Jar of Hearts

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, child death, and rape.

The book’s title alludes to a Mason jar that Calvin fills with cinnamon heart candies and gives to Geo. This jar comes to symbolize several things. Calvin gives it to her as an apology after the first time he hits her. The fact that he fills it with a candy he loves and she doesn’t demonstrates the selfish nature of his feelings for her and his efforts to impose his own desires and needs onto her, developing the theme of Manipulation and Control in Abusive Relationships. Calvin believes he loves Geo, but his abusive treatment qualifies that love as distorted and deceptive. The jar of cinnamon hearts, like the heart that Calvin tattoos on his wrist with Geo’s initials or the heart he draws on his note to Geo in the courtroom, symbolizes the false love that embroils Geo in an abusive relationship and murder.

For her part, Geo accepts Calvin’s gift of heart candies “because she [thinks] the bright red hearts inside the glass look[] pretty” (136). The hearts represent Geo’s naive sense of what love is. She falls for Calvin because he’s beautiful and charming, like the pretty red hearts in the glass jar, and she thinks their intense relationship is love. 

The night Calvin rapes Geo, he eats the last of the candies in the jar. This is symbolically significant, as the rape is the culmination of what began when Calvin killed Angela; they are two connected events that destroy Geo’s innocence. She says that rape is “about taking the best parts of a person and leaving the empty shell behind” (296). The now-empty jar symbolizes the empty shell of herself left behind after the loss of her innocence, thus illustrating The Enduring Trauma of Violent Crimes. More broadly, when Calvin eats the heart candies, it symbolizes his destruction of women, both figuratively, through emotional trauma, and literally, when he rapes and murders them. 

The jar is also related to The Psychological Weight of Guilt and Secrets—one of trauma’s effects. In the dramatic present, Geo describes the empty jar as “the one that used to contain all her innocence, all her goodness” (220), saying that she kept it all this time as punishment for Angela’s death. It reminds her of her own trauma and pain, which she feels she deserves. After leaving prison, Geo tries to smash the jar by throwing it at the wall, but it doesn’t break. This is symbolic of the fact that her past—her trauma and guilt—still has a hold over her even after she has done legal penance for her actions.

Part 5’s epigraph is a line from “Jar of Hearts” by Christina Perri, a song about a heartbreaker who, metaphorically, collects the hearts of those who have loved him, leaving only emotional scars behind. Similarly, the Mason jar in the novel symbolizes the emotional scars of abusive and selfish love.