52 pages • 1 hour read
Jacob Have I Loved
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Symbols & Motifs
Music/Singing
Music appears as a motif throughout the novel, haunting Louise’s steps and reminding her of her sister, beginning with Caroline’s musical talent as a young girl. Music follows Louise from the second chapter onward, as Caroline plays the piano in their home, performs at school concerts, causes the family financial hardship with her lessons on the mainland, and finally steals Louise’s chance to escape when the Captain gives Caroline the money to attend school in Baltimore.
However, Louise clearly takes pride in her sister’s ability, even as she also feels jealous of the attention it garners. She describes Caroline’s singing during the Christmas concert with evocative imagery: “Caroline’s voice came suddenly like a single beam of light across the darkness” (34). She sings the Christmas hymn, “I Wonder as I Wander,” with a clear, beautiful voice that leaves Louise “shaking, perhaps shattering” (35). The novel is brought full circle at the end in a couple of different ways, one of which is the return of this song in the final lines. As Louise walks home in the snow, she hears someone in her Appalachian village home singing “a melody so sweet and pure that [she] had to hold [herself] to keep from shattering” (244). The final line of the novel is the lyrics: “I wonder as I wander out under the sky…” (244), signifying that Caroline’s music still follows Louise even as an adult, but also implying that Louise has at last come to accept its place in her life.
Water
In the novel, water is a powerful symbol of the realm of the masculine on Rass Island, as well as Louise’s more masculine traits and yearning for control over her life. Throughout the narrative, Louise returns to the water as a place of escape and comfort when she is angry or upset. In the prologue, she recalls how she would wade out into the marsh on the “first warm day of spring” (3) and enjoy the sensations of mud on her feet and the smell of the bay. She states unequivocally that she loved Rass Island, despite her many hardships while living there, and it becomes increasingly clear that much of that love is for the water itself.
However, the water is the realm of men. Only the men of the island own boats and go crab fishing. Louise is bitter for years when her father refuses to let her work with him on his boat. She remarks that her father “like nearly every man on our island, was a waterman” and that “he needed a son and [she] would have given anything to be that son” (21). The water symbolizes the divide between the men and women of the island. It is partially because Louise is denied entry into this realm of men that she finally feels she must leave the island, despite loving it. And yet, even when she makes her own life as a nurse-midwife in the Appalachian Mountains, her love of water remains. She is attracted to the mountain village because it is isolated in a sea of mountains just like her island. When she gives birth to a son, she believes he will also feel drawn to the water, with its ability to connect and isolate, give life, and destroy it.
Hands
In the second half of the novel, hands become an important symbol for Louise. She decides hands are more indicative of a person than their eyes, symbolizing their character and fate. She first fixates on the Captain’s hands, which she describes as strong with long fingers and nails that are “large, rounded at the bottom and blunt and neat at the tips” (132). His hands remind her of the hands in a Pond’s lotion ad, in which a man’s hand places a diamond engagement ring on a woman’s hand. This comparison leads her to obsess over her own hands as well, which are rough and cracked with broken nails from working. She believes the state of her hands indicates that she is doomed, that she will remain stuck on the island, and that no man will ever fall in love with her because her hands are not beautiful and manicured like the Pond’s ad.
She also sees Caroline’s and Call’s hands as symbols of their personalities and their destinies in life. She believes that Caroline’s hands signify that she is an artistic person with “long and gracefully shaped” (147). Her hands, Louise believes, demonstrate that she is “gifted and [has] the strength of will to do something about it” (147). In contrast, Call’s hands are “wide with short fingers, the nails bitten well below the quick. They were red and rough to show her worked hard, but not muscled enough to give them any dignity” (147). Based on this description, Louise concludes that Call is a “good-hearted but second-rate person” (147) who is not destined for much in life.
The more convinced Louise becomes that hands represent a person’s role in life, the more she becomes determined to change her hands to change her fate. She buys lotion, emery boards, and nail polish, and secretly tries to make her hands soft and beautiful like the woman in the ad. At one point, she says: “My hands stubbornly refused to be softened. But I was determined not to give up on them” (196). She believes that if she fails to soften her hands, that means she will also fail to escape her hard life on the island. Giving up on her hands is tantamount to giving up on her future.
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