“They never spoke about any of it, not one word in all those years. Not about the house Doll stole her away from, not about the old woman who took them in. They did keep that shawl, though, till it was worn soft as cobwebs. But she felt the thrill of the secret whenever she took Doll’s hand and Doll gave her hand a little squeeze, whenever she lay down exhausted in the curve of Doll’s body, with Doll’s arm to pillow her head and the shawl to spread over her.”

Lila’s shadowy childhood past complicates how she sees herself throughout her life. Although she loves Doll and grows up seeing her as a mother figure, she knows next to nothing about her birth, her biological parents, or the circumstances surrounding her so-called kidnapping. The only memento of this time is the shawl Doll took from the house where she was born. The shawl symbolizes Lila’s origins and connects her to her past life. This moment introduces the novel’s theme of Memory as Survival and Self-Definition.

“Still, here Lila was with something more to worry about. The old man could have been telling her she should leave, she didn’t belong in his house. Maybe that’s how a gentleman would say it. If he wanted to, he could say, This was your idea, you’re the one who said I should marry you. Maybe a gentleman couldn’t say it.”

Lila’s internal monologue conveys her fear of embracing life with the reverend and accepting his love for her. Although he has shown her nothing but kindness, Lila is always waiting for him to betray her and evict her from his life. The passage contributes to the theme of The Search for Belonging After Displacement. Lila desires acceptance and community, but is reluctant to accept her newly secure life because of her historically unstable circumstances.

“But she wanted to stay in one place for a while. The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of. It was probably loneliness that made her walk the mile or so into town every few days just to look at the houses and stores and the flower gardens. She never meant to talk to anybody.”

Lila’s innate attraction to the town of Gilead foreshadows the town’s significance in her life to come. Lila is confused as to why she is so drawn to the place, but her newfound habit of wandering the neighborhood “looking at the houses and stores and gardens” is a manifestation of her deepest longing. The passage speaks to the search for belonging after displacement even before Lila is aware that what she wants is acceptance and security.

“Why did she care what people thought. She was nothing to them, they were nothing to her. There really was not a soul on earth she should be worrying about at all. Especially not that preacher.”

Lila’s internal monologue effects a harried and anxious mood, caused by Lila’s self-deprecating tone. Lila chastises herself for worrying over the Gilead townspeople’s impressions of her, because she does not believe she deserves to be a part of a community. She tells herself that the preacher could not care about her and she should not worry over him, because she is afraid to admit her longing for companionship and connection.

“She thought, A crazy woman would do something like this. She had known some crazy women, and any one of them would probably have had better sense. There was more shame in life than she could bear.”

Lila disparages herself whenever she makes impulsive decisions she cannot explain. She repeatedly calls herself “crazy,” which conveys her fear that others might perceive her as unstable. She feels like an imposter and an interloper no matter where she goes—and this sense only intensifies once she begins frequenting Gilead. Lila is also shaming herself, because she lives with a lifelong belief that she is doing something wrong. Her inability to trust or accept herself complicates her self-actualization journey.

“They were just figuring out where to leave her. For her own good. Where to tell her, stay, and wait, and somebody will come along. So after that she couldn’t love Doll like she did all those years. For a while she couldn’t. She’d never thought she might be sitting on that stoop again, at night probably, watching Doll sneak off into the woods. One way or another, it comes out the same. Can’t trust nobody.”

Lila’s lifelong fear of abandonment colors her narrative. In this passage, Lila is remembering the time that Doane and his group left her on the church steps, while Doll disappeared for four days. Lila takes this scenario as evidence that her traveling companions—including Doll—are untrustworthy. Her perspective in this passage is emblematic of how she relates to others (particularly the reverend) throughout the novel.

“It should have pained her to remember, but every time she rested her head on that old sweater she was just glad for it all. She had even thought about putting it in the fire, because it worried her how it kept him on her mind. Then maybe she could catch that bus. She certainly did wonder about herself. He should be thinking she’s crazy for sure by now. No sign of it in that letter, though. She thought, How can he forget what I am?”

The images of Lila resting her head on the reverend’s sweater create a bittersweet mood. Lila is overcome by loneliness when she is living in the cabin in the woods. The preacher’s sweater offers her the illusion of companionship. Now that she and the preacher are together, Lila struggles to reconcile this memory of the sweater with their life in the present. She fears that her past—and her private, shameful experiences—might earn the preacher’s scorn and turn him against her.

“It ain’t the same. Somebody like me might marry somebody like you just because you got a good house and winter’s coming. Just because she’s tired of the damn loneliness. Somebody like you got no reason at all to marry somebody like me.”

Lila and the reverend’s dialogue reiterates Lila’s fears of rejection and condemnation. Although the preacher has agreed to marry her and has welcomed her into his home and life, she remains distrustful of his kindness, because she is unaccustomed to it. She constantly disparages herself because she is trying to point out in herself what she believes others already see and disdain in her. At the same time, Lila is showing the preacher some vulnerability, in that she admits to being “damn lonely.”

“She’d thought, I’ll do this first and think about it afterward. Now afterward had come and she had no idea what to think. I am baptized, I am married, I am Lila Dahl, and Lila Ames. I don’t know what else I should want. Except for the shame to be gone, and it ain’t.”

Lila’s internal monologue in this passage reiterates the complexities of her journey toward self-actualization and self-acceptance. Lila has been married to and living with the reverend for some time, but still cannot reconcile who she has become with where she has come from. She cannot eradicate her shame because her past is defined by it. Because she is in such conflict with herself, she remains in conflict with her surroundings.

“She’d heard people say that a sad woman will have a sad child. A bitter woman will have an angry child. She used to think that if she could decide what it was she felt, as far back as she remembered, she could know that much, at least, about the woman who bore her. Loneliness. She pitied the woman for her loneliness. She didn’t want this child of hers to feel afraid with no real reason.”

The impending birth of Lila’s child changes how she thinks about the world and perceives herself. Lila has had a fraught sense of self ever since she was young, due to the circumstances surrounding her birth and childhood. In this passage, Lila worries that a significant part of who she is relates to her estranged, allegedly deceased biological mother. She fears passing her own sadness on to her own child, which her child will carry with him throughout his life. Her thinking is generational in this passage and conveys her desire to break cyclical patterns and make a new future for herself.

“Why else did she say, You ought to marry me? Did she think he would laugh? Maybe she didn’t want him to say, I will. She never thought he would. She didn’t believe him when he did. Maybe she meant to go back to that leaky old cabin and feel ache and sting down to her bones and nothing else.”

Lila interrogates her motives behind proposing to the preacher to make sense of who she is. The passage contributes to the themes of both the search for belonging after displacement and Love as an Act of Mutual Vulnerability. Lila wants to belong with the preacher but still struggles to accept their good life together. Lila also wants to be loved, but fears confessing her feelings and embracing the preacher’s love. The “ache” and “sting” in her bones convey the poignancy of her longings.

“In those days it seemed to Lila that they were nothing at all, the two of them, but here they were, right here in the Bible. Don’t matter if it’s sad. At least Ezekiel knows what certain things feel like. That voice above the firmament. He knows the sound of it.”

References to the biblical book of Ezekiel pervade the novel and provide insight into Lila’s childhood past and emotional state in the present. In this passage, Lila meditates on her favorite Ezekiel verse once more; this time she finds clarity for her relationship with Doll. Despite the unconventionality of their dynamic, Lila finds authentication for it in the Bible. This offers her a sense of comfort and validation.

“He never came into her room, he never preached from Ezekiel, and he never asked her another question about Doll, even when he gave her back that knife. The morning after she mentioned it, it was just lying there on the breakfast table between the pitcher and the sugar bowl, the blade closed into the handle, looking harmless enough. She’d left it there. Seemed like he might want to know where it was, until he knew her a little better.”

Lila’s musings on the preacher’s behavior develop the novel’s theme of love as an act of mutual vulnerability. After Lila tells him about Doll’s blade, she regrets her decision and fears the preacher will turn against her as a result. In this passage, she is realizing that the preacher has remained faithful to her and still is not pressuring her about her past. She has shown him her vulnerability and he has not rejected her for it. At the same time, the knife (symbolic of guilt and shame) continues to weigh on Lila.

“That’s how it is, she thought. Keep to yourself. So long as you can do that, you’re all right. Then somebody finds you in a corner somewhere, and you ain’t even there to hear them say, What a pity. And that seems better than asking for help. She said, ‘I understand that. I do. I know how you feel around strangers. I feel the same way. So you can trust me.’”

Lila experiences a moment of clarity when she meets the boy in the cabin in the woods. She sees something of herself in him and is able to reconnect with a part of herself she once thought was irretrievable. In her dialogue with the boy, she offers him comfort by assuring him that she understands his plight. Her past helps her to relate to another individual in need, while compelling her toward reconciliation with her own fraught background.

“You might pick up something belonging to somebody and feel for a minute how theirs it is, particularly if you hate them enough. But a whole roomful of somebody’s days and thoughts and breath, things that are faded and they don’t see it, ugly and they don’t care, things worn by their habits, it seems strange to walk in on that when you’re almost nothing more than a cold wind. She did wish she could at least find a way to tell him how hard it was, the ache you feel walking out of a cold day into a warm room.”

This descriptive passage conveys Lila’s intense emotional responses to the novel’s micro settings. Lila is keenly aware of and attuned to her surroundings. Just moving from the cold outdoors to the warm interior of her home conjures this philosophical meditation on life and human intimacy. She feels the preacher’s presence in his objects and space, and wishes she could share this sensation with him, which is a mark of character growth. The passage contributes to the novel’s explorations of love as an act of mutual vulnerability.

“She couldn’t talk to him the way he was talking to her. That boy out at the cabin, he knew her. Married? To a preacher? Sounds like you making that up. That his child you got there? Meaning no harm, knowing no better. It seemed almost as if she had lied to the preacher when she said she didn’t know that boy.”

Lila’s reflections on her interaction with the boy in the woods further the novel’s explorations of both belonging and self-definition. In her conversation with the preacher about the boy, she realizes how much the boy’s experience resonated with her own. She feels as if she is lying by saying she doesn’t “know that boy” because she recognized herself in him. She is experiencing the collision of her past and present selves in this passage, an internal conflict she has been trying to resolve throughout the novel.

“What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore? I seem to be getting used to things I never even knew about just a few months ago. Not wondering what in the world I’m going to do next, for one thing. Maybe it’ll be something the old man liked about me that will be gone sometime, and I won’t even know what it was.”

Lila’s stream of consciousness in this passage furthers the novel’s theme of memory as survival and self-definition. Lila is aware of the parts of herself she is forgetting—a phenomenon she fears because her past has always held the key to her identity. In this moment, she is beginning to resign herself to her personal evolution, while mourning the facets of her life and identity she may end up forgetting.

“Why you should have to stand there feeling ridiculous with a bloodstain still on your shoe, just at the time when other people are out to insult you, and not one part of it is your fault or your choice, that’s the kind of thing she didn’t understand. Because you do it to yourself. Why should she have cared for one minute what those people thought of her? Or cared that they never so much as spoke to her. She remembered a hot blush of something like anger, but more like damned old shame.”

In this passage, Lila’s plaguing consciousness of how others see her reiterates her lifelong struggle with guilt and shame. Lila did not kill her father, but her shoe is stained with his blood; the blood imagery is symbolic of culpability. Lila feels to blame for what happened because she always anticipates others’ scorn and condemnation. She is seeking her own redemption but fears that salvation and grace might not extend to her. Her feelings in this moment following the murder underscore Lila’s complex spirituality and relationship with the past.

“It came over her, before he had even closed the door behind him, the thought of that house in St. Louis. It was just pure misery. Misery must have been what she was looking for, because she felt it the minute she walked in that door.”

This passage furthers the novel’s theme of memory as survival and self-definition. Lila is physically situated in her private room in the preacher’s house in Gilead; however, just a mere “thought of that house in St. Louis” has the power to transport her to the past. This memory in turn conjures the misery, guilt, and shame Lila associates with this period in her life. Because Lila spends so much time in her memories, she risks letting them define her for good.

“There she was, missing Doll again. For so many years she had belonged to somebody. The cow and her calf. That was all right, because Doll wanted her there beside her. The way they used to laugh together, half the joke being that nobody else would know what the joke was.”

This poignant passage underscores the novel’s theme of the search for belonging after displacement, which is Lila’s lifelong quest. Lila has thought about and remembered Doll throughout the entirety of the novel but it is not until this passage that Lila identifies why she is thinking about Doll at all. She misses her and her absence has stolen her sense of belonging from her. She compares Doll and herself to a “cow and her calf,” a metaphor which evokes notions of maternity, comfort, and protection. Without Doll, Lila has felt lost, alone, and disoriented.

“This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation.”

The reverend’s essay on joy and sorrow helps Lila to make sense of her internal unrest. Throughout the novel, she has found it impossible to reconcile her fraught past with her peaceful life in the present. The preacher however argues in his essay that sorrow and joy are distinct and need not negate or alter one another. This point of view challenges Lila to allow her past and present—her sorrow and happiness—to coexist.

“And her life was just written all over her, she knew it without looking, because that’s how it was with all the women she used to know. And somehow she found her way to the one man on earth who didn’t see it. Or maybe he saw it the way he did because he had read that parable, or poem, or whatever it was. Ezekiel.”

Lila’s musings on her new life capture how her character is changing. Throughout the novel, Lila has resisted accepting her new circumstances because they feel illogical given where she came from and the things she experienced throughout her coming of age. In this passage, she is reaching a state of acceptance. She proves more ready to embrace the preacher’s grace and goodness, no matter how inexplicable it might feel.

“His, she thought, because it reminded her of that old gray sweater, when she loved how his it was. Loneliness and mice and the wind blowing and then that woolly old thing against her cheek, smelling like him. She’d put her head on his shoulder that one time when he hardly knew her name. She laughed to remember.”

This descriptive passage contributes to the theme of love as an act of mutual vulnerability. Lila is accepting that she and the preacher love each other and belong to each other. She marvels at how remarkable their dynamic is in light of the recent past, where she was talking to his sweater to ease her loneliness. Lila has found peace, comfort, and contentment since opening up to the preacher.