Belladonna

Throughout the novel, Signa carries an etiquette handbook called A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette, one of the few possessions she has from her late mother. Though A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette is fictional, etiquette guidebooks were popular for women in the Victorian era and often had similar names. These books taught young women—often those of the upper classes—how to behave in society. These books instructed women to be as demure and self-sacrificing as possible, mostly for the purpose of finding a husband rather than teaching more tangible skills.

In Belladonna, A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette symbolizes Signa’s limited knowledge of society and her obsession with becoming a proper lady. Without many helpful guardians or social exposure, Signa has to rely upon A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette to know what to do. When she has tea at Thorn Grove, the narrator notes that Signa “was contemplating every which way she might possibly sneak A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette into tea with her” (120), showing how Signa believes this to be the definitive guide to how she should live her life. However, the more experience Signa gains, the more she becomes suspicious of the book and the guidelines young women are expected to follow.

By Chapter 30, the narrator says “A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette was starting to feel less like her saving grace and more like a nuisance. A grim reminder that because she couldn’t master the rules—because they exhausted her so—she would never be good enough, or perfect enough, or deserving enough” (229). While Signa treats A Lady’s Guide to Beauty and Etiquette like a definitive answer to her problems at the beginning of the novel, by the end of Belladonna she sees the book for the piece of propaganda it is.