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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Sophia Loren:
In this passage, the author uses an allusion to show how Lily measures her appearance against a period-specific cultural ideal. At the beginning of the novel, Lily reflects on how others see her and wonders why her “nice” features aren’t enough to attract potential boyfriends:
I had nice eyes, though, what you would call Sophia Loren eyes, but still, even the boys who wore their hair in ducktails dripping with Vitalis and carried combs in their shirt pockets didn’t seem attracted to me, and they were considered hard up.
Sophia Loren is an Italian actress best known for her films made in the 1960s. She had a very distinctive signature makeup look that emphasized her large, upturned hazel eyes. Because Lily’s eyes also have these qualities, she tries to borrow Sophia Loren’s image when describing her own facial features. The comparison creates a momentary spark of confidence because it links her to someone who is seen as beautiful by her peers. However, Lily observes in the same breath that however “nice” her eyes are, she still can’t seem to attract the attention of the boys in her community. Even the most “hard up” boys, who Lily considers to have lower standards than the rest, don’t seem interested in her. The boys she mentions here belong to a working-class socio-economic group called “greasers,” which was strongly associated with the rock’n’roll and motorcycle subcultures of the 1950s. The allusion she makes here—to the “ducktail” haircuts covered in the oily, strong-smelling pomade Vitalis that the greasers all wear—places the scene firmly in its period. Lily feels that if even these boys aren’t attracted to her, there must be something very wrong with how she looks.
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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Making the Paper:
After they escape from Sylvan, Lily buys a newspaper to see if she and Rosaleen have been mentioned after fleeing the jail. Kidd uses allusion and situational irony to show how Lily’s private crisis pales beside the larger, more chaotic events of the 1960s:
I dropped a dime into the slot and took one of the papers, wondering if the story was inside somewhere. Rosaleen and I squatted on the ground in an alley and spread out the paper, opening every page. It was full of Malcolm X, Saigon, the Beatles, tennis at Wimbledon, and a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, that closed down rather than accept Negro guests, but nothing about me and Rosaleen. Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.
The allusions Kidd makes here place Lily’s story inside a real historical moment. The newspaper she is reading contains stories about Malcolm X, the Beatles, Saigon, Wimbledon, and an anti-integrationist Jackson motel. Each reference gives the reader a clear sense of the time period. The news spread out in front of Lily ranges from articles on civil rights leaders to the Vietnam War to British tennis tournaments. The mix shows how the world stretches far beyond Lily’s experience and does not pause for her problems. They also also reveal Lily’s limited sense of scale. All of these momentous things don’t mean much to her, as long as she and Rosaleen haven’t made the papers themselves.
The situational irony comes from what Lily does and does not find in the paper. Because it seemed so important to them, she expects a headline about her disappearance and Rosaleen’s flight. Instead, she sees stories that feel enormous compared to her personal turmoil. The irony rests in the fact that Lily is relieved when the paper ignores her and “thanks God” for “the poor news reporting” that made it so. She feels grateful for the oversight, even if it doesn’t bode well for the quality of news being published.
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Explanation and Analysis—Thoreau:
In this reflection the author uses allusion, simile, and the motif of finding comfort in nature to show how Lily sees her escape from T. Ray’s house as the start of a new life. As she wakes beside the creek next to Rosaleen, she thinks back to her favorite authors from English class:
Next to Shakespeare I love Thoreau best. Mrs. Henry made us read portions of Walden Pond, and afterward I’d had fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find me. [...] A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air. It was such a pretty sight for a second I forgot the heavy feeling I’d carried since T. Ray had told me about my mother. Instead I was at Walden Pond. Day one of my new life, I said to myself. That’s what this is.
Walden is a memoir by the American author Henry David Thoreau, which talks about his two-year retreat from society into a cabin in the woods. The allusion to Kidd makes to Walden connects Lily’s escape from T. Ray to Thoreau’s search for independence. When Lily read the book at school she imagined a “private garden” far from T. Ray, and as she wakes in the woods she believes she’s found it. Although she’s nowhere near Walden Pond (which is in Massachusetts), she feels she’s found a place of true peace and safety.
The motif of nature as a source of comfort appears in this scene and many others in the novel, and gives Lily a way to understand her own growth. As she moves away from T. Ray and the trauma of her childhood, she moves closer to people who value natural things and live harmoniously. The natural world becomes a setting where she feels safe enough to imagine a different version of her life, which helps her take the first steps toward healing. Aside from the generally idyllic surroundings, the simile of the dragonflies moving “like they were stitching up the air” helps the reader understand how Lily reads the scene as healing. The idea of “stitching” suggests repair or renewal, which Lily is desperately craving. In this place, she can live “day one of [her] new life” and forget the “heavy feeling” of her previous one.
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Explanation and Analysis—General Sherman:
When giving her first impressions of the town of Tiburon, Lily reads the worn look of its shopfronts through the lens of Southern history. She tries to describe the place by joking that even a Union Commander like General Sherman wouldn’t have been interested in looting it:
General Sherman had probably ridden by here and decided to spare it on the basis of its name, because I’m sure it hadn’t been on looks. The whole front of it was a forgotten bulletin board: Studebaker Service, Live Bait, Buddy’s Fishing Tournament, Rayford Brothers’ Ice Plant, Deer Rifles $45, and a picture of a girl wearing a Coca-Cola bottle cap on her head. A sign announced a gospel sing at the Mount Zion Baptist Church that took place back in 1957, if anyone wanted to know.
General William Sherman was a leading Union commander during the American Civil War. He is best known for his 1864 march through Georgia, where his troops destroyed military targets, railroads, and supplies to weaken the Confederacy. Although it’s unlikely that Sherman himself would have passed through a tiny town like Tiburon, South Carolina, Lily jokes that he wouldn’t have been interested in it even if he had. The details that follow support her point, as she exhaustively lists the things on the massive bulletin board that forms the front of the only store. As she does so, she notes that the last event that seemed to have happened in Tiburon was in 1957, seven years prior. The cluttered wall of notices suggests that the place that has not changed in years. Even though Lily will soon discover her new home with the Boatwrights on the other side of town, her first feelings about Tiburon aren’t strongly positive.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Birmingham, AL:
When Lily discovers the stone wall near the woods, she reads one of the notes May has pressed into its cracks. Kidd uses this moment to make an allusion to one of the great tragedies of the Civil Rights Era:
Where the grass gave way to the woods, I found a stone wall crudely cemented together, not even knee high but nearly fifty yards long. It curved on around the property and abruptly stopped. It didn’t seem to have any purpose to it. Then I noticed tiny pieces of folded-up paper stuck in the crevices around the stones. I walked the length of the fence, and it was the same all the way, hundreds of these bits of paper. I pulled one out and opened it, but the writing was too blurred from rain to make out. I dug out another one. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead.
The allusion here is a reference to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in September 1963. This was a terrorist attack by the Ku Klux Klan that killed four young Black girls and injured many other churchgoers. The event shook the country and caused massive unrest in Alabama and nationwide. Pictures of the four young victims were published everywhere. The mention of the “four little angels” in May’s note reflects the language many people used when they mourned the loss of these girls and the viciousness of the bombing. This moment connects May’s private sorrow to the wider sorrow shared across the country.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—May's Wall:
Knowing that her sensitivity to the world can be overwhelming, August gives May a structured way to handle grief by having her build a “wailing wall.” When Lily asks about the notes she found stuffed into the stone wall in the woods, August makes an allusion to explain why May needs it:
“Mother was good about taking care of her, but when she died, it fell to me and June. We tried for years to get May some help. She saw doctors, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with her except put her away. So June and I came up with this idea of a wailing wall."
"A what kind of wall?"
"Wailing wall," she said again. "Like they have in Jerusalem. The Jewish people go there to mourn. It’s a way for them to deal with their suffering."
The allusion August makes here is to a real religious site in Jerusalem. The Wailing Wall, also called the Western Wall, is the sole remaining section of an ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and remains open as a site of prayer. People write prayers on slips of paper and place them in the cracks of the stones as a way to express grief or devotion. It’s a sacred place where people gather to grieve and pray. By comparing May’s wall to this site, August is trying to explain to Lily that May’s emotional life needs a protected space. The allusion helps Lily understand that this homemade wall is not a random idea. After May’s sister April killed herself, May was psychologically damaged and needed an outlet for the intensity of her reactions to things. The wall in the Boatwrights’ garden gives May a method for survival when her feelings threaten to overwhelm her.
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Explanation and Analysis—Lily's Note:
The narrator uses a metaphor and an allusion to describe Lily seeking a place where she can set down the pain she carries about her mother. After August explains the purpose of the Wailing Wall, Lily walks to May’s wall at night and tries to understand how the Boatwright women use the space for comfort:
I tore a piece of paper from a tablet and wrote my mother’s name on it. Deborah Owens. When I looked outside, I knew I would have to make my way by starlight. I crept across the grass, back to the edge of the woods, to May’s wall. Hiccuping all the way. Placing my hands on the stones, all I wanted was not to ache so much. I wanted to let go of my feelings for a little while, to pull in my moat bridge. I pressed the paper with her name into a cranny that seemed right for her, giving her to the wailing wall. Somewhere along the way my hiccups disappeared.
Lily carries around her sadness about her mother all the time, and the metaphor of the “moat bridge” shows how Lily thinks about her own emotional defenses against it. A moat surrounds something precious and keeps danger away from it. By placing a bridge across that moat, Lily allows the outside world to cross into that protected space. When Lily says she wants “to pull in [her] moat bridge,” she imagines pulling the bridge up so no one can reach her. She wants to seal herself off from the pain that rises each time she thinks about her mother.
The allusion to the Wailing Wall links Lily’s private grief to the ancient Jewish tradition of writing down painful or hopeful thoughts and placing them in the Wall to ease the burden. By pressing her mother’s name into the stones, she is participating in the version of this ritual that May and the Boatwright sisters created. The act does not erase her sorrow, just as it doesn’t get rid of the negative emotions that plague May. However, it does give both May and Lily a way to take action toward releasing some of their grief.
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Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Satellite Surveillance:
Even in the Boatwrights’ garden, Lily doesn’t feel completely safe from the threats of the outside world. Kidd uses an allusion and hyperbole to show how Lily’s fear rises while she sits alone near May’s wall and lets her thoughts drift toward the sky above her:
I sat on the ground with my back against the stones and my head tilted back so I could see the stars with all the spy satellites mixed in. Maybe one of them was taking my picture this very minute. They could spot me even in the dark. Nothing was safe. I would have to remember that.
The allusion to “spy satellites” connects Lily’s general anxiety about being discovered in her lies to the Cold War climate of the 1960s. The media bombarded Americans with information—both facts and propaganda—about the threat of Russia spying on them and/or attacking from space with nuclear weapons. As she sits in the garden in South Carolina Lily imagines there are malicious machines watching her from above. The hyperbole in her thinking appears when it occurs to her that a satellite might be “taking [her] picture this very minute.” This exaggeration shows how exposed she feels, and how fragile after weeks of running and lying. It’s already clear to the reader that Lily sees the outside world as threatening and intrusive. She seems to be teetering toward paranoia in this moment, where she seems to think that “nothing is safe” and that distant forces could reach and harm her.
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Explanation and Analysis—Ranger 7:
In this passage from Chapter 6, Kidd uses an allusion, hyperbole, and a flashback to show how Lily begins to intertwine the scientific ideas she hears in the news with her own hopes. She stays outside in the garden after August and Rosaleen leave to go to bed and lets her thoughts drift toward the sky:
August disappeared into the house, and Rosaleen headed for her cot in the honey house, but I stayed on and stared at the sky, imagining Ranger 7 blasting away for it. I knew one day I would go back into the parlor when no one was around and touch the Lady’s heart. Then I would show August the picture of my mother and see if the moon broke loose and fell out of the sky.
The flashback at the end of this passage connects this thought of Lily’s to her earlier dream about the moon cracking. When she had that dream before, it represented the total upheaval of her life as she ran away from T. Ray. The return of the cracked moon at this later point shows that her old fears haven’t completely disappeared. She still worries that she will somehow destroy everything because she makes a mistake, just as she believes she destroyed her family when she causes T. Ray’s gun to discharge on that fateful morning. The hyperbolic thought that showing August the photo of her mother might actually cause the moon to “break loose” shows how much she has already come to depend on the Boatwright family. She is terrified of disrupting things, but is also desperate to learn more about her mother and about August.
The allusion to the Ranger 7 NASA space probe aligns Lily’s hopes for the future with the “Space Race” of the 1960s. Ranger 7 launched on July 28, 1964, took the first clear photos of the moon, and sent them back to earth. Lily imagines it “blasting away” toward this seemingly impossible goal. Thinking about that enormous endeavor helps her to frame her own search for answers as more achievable.
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Jane Eyre:
As August sits on the porch reading a new book from the bookmobile, Lily notices the title and stops to ask her about it. In this passage, Kidd uses a literary allusion to link Lily’s situation to the story of a famous orphaned heroine:
August sat on the porch swing that was suspended from two chains in the ceiling. She was rocking back and forth, having her orangeade break and reading her new book, which she’d gotten from the bookmobile. I turned my head to read the title. Jane Eyre [...]
“It’s about a girl whose mother died when she was little,” she said.
Then she looked at me in a way that made my stomach tip over, the same way it’d tipped over when she’d told me about Beatrix.
“What happens to the girl?” I asked, trying to make my voice steady.
“I’ve only started the book,” she said. “But right now she’s just feeling lost and sad.”
Jane Eyre is a novel published in 1847 by the English author Charlotte Brontë. It is one of the most famous novels about a young person’s growth to adulthood ever written, and it follows the story of an orphan girl's journey through a harsh, class-bound world. The brief allusion to Jane Eyre here ties Lily to a well-known character whose life also begins with loss. Both Jane and Lily lose their mothers at a young age, and both begin their lives in environments where their guardians resent and abuse them. By alluding to it, Kidd locates Lily in the literary tradition of motherless girls fighting to understand themselves in a world that wants to squash them. August appears to see this comparison clearly too, which is why the look she gives Lily “makes [her] stomach tip over.”
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