Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Throughout Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, Schwab positions love and power as continually in tension. The first romantic relationship that appears in the novel is the marriage between María and Andrés. María does not love Andrés, nor is she attracted to him, but she agrees to his proposal to get out of her village and start a new life in a higher socioeconomic stratum. Once they marry, María finds herself still mired in the constraints of societal expectations that position women as subject to the needs and desires of men. Andrés treats her as an object, something to possess and use to produce a male heir. María notes that “Andrés looks at her, through her, as if she is a common thing. As if he did not worship at her feet the day they met. As if she did not make him bow with want” (106). María remembers how much Andrés sought her before their marriage, when she had the power to make him drop to his knees with desire. Now that he has María as his wife, he treats her as a means to an end, something he can bend to his will.

Schwab emphasizes the ways that—even as a human—María carries out small acts of defiance to reclaim her power. For example, she plants her cherry pits in Andrés’s olive grove, asserting that “it will be worth it, to see the cherries growing up like weeds between the olive trees, to imagine Andrés’s surprise, his annoyance, even, as her black fruit invades his green” (54). The use of the word “invade” illustrates how integral power is to María and Andrés’s relationship. While Andrés controls María’s life, María fights back, first in small gestures, then by killing Andrés and escaping her old life.

María’s desire for power and agency over her own life drives her to seek out Sabine Boucher and take drastic action—killing the widow and assuming her identity. Her interest in love is always secondary to her desire for power. Throughout the novel, she treats love in relationships as a kind of experiment—one that she ultimately rejects because to love someone is to give up a piece of her power. When she encounters Matteo and Alessandro’s love, she deems it “a ruinous thing” (252). When Sabine forms a romantic attachment to Charlotte, Sabine’s failure to extricate love from power leads her to isolate Charlotte, who notes that she’s had “a hundred years, apart, alone, with no one but Sabine. A hundred years without another confidante, or friend. A hundred years of waiting, wanting” (409). Charlotte wants connections outside of Sabine, to make friends with other vampires, but Sabine forbids it, refusing to relinquish control. Sabine worries that Charlotte forging other relationships will weaken Sabine’s power over her. Sabine was once powerless in her relationship, and her desire for power tarnishes her and Charlotte’s relationship, leading Charlotte to ultimately fall out of love with her.

Within the fictional world Schwab builds for Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, the price for immortality is the slow loss of one’s humanity. When Sabine, Alice, and Charlotte become vampires, they become immortal, reborn with an insatiable thirst for blood. At first, each woman clings to her humanity, trying to remember the people they were before they felt the insatiable hunger. As Sabine plays games with Matteo to slow down her bloodlust, she keeps the picture of her chosen target “like a cherry on her tongue,” which is something she notes that “she did a century ago, when she was a girl named María, when the season was ending, and the fruit almost gone, and she let the last few morsels go soft between her teeth” (219). Even a century later, she still remembers the small moments her life as a human.

The deterioration of Sabine’s relationship with Charlotte as a result of her declining humanity. As Sabine’s humanity drains away, she gives herself over more and more fully to her hunger for blood and pleasure in violence, turning her relationship with Charlotte toxic and abusive. When Charlotte finally recognizes that the Sabine she once knew is gone, she thinks, “What happened to the woman who seduced her on the stairs? The one who taught her how to dance in hidden parlors, how to dream and want…The one who ran barefoot with her through empty castle halls, and made her heart feel like it had never stopped beating?” (419). Schwab’s novel positions love, empathy, and an ability to experience joy in the world as distinctly human virtues. When they first fall in love, Charlotte links the feeling that Sabine inspires in her as a facsimile of humanity. As Sabine’s humanity declines, the love between them dies as well.

Across her arc, Charlotte grapples with an internal struggle between her human desire for love and the inherent violence of life as a vampire. For example, when Sabine kills their carriage driver, “Charlotte [can] hardly bear the violence of it, the horror—but that’s not what [makes] her turn away. No, it [is] the way her mouth [goes] dry, the way her teeth [begin] to ache, hunger rising in revulsion’s wake” (371). Charlotte feels her human and vampire natures constantly at war with each other—she hates the violence of death, but she also hates that the violence triggers her hunger. The price of her immortality is the necessity of brutality, of consuming people’s life source. Her hunger eventually outweighs her disgust, as she begins killing alongside Sabine. Charlotte and Sabine both demonstrate the truth of Ezra’s words when he says: “The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest” (427). Charlotte dies more slowly than Sabine, as she works harder to resist her bloodthirsty hunger, but even she eventually surrenders to a life oriented around blood. Alice’s immortality has only begun, so the consequences of her vampiric rebirth remain open-ended.