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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Mirrors
Throughout the novel, mirrors symbolize the mutable nature of identity. When Jude walks in on Reese binding his chest, they look at each other in the mirror rather than face-to-face. In this moment, Jude comes to understand Reese’s identity in a new way, and Reese is forced, uncomfortably, to witness himself being seen in the process of becoming a man. The mirror intensifies the intimacy of this situation and refracts Reese’s identity. Before they witness their father’s lynching, Desiree thinks that Stella is “as predictable as a reflection.” When Desiree and Stella are cleaning for the Duponts, Desiree catches Stella staring at the vanity mirror, longing to sit and admire her reflection the way white women did. This foreshadows Stella’s desire to look in the mirror and see a white woman. However, when Stella is an adult and living as a white woman, she still feels a sense of disconnect from her reflection when sitting at her own vanity. She experiences a sense that the woman in the mirror is someone different than who she is. In passing as white, Stella says she feels trapped, as though in a hall of mirrors she once went to with Desiree at the fair. There, searching for her sister, she became frightened when confronted with her own reflections. This metaphor creates a sense that adult Stella, facing the way her identity has morphed over the years like the endless iterations of her reflection in the hall of mirrors, feels destabilized and trapped and struggles to know who she is.
Maps
Maps symbolize the search for home and belonging throughout the novel. Mallard, the town that Desiree, Stella, and Jude grow up in, seek to escape, and are drawn back to, is a town that doesn’t exist on a map. This parallels the way that home is an absence for the Vigneses, a place they continually seek but struggle to find. When Reese was a child, he thought that the known world was just one side of the map and believed that the other side of the map was another world to be discovered. This parallels the way that Reese, like many characters in the novel, is searching for a place to call home—one that may not exist and may need to be created. Just as Reese creates his own identity, living as a man though the world told him he could not, Jude and Reese, in a sense, find the other side of the map and create a new world, one in which the pain of the past may begin to heal.
The Photograph
The photograph of twin sisters Desiree and Stella symbolizes the way that, as children, they often felt like a single person. In the photograph, which was taken at their father’s funeral, Desiree and Stella hold on to each other just like they did when they saw their father being attacked as they hid in the closet. In the aftermath of their father’s death, they both often feel like two halves of one whole. When Stella cuts herself, Desiree puts Stella’s finger in her mouth, suggesting that they are almost like a single body with an instinct to heal itself. Desiree succeeds in passing as Stella, suggesting that, in some ways, Desiree knows what it’s like to be Stella. This sense of unity between Desiree and Stella provides them comfort as well as a sense of stagnation. After their long separation, the two will never be as one again. After Desiree’s daughter shows it to Stella’s daughter, it’s the photograph that ultimately spurs the twins’ reunion, bringing them back together at last.
