Symbols Gallant V. E. Schwab

The Mother's Journals in Gallant: Symbol Analysis

What the Journals Are

The mother's journals are two physical books—one green, one red—both stamped with a gilded G. The green journal is worn soft with age, dented by two parallel grooves gouged into its cover, with pages sticking out where they were torn and put back. Olivia has carried it since arriving at Merilance as a toddler, and it is the closest thing she has to a memory of life before the asylum. The red journal is clean and soft, far less abused, discovered hidden behind the headboard in Olivia's room at Gallant.

The green journal contains entries in Grace Prior's sloping hand, addressed to a mysterious figure Olivia eventually understands to be her father. The entries trace a courtship, a descent into madness after her father's death, and end with a warning addressed to Olivia. The red journal contains earlier, more lucid entries from Grace's youth, mentioning Arthur, Hannah, and Edgar, and includes the pivotal entry: Last night I went beyond the wall.

Two Hands, Two Voices

The most significant revelation about the journals comes when Olivia studies them side by side. The delicate, precise sketches in the margins are so different from the wild, amorphous ink blooms that they seem made by different hands. Olivia realizes: the words are her mother's voice; the drawings are her father's.

This reframes the entire journal. What Olivia read for years as her mother's descent into madness becomes a correspondence—a conversation carried out in two forms, one line, the other shape. The father, whom Olivia never met, was the tallest shadow Grace met beyond the wall. He was real, and he answered her through images. Olivia learns to read the drawings like watching clouds, letting the shapes become gestures, the images unfurl into sentiments. In her father's gestures, she reads relief and sadness, hope and longing.

The journals also connect to the theme of silence and alternative communication. The father's drawings function like a signed language—the difference between a language spoken and one signed, the mouth shaping words while the hands shape more. This resonates with Olivia's own muteness and her reliance on sign language and sketching.

A Key to the Wall

The journals function literally as keys. The twin grooves gouged into the green cover match the two bolts jutting from the door in the wall. Olivia slips the journal between the door and the wall—the gap is the width of a thumb, or a journal spine. The journal's physical dimensions unlock the passage between worlds.

This physical role ties the journals to the theme of guarding the boundary between life and death. The journal is not just a record of Grace's experience beyond the wall; it is the instrument that lets Olivia cross it herself. In the epilogue, Olivia still thinks of the small green journal with a G on its cover, left beyond the wall—a bridge deliberately kept in place.

How the Journals' Meaning Shifts

At Merilance, the green journal is a relic and a mystery. Olivia reads it as her mother's voice reaching across time, and she guards it fiercely—when another girl reads it aloud and tears pages, Olivia attacks her and later retaliates by dumping a jar of insects and ash over her head.

At Gallant, the red journal opens a door onto another life. Grace was not always the broken woman of the green journal's later entries; she was once a restless girl who complained about Arthur's moods, who was threatened with trousers by Hannah, who left a window open hoping a bird would return. The mundane entries make Grace human.

The revelation that the drawings are her father's work transforms the journal from a monologue into a dialogue. It becomes evidence that the father was real, that the tallest shadow was a man who lived and breathed and wrote.

Finally, in the novel's closing movement, Olivia writes her mother's entries into the red journal from memory, resurrecting each line. In doing so, she comes to understand that Grace wasn't mad. She was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted. The journal becomes an act of reconstruction—Olivia rebuilding her mother's story, and by extension, her own.

Character and Theme Connections

The journals connect to nearly every major character. For Olivia, they are her inheritance, her puzzle, and her only link to parents she never knew. For Grace, they are her voice, preserved across time. For the father, they are the medium of his silent correspondence. For Matthew, they are a warning—his illness mirrors Grace's, and Olivia reads the journals partly to understand whether the same fate awaits her. Hannah provides the human context for the red journal's entries, confirming that Grace was a willful child and always restless.

Thematically, the journals touch on:

Study Questions

1. Why does Olivia initially believe the you in the journal is herself, and what changes her understanding?

When Olivia was small, she thought she was the you—that her mother was speaking to her across time, those three letters a hand reaching through paper. But she eventually understood the you was her father, based on the way her mother wrote to him and mourned his loss. The entries about courtship, the references to our daughter, and the grief that follows her father's death make the addressee clear.

2. How do the two journals differ in content and condition, and what does each reveal about Grace?

The green journal is worn, dented, with torn pages—it carries the weight of Grace's descent into madness, from lucid courtship entries to jagged, broken fragments. The red journal is clean and soft, containing earlier, mundane entries about daily life at Gallant. The green shows the unraveling; the red shows the woman before the unraveling—restless, clever, and alive.

3. What does the discovery that the drawings are her father's work change about how Olivia reads the journal?

It reframes the journal from a monologue into a conversation. The father was real, he was the tallest shadow Grace met beyond the wall, and he communicated through images. The journal becomes evidence of a love story, not just a record of madness. Olivia begins to read the drawings as gestures, finding relief and sadness, hope and longing in her father's work.

4. Why does Olivia reconstruct her mother's entries in the red journal at the end of the novel?

Olivia writes her mother's entries into the red journal from memory, resurrecting each line. In doing so, she comes to understand that Grace wasn't mad but was lonely and lost, wild and free, desperate and haunted—and that she did everything she could, even if it meant leaving her daughter. The reconstruction is an act of forgiveness and understanding, a way of completing the correspondence her parents began.

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