Verity
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, child abuse, child death, suicidal ideation, self-harm, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual content, mental illness, illness, and death.
Knives
Knives serve as a motif representing Violence as a Release. The motif first appears when Crew injures himself with a knife, seeking a release from the tension and trauma of his family life. Later in the story, Lowen brandishes a knife at Verity because she blames Verity for the strife the Crawfords have experienced and for the unease in the home. On a more visceral level, the protagonist craves the release of violence because she views Verity as an obstacle to her relationship with Jeremy and actively wants to replace her. Threatening the woman with violence is a way for her to unleash those unspoken desires and fears. At the end of the novel, Lowen finds the missing knife in the same hiding place as the letter in which Verity expresses her plan to run away, underscoring the novel’s thematic association between violence and release. Hoover uses the weapons to illustrate how powerful emotions drive people to seek dangerous outlets.
Locks
Throughout the novel, locks symbolize the characters’ attempts to control themselves and one another out of fear. After she moves into the Crawfords’ home, Lowen has Jeremy install a lock on the outside of her door because her sleepwalking makes her afraid of the harm she might unknowingly cause to herself or others. Her inability to trust herself hints at her unwitting status as an unreliable narrator, and her overwhelming fear colors her suspicions of Verity. After Jeremy and Lowen begin their sexual relationship, he places a lock on the outside of Verity’s door. While this action is ostensibly to reassure Lowen that Verity can’t threaten her, the lock symbolically shows Jeremy’s efforts to control and contain Verity so that he can distance himself from his commitment to her.
During the resolution, Verity’s letter offers another insight into the locks’ symbolic meaning. Verity explains that she locked Lowen and Jeremy in a room together when she discovered they were having sex so that she would have privacy to write the letter that outlines her plans to run away with Crew. Seeing no way to reclaim her old life, she attempts to contain the damage by locking the husband who sought to kill her and the woman who has taken her place in his heart so that she can flee and start a new life with her son. Locks function as a symbol of control, and fear adds to the sense of danger and distrust in the house, elevating the thriller’s suspense.
Mothers
Mothers are at the center of this novel. Verity’s complicated relationship to motherhood becomes a central plot point that introduces the essential questions of the text. Both Verity and Lowen have trauma from difficult relationships with their mothers, who both abandoned them. Lowen struggles to recognize her own worth because of her mother’s guilt and shame around her sleepwalking. The fictionalized version of Verity in So Be It attempts to maintain her own individualism separate from the all-consuming nature of motherhood. Hoover offers a commentary on the truth of motherhood and what it demands while also exploring the responsibilities mothers have for their children and their development. As Verity’s depiction of motherhood in her manuscript grows bleaker, Lowen’s maternal instincts lead her to have unprotected sex with Jeremy and, ultimately, to carry his child. While Lowen’s pregnancy at the end of the novel represents another stage of her calculated, escalating efforts to replace Verity, it also offers a fresh start and new beginning from the death and destruction that dominates most of the novel, giving the resolution a note of hope.
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Related Titles
By Colleen Hoover
