57 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyThe Quarry Girls: A Thriller
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Smiles
Content Warning: This novel and guide discuss rape, child abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional), domestic violence, murder, kidnapping, torture, and death by suicide.
Throughout the narrative, women and girls in the novel flash their smiles. Smiles represent the docile nature expected of women and a way to get attention from men, something that signifies their value and worthiness. Heather narrates that “I figured if I practiced, I could make it prettier so that when guys ask me to smile, I had something to offer” (17). Practicing smiles also becomes a way to condition Junie since she begs Brenda and Heather to teach her. Heather realizes this when she sees Junie smile through her fear at the cabin after she’s been abducted by Ed. In this moment, her smile is a symbol of oppression and sorrow to Heather.
By the end of the narrative, though, the smile comes to symbolize resilience and liberation for the novel’s female characters. When the girls go to Valleyfair, men tell them to smile and Junie replies: “My sister‘s friends are dead, and the people I thought I could trust I can’t … So I’ll damn well decide for myself when I’m ready to smile” (304). Instead of submitting to their request, Junie expresses her own feelings and subverts their expectations, shedding the cultural conditioning she originally sought from her sister and her friends.
The Tunnels
The tunnels are a symbol of the hidden world “underneath” Pantown, the many secrets its citizens hold that are hidden just below the surface. When Heather introduces the tunnels, she says that “We had our regular smiling life aboveground, but below, we became something different, rodents, scurrying creatures in the dark, whiskers twitching” (21). The tunnels represent the seedy underworld that writhes underneath Pantown, embodied in this metaphor that compares Pantown’s citizens to rats. When Heather enters the tunnel to play with her friends, she remembers the phrase “You can’t live in the dark and feel good about yourself” (101), something she later realizes that her mother said to Gloria after she was caught sleeping with Gary. The tunnels symbolize the secrecy and the sickness of Pantown, darkness that keeps the town and its inhabitants trapped in the shadows while pretending everything is alright.
The Prologue, which figures America as Superman in a cape, suggests that the United States does the same while misogynistic violence remains a problem and the justice system does little to protect women. The tunnels are also where Heather begins her journey to the truth, revealing that only by looking such ugliness in the face can justice truly be served.
The Quarries
The quarries are a motif throughout The Quarry Girls, representing the emptiness, danger, and despair that the girls in Pantown can fall into as they grow up. Heather describes the quarries as “A hole that probably hid prehistoric water monsters, slithering, sharp-toothed creatures that needed immense depths to survive but that sometimes, only every few years or so, would unfurl a tentacle and wrap it around your ankle and suck you down down down” (68). The quarries, therefore, mirror the inescapable weight of Pantown’s secrets, its fabric a trap that is impossible to escape. Likewise, it characterizes Pantown as full of monsters. When Heather and Brenda ride out to the quarries and see Maureen’s body, Heather describes them as “[s]till being actively mined, fences protecting the snarling machinery, hiding their violence” (165). Like Pantown, hidden behind its people and their families, the “snarling machinery” of misogyny continues to turn, allowed to persist behind denial, omission, and deception.
Gold Earrings
Jewelry, like earrings or rings, can symbolize possession, such as how women traditionally wear engagement rings while the men who propose do not. The bauble earrings symbolize Ed’s next victim, marking his impending kill, which Heather recognizes and uses to prevent Junie’s murder. However, the gold earrings symbolize more than just Ed’s next kill. Brenda notes that Ed gave her the earrings and then quit paying attention to her, yet she still feels compelled to spend time with him. With this, the earrings are a tool of emotional manipulation, a way to win loyalty from girls who might otherwise avoid him. Heather describes them as something too expensive for a girl to buy herself, suggesting that the earrings are a way to claim territory—a way of forcing his recipients to owe him their attention, company, and eventually their lives. As such, the earrings symbolize the social norms that keep women and girls in subordinate positions to men.
