Hester Shaw’s facial scar symbolizes how sometimes a person can look like a “monster” (a word Hester uses to describe herself) on the surface, but actually be kinder and braver than people who look more conventionally beautiful. The scar also symbolizes the dark side of Thaddeus Valentine, who looks like a dashing hero on the surface, but who gave Hester that scar and who is willing to resort to murder to get what he wants. Hester lost one of her eyes when she got the scar, but in spite of that, she is often better than Tom at seeing people’s true nature, since Tom continues to believe in Valentine’s goodness even after Valentine attempts to murder him. The trauma of her parents’ murder is so central to Hester that it’s visible on her face, and this helps explain why she is so eager to exact revenge on Valentine. By spending time with the scarred Hester, Tom realizes that superficial beauty doesn’t count for much and that true friendship and love are more important than outward appearance.
Scar Quotes in Mortal Engines
“Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”
“It’s made of junk!” he gasped.
“Junk?” laughed Miss Fang. “Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aero-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon... It’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards...”
“I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”
She had come to think of Bevis Pod as a sweet, clumsy, rather useless person, someone who needed her to look after him, and she suspected that that was how the Historians all thought of him as well. But that afternoon she had begun to understand that he was really much cleverer than her.
“But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”
Scar Symbol Timeline in Mortal Engines
