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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Momma's Seeds

When Robert Finch takes Isabel and Ruth home to gather their blankets and shoes, Isabel wonders what she might hide in her pocket. She chooses a few “flower seeds that Momma had collected,” although she does not know what kind of seeds they are. At the Locktons’, Isabel plants the mystery seeds in the yard. In the late fall, the plants that eventually grew were killed by the frost, but Isabel collected a few seeds from the dead flowers, wrapped them in a cloth, and laid them under a loose board in the pantry. Just as Isabel feels she has abandoned Ruth, she feels guilty for not caring for the seeds. Before she escapes in Chapter XLIV, she pries the board up and removes the seeds, tucking them once again in her pocket. The seeds represent Isabel herself, trying to grow but unsure of her identity. They also symbolize her loyalty to her mother and her ancestors. The fact that she carries them into the next part of her story means that she, like them, will have a new life.

Ruth's Dolls

When Isabel and Ruth leave Rhode Island, Ruth must leave her doll “made of flannel bits and calico,” her only real possession. At the Locktons’, Isabel makes Ruth a new doll from cornhusks and fabric scraps, something to play with and remind her of their former life. After Madam sends Ruth away, the cornhusk doll is a comfort to Isabel. It replaces and represents Ruth, and when Isabel leaves home in Chapter XXVIII, she carries Ruth’s doll in her basket. While escaping the fire with Lady Seymour, Isabel loses Ruth’s doll, feeling she has now lost everything. The doll has accumulated symbolic meaning by this point in the novel, as it symbolizes motherhood and childhood, it symbolizes Ruth, and it ultimately symbolizes family love.

Curzon's Hat

Curzon is introduced in Chapter III as a boy who wears a floppy red hat, and this hat becomes his distinctive feature that changes in appearance as he changes. When Isabel learns that Curzon has joined the army, she notices the hat is flecked with mud just as the rest of him had changed from a house servant of a wealthy man into a tattered, barefoot slave. When Isabel sees Curzon limp into the prison, the hat is “nearer brown than red now, with a rip through the brim.” When she visits him in prison, he no longer has his red-brown hat. The hat essentially represents Curzon’s hopeful nature. Curzon is jovial and high-spirited when he meets Isabel, but he loses that quality over time just as the hat slowly loses its red color and then eventually disappears. The hat has no place in the prison. Like Curzon’s boyhood innocence, the hat is gone for good.

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