The Great Gilly Hopkins

“Gilly was left alone with the dust, the out-of-tune piano, and the satisfaction that she had indeed started off on the right foot in her new foster home.”

Using imagery, the author creates a solitary mood after Gilly has made a bad first impression on Maime Trotter. The image of being alone surrounded by dust and an out-of-tune piano expresses that Gilly feels alone in the world and lashes out at others because she does not want to be vulnerable.

“Out of the pasteboard frame and through the plastic cover the brown eyes of the woman laughed up at her as they always did. The glossy black hair hung in gentle waves without a hair astray. She looked as though she was the star of some TV show, but she wasn’t. See—right there in the corner she had written, ‘For my beautiful Galadriel, I will always love you.’”

The imagery and metaphors that the author uses when Gilly looks at her biological mother’s photograph express how Gilly idealizes Courtney. The metaphor of “laughing” brown eyes and the imagery of her waves “without a hair astray” show how Gilly sees Courtney as perfect and does not want to acknowledge Courtney’s faults or feel anger at her for leaving her. The description of the quote highlights Gilly’s longing for her biological mother’s love.

“Trotter’s eyes were still flashing, but her hand and voice were under control. ‘He’s had a rough time of it in this world, but he’s with Trotter now, and as long as the Lord leaves him in this house, ain’t anybody on Earth gonna hurt him. In any way.’”

The author uses imagery and diction to express Maime Trotter’s character and values. Her anger at Gilly for picking on William Ernest is shown in imager of her flashing eyes. Her strong emotional reaction is expressed in her diction. This shows that Maime Trotter does not see herself as a foster parent, but as a real parent to the children in her care, foreshadowing her later defense of Gilly when Miss Ellis wants to move Gilly to a new home.

“The corridors stank of oiled floors and cafeteria soup. Gilly had thought she hated all schools so much that they no longer could pain or disappoint her, but she felt heavier with each step—like a condemned prisoner walking an endless last mile.”

The sensory effects of the bad smells in the school hallway create a sense of foreboding and a mood of despair. Gilly’s sense of dismay at attending her new school is expressed in the simile that Gilly is walking toward her new classroom like a prisoner. Gilly’s initial unhappiness at Thompson Park changes over the narrative, and at the end of the novel she even says that she misses her old class.

“She put her head down and began to cry. She didn’t mean to, but it was so unfair. She hadn’t even seen her mother since she was three years old. Her beautiful mother who missed her so much and sent her all her love.”

Gilly’s sadness at Courtney’s disappearance from her life for the past eight years is expressed in the description of her weeping after she receives a letter from her. The author shows Gilly’s torn emotions about Courtney by juxtaposing Gilly’s anger at the unfairness of her situation with Gilly’s hope that her biological mother loves her and wants to take care of her. Gilly blames Miss Ellis and other people rather than facing the truth.

“Money. She half fell, half jumped off the chair, and snatched it up. Two five-dollar bills had fallen out from behind ‘Sarsaparilla to Sorcery.’ She put the encyclopedia down and studied the old, wrinkled bills. Just when she was needing money so badly. Here they’d come floating down. Like magic.”

Gilly’s sense of joy when she discovers the money hidden in Mr. Randolph’s bookshelf is show in the simile that the money floated down “like magic.” The sense of fate that Gilly feels about the money emboldens her to follow-through on her plan to see her biological mother in San Francisco. The encyclopedia title includes the word “sorcery” which symbolizes the sense of fate and magic that Gilly feels about finding this money.

“Agnes put her hand up and whispered behind it. ‘My grandma says the whole family’s nothing but trash.’ ‘Yeah?’ Gilly smacked her gum noisily. ‘What’s your grandma say about your family?’ Agnes went as stiff as a dried sponge. ‘Who’s been telling lies about my family?’”

The simile comparing Agnes’s body language to “a dried sponge” emphasizes the sense of embarrassment and shame that Agnes feels about being raised by her grandmother, as her biological parents left her several months before. Agnes thinks that Gilly somehow knows about this, even though Gilly is simply guessing to throw Agnes off and make her feel insecure. Gilly’s intimidating behavior toward Agnes is expressed in the description of her smacking her gum “noisily” when she talks to her.

“It wasn’t Agnes Stokes she could use. Agnes couldn’t be trusted between freckles. It was William Ernest. Of course. Trotter’s honey-baby engaged in a life of crime. She laughed out loud at the pleasure of it. Baby-Face Teague, the frog-eyed filcher. Wild-eyed William, the goose-brained godfather.”

Gilly’s sense of humor and creativity is expressed in this private moment of verbal fancy while she plots her scheme to steal money from Mr. Randolph. As she makes various puns and alliterations joking about the idea of shy and deferent William Ernest as a criminal, she makes herself laugh at William Ernest’s expense. The irony is that William Ernest is suspicious of Gilly when she tries to get him to help her, showing that William Ernest is more aware of things than Gilly realizes.

“She took his elbow and guided him carefully down the stairs, taking care not to look back over her shoulder because the look on Trotter’s face was the one Gilly had, in some deep part of her, longed to see all her life, but not from someone like Trotter. That was not part of the plan.”

Gilly’s fear of looking into Maime Trotter’s loving face shows her complicated inner conflict about love through imagery. On the one hand, she desperately longs for a mother’s love, and this drives her to extreme actions such as stealing so she can see her biological mother. On the other hand, she tries to reject Maime Trotter’s love, because she had an idealized view of her biological mother, and Maime Trotter does not fit this image.

“You may find this hard to believe, Gilly, but you and I are very much alike…I don’t mean in intelligence, although that is true, too. Both of us are smart, and we know it. But the thing that brings us closer than intelligence is anger. You and I are two of the angriest people I know.”

The dialogue between Gilly and Miss Harris adds to the characterization of both. Miss Harris compares she and Gilly not only for their intelligence, but their anger at the world: Miss Harris shows that she understands Gilly better than Gilly understands herself, and this makes Gilly feel very vulnerable and nervous. The author employs direct and plain diction to express the complex emotional insights Miss Harris shares with Gilly. Miss Harris’s care for a white child who has treated her poorly shows grace and self-awareness.

“She set the ladder up under Trotter’s chandelier, and as she painstakingly wiped each piece of glass with her ammonia-water rag, she would have to grab the ladder from time to time, dizzy as she was with the smell of the ammonia and the thought that by tomorrow night at this time she’d be on her way to California.”

The author uses description and imagery to express Gilly’s desperation to return to her biological mother’s side. The description of Gilly feeling “dizzy,” both from the ammonia as she cleans the chandelier and from her excitement about the idea of going to San Francisco the following day, shows the lengths that Gilly is willing to go. This expresses her frenzied and anxious emotional state when she believes her plan is nearly realized.

“Nothing was visible except dust. She took out books on either side, dusting each one with a kind of fury. Still nothing. Mr. Randolph was shifting in his chair across the room. She looked into his blank white eyes. Oh, god. Maybe he could really see. Maybe it was all a trick to fool people. She froze.”

When Gilly dusts Mr. Randolph’s house, she feels nervous while he sits right next to her as she searches for more hidden money in his bookshelf. The author uses imagery to show Gilly’s frustrating search, describing her dusting in “a kind of fury.” Gilly’s fear of being caught is shown in the mood of paranoia when she wonders if perhaps Mr. Randolph is not visually impaired. Gilly’s guilt about stealing from a visually impaired man causes her to feel extremely anxious.

“Miss Applegate neglected to say what Billy Sunday had saved her from. A burning building? The path of a speeding locomotive? Or indeed, having been so luckily preserved, what good had her pickling accomplished for either herself or the world?”

The use of rhetorical questions, hyperbole, and puns depict Gilly’s cynical view of religious salvation. Gilly uses hyperbolic imagery, such as a building on fire and speeding train, to express her skepticism about anyone being saved by religion. The author uses a pun on “preserved” and “pickling” to emphasize Gilly’s questioning of whether her Sunday school teacher has done anything helpful or important for anyone.

“‘Oh, my sweet baby, what have you done?’” Gilly’s blood went cold. How could Trotter know? ‘That tie. It’s the worst crime Melvin ever committed. Rest his precious soul.’”

Gilly’s anxiety increases when she must lie and steal from more people to buy the bus ticket to San Francisco. The author uses the metaphor “blood went cold” to express Gilly’s anxiety after she stole $100 from Maime Trotter’s purse. Gilly panics because she misunderstands the context of Maime Trotter’s statement and for a moment thinks that she somehow knows that she just stole from her. Gilly feels guilty about stealing from someone who cares for her.

“‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Rhine was asking. Want to go home? Don’t I want to go home? Where in the hell do you think I was headed?”

Through the author’s use of internal dialogue, the meaning of home for Gilly is explored. When he states home, Officer Rhine is referring to Gilly’s current residence, which is with Maime Trotter. However, Gilly thinks metaphorically of her home, as she still considers her home as being with her biological mother, Courtney. The true meaning of home is revisited many times in Gilly’s thoughts.

“‘Thank you,’ he said, for once not doubling the phrase […] Gilly hesitated for a moment, waiting for the sermon that was bound to pour forth, if not from him, surely from Trotter. But neither spoke, so she took Mr. Randolph’s hand, instead of his elbow as she usually did, as a kind of thank you.”

This moment symbolizes Gilly overcoming her racist attitudes. She grabs Mr. Randolph’s hand finally, rather than his elbow, when she walks him over to Maime Trotter’s home for dinner that evening. The author creates a mood of peace and acceptance using simple diction, choosing to leave the moment as understated as possible.

“Helplessly Gilly watched the little woman stumbling for words, trying to tell a painful story and not knowing how.”

When Gilly meets her grandmother for the first time, the mood is awkward and uncomfortable as neither of them know what to say to each other. The grandmother’s sense of uncertainty and sadness about her daughter Courtney’s not speaking to her or telling her about her granddaughter is described through the metaphor of “stumbling” for the correct words .

“Like Bluebeard’s wife, she’d opened the forbidden door and someday she would have to look inside.”

The allusion to the legend of Bluebeard compares Gilly finally getting in contact with Courtney to Bluebeard’s wife who has opened the forbidden door in his castle and revealed the skeletons of his dead wives. In the legend, Bluebeard forbids his new wife from opening one of the doors in his castle, but she opens the door when he is gone and is deeply disturbed when she finds the dead bodies of his past wives. Similarly, Gilly is afraid that she will discover bad or unsavory things about her biological mother now that she is going to live with her grandmother. The reference to a dark fairytale shows the shift in Gilly’s view of Courtney over time.

“She didn’t understand it any more than she had the first time. If birth was a sleep and a forgetting, what was death?[...] Was that God with the huge lap smelling of baby powder? Or was that home?”

Gilly contemplate the poem “Intimations of Immortality” as she falls asleep the night before she goes to Virginia to live with her grandmother. The spiritual themes of the novel are captures in the repetition of this poem and its strong impact on Gilly emotionally. Gilly’s sense of curiosity is expressed in the many questions that Gilly has about birth, death, God, and home that the poem inspires.

“Perhaps Gilly should have protested further, but instead she gave herself over to the rhythmic stroking under whose comfort she wished she could curl up her whole body like a tiny sightless kitten and forget about the rest of the whole stinking world.”

The simile reveals Gilly’s sense of safety in Maime Trotter’s care. The author compares Gilly being held by Maime Trotter to a baby kitten cuddling up into its mother’s body. This imagery shows the warmth and motherly love that Maime Trotter has for Gilly, and Gilly reciprocates this by allowing herself to be taken care of rather than resisting anyone’s help.

“She felt herself loosening. Had Chadwell been homesick for this sight as he dropped his bombs into the jungle? Why would anyone leave such peace for war? Maybe he had to go. Maybe they didn’t give him any choice. But Courtney had had a choice. Why had she left? You don’t just leave your mother because she talks too much.”

When Gilly arrives at her grandmother’s home, she begins to wonder about her biological mother’s decision to leave for San Francisco and stop speaking to her parents. The author uses imagery and repeating questions to express Gilly’s sense of curiosity about her blood relatives, including her uncle Chadwell who passed away in the Vietnam War. The references to the “bombs” and “jungle” capture the sense of violence and chaos of Vietnam War and implies that Courtney’s choice to leave home might have been connected to grief over her brother’s early death.

“She hadn’t come because she wanted to. She’d come because Nonnie had paid her to. And she wasn’t going to stay. And she wasn’t going to take Gilly back with her. ‘I will always love you.’ It was lie. Gilly had thrown away her whole life for a stinking lie.”

The author expresses Gilly’s sense of anger to Courtney with metaphor, clipped sentences, and repetition. Gilly compares the sweet words Courtney wrote on the photo, words that she cherished for so many years, to a “stinking lie,” expressing her sense of outrage when Courtney does not seem to want to take Gilly with her to California or stay with her for very long.

“‘...all that stuff about happy endings is a lie. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?’ ‘Trotter, I’m not talking about dying, I’m talking about coming home.’”

The dialogue between Gilly and Maime Trotter at the end of the novel emphasizes the meaning of the poem “Intimations of Immortality” in which death is compared to “coming home” to a creator. Gilly does not completely understand what Maime Trotter means when she brings up death because Gilly is still a child, but she understands that the fairy tale ending that she expected when she met Courtney did not happen. Maime Trotter shows Gilly how to learn from this painful disappointment rather than becoming emotionally paralyzed by offering her comfort during her moment of devastation.