Tokens and Trophies as Anchors of Memory and Identity
What Are Tokens and Trophies?
In V. E. Schwab’s novel, tokens and trophies are physical objects that characters collect, wear, or wield, each tied to a moment of death, memory, or transformation. The most prominent appear around Sabine Olivares’s neck—a growing assortment of charms, pendants, and trinkets taken from her victims across centuries. These items clink together with every movement, a metallic tally of lives ended. Alice Moore, the mortal-turned-vampire, carries a different kind of token: a small golden vial containing a pinch of her mother’s grave dirt, gifted by her stepmother Eloise. Later, a silver hairbrush becomes an unexpected weapon and a symbol of Alice’s irreversible change. Even natural objects—the white roses Hector gifts, the thorns that draw blood—function as living trophies, echoing the feral rose of the epigraph that blooms from buried bones.
Where Tokens and Trophies Recur
Sabine’s collection is first described in vivid detail during her early travels with Renata and Hector. “The charms and pendants at her wrists and throat knock against each other, chiming like bells,” and she runs her fingers over the bits of metal, glass, and stone “to recount each and every kill.” This practice marks her as a predator who savors the memory of the hunt. In Venice, under Matteo’s tutelage, her relationship with the tokens shifts. He criticizes her for killing too often, and she begins to court her victims over weeks or months. As a result, the charms take on “a special air, each a memory no longer of a moment’s kill, but a month’s slow pursuit.” The tokens evolve from crude tallies to nuanced souvenirs of prolonged seduction and control.
Alice’s grave-dirt pendant appears at her father’s wedding to Eloise. El gives both sisters a small blue velvet box containing a gold bauble with a locket of dark, sandy soil from their mother’s grave. Catty violently rejects it, but Alice cherishes the pendant as “the weight. The object, filling the space of memory.” She wears it beneath her clothes and touches it for comfort, using it to anchor her connection to her mother and her past humanity even as she becomes a vampire.
The silver hairbrush emerges as a token of violence when Alice drives its handle into Lottie’s heart. After Lottie crumbles to ash and rot, the brush remains, “sticking out like a petrified bloom.” This object, initially a grooming tool, is transformed into a weapon and a marker of Alice’s final severance from innocence.
Sabine’s death in Chapter VI leaves behind “a dozen tokens on weathered chains, pooling on the tile floor.” The accumulation is rendered meaningless in an instant, stripped of the wearer who gave them significance.
How the Meaning of Tokens Changes
At first, Sabine’s tokens function as simple trophies—evidence of a kill, a way to relive the violence. They are “like armor,” protecting her with a constant reminder of her power. Under Matteo’s guidance, however, the tokens acquire emotional depth. They become records of a relationship, a short-lived intimacy that makes the final betrayal more satisfying. Yet they also reflect the core emptiness Matteo describes: “You will never be sated.” The growing collection can never fill the void inside her; it only marks her accelerating decay. When she dies, the chains are just inert metal, devoid of memory without a consciousness to animate them.
For Alice, the grave-dirt pendant carries an entirely different meaning. It is not a trophy of conquest but a talisman of love and grief. Unlike Sabine’s tokens, which celebrate death, Alice’s pendant honors a life lost. It also becomes a bridge between her old self and the monstrous new existence. Throughout the novel, she touches it when needing strength, connecting her to maternal warmth and the idea that “wherever you go, she’ll be with you.” It anchors her humanity amid the hunger.
The silver hairbrush represents the corruption of an everyday object into an instrument of survival. When Alice uses it to kill Lottie, she mimics Sabine’s own methods of collecting tokens through murder, but without the predatory glee. Afterward, she whispers the epigraph’s line, “Bury my bones,” acknowledging that she has buried her former self. The hairbrush—a “petrified bloom”—mirrors the feral rose of the poem, a beautiful thing turned deadly, and signals that Alice, too, is now a creature of sharp teeth hidden beneath soft petals.
Connections to Major Themes
- Immortality and Hunger: Sabine’s charms are a physical manifestation of insatiable appetite. The more she collects, the more she hungers, proving Matteo’s lesson that “the hunger will not ease.” The tokens only chart her descent into hollowing decay.
- Toxic Love and Control: Sabine’s collection reflects a possessive ownership over victims. She keeps parts of them as she might keep lovers. The ritual of taking a token after a prolonged courtship (as she learns from Matteo) transforms murder into a twisted romance, amplifying the theme of toxic intimacy.
- Identity and Transformation: The contrast between Sabine’s death-charm collection and Alice’s grave-dirt pendant underscores two kinds of identity. Sabine builds her self-image from accumulated kills; Alice clings to a single object that connects her to who she was. When Alice uses the hairbrush to kill, she accepts a new identity as a survivor who does monstrous things, even as she mourns her old life.
- Sacrifice and What Survival Costs: Each token represents what has been sacrificed—for Sabine, countless lives; for Alice, her innocence and sister. The silver brush is a stark reminder that survival demands she become something feral.
- Memory and the Passage of Time: Tokens are external memory banks. Sabine’s charms help her recall kills that would otherwise blur across centuries. Alice’s pendant keeps her mother present despite time and death. Yet when Sabine crumbles, all those memories evaporate with her, suggesting that tokens can never truly preserve the past—they are only as durable as the mind that values them.
Study Questions
1. How does Sabine’s approach to collecting tokens shift during her time with Matteo, and what does this reveal about her character?
Early on, Sabine takes tokens impulsively from nearly every victim, using them to relive the thrill of the kill. Under Matteo’s influence, she learns to delay gratification, to romanticize the hunt, and the tokens become memories of a slow, intimate conquest. This shift shows her capacity for manipulation and her willingness to adapt to prolong pleasure, but also foreshadows her increasing emptiness: the more elaborate the courtship, the deeper the eventual hollowness.
2. In what ways does Alice’s grave-dirt pendant function as an anti-trophy compared to Sabine’s collection?
Sabine’s trinkets celebrate death and feed an ego built on predation. Alice’s pendant honors a life that was taken from her naturally; it is a symbol of grief, not glory. While Sabine’s tokens separate her from humanity, Alice’s pendant ties her to family and memory, acting as a moral compass even as she turns vampire. It is a token of love rather than possession.
3. Why is the silver hairbrush an effective symbolic token for Alice’s transformation?
The hairbrush is a mundane, domestic item perverted into a killing tool. Its transformation mirrors Alice’s own: she begins the novel as a cautious, gentle girl and ends as someone capable of driving a makeshift stake through a heart. After the act, she calls it a “petrified bloom,” echoing the epigraph’s feral rose—a creature both beautiful and deadly. The brush signifies that Alice has bloomed into the night’s thorny reality.
4. What do the pooled tokens after Sabine’s death suggest about the nature of immortality and legacy in the novel?
When Sabine crumbles to ash, her collection of centuries falls to the bathroom floor as a meaningless jumble. No one remains to interpret the memories attached to each charm. This moment underscores the novel’s view that immortality does not protect against oblivion; what endures is not the tokens themselves but the choices they represent. Sabine’s legacy is nothing more than inert metal, while Alice’s use of her own token—the hairbrush—signals a legacy of survival built on her own terms.