50 pages • 1 hour read
The Huntress
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Symbols & Motifs
McBride’s Antiques
McBride’s Antiques, the business that has been in the McBride family for three generations, is a sustained motif in the novel. Despite its New World, American location, it functions as a window and even a passageway into Old World Europe.
The antiques store is the place where Daniel trades his all-American Red Sox cap and sportive talk for a three-piece suit and expert knowledge on what are likely European antiques. In the early postwar years, the shop becomes a place where Daniel meets “refugees […] selling their last antique brooch or bit of silver - men with names they’ve obviously changed, women holding children who don’t look anything like them, people making excuses for their scars or accents” (186). Daniel’s acceptance that such refugees are necessarily secretive means that he does not find anything especially suspicious about the Huntress, who comes to him with a false name, a child that does not resemble her, and her jewelry to sell.
Given that the Huntress is beautiful and refined, Daniel admires her “as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase” (356) and agrees to bring her into his family. He only becomes suspicious when Jordan reveals the Huntress’s links to the Nazis and when she installs dubious Mr. Kolb in the store under the guise of a rare book dealer. The antiques store, with its exchange of goods and valuing of Old World, European assets, thus becomes a place where refugees, war criminals and people like Tony, who are trying to track them down, can hide and simultaneously make a home for themselves.
Within the McBride family, the antique shop mixes the idea of the American dream with a timeless sense of familial obligation. Daniel states that the shop was “only a curio junk-room” (187) and of relatively low value when he inherited it from his father and that he expanded it and made it “special” enough to pass onto Jordan (187). Given that the McBride family is likely of Irish descent, the antiques store’s rising value is symmetrical with the rising fortunes of Irish Americans as the 20th century wore on. Although Jordan has dreams of her own, she feels that she has to take over the store out of duty to the father she loves. She thus also accepts her father’s idea that she will marry Garrett and create a nuclear family with him.
The Rusalka
The rusalka is a “lethal, malevolent water spirit” (3) from Slavic folklore and a dominant symbol in Quinn’s novel. Although the novel’s action takes place in the real world rather than a fantastical one, the rusalka accompanies descriptions of both the Huntress and Nina. Both from non-Anglo-American civilizations—the Huntress hailing from Nazi Austria, and Nina from the wildest part of the vast Soviet Empire—the rusalka-like women have diminutive physiques, small noiseless feet, and a capacity to seduce. Unlike the men of the industrial war-machine, the personal-scale of the women’s violence—Nina with her razor and the Huntress with her shotgun—makes them akin to fairytale witches who handpick their victims. The rusalka is thus symbolic of a particularly female danger.
After her father’s attempt to drown her while he murmurs “you’re a rusalka […] the lake won’t hurt you” Nina fears water and takes to the air. Yet she cannot help naming her U2 plane the Rusalka (39). Despite her fears, both in the air and later when she faces the Huntress, Nina knows that her resemblance to the rusalka is what enables her to thrive as a hunter of hunters. For her part, the Huntress initially finds refuge in a home beside Lake Rusalka, the tranquil manmade lake created by Polish slave-labor. Before the war’s end, she is like the rusalka, going on individual hunts for Jews and escaped prisoners of war, according to the Nazi directive. However, following the Huntress’s confrontation with Nina the night that she murders Sebastian, she begins to see Nina as the rusalka, “the night witch” (275) who wants to cut her throat. The vision of Nina as the rusalka penetrates her nightmares when she is in her apparently secure Boston home. The knowledge that she is not the most fearsome huntress around makes her feel unsafe.
Violin Music
Violin music functions as a symbol of essential truth in Quinn’s novel. Although the Huntress forces Ruth to pretend that she is Ruth’s biological mother, Ruth cannot help insisting to Jordan that her mother played the violin. Jordan, who as yet does not know the truth about the Huntress’s relationship to Ruth, recalls that the Huntress not play an instrument. Moreover, she is so unmusical that “she never asked to turn on the radio to listen to music either” (97). Indeed, the Huntress is so wary of Ruth’s instinctive passion for violins that she refuses to allow her to take a small silver violin brooch from the store or to have violin lessons, because she does not “want her remembering more” (306) about either her mother, or what the Huntress considers to be her shameful Jewish heritage. Jordan, who sees that Ruth has a magnetic draw to violins and stares at Ian’s “as though she thought it was home” (346), knows that Ruth’s violin lessons will help her grow in strength and confidence.
Through her lessons with Ian, Ruth grows to love and trust him. She recognizes that when he whistles the Siberian lullaby they played together, she knows to run for her life, away from the lying Huntress and toward the adults who will save her. Ruth’s instinctive trust of music and the people who play it indicates an intrinsic knowledge of goodness that is linked to the benevolence of the Jewish mother who played for her. Ian even goes as far to say that Ruth’s love of music renders her “at least one thing that’s right, going forward” (412), as she is part of a more peaceful generation than their own (412). While the hunters in Ian’s team are motivated by chasing and capturing criminals, Ruth’s love of music indicates that she will devote her life to a pursuit that actively brings harmony.
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By Kate Quinn
