51 pages • 1-hour read
The House at Riverton
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This part of the guide contains descriptions of illness or death.
“The Game”
“The Game” is a crucial childhood motif that symbolizes lost innocence and coming of age in a changing world. The Hartford children move from childhood to adulthood at the time of World War I, when widescale warfare fractured the established social patterns of a previous era. The importance of “The Game” to the children and its subsequent loss symbolizes this watershed.
“The Game” helps to establish an exclusive, triangular dynamic that defines the Hartford children’s relationship. Hannah in particular is protective of it, becoming jealous in Chapter 7 when David brings Robbie home and its secrecy is threatened. As the most significant of the rules is that “only three may play. No more, no less,” the essential geometry of their relationship is triangular (48). When David brings the sophisticated Robbie into their circle, he breaks into this triad, destabilizing the loyalties that have governed the siblings’ lives and forcing their private, childlike world to collide with the outside forces of adult life, including sexual attraction. This dynamic foreshadows the dangers of the later love triangle between Hannah, Robbie, and Emmeline and highlights Sibling Loyalty Versus Romantic Love. The tragic events at the lake are the final, devastating play-out of “The Game” in the adult world.
Moreover, as only three can play, the tripartite nature of “The Game” shifts after David’s death at the front—an ultimate signal of lost youth and innocence—when his place in the dynamic is taken by Robbie. The triangle moves from the domestic sphere of childhood sibling relationships, into the adult world of sexual desire and betrayal, underscored by Hannah burying “The Game” at the lake, the location of the final denouement.
The motif of “The Game” is also closely tied into the Gothic elements of the novel. The Hartford children’s imaginative world “The Game” is reminiscent of the Brontë children’s fantasy worlds of “The Glass Town” and “Gondal,” juvenilia that helped shape the Brontës’ later influential works in the Gothic genre. The Hartfords’ Game reflects changing sibling dynamics, anxieties, and rivalries which have also been recognized in the Brontës’ fantasy interactions.
Reading Literature
The reading of literature is a pervasive motif that expresses the hierarchical world of the novel’s historical setting, and the tensions surrounding Grace’s place within it. It therefore highlights The Impact of Class and Gender on Lineage and Opportunity. Grace's reading of “any material beyond […] the Holy Bible” is a subversive act in the controlled world of the Riverton staff (20). Appropriate interest in and access to books is defined by a marked class divide in the novel, and on her arrival to the house in Chapter 3, it is made clear to Grace that she is not expected to read for pleasure. Finding it “unthinkable” that she should live without her favorite novels, Grace hides her books under her bed, an act that is symbolic of her character’s combination of independence and repression. It reflects the need for her to act in deference to “her place,” outwardly at least.
Grace’s continued reading early in the novel therefore characterizes her as unusual, independently-minded, and intelligent, as well as foreshadows the trajectory of her later life into academic studies. The motif links her reading to significant turning points in her life and relationships. In Chapter 3, it is Grace’s secret reading in the nursery which leads to her knowledge of the Hartford children, a defining moment. Similarly, Grace’s secret trip to the village to collect a book in Chapter 8 leads to shared secrets with Hannah, forging a bond between them that foreshadows the later revelation of their secret sibling status.
Methods of Storytelling
Methods of storytelling is a motif that highlights the nature of memory, personal experience, and the concept of historical “truth.” By referencing various different methods of storytelling and record-making—including internal monologues, verbal information, films, audio recordings, photos, and letters—the novel highlights how multiple versions of an historical “truth” can survive in parallel. It also mimics the process through which historical sources are created, framing the reader as a researcher as well as a detective into the narrative’s past mysteries. The material nature of these artifacts also corresponds with the 1914-1999 setting, emphasizing the novel’s engagement with storytelling in a pre-internet age. By highlighting the various forms of storytelling, the novel questions the very nature of truth, suggesting that methods of storytelling are as consequential as the events the stories describe.
The narrative is framed by 98-year-old Grace’s decision to record her version of the past for her grandson, Marcus. This act of telling is her final attempt to reclaim her own story, wresting control from official histories and long-held deceptions to construct a definitive truth. As she prepares to begin, she acknowledges the gravity of this narrative act, stating, “I am going to tell him a secret, an old secret, long kept” (81). Grace’s recording sessions become a deliberate process of confronting a past she has spent a lifetime suppressing, illustrating the central theme that memory is not a static archive but a story that can be shaped, edited, and retold.
In particular, Grace’s recordings, and by extension the novel, become a private, alternative “truth” to the public narrative portrayed by Ursula’s film. Significantly, Grace allows Ursula’s continued misunderstanding of the past, keeping her own storytelling for her grandson. As she dies, Grace knows that Ursula’s version is “not what really happened,” and the novel gives her the last word in her last, posthumously presented, audio for Marcus (448). The materiality of Grace’s memories therefore outlive her, recalling her own thoughts about Hannah and Robbie, that “those who live in memories are never really dead” (25). Having presented multiple methods of storytelling, the novel suggests that the private, internal story is the most significant of all. As Marcus is a “famous novelist,” the novel hints at a meta level of narrative where The House at Riverton is his publication of Grace’s story.
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