53 pages • 1-hour read
Three Dark Crowns
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Symbols & Motifs
Breccia Domain
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of animal cruelty and death.
The narrator describes Breccia Domain as a “deep chasm in the ground that [the islanders] call ‘the heart of the island.’ It is a sacred place. They say it has no bottom” (298). This abyss is a motif that points to The Moral Complexities of Fighting for Survival and The Dual Nature of Gifts. Genevieve says that generations past would throw “the bodies of the queens who did not survive their Ascension Years” into the chasm (299), and those bodies lie in shattered piles at the bottom of Breccia Domain. This practice indicates that the successful queens who murdered their sisters did not want to acknowledge their dark deeds, so they sought to erase their guilt by hiding the evidence. In this way, the Domain highlights the moral cost of fighting for power since the queens must kill to survive. As the “heart” of Fennbirn, the Breccia Domain symbolizes the brutality at the center of its monarchy, political structure, and social classes.
Further, when Pietyr takes Katharine to see the gorge, it strikes him as “morbid” and frightening, while she finds it “vast and deep” (299), even peaceful and serene. Her reaction replicates the dual nature of the gifts Katharine and her sisters have, which can cause both good and bad outcomes. Later, when Pietyr searches for a way to save Katharine from the priestesses’ plot, he decides to pushing her into Breccia Domain to save her from the brutal execution that awaits her. Here, the gorge simultaneously symbolizes both violence and salvation.
Arsinoe’s Mask
After the bear attack, Jules’s grandfather Ellis makes Arsinoe a beautiful black mask to cover her scars. However, at Arsinoe’s request, “[h]e paints bright red slashes across it, down the cheek and from the eye” (274). This mask symbolizes The Impact of Power and Expectations on Identity. For most of her life, Arsinoe has felt like a failure—she believed she was a “weak” queen since her gift did not appear. She and the Milones tried to hide her weakness.
However, as Arsinoe grows, she chafes against her community’s expectations of her, and she doesn’t want to hide anymore. This is why she asks Ellis to paint the mask as though it’s been slashed by the bear’s claws, demonstrating her new resistance to concealment. The discomfort she experiences when she wears the mask symbolizes her unwillingness to hide or to be someone other than who she is. Though even “the lightest touch on her inflamed skin hurts,” she decides “she must wear the mask” (333), partly because “the painted red streaks will look fierce against the firelight” (333). The bear attack that disfigured her face also liberated Arsinoe from societal expectations of seeming queenly. She likes that she looks different and that people can see that “[s]he [is] nothing like the other queens […]. Now, [people] wonder if there is more to her than meets the eye” (343).
Ironically, it is when she puts on the mask that people begin to notice her in more positive and affirming ways. Simultaneously, her physical discomfort with the mask symbolizes her unwillingness to hide and pretend anymore.
Katharine’s Snake
Katharine’s pet coral snake, Sweetheart, lives in a glass cage on her dresser; she has had the snake since it hatched. The snake “is the only venomed creature Katharine does not fear. She knows the vibrations of Katharine’s voice and the scent of her skin. She has never bitten her, even once” (7). Sweetheart is a symbol of Katharine herself: The queen is similarly confined by a metaphorical cage of community expectation and obligation.
At the novel’s end, Arsinoe learns that she is actually a poisoner, not a naturalist, suggesting that Katharine—misidentified by her mother—might be this generation’s naturalist and not a failed poisoner. If so, then Sweetheart might be her familiar rather than just a pet.
Sweetheart’s death and replacement foreshadow Katharine’s own transformation. Just as the new snake looks the same but behaves more violently, Katharine returns from Breccia Domain looking the same though she is fundamentally changed.
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