60 pages • 2-hour read
Promises and Pomegranates
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, emotional abuse, and graphic violence.
Desire Overwhelms Duty
Elena has struggled with obedience for her entire life. As a child, she sought to please her parents—especially her father—and so she tried to prove herself over and over, either through submission to their rules or through a violent, personal independence. She often fought with other children to prove that she could hold her own and deserved greater freedom to make her own choices. Elena sought to prove that she was more than Rafael’s “little Mafia princess” and should be allowed to “live the life [she] wanted” (49). Ultimately, however, Elena’s desire for freedom defeats her wish for parental acceptance via filial duty. This is shown in her decision to embrace Kal even though it means severing ties with her parents, since choosing him represents not only sexual fulfillment but also a rejection of a family system that demanded obedience above all.
Elena’s hasty, forced marriage to Kal upsets everything she’s ever thought about her place in the world and what her future would look like. Incredulous, she asks Rafael, “Do I get a say in anything?” (34). The unsaid answer, of course, is no, not with her family. She is appalled at the abrupt change, from her engagement to Mateo de Luca, the abusive and narcissistic heir to a Boston media company, to a hasty, impromptu wedding to Kal; she never would have slept with Kal if she knew that it would “result in this, in the complete stripping away of any semblance of freedom [she’s] ever had” (35). Life as Elena knows it has irrevocably changed, any love her parents feel for her paling in comparison to their wish to control her. This ultimately reveals the strength of her desire, which becomes more of a priority than obedience after this revelation. Even when she tries to maintain filial duty, such as during her trip to Boston, her desire resurfaces with Kal in ways that overpower any loyalty she still feels to her parents.
Carmen Ricci’s marital advice to her daughter seems to prove that desire will always triumph over most anything else. On her wedding day, Elena recalls her mother’s words about “Betraying body syndrome […]. When you’re powerless to carnality, despite your mind knowing better […]. The mind, she mused, was a different battlefield entirely but one she swore could eventually be conquered, citing her own success” (102). In other words, Carmen says that the body “betray[s]” the individual, responding to desire even in the presence of competing expectations, like duty. She also argues that one’s mind can be “conquered,” yet she still engaged in multiple extramarital affairs, suggesting that desire will always surpass duty. In terms of her body, at least, Elena admits that her experience “lines up too perfectly with what Mamma said would eventually happen” (182). Carmen’s confession near the end of the novel—that she deliberately undermined Elena since birth and pursued Kal out of jealousy—further confirms that desire, not duty, dictated her choices, even at the expense of family bonds.
Ultimately, Elena’s parents’ restrictive treatment and the constant limitations they place on her contrast with the relative freedom to be herself, which she feels with Kal. She begins to enjoy the idea of defying them, of shocking them, and asserting her independence via her sexuality. Her final act of leaking Ricci Inc.’s secrets to the press is the culmination of this theme, since her choice to expose her family’s corruption demonstrates that her allegiance lies with her own desire for autonomy rather than with filial duty.
The Boundary Between Obsession and Love
At the beginning of their relationship, both Kal and Elena are obsessed with each other. This is seen in their descriptions and how they choose to focus on sex alone. Kal often objectifies Elena, comparing her to a work of art or some other thing he might possess, and she often focuses on the arousal she experiences with him. This continues until their feelings begin to deepen, and they cross the boundary into love, as each begins to care for the other. The novel emphasizes this shift by framing early encounters through imagery of conquest and possession, and later encounters through imagery of mutual recognition and vulnerability, such as Kal exposing his scars and Elena marking his chest with her own initial.
Early in their marriage, Elena and Kal’s word choices show that their feelings are rooted in obsession, not love. She says of Kal, “He looks savage, like a monster […], and it steals the oxygen from my lungs […]. Not because I’m afraid though. Because I like it. The chaos in his eyes sucks me in like an undercurrent, pulling me deeper into his dangerous waters” (66). Typically, love is comforting and not chaotic; it doesn’t create danger but safety. Further, Elena uses the same simile to describe herself and Kal’s effect on her, their feelings for one another turning her into a “monster,” like him. She says, “My heart thumps erratically, knocking against my ribs like a caged monster desperate to be set free. Self-consciousness rears its ugly head, making me wonder if he can hear it too; how embarrassing it’d be for my husband to know how he affects me” (147). While love makes one vulnerable, to a degree, one’s feelings toward one’s partner ought not to be “embarrassing”; this description of herself is another indicator that Elena and Kal are not in love. Kal’s description of their first sex as a married couple—“legitimizing our marriage and solidifying [his] obsession once and for all (158)—confirms this. Kal’s fixation on bodily marks, from carving his initial into Elena’s thigh to demanding she carry his semen as a “secret,” reflects the possessive quality of obsession rather than the reciprocity of love.
However, Kal and Elena both begin to develop deeper and more meaningful feelings the longer they are together. When she plants a garden, Kal says, “I exhale, remembering how she said she’s lonely. How, in the entire time we’ve been on Aplana, this is the first time I’ve seen her look something other than miserable, barring sexual activities” (213). He takes her to a private beach where roses grow because he wants her to be happy. For her part, when they go skinny dipping, Elena says, “I do my best not to look down [at Kal’s naked body], sure that whatever I find there will humanize him. That I won’t be able to resist the brokenness, and my attraction will let loose and morph into something real” (215). As she acknowledges moments later, it’s too late; the sight of Kal’s scarred body only proves what she already knows: “In the pit of my stomach, in the fabric of my soul, I know. I’m in love with my husband” (236). For his part, Kal’s feelings cross that boundary between obsession and love around the same time. When he talks about Elena now, he says, “If it were anyone else, I […] [w]ould never have even brought them back to my house to live, much less started spilling my guts [….]. But something about this woman makes me want to risk everything” (226). Kal is now willing to “risk everything” because he is falling in love with her, something he vowed he’d never let happen after Carmen’s betrayal. By the end, the balance shifts: Elena insists on choice when she carves her initial into Kal’s chest, and Kal acknowledges her as his soulmate, demonstrating that obsession has been transformed into love that includes respect, risk, and reciprocity.
Reclaiming Agency Within Forced Marriage
Although Elena definitely did not consent to her marriage to Kal—or even to Mateo—since the threat of death to oneself or one’s family constitutes coercion, she finds ways to be happy and even to fall in love. This complicates issues regarding consent and Stockholm syndrome, and given that this is a fictional relationship based on another fictional relationship (the Hades and Persephone myth), it can be equally problematic when attempting to extrapolate messages about consent to real relationships. However, through Elena and Kal’s relationship, which did begin before their marriage—and on her terms—the novel suggests the possibility of reclaiming one’s agency when in such a forced marriage. The text underscores this possibility by showing Elena move from enforced passivity at her wedding, where her mouth is literally covered, to active decision-making, as when she chooses to return to Aplana and rejects the annulment.
While Persephone may have been forced to find the good in an objectively bad situation, Elena’s lot is somewhat less gloomy. She has long been attracted to Kal, so much so that she asked him to be her first sexual partner; she likes him enough that she got her pomegranate tattoo in the hopes of becoming “his Persephone.” Ultimately, she is more horrified by her lack of choice than she is by her father’s choice of partner. She was so upset by the prospect of marrying Mateo, who was abusive, that her mother tells her on her wedding day, “‘You’ll find ways to make peace with it’ […]. When [Carmen] releases [Elena], she offers a smile, but it feels forced and wobbly, so fragile, it could break in an instant” (17). Elena does find peace in her marriage because it offers a kind of liberation and freedom that she’s never had before. This sense of peace grows when she sees Kal naked in the ocean, when she seduces him of her own accord, and when she asserts her agency by leaking Ricci Inc.’s crimes, suggesting that agency emerges not only in sexual contexts but also in public acts of defiance.
Elena’s sexual liberation precedes almost every other kind of independence she comes to enjoy. Early in their time on Aplana, Kal describes Elena as “taking charge [of an intimate encounter] before [he] can put a stop to it” (93). Similarly, right before they have sex in the shower, she tells him, “Make me yours” (152). Though he didn’t secure her consent to their marriage, Elena enthusiastically consents to their sexual relationship, even taking control of it at times. She even begins to appreciate the other aspects of life with Kal, stating, “Honestly, it’s been so refreshing [here], even though I live as a captive now [….]. It’s okay, I’ve already grown quite accustomed to my Stockholm syndrome” (229). Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes experienced by victims of abuse or captivity in which they develop positive feelings toward their abuser or captor. However, it is not long after this that Elena fully accepts that she is in love with her husband. Her willingness to describe her situation in psychological terms demonstrates her effort to name and frame her experience, which itself is a way of reclaiming interpretive agency even when material freedom is constrained.
Elena chooses to walk away from Kal after she learns of his affair with Carmen, and then ultimately chooses to walk back into his life after he serves her with annulment paperwork. He says he wanted to give her a choice, and she carved out a new one, in which she is his equal in the relationship, like Persephone did with Hades. By choosing to stay, carving her initial into his body, and demanding no annulment, Elena asserts that her place in the marriage is no longer dictated by Rafe, Carmen, or Kal, but by her own decision, completing her trajectory of reclaiming agency within a forced union.
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