48 pages • 1 hour read
Mary NortonThe Borrowers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1952A 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
Size and Scale
Norton often describes the human world from Arrietty’s viewpoint, and the gigantic scale of everyday items becomes a running motif throughout the book. To Arrietty, a soup pot is a deep ocean, and a set of stairs is a series of sheer cliffs that must be scaled using a hatpin. While the magnitude of human-sized items is often emphasized simply to establish the relative size of the Borrowers, it also allows the reader to view the human world from an entirely different perspective, imagining just what it might be like to navigate a world in which the most basic items towered overhead and introduced seemingly impossible obstacles to overcome.
Conversely, the motif of size and scale is used in reference to the Borrower world to relay how differently the many common items in the human world would be regarded by a person only a few inches tall. Thus, a thimble becomes a useful stool, a coin becomes a plate, and a postage stamp becomes a piece of elaborate artwork worthy of being hung on the wall and admired as a hard-won item of decor.
Fine Old Pale Madeira
The Fine Old Pale Madeira, Great Aunt Sophy’s favorite drink, is a symbol of the skewed perspective that comes from drinking alcohol and the tendency for adults to believe that supernatural events have reasonable explanations. Its presence is evoked multiple times throughout the story to explain away the more fantastical occurrences of the tale, thus introducing yet another element of uncertainty, for as the novel concludes, Norton has taken great care to create a fictional world in which the balance of evidence could swing either way. The Borrowers may in fact exist, or they may be the fantastical result of her brother’s imaginings and an old woman’s alcohol-induced hallucinations.
Hatpins and Blotter Paper
These items are some of the most regularly borrowed things, as they have many uses to the Borrowers. Collectively, they come to serve as symbols of most peoples’ minimal perception of the Borrowers’ presence, as well as a way for Norton to imply that Borrowers may in fact be real and living in houses all around the world, for everyone, at some point or another, has had the experience of misplacing small household items that mysteriously vanish and are never seen again. Accordingly, the human characters in the novel notice only that such common items often seem to disappear more quickly than they are actually used. This dynamic also represents the Borrowers’ extreme resourcefulness in securing useful items, as well as their ingenuity in repurposing human artifacts in new and interesting ways. A hat pin, for example, can be used as either a weapon or a climbing tool, while a piece of blotter paper can be used for many things around the house, such as carpets.
The Family Names of the Borrowers
The various names of the Borrowers signify a number of different things in the overall story. As Mrs. May mentions, their first names are actually “borrowed” from human words; they are usually a combination of different words arranged in unusual ways or are slightly altered versions of familiar human names.
The Borrowers’ various surnames, on the other hand, symbolize their status within the interconnected culture of the various families ensconced in different nooks and crannies throughout the old country house. Borrower surnames reflect a very specific etymology in that they are directly related to where the Borrowers happen to live in the house. The Clocks, for example, are so named because the entrance to their home lies under a grandfather clock, even though their actual house is under the kitchen floorboards. Homily’s reminiscences also reveal that Borrower families sometimes change their last names in an attempt to change others’ perspectives on their overall status and circumstances. For example, the Linen-Presses made it a point to change their name to Harpsichord in order to evoke a sense of belonging to the upper class, even though there may never have been a harpsichord in the house. Thus, for all their tiny size, the Borrowers remain remarkably human-like in their desire for status and acceptance amongst other members of their miniscule world.
The Clock
The large grandfather clock that marks the entrance to the Clock home symbolizes the stability, predictability, and stolid regularity of life in the human house where they reside. As Borrowers, they are best suited to a house with a very standard schedule so they know when it is safe to venture out into the human spaces. The ticking of the clock is referenced several times in the book in order to show that life follows a regular pattern and that time is always passing whether people want it to or not.
In the closing scenes, when the rat catcher is trying to eliminate the Borrowers, the clock stops, and in light of the Clock family’s dire straits at that moment, the stillness of the clock symbolizes both an ending as well as the extent of the disruption that Mrs. Driver’s intrusions are bringing to their lives. Their time in the house has quite literally come to an end, and Norton also uses this symbol to create a sense of fear, tension, and uncertainty about the Clock family’s survival—a tension that is only relieved when the boy hits the clock and starts it working again, thus indicating that although their lives are in shambles, they have nonetheless survived the dangers of this particular moment, as has the clock itself.
