73 pages • 2 hours read
A Court of Thorns and Roses
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Flowers
Maas mentions flowers in connection to several characters in the novel to reveal their essential natures and to highlight the natural beauty of the Spring Court. Feyre’s sister Elain tends to a small flower garden at their cottage, even though the seeds are expensive and the garden produces nothing to eat. Feyre sees this as frivolity and irresponsibility at first, but she later recognizes that Elain was truly tending to her own hope by maintaining a sense of beauty to their home. In the Spring Court, the flowers are eternally in bloom, signifying the supernatural beauty and abundance of the faerie world.
The titular roses play a symbolic role in Feyre’s and Tamlin’s relationship. Tamlin’s rose garden is a testament to the true love between his parents, and he gives roses to Feyre in apology after his aggressive sexual advances after Calanmai. Feyre compares herself to a rose with too many thorns, implying that her insecurities and perceived deficiencies make her undesirable. Tamlin sheds a kinder light on this metaphor when he declares to love Feyre, “Thorns and all” (248), accepting her unconditionally as his mother accepted his father. Through her symbolic use of roses, Maas also references certain versions of Beauty and the Beast that feature a rose enchanted to wilt when the Beast runs out of time to break his curse.
Painting
Throughout the novel, Feyre’s mentions of and relationship to painting indicate her emotional state. Admiring the beauty of the snowy woods in Chapter 1, Feyre notes how “Once I’d dreamed and breathed and thought in color and light and shape […] I couldn’t remember the last time I’d […] bothered to notice anything lovely” (3). Desperation forced Feyre to numb herself to emotion, cutting off her artistic sensibilities in the process. When Feyre arrives at the Spring Court, she frequently describes the beauty of Prythian in terms of the difficulty she would have capturing the landscape on canvas, again attaching her emotional state to her artistic practice. Feyre regains emotional fluency through painting, and she shares her artwork with Tamlin to show him that she trusts him with her whole self. Feyre’s fears or worries, by contrast, are expressed as an inability to paint, such as after she discovers the decapitated head in the garden: “I couldn’t bring myself to paint that day” (219). Amarantha’s incomprehensible cruelty is expressed similarly, as Feyre thinks, “To paint her would have driven me to madness” (296). As Feyre soon discovers, any engagement with Amarantha is likely to result in tragedy. Maas uses Feyre’s relationship to painting not only to track her emotional recovery but to create tragic overtones at the conclusion of the novel. “If I could ever bring myself to paint again,” Feyre considers after her resurrection, “I would never be able to stop seeing those faces instead of the colors and light” (410). Murdering the two innocent faeries has so traumatized Feyre that she is once again separated from her primary form of expression. Maas uses Feyre’s emotional turbulence, expressed through the motif of painting, to situate Feyre’s internal conflict in the next novel in the series.
Faerie Lore
As part of her world-building strategy, Maas has both human and faerie characters profess many items of faerie lore. Feyre and Nesta discuss the merits of iron and ash in repelling faeries, and Feyre is nearly derailed by her belief that faeries are unable to lie. In Prythian, she encounters infinite kinds of faeries, both the High Fae and “lesser faeries” who are typically defined by specific characteristics, such as how the puca imitates desires or how the Suriel tells the truth if caught.
Maas uses truth and misconceptions about faeries to establish and subvert expectations while portraying a world rich in magic and sophisticated supernatural hierarchies. While some faerie types, like the puca, are directly borrowed from Celtic traditions, Maas combines mythological creatures with faeries of her own invention, like the naga. This narrative strategy both entices the reader, who may have an external reference point for magical creatures, by lending the novel a sense of authenticity, and it offers exciting new creatures for readers of all familiarity with Celtic myth.
Maas is careful to incorporate faerie lore into the plot mechanics as well, as both the story’s internal history and the legends about High Fae inform Feyre’s understanding of Prythian’s political struggles. As Feyre learns which of the legends are true (ash wood is lethal) and which are false (iron is not), she becomes better able to navigate her challenges. Maas portrays legends and stories as crucial to human development, as Tamlin asks Feyre, “didn’t your mother tell you anything about us?” when confronted by Feyre’s ignorance of faerie life (79). In this moment, Maas uses faerie lore both to nod to the tradition of fairy tales as nursery stories and to signal the importance of storytelling to understanding one’s world.
Unlock all 73 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Sarah J. Maas
