52 pages • 1 hour read
Heather MarshallLooking for Jane
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A 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
Letters and Letter Writing
Content Warning: This section references abortion.
The motif of letters and letter writing reflects the importance and difficulty of honest communication. A letter first appears in the Prologue when Frances’s letter to Nancy is misdelivered and becomes lost for seven years. This letter launches one of the main plotlines, as Angela discovers the letter years later and searches out the people involved. Although the letter goes astray, the honest and emotional revelations within its pages motivate Angela to find Maggie (under the name Evelyn Taylor) and reunite her with her daughter, Nancy (born Jane).
In a novel that is deeply interested in the power of relationships, letters and letter writing represent the characters’ attempts to reach each other. Other prominent letters include the notes that Maggie and Evelyn write to their daughters, stowing them away in their blankets with the hope that someday their daughters will know that their birth mothers loved them. Angela sends Facebook messages—modern-day letters—in search of Nancy. The letters that Maggie and Evelyn write to their families from St. Agnes’s are monitored, censored, or even thrown out. The author uses these various instances of letters and letter writing to demonstrate the difficulty of clear, honest communication. Unlike a verbal conversation, written communications experience a delay as the words are transported from the writer to the addressee, creating more chance for interruption. Just as secrets, misunderstandings, and missing years result in wrinkles and interruptions for the characters’ relationships, so the letters in the novel are delivered late or are incomplete.
Jane
The name Jane recurs throughout the novel, and its meaning transforms as the novel unfolds. As a motif, the name Jane develops a few of the novel’s central themes, including Justice Under Unjust Systems and Motherhood as Both Universal and Personal. Because names are so closely tied to people’s self-identity, the use of a name as a multilayered motif underscores the importance of self-determination and choice.
As the code word that women use when seeking a safe underground abortion through the Jane Network, the name Jane represents people seeking their own justice under a system that is failing to provide it. The code word keeps the patients, doctors, and other volunteers safe and also brings them together. For example, Nancy calls doctors’ offices asking for Jane when she needs her abortion, and the use of the code word leads her to Evelyn and Alice. Later, with just a whispered question, “Jane?”, a waitress in a café can bring up her shared history with Evelyn and thank her for her work. The name stands in for the network and represents the efforts of those involved with it to support each other.
The name Jane has other meanings in the novel as well. Maggie (later going by the name Evelyn Taylor) names her daughter Jane. Jane is renamed Nancy when she is adopted, so Evelyn’s “search for Jane” is a search for a daughter who has been separated from her mother for all her life. Because the name has broad resonance (i.e., via the Jane Network), the name also stands in for all daughters—especially all the daughters who were unwillingly separated from their mothers at St. Agnes’s. The individual and universal application of the name Jane highlights both the shared and the personal experiences of motherhood.
Maggie’s Yellow Baby Booties
Marshall uses the symbol of the yellow baby booties to develop the theme of motherhood. The booties represent motherly love not only because Maggie knits them as a gift for her baby but also because Frances secretly holds on to the booties and gives them to Nancy when Nancy is pregnant with her own daughter. As an object passed from mother to daughter through generations, the booties highlight the shared experience of motherhood and the way that role can bring women together. The booties also represent the personal, unique aspects of motherhood, as they mean something different to each of the women who owns them. For Maggie, the booties are a desperate attempt to send something of herself with her daughter. For Frances, the booties begin as a painful reminder that her daughter had another mother and come to demonstrate her wish that she could be fully honest with Nancy. For Nancy, the booties symbolize her love for and relationships with both of her mothers.
