Promises and Pomegranates

This section uses figurative language to characterize Kal and Elena. Kal has a condition known as misophonia, in which certain kinds of sounds—like clock sounds—trigger emotional and even physical responses that might seem excessive to an outsider. He talks about the calm he finds in silence, and the reverse is also true. When he sits with Rafe, who is loudly drinking tea in the Prologue, Kal says, “The sound of his lips sucking in liquid grates on my nerves, a dull knife sawing at the frayed edges” (5). This metaphor compares the sound of Rafael’s liquid gulping to a blade to his insides, much more intense than a mere aggravation. Similarly, when Kal hears the dual ticking of his watch and the clock in the Riccis’ home, he describes the anger he feels as a “red-hot tidal wave crashing along [his] insides” (40), causing him to shoot his watch with a gun. These moments reveal how deeply Kal associates sound with control and power, as the obliteration of noise through violence provides him with an artificial sense of calm. By linking his emotional volatility to metaphors of knives and tidal waves, the text signals that Kal is never truly in control of his destructive instincts, which mirrors how Hades’s act of abduction is framed as both sudden and overwhelming in the myth.

Kal’s “obsession” with silence reflects the idea that unchecked desire erodes restraint, even when the pursuit of calm is his stated goal. Elena says that she is “like a moth to a flame, […] chas[ing] his heat” (49). She is the delicate moth who is drawn to his chaos and anger, finding it irresistible even while forced into a hasty marriage moments after her fiancé dies. In the car on Aplana Island, she says that “[h]e looks savage, like a monster come to life” (66). These similes and metaphors characterize Kal as volatile and explosive, as someone who is not always in control of his feelings or actions. They also establish the paradox that defines Kal’s character, as his role as a doctor is in constant tension with his violent impulses. The juxtaposition of healer and destroyer deepens the mythic parallel, as Kal embodies both the life-giving and life-taking aspects of the Underworld, and Elena’s simultaneous terror and attraction to this duality reflect her larger struggle to reconcile duty with forbidden desire.

Conversely, the figurative language used to describe Elena characterizes her as someone who has long felt trapped by life’s circumstances and falls short of meeting her family’s expectations. Even on her wedding day, she feels “like an ugly duckling” compared to her sister, Ariana (15). At the same time, Elena says she “feel[s] like a porcelain doll,” an object that is expected to look pretty and be silent (16). Kal senses that, after their hasty marriage, “She feels trapped, like a broken bird caught in her gilded cage” (37); for the time being, Kal must “ensur[e] her wings stay clipped” (37). Her sense of powerlessness within her family, and now within her forced marriage, is obvious to him. When he looks at her, however, he sees the “Golden irises [that] glisten like melted luxury, and [his] hand lifts of its own accord, reaching for the ends of her chocolate-colored hair” (23). He associates her with value, beauty, and a luscious richness that is both visual and gustatory, but she is unaware of these connotations. This description also places Elena in the position of both object and prize, her desirability framed in sensory metaphors that Kal primarily consumes. That Elena remains unaware of these associations underscores how little she controls the narrative of her own body, which situates her firmly within the dynamic of coerced marriage and paternal control, regardless of how much she simultaneously desires him.

Kal also notes the way art and poetry inspired Elena’s “rebellious gene” (9). Allusions to her favorite poems—Percy Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”—provide evidence of her desire for freedom and the strength of her own desire. Shelley’s poem is a response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, a rallying cry against unjust authority and a call for freedom. Browning’s poem considers a beautiful, rather willful young woman whose husband could not tame her. These poems, and Elena’s characterization as someone who’s battled feelings of powerlessness against her family’s expectations suggests the way Desire Overwhelms Duty. Her attraction to works that center rebellion against tyranny and the fatal consequences of unchecked male authority illustrates how her literary tastes mirror her lived circumstances, foreshadowing the way she will test the limits of Kal’s control and her father’s demands.

Additional details in the opening chapters underscore how obsession and coercion structure the relationship. Kal recalls leaving poems on Elena’s balcony, believing it to be Carmen’s, which ties his early attraction to Elena to a history of mistaken intimacy and blurred boundaries between mother and daughter. Carmen’s later warning that he must not use Elena for revenge connects their past affair to Kal’s present fixation, highlighting the Ricci family’s intergenerational cycle of secrecy and betrayal. These moments explore blurred boundaries and Elena’s initial victimization, since her forced marriage is born not just of Kal’s obsession but of Carmen’s secrecy and Rafael’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter’s autonomy.

Frequent allusions to the myth of Hades and Persephone also characterize the relationship between Kal and Elena. Kal calls Elena the “Persephone to my Hades” (3), and he recounts a poem he once left for Elena, “The Rape of Proserpine,” the Roman version of the same story, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like Hades does with Persephone, Kal forces Elena to marry him and kidnaps her, taking her to his home. Hades lives in the Underworld, and Kal’s home is named the Asphodel, after the fields of asphodel, the area of the Underworld to which most souls travel after death. Further, Elena has a tattoo of a pomegranate and uses shampoo scented like the fruit because she longs to be Kal’s Persephone, the woman he cannot live without. She even starts a garden, though with little success, after the goddess of spring. These allusions are not neutral decorations but direct commentaries on the power imbalance of their relationship. Kal aligns himself with a god who seizes, and Elena marks her own body with the symbol of Persephone’s captivity, revealing the extent to which desire is entangled with mythic coercion.

These references to the story of Hades and Persephone highlight how mythic symbolism can operate as a psychological framework, as Kal and Elena both embrace this story and its similarities to their own to justify their feelings and behaviors, which, for now, lie mostly on the “obsession” side of The Boundary Between Obsession and Love. Moreover, Persephone’s assumption of the title, the Queen of the Dead, foreshadows the possibility of a truer partnership between Kal and Elena than currently exists. Though her story is controversial due to Persephone’s lack of consent to her union with Hades, her eventual power suggests that Elena could also be successful in Reclaiming Agency Within Forced Marriage. Fruit also appears when Kal eats an apple while touching Elena on the plane, echoing biblical imagery of temptation and original sin and suggesting how erotic desire and moral transgression intertwine in their relationship.

Equally significant is the violence that frames the marriage itself. The injection Kal gives Elena before abducting her mirrors the abduction of Persephone, where force is disguised as fate. The presence of a priest at the ceremony, and Rafe’s willingness to sanction the marriage despite Elena’s refusal to consent, reveals how patriarchal authority colludes with Kal’s obsession to strip her of agency. This ritual context highlights the novel’s exploration of consent and power, as Elena is symbolically transformed from daughter to wife without the opportunity to choose. The priest’s compliance and Rafe’s silence reveal how institutions of family and faith normalize coercion, showing that Elena’s lack of agency is upheld not only by Kal but also by broader patriarchal structures.

Elena’s attraction to death imagery also plays a crucial role in these chapters. She dreams of her funeral rather than her wedding, and she links marriage with death rather than life. This symbolic framework situates her initial sexual surrender to Kal within a death-and-rebirth narrative, positioning him as both executioner and deliverer. Her longing for annihilation and transformation reveals the psychological depth of her attraction, aligning with the darker strands of the Persephone myth. By choosing to frame her marriage vows and first sexual encounters in terms of death, Elena participates in the symbolic construction of herself as Persephone, suggesting that her agency, though constrained, is exercised through how she interprets and narrates her captivity.