69 pages • 2-hour read
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts and discusses graphic violence and blood, physical and emotional abuse, toxic relationships, antigay bias and societal oppression, and death and grief.
María/Sabine Olivares
María/Sabine Olivares is one of the three protagonists of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. She’s described as having red hair and hazel eyes. She is born in a small village in Spain in the 16th century, and her father died when she was young. Raised by her mother, who works as a seamstress, the prescribed gender roles of the 16th century are drilled into her from an early age, introducing the novel’s engagement with The Impact of Societal Constraints on Personal Agency. María’s mother tries to smother María’s light and charisma, even forcing María to cover her red hair in mud to mute the color. María notes that her mother “would not mind so much…if the hair were honey-colored, or earthy, even auburn, but such an angry shade of red, she says, is a bad omen. Not a warm color, but the hot orange of an open flame. One she cannot seem to douse” (5). The brightness of María’s hair acts as a physical symbol of María’s inner brightness, her outgoing personality and boundless ambition.
Schwab emphasizes that, even within the strict constraints placed on her by society, María continually finds ways to assert her own agency. She and her hair are too bright for her small village, so she orchestrates a marriage to a viscount that will allow her to leave forever. Marriage itself is not María’s dream, but she’s pragmatic enough to understand that it’s unavoidable in the patriarchal society in which she lives. Once married, María feels determined to avoid having a child and takes steps to find a tonic that will prevent conception. Her choices lead her to the widow Sabine Boucher, the first vampire to appear in the novel. María sees in Sabine a vision of the life she wants for herself, emphasizing her Hunger for Freedom and Identity Formation. Sabine turns María, offering her freedom in exchange for her humanity, but María’s hunger is so great, she can’t stop herself from killing Sabine, establishing a pattern that will define her choices throughout the novel.
Across the novel, Sabine’s humanity progressively erodes, allowing Schwab to explore question of what it means to be human. As Sabine moves through the world with her new identity, her past as María moves further and further away. Though she makes brief friendships with both Hector and Renata and Matteo and Alessandro, Sabine exists primarily alone. Even when she considers turning a victim into a vampire companion, she notes that “when the moment comes, they scream, they fight, they run, and hunger always gets the best of her. Perhaps, if in that vital, final beat they looked at her with want or love instead of terror” (266). The women Sabine drinks from look at her as if she’s a monster, so she acts like one.
Meeting Charlotte represents a turning point in Sabine’s arc—her attempt to explore the kind of love she’s only seen in others. Despite the romantic beginning, Sabine’s darker tendencies eventually reemerge, and she becomes possessive and violently abusive toward Charlotte, morphing from a protagonist into an antagonist. When Sabine attacks the young girl in the house in England, Charlotte notes, “[Sabine’s] eyes are black and bottomless, so unlike the burning hazel ones that Charlotte knows and loves. There is a stranger looking out” (394). Sabine is transformed by her violence into someone Charlotte doesn’t recognize. Her lack of humanity makes her a new person, the version of herself free from the complicated emotions of guilt or compassion. Once Charlotte fleas, Sabine becomes driven by bloodlust and her desire for revenge, and her callousness and hubris leads her to underestimate Alice. Her pride is her downfall, the bane of her immortality.
Alice Moore
Schwab describes Alice, another protagonist in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, as pale with blonde hair and blue-green eyes. Alice is born in the early 2000s in Hoxburn, a rural village in Scotland. Her mother dies when she’s young, and she doesn’t remember her, but Alice’s older sister Catherine (Catty) does. Alice’s young life is marked by Catty’s anger and grief as their father attempts to move on with his former childhood love, Eloise. Catty is expressive and feels her emotions strongly, while Alice’s emotions are more internal: “the truth is, Alice has never felt an anger strong enough to be called hate. Oh, she feels plenty of other emotions—worry, and panic, sadness, and fear—but they make her want to hold on to things as tight as she can, keep them together” (179). Catty’s emotions explode outwards, while Alice’s emotions remain deep within her, buried.
Much of Alice’s character arc involves her journey toward emotional expression and self-actualization. Alice struggles with emotional repression, but once she becomes a vampire, she becomes incapable of pushing her feelings down, especially her anger. Alice describes her anger as “a coal inside her chest, a searing heat that she keeps swallowed so it only hurts herself” (381). Alice realizes that her suppression of her own anger doesn’t make the feeling stop. Across the novel, she learns to embrace her anger, allowing herself to feel it in order to understand it and herself.
Alice’s feeling of being an outsider echoes the feeling both Charlotte and María/Sabine have of never quite fitting in their human lives. As a child Alice struggles to understand her place in the world, feeling constantly caught between Catty’s hatred of Eloise and her own desire to love their stepmother. In her family, Alice feels she “will never be able to shake the feeling that it’s three plus one. That they have everything they need right here, and she does not. That her whole life is out there— Waiting to be lived” (527). Just as Catty desires to find a life outside Hoxburn, Alice yearns for a life of her own. She feels like an extra piece of an already completed puzzle, unable to find a place that fits.
Meeting Lottie acts as the inciting incident of Alice’s life, and their journey together foregrounds The Consequences of Immortality, Transformation and Rebirth. After spending the night with Lottie, Alice wakes up transformed into a vampire and unwittingly embroiled in a decades long lovers’ quarrel between Sabine and Lottie. Sabine turned Alice into a vampire to hurt Lottie, leaving Alice caught in the crossfire. Alice’s anger at Lottie for ending her life dominates her emotional development. However, after killing both Sabine and Lottie, Alice realizes that she still has a life extending out in front of her to do with as she chooses: “[Alice] tips her head back as she strolls, forcing air she doesn’t need into her lungs, again, and again, until it feels like breathing. Until the sound of her steps beats like a drum inside her chest, reminding her she is alive. Alive. Alive. And she is hungry” (533). Alice mimics the human actions of breathing and having a heartbeat, clinging to the remnants of her humanity as her vampiric hunger overtakes her. Schwab leaves Alice’s character arc open-ended, underscoring her autonomy and agency.
Charlotte/Lottie Hastings
Charlotte (Lottie) Hastings is the third protagonist of the novel. She’s described as having warm brown skin, dark curly hair, and brown eyes. Charlotte is born in Hampshire, England in the early 19th century. Although she grows up free in her family’s home in the country, allowed to roam, explore, and read as much as she wants, Charlotte’s human life is ultimately governed by the societal constraints of her era. After her brother James discovers Charlotte kissing her best friend Jocelyn, Charlotte’s parents send her to London to learn about propriety, etiquette, and the 19th century marriage market.
Charlotte struggles to fit in with her Aunt Amelia and her other wards, who seem to find it easy to repress their true feelings in a way that Charlotte cannot, foreshadowing her choice to trade her humanity for her freedom and become a vampire. The narrator notes, “[Charlotte’s] never been good at hiding her emotions, the way other girls do, not when they seem intent on hovering just beneath the surface of her skin” (310). Unlike Alice, who buries her feelings deep, Charlotte cannot help but express her emotions as soon as she feels them. Her emotional honesty is what draws Sabine to Charlotte, as Sabine’s human emotions began to evaporate decades before they meet. Sabine romances Charlotte, and Charlotte falls in love with her. However, Charlotte’s love for Sabine fades when Sabine begins to exhibit abusive behavior.
Schwab uses the fundamental differences between Sabine and Charlotte to launch her thematic exploration of The Intersection of Love and Power. Sabine grows tired of Charlotte’s empathy and guilt, cruelly telling Charlotte, “You cling to the suffering, you make it yours, as if you think you must. As if you think that it will somehow keep you human, but it can’t, because the human part of you is dead” (405). The very thing that drew Sabine to Charlotte, Charlotte’s depth of feeling, is the thing that Sabine then seeks to destroy with her cruelty. Once the novelty of Charlotte’s rich emotional landscape wears off, Sabine dedicates herself to making Charlotte as callous and bloodthirsty as she is.
Charlotte’s hunger for love is as strong as her hunger for blood, and it is her hunger for love that leads her to Alice and, ultimately, to her demise. Charlotte stays with Sabine for decades because of her love and loyalty—qualities the text frames as distinctly human. When Charlotte leaves Sabine, she’s love-starved. Charlotte notes that “the closest she’s come to touch is in the bodies she claims, the lives she’s forced to take, and what they feel for her is hardly love” (439). Charlotte doesn’t relish killing like Sabine; she does it out of necessity. Charlotte acknowledges that her immortality is robbing her of her humanity, but she “rots” differently from Sabine, whom she refers to as “a cold and calculating hunter” (471). Charlotte’s “heart is too hungry,” so she’s willing to risk the lives of her lovers for the sake of her own loneliness.
The Widow/Sabine Boucher
Sabine Boucher sees young María’s hunger for freedom and Identity formation. María meets Sabine when she passes through María’s village posing as a young widow. María is fascinated by Sabine, by her beauty and her freedom. Schwab leaves much of Sabine’s backstory is unknown. Her name has French origins, but she never tells María where she came from. Sabine tells María that she was once married and her husband died slowly, but she doesn’t clarify when or how. The mystery surrounding Sabine’s backstory allows María to easily adopt Sabine’s name and history for herself after Sabine’s death. Sabine is the embodiment of the possibilities and risks of vampirism and immortality: On one hand, there’s the opportunity for freedom from societal constraints, and on the other hand, there’s the risk of the loss of humanity and death.
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