47 pages • 1 hour read
Hillary JordanMudbound
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A 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
Mud
Soil and land are necessary for farming. When he is a child, Henry’s father shows him a swath of earth and says: “This is land. Because it’s mine. One day this’ll be your land, your farm. But in the meantime, to you and every other person who don’t own it, it’s just dirt” (71). When Henry brings the family to the farm, it appears as if it will have what they need. But the frequent rain changes the earth to mud, which has no use to a farmer. Indeed, it is detriment to nearly everything a farmer needs from his land. Mud is created when something useful is corrupted, turning it into something that does not work. The children jokingly call their home “Mudbound,” but it soon stops feeling like a joke. Mud and storms isolate the family from the town, and they make it difficult for help to reach them when there are emergencies of any kind. Mud dictates much the reality of life on the farm.
Lavender
While remaining devoted to Henry—she stays with him in the end, despite her attraction to, and brief sexual affair with, Jamie—Laura never gets the kind of attention from him that she craves. Henry does not notice her, and he does not go out of his way to make her feel valued. Jamie, on the other hand, notices a great deal about what would make her feel special. After building her the outdoor shower, he also includes a soap dish with a piece of lavender soap in it. Laura remembers that they have only spoken of lavender once, and it has been years. Jamie remembered after all that time. It is a small gesture, but Laura’s life with her husband has no small gestures of affection in it. After Jamie leaves at the end of the novel, Laura eventually finds a gift that he says he had left for her. Near the edge of one of their gardens, she finds a copse of lavender plants. She is going to have Jamie’s baby, and she will also have a constant reminder in the garden of what Jamie had meant to her, and what she had learned about her own capacity for passion.
Resl’s Letter
Ronsel never felt more important than during his time in the war, and he describes himself as never feeling like more of a man when he was with Resl. She writes to him asking him to come back to unite their family, after revealing in the letter that they now share a son together. It is a plea for help, but it is also a love letter, reminding Ronsel of how it had felt to be with her. The letter contains a picture of Resl with their baby, and the picture is what enrages the Klan members to the point of abducting him.
In their hands—and in the eyes of any racist—the love letter is an abomination. To them, it is proof that, as they make Ronsel repeat: “I defiled a white woman” (271). Love could not exist between a black man and a white woman, and in their view, the letter justifies everything they could ever do to Ronsel.
The letter is also a symbol of the constant reminders that Ronsel was given by his father, and by Henry. He was told not to ride in the front seat of Jamie’s truck. If he had never done so, he never could have dropped the letter in the truck, which Pappy then finds. That it should have been his right to do so is irrelevant in the Mississippi of the story. The letter is a symbol of the horrors of the ideological system in which he found himself forced to work in after the war: Something as simple and precious as a love letter is damning evidence in hands of the people in power.
