53 pages • 1 hour read
Emily FranklinThe Lioness of Boston
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A 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
Plants
In the novel, plants, especially those grown in gardens, often symbolize growth, renewal, and vitality. When Isabella is struggling to find a sense of community as a young bride, she bonds with Mr. Valentine, a gardener employed at the Boston Public Gardens. She is drawn to him due to the book Jack gave her with images of flowers and plants. Even though Isabella received this book shortly after a disappointing realization that she was not pregnant, it gave her the sense that “life might be possible whether I was tranquil or not” (38). Later, after the loss of their son, Jack takes Isabella to the famous Chelsea Physic Garden (one of the oldest gardens in Great Britain); the garden is full of medicinal plants and helps to inspire emotional and psychological healing for Isabella. Plants and gardens are one of the first areas where Isabella expresses her creativity and talent for curating and collecting. As she explains to her father-in-law, “I think I like making something” (70).
Later, looking back on her life, Isabella compares herself to horticulture: “I had been learning about leaves and blooms, shrubs and what to plant where, but really I had been cultivating growth” (346). Isabella even imagines herself as “a fully realized but free-flowing vine of some sort” (346). In this way, she characterizes herself as an independent spirit. When Jack dies, Mr. Valentine sends Isabella two plants, and she describes the package as “a wooden crate with life inside” (360). This suggests that life and Isabella’s growth continue, even in the face of her husband’s death. Her construction of Fenway Court incorporates significant garden space and the use of live plants, which remain a feature of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to this day.
Glass Animals
In 1870, Isabella spends time in Dresden, Germany, where she visits a glassblowing workshop. She is entranced by the beauty of models of “lifelike glass botany and animals” (144). Isabella steals three of the models to give to her three young nephews; the glass animals symbolize how appreciating beauty can create resilience and the importance of never giving up hope.
Isabella first sees the glass animals when she is still deep in grief after losing her son, Jackie, and before she becomes her nephews’ guardian. Because they are made of glass, the specimens are fragile. This is part of what Isabella appreciates about them; she notes that they are “something to hold when [the children] are older and need to know fragility and hope” (144). Isabella is drawn to the glass animals because she continues to feel a sense of beauty and wonder even when she is suffering; the animals symbolize how she is saved by her curiosity. Although she doesn’t know it when she first selects the glass animals to take to her nephews, Isabella will end up having a second chance to nurture young people when she becomes her nephews’ guardian.
The symbolism of the glass animals becomes important many years later when Isabella decides to take her oldest nephew, Joe, on a trip to Europe when he feels isolated and depressed. Aboard the ship, Isabella and Joe talk about the glass animals: She insists that “they’re delicate […] but strong” whereas Joe counters that “they’re so easily broken. Gorgeous and ruined” (285). Joe is struggling with his sexual orientation and cannot imagine a happy future for himself. Whereas Isabella is able to see the glass animals as symbols of fragile resilience and unique beauty, Joe thinks he is too delicate to survive the world and its expectations of masculinity.
Ice Cream
In 1882, Isabella and a group of female friends go to eat ice cream together at a recently opened ice cream parlor in Boston. Despite increasing independence, women at this time are still constrained and sometimes engage in self-policing behavior. All the women who go to eat ice cream are writers, intellectuals, and feminists; they are keenly aware of how 19th-century social norms constrict women’s agency. They are excited that places like the newly opened ice cream parlor make it possible for women to venture into social and public spaces in new ways; significantly, the women go out together without any male chaperones or companions.
While the ice cream symbolizes expanded freedom for women, it also implies limits and restraints. Ice cream is sweet, uncomplicated, and has associations with childhood treats, making it a “safe” indulgence for women that reaffirms expectations of their behavior. Isabella points out that “men keep the lusty items, the ales and the cheddars, the heavy desserts, for themselves” (256). Ice cream symbolizes how women are being given some social license but nowhere near the same freedom and agency granted to adult men.
While eating the ice cream, Isabella’s friends also feel and exert pressure to restrict their portion size: “[T]he rest of the party felt the need to also order small” (255). This shows how women hesitate to test the limits of the freedoms granted to them and engage in self-policing behavior. The hesitation to consume too large a portion of ice cream reflects societal expectations of women to maintain a small and slender body size and literally and metaphorically not take up too much space (a critique often leveled at Isabella and her outspoken opinions).
The notion of appetite and the desire to consume sweets symbolizes a woman’s potential to desire other forms of pleasure, including sexual pleasure. It is significant that the scene with the ice cream occurs during Isabella’s affair with Crawford. The consumption of ice cream symbolizes how women hesitate to fully explore their desires and appetites, and the way they can judge one another for their passion.
