55 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline WoodsonRed at the Bone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A 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
The Dress
The dress Melody wears to her ceremony symbolizes the expectations Melody fulfills in her mother’s place, as well as the things Melody has inherited from her mother. It is a tailored, tea-length dress made of lace and silk. The fine quality of it, and the fact that it was tailor-made for Iris—and then altered for Melody—communicates their wealth. The attention Sabe gives to every detail of the dress conveys how significant the ceremony is for their family—particularly because they could not host one for Iris.
This dress represents different things for the three generations of women in this family. For Sabe, it represents the family’s social and economic status, which she and Po’Boy fought and sacrificed to attain. For Iris, it is a reminder of the life she could have had, the life that “the baby in [her] belly” prevented (6). For Melody, it signifies the onus placed on her to heal her family.
Melody’s ceremony, being “the only ceremony skipping a generation of mothers showing daughters” (4), emphasizes the shared trauma among the older generation and how Melody’s ceremony both re-exposes and heals the wounds of the past. It initially highlights the absence of Iris’s own ceremony through the text’s representation of her fixation on the dress: she runs her hands over it repeatedly, lost in thought. Iris’s regrets are clear, but her focus eventually shifts to Melody, allowing the moment to belong to her daughter rather than her grief. When Melody descends the stairs, the dress takes on a final new meaning. As each member of her family watches her with pride, Melody entering the room in that dress represents new beginnings for their family, even though these beginnings are tainted by the past.
Music
Music is a frequent motif used in the novel by Woodson. The opening chapter is especially grounded in music as Woodson uses melodic prose to describe the effect of the orchestra: “Music filling the brownstone. Black fingers pulling violin bows and strumming cellos” (1). This ultimately sets the tone for the significance music plays in the narrative. Woodson uses music to advance the melodic tone of the novel, but also to connect characters across time and place. Music, additionally, creates a spiritual connection for the characters, particularly connecting them to their cultural heritage.
Each character has a special relationship to music. Melody’s reflects her petulant nature, as she insists on having Prince’s “Darling Nikki” at her ceremony despite her mother’s protests. However, music also connects the family. Firstly, Aubrey and Melody share a love for the same music, having gone to Wu Tang and Rage Against The Machine concerts together. This is also shown through the family’s shared connection with Louis Armstrong’s “Jeannine (I Dream of a Lilac Time).” It plays at Melody’s ceremony and is later revealed to be a favorite of Po’Boy’s from his adolescence.
The most important role music plays in the narrative is in Melody’s name. Though Melody is named for her great-grandmother, her name works better to represent the joy and release she brings to her grandparents and father—like a song. Po’Boy touches upon this explicitly, relating her existence in the world to the purpose of music: bringing happiness to those who encounter it.
Body Parts/Bodily Fluids
Body parts appear as a recurrent motif to generally represent legacy and inheritance—and all of its complications. Hands are used to communicate the act of holding onto someone or something. This is shown with Aubrey’s urge to hold onto Melody—representing his desire to hold onto her childhood forever. During her ceremony, when he obsesses over what to do with his hands, Aubrey is metaphorically wondering what he is to do with himself now that his child is mostly grown. Hands are also typically used to identify a person’s relationship to manual labor—this would be an easy symbol to use with Aubrey, but Woodson refuses. Instead, Aubrey’s hands convey his role as a parent.
A focus on body parts is also used to denote desire. Aubrey obsesses over Iris’s body—specifically her tongue—and the desire he feels for her controls him. Similarly, when Iris falls in love with Jam, she becomes preoccupied with various parts of Jam’s body, each one fascinating Iris in its beauty and eroticism.
The body and its functions—particularly its fluids—are used to convey Iris’s horror at motherhood. After Melody’s birth, Iris’s body is no longer her own. She is achy and leaking from every crevice, and her body belongs to the child that calls to her in the middle of the night. Woodson conveys Iris’s vision of motherhood primarily through nursing, with her leaking nipples representing a lack of control. Furthermore, Melody nursing is portrayed as sucking the life out of Iris. Despite Iris’s love for her child, she is emotionally and physically drained by motherhood. Similarly, Melody’s hunger for her mother’s milk conveys her need for connection; Melody craves intimacy more than anything else. In the end, Woodson’s recurrent mention of body parts and bodily fluids centers the narrative in the stories our bodies tell—in the trauma they carry, the purpose they serve, and the life they feed, however reluctantly.
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By Jacqueline Woodson
