48 pages • 1 hour read
The Dearly Beloved
A 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 Cloister Rosary Beads
The cloister rosary beads symbolize the intricacy that Charles perceives in Lily during their courtship. He compares her to the rosary beads at the cloisters, describing the beads with carved “eyelashes and fingernails almost too small to be seen” and notes, “They must have taken years to carve, the monks hunched carefully over every movement, still and precise and attentive” (80). He sees Lily as “like both the beads and the carvers: intricate and patient, closed and waiting to be seen” (80). This highlights Charles’s desire to better understand Lily’s introverted and guarded demeanor. He desires her to open up to him and show more of herself to him. This foreshadows Lily becoming more vulnerable during their marriage, her pregnancy with the twins, and their mission to help Will.
Nan’s Gardens
Nan’s gardens are a motif that appears after Nan marries James and helps convey Faith Versus Doubt and The Search for Meaning and Purpose. Nan plants gardens at the flat in Kensington and the manse near Third Presbyterian. She takes great comfort in this, hoping that like Vita Sackville-West, she can “grow anything anywhere” and “[a] whole life could be created and made meaningful around doing so” (136). Nan’s gardening reflects her efforts to find meaning and hold onto faith throughout her life. At the manse, she wishes to build a community and a family, which is reflected in her gardening. After her second miscarriage, she plants a tree but soon starts to feel like it is pointless, thinking, “This used to matter” (239). Eventually, with James’s help, Nan takes initiative and starts planting the community and the family she always wanted.
Books
Books symbolize comfort and thirst for knowledge for both Lily and Charles. Both of them enjoy reading from a young age, with Lily doing that most of the time growing up. For Lily, they provide comfort because they never change. However, she starts finding it difficult to “follow a story” (17), including in her textbooks, following her parents’ deaths. The change in her enjoyment indicates the control grief has taken of her and her inability to continue deriving comfort from books.
Charles also loves books and is nostalgic when he thinks about his and Lily’s college years. After Will’s diagnosis, Lily spends “every hour she c[an] at the library” (277). Books reflect Lily’s desperation for knowledge about her son’s condition and her desire to make sense of it. In this way, books drive The Search for Purpose and Meaning, showing Lily’s determination to help Will and her making sense of her parents’ deaths.
Unlock all 48 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: