53 pages • 1-hour read
A Dawn of Onyx
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide features descriptions of domestic violence and child abuse.
Roses and Thorns
The habit of mentioning the day’s “roses and thorns” (high points and low points) is a tradition with Arwen’s family. This ritual acknowledges the fact that hardships that exist in tandem with the comforts in their lives. In the novel’s earliest scenes, Arwen’s “rose” from her day’s work in Abbington is that she saved a man’s finger. Although she does not mention her thorn, her thoughts reveal that she is worried over the year-long silence from her brother, Ryder, who may have died in service of King Gareth’s army in the war against Onyx. In these early scenes, the rose-and-thorn game allows Golden to introduce the novel’s chief characters and conflicts, but in subsequent chapters, while Arwen works as a healer for Onyx, she decides to play the game to maintain her positivity about her current circumstances. As she wryly reflects during her self-defense lessons, “Rose: I was finally using an adult’s sword” (211). While she also has many potential thorns to list, her focus on the game shows that she doesn’t live in constant fear anymore. By applying her family tradition to a new setting, Arwen celebrates the fledgling idea that she has found a place to belong: a place where the roses will finally outweigh the thorns.
Lilies
Lilies symbolize feelings of belonging, home, and love in Arwen’s life. Arwen’s middle name is Lily, and the flower therefore represents everything that is of her essence. While she views her hometown of Abbington as stifling, she positively associates the scent of lilies with all the comforting smells of her family’s house, and Despite its small frame and rickety state, she “loves this setting deeply.
In the Onyx Kingdom, after being wounded by a poisonous creature, Arwen wakes to find herself in Kane’s room, and her first thought is that “something smelled familiar, like home” (282). She then notes the lilies spread about the room. Notably, she finds them “beautiful” but then suddenly reacts to the sweltering room, which feels as though it is “suffocating” her. This sequence of events indirectly suggests that in her own home back in Abbington, the happy moments were mitigated by the equally suffocating nature of her self-sacrifice and responsibilities to her family. Her hometown was a safe haven but also a prison, and Arwen can never forget the memories of her abusive stepfather, the loss of Ryder and Halden to conscription, and the bleak realities of war that taint her time in Abbington.
Later, Golden deliberately alters the meaning of the lily symbol when Arwen walks around the Onyx palace gardens and finds “twisted black voodoo lilies” (293) that contrast sharply with the pure-white flowers of her hometown. She appreciates this “gothic display of beauty” and acknowledges that there is “more to this place than horror” (293). This moment illustrates the shift in her sense of belonging and her love life, and near the end of the novel, she imagines a future with Kane and fantasizes about opening “a tropical flower shop” (334). This moment of daydreaming, adorned with flower-based imagery, is linked to her visceral realization of her feelings for him.
Claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is a motif that serves as a mental and physical manifestation of The Prison of Fear. Arwen’s intense reactions and subsequent panic over being entrapped in stifling or enclosed spaces occurs repeatedly and illustrates the stranglehold that her fear still has on her life. While this phobia is born of her childhood trauma, in which Powell locked her in his work shed and abused her, Arwen’s fear of enclosed spaces also represents the idea that her fear has trapped her in the small-minded town of Abbington, with little room for personal growth. Shortly after she becomes a healer for Shadowhold, Kane asks her why she stayed in Abbington when she clearly wanted to escape, and she replies that she was afraid of everything beyond its boundaries. As she says, “Look what happens […] when you take one step out of your tiny, suffocatingly safe life” (99). She views her decision to flee town as a factor in her current imprisonment in Onyx, and it is clear that she associates risk-taking with suffering and punishment. This correlation of claustrophobia with The Prison of Fear is aptly articulated in a conversation between Dagan and Arwen, when she admits to feeling “trapped” and explains, “Sometimes it’s just hard. To wake up each day knowing how much of my life will be ruled by it, by being afraid” (225).
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