53 pages • 1-hour read
The Book of Cold Cases
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Symbols & Motifs
Bitter & Sweet
In The Book of Cold Cases, the Lady Killer leaves a note at the scene of her first crime that reads, “Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either. Publish this or there will be more” (162). This is a reference to something Mariana said to Lily and Beth: “Which one are you today? Mariana would say when they were little girls. Are you bitter or are you sweet?” (162). It becomes a motif that recurs in Beth’s mind throughout the story and ties in with one of the major themes of the book, that of Women and the Feminine Ideal. There is an implication in this quote that girls are either one or the other, easily categorized, and that a girl should strive for sweetness.
St. James uses Beth’s preoccupation with this motif to thread it throughout her life. When she is fairly young, Beth realizes that it is better to be the bitter girl for two reasons. The first is that Mariana seems to prefer her own bitter daughter, Lily, to her sweet one, Beth: “There was no question about Mariana belonging to Beth. She belonged to the bitter girl, the one who wouldn’t be eaten” (202). She also learns with Lily’s tutelage that a bitter shell can serve as protection. By assuming a “bitter” attitude during the Lady Killer trial, she protects herself from condemnation. Society would prefer if she were a sweet girl, but she knows “the sweet girl was the one who got eaten. The bitter girl was the one who survived” (199). This juxtaposition reaffirms the societal expectations of women, that they should strive for goodness and will be shunned if they are bitter. There is also the recognition, emphasized by Beth’s revelation, that for her own well-being it is better for a girl to be bitter because she will survive. By exploring this motif, St. James illustrates a basic dilemma that women face: be sweet and therefore “eaten,” or be bitter and therefore shunned.
Greer Mansion
Beth’s house, known throughout Claire Lake as the Greer mansion, is a symbol of all of the dysfunction of the family and people inside:
half pseudo-Victorian, half midcentury, an unlikely mix of peaked gables with yellow brick, brown wood, and glass. It was ugly–very, very ugly–but it drew the eye, moving your gaze over one line and then another, as if every time you looked it created itself anew. (53)
The house is monstrous, yet compelling: “An awful thing that was tolerated because it was made with money and pretended to have class” (286). This description seems like one that Beth might offer in reference to her own family, reinforcing that symbolism. Lily has a different view, saying, “‘It’s an abomination that shouldn’t exist,’ Lily said, ‘and it knows it. That’s why I like it. It’s exactly like me'” (84). To Lily, the house is a symbol of herself, and it offers a rare insight into Lily’s perspective in which she sees herself as an “abomination.” With the Greer mansion, St. James creates a symbol that operates from a number of different perspectives for the reader, Beth, and Lily, as well as the community of Claire Lake. The symbol of the house is made even more prominent in the story by St. James’s decision to begin and end the novel with chapters from the house’s perspective. By drawing attention to the house in this way, and even developing a certain degree of sentience for it, St. James highlights the importance of this symbol to the book.
Ghosts
The Book of Cold Cases boasts a number of ghosts throughout the two narratives. Lily, Mariana, and Julian all haunt the Greer house and have been haunting Beth for years. This is one of the reasons Beth depends so heavily on alcohol: “being drunk kept the ghosts away most of the time, but not all of the time” (43). However, in case the reader is tempted to write these ghosts off as hallucinations, St. James brings Shea into close contact with the ghosts as well from nearly the moment she sets foot in the Greer mansion. At first, she has difficulty believing her experiences at the house: “I absolutely did not believe in ghosts or the supernatural” (75) but admits later that “[t]here are ghosts in her house that terrify me” (279). These supernatural presences that inhabit the house keep Beth mired in her past, reliving her father’s death, her mother’s leaving, and Lily not allowing her to change anything about the house. These ghosts keep Beth’s guilt alive.
Another way to look at the motif of ghosts that runs throughout the book is to consider the other ghosts who present themselves: Sherry Haines, whose death haunts Shea; and the men who Lily killed, whose deaths haunt Beth. Throughout the novel, Beth and Shea both refer to their ghosts as a way of talking about regrets and guilt that they live with. These more metaphorical ghosts run as a motif throughout the book as well and operate as manifestations of Shea’s and Beth’s feelings of guilt, which are constant and resonate through their lives.
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