44 pages • 1 hour read
Alice HoffmanIncantation
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A 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
Water
A counterpoint to the fire and tension that exist in the book, water is framed by both the characters and the narration in terms of healing and goodness. Estrella’s grandmother sees water and fire as balancing each other out and gives the pearl necklace to Estrella after the public burning of books, saying, “On a day when there’s fire, there should also be water” (13).
Water’s fluidity also associates it with change—a positive in a novel that explores the nuances of Finding Identity Within Tradition. Estrella’s family tries to prepare her for the need to adapt by using metaphors involving water and change. When she learns her grandfather is a surgeon, he tells her, “Everything changes. One minute we are part of the river, and the next we are joined with the sea” (48). The goodness and inevitability of change allow the protagonist to heal some of her trauma; at the end of the novel, she is able to bathe in the rainwater of the mikvah and leave the destruction and ash behind.
Blue
Although many colors feature prominently in the novel, the color blue plays an especially important role to the protagonist and her mother. The motif of blue is most clearly connected to Abra, Estrella’s mother. Her hands are dyed blue from her first appearance until her death. Estrella notices, “My mother’s hands were always blue, sometimes like water, sometimes like the sky, sometimes like the colors of a bird’s feathers” (8). These different shades of blue indicate Abra’s complexity. Estrella also looks for this color, which she associates with comfort and beauty, in other people, as when she remembers her father or when she grows close to Andres and notices the color of his eyes.
However, blue is also connected to grief. Abra, for instance, argues with her daughter that tears are in fact blue, not clear as Estrella claims. These two contradictory connotations show the complicated relationship that Estrella is developing with her home. It is both a place of great natural beauty and also a place that brings sorrow.
The Emerald Ring
The emerald ring is a symbol of the love Estrella’s father had for Abra. The connection between Estrella’s father and emeralds is clear in Abra’s personal interpretations of the gates leading to heaven. One morning she frantically asks Estrella about the gate in the latter’s dreams, saying, “Was it made of gold or marble or emeralds? Was your father in the garden?” (13). Abra holds the emerald ring in such high esteem that it is the one object she saves from the soldiers when Estrella’s grandfather is arrested. The ring itself is passed from Abra to Estrella to Andres before the latter sells it to an unnamed person to facilitate their escape to Amsterdam. While losing this heirloom pains Estrella, in passing it along to Andres she mirrors the love her parents had for her. That doing so also saves her own life allows her parents to protect her even in death.
The ring’s association with Estrella’s deceased father (and later mother) speaks to emeralds’ second function: as a symbol of a past that is no longer here. Ironically, Abra favors emeralds in part because they “[are] the single thing that remain[s] constant, always green, always the same” (10). The emerald ring, however, shifts hands several times, and after Abra is arrested, the past confronts Estrella by positioning Catalina, her old best friend, in front of her, “shining like an emerald” (56). Here, the green color of emeralds symbolizes jealousy, the coopted symbol underscoring Catalina’s betrayal.
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By Alice Hoffman
