct, solitary connection to nature. When he discovers Mia, he is walking alone, accompanied only by the sparrows overhead, indicating that his solitary life is ending as he comes across the woman he will love. Elizabeth tells Mia that a sparrow and a fish cannot live together to encourage her to return home. When Nathaniel is grieving Mia’s absence, he is followed by flocks of sparrows as he wanders the countryside, and children call him “the bird man” (178). When he tries to write, “words [seem] as elusive as sparrows, flying out the open window as he toss[es] away crumpled pieces of failed work” (179). Mia’s arrival in Blackwell near the end of the novel is punctuated by “enormous flocks of sparrows […] heading south” (226), which indicates Nathaniel’s proximity and foreshadows their coming permanent separation.
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By Alice Hoffman
