56 pages • 1 hour read
The Heiress
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Symbols & Motifs
Ashby House
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to physical abuse, domestic violence, psychological manipulation, death by suicide, alcohol use disorder, and substance misuse.
Ashby House is a symbolic presence throughout the novel, a physical representation of the McTavish family. Its imposing façade and isolated location highlight the family’s insulated entitlement bought by their wealth and influence. Jules is impressed with the house, first describing it as “eternal, immovable. A fortress” (75). She initially sees the house as protection, but Cam experiences it as imprisonment; when he first returns, Cam comments that he “let Ashby House pull [him] back in” (73).
While Cam sees Ashby House as restrictive, a place he escaped from and is reluctant to return to, the other members of the family enjoy it as a retreat from accountability. As Cam notes, “Stay there long enough, and you forget there’s a world outside its tall doors, its oversize windows, and shadowed lawns” (24). Ashby House is where the McTavishes retreat, most notably Ruby, who returns to Ashby House to avoid rumors and investigation; as she notes, “I’d gotten so used to life there at Ashby […] Out in the rest of the world, my money still opened doors and smoothed paths, but it wasn’t the same” (201). While she and the other family members see Ashby House as protective, Cam has a different view, stating, “It swallows everyone eventually” (24). Cam’s continuing personification of Ashby House emphasizes his perception of it as representative of the McTavish family as a whole—the risk of being “swallowed” by the house is a metaphor for his fear of being swallowed up and entangled in his family.
The house is also a central element in other works of Gothic fiction, where it often functions similarly as a representation of the family, its culture, and its current state. As in many Gothic novels, in The Heiress, Ashby House seems almost supernatural as the characters attribute intention and even action to it, as with Cam’s feelings when he enters the gates. Rachel Hawkins hews closely to this convention even when Ashby House burns down, evoking the burning of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre.
Ruby’s Portrait
In itself, Ruby’s portrait is significant because Ruby is wearing the emerald-green Dior gown she had made on her honeymoon in Paris. As the reader knows, Ruby’s honeymoon was less than ideal, with Duke’s unrelenting physical abuse only ending with his murder. This history layers the dress with meaning that only a few people know. The portrait is also significant because her third husband, Andrew, painted it while they were falling in love, and he was the only one of Ruby’s husbands that she truly loved.
In the narrative, however, Ruby’s portrait acts as a symbol of her power, both in the past and the present. Her continued outsized presence in Ashby House is manifested by the portrait, which “hangs at the top of the stairs, massive in its gilt frame” (84). This prominent location, confronting anyone who walks through the front door, is a physical representation of the way that Ruby dominates the McTavish family, even after her death.
The portrait survives the fire, underscoring the way that Ruby’s power continues after death. Although Jules finds out that the explanation is mundane—as a firefighter tells her, “the heat tended to snap (paintings’) hanging wires early on, so that they fall face down, protecting them” (284)—the painting’s survival is narratively significant: Even though everything else about the McTavish family has been incinerated, Ruby’s influence remains. Jules and Cam take nothing but the portrait into their new life, showing their recognition of Ruby’s continued influence in their lives. After all, regardless of how and why, she brought them together, and they fell in love. As Jules put it, “[S]he’d manipulated [Cam]—manipulated me—in ways I might never fully understand. And yet. I couldn’t make myself get rid of that fucking portrait” (284). Regardless of how Jules and Cam feel about Ruby’s actions, neither can deny her influence on their lives—she is given a place of prominence in their home, even as they start anew.
Ruby’s Philanthropy
Each time one of Ruby’s four husbands dies, Ruby donates money to a worthy cause. These charitable contributions befit the circumstances of their deaths or their characters and serve as motifs that reveal both her true feelings about the men and her reliance on money to escape guilt or blame.
When Ruby kills her first husband, Duke Callahan, she donates money to his school, where she suspects he may have been subjected to trauma that created the abusive man he grew up to be. Her second husband, Hugh, is abusive in his own way: controlling, manipulative, and needy. When he dies by electrocution while hanging lights for their anniversary party, Ruby donates the money for a gazebo in Tavistock’s park, decorated, in an example of Ruby’s dark humor, with electric fairy lights. Likewise, the plaque on the gazebo reads differently for those who, like Ruby and the reader, know the truth about Hugh’s death: “In Loving Memory of Hugh Woodward, Devoted Husband to the End of His Days” (145). Ruby is referencing Hugh’s “devotion,” which manifested as controlling and manipulative. Andrew, Ruby’s third husband, was the only man she loved. She killed him slowly by poisoning his tea, unable to face his disapproval of her murder of Hugh. His death is the only one that is celebrated with a true, unironic gift of a new arts center to Tavistock.
Ruby’s fourth husband, Roddy Kenmore, is the only one who didn’t merit philanthropy after his death. In this case, the lack of a gift signifies Ruby’s lack of interest in Roddy or his death. The other gifts, as a result, take on additional significance. Ruby was motivated by some combination of guilt and dark humor to donate the first two gifts. With Andrew, her gift is sincere, and her lack of a gift for Roddy’s death is sincere as well—a sincere indication of her lack of guilt or attachment.
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