Heartless

Hearts are both a symbol and a motif in the novel and recur throughout the narrative at key moments. They primarily serve the theme of Being True to Your Own Heart but also communicate aspects of the novel’s other core themes.

The hearts motif represents a convergence of the novel’s three major themes. They first symbolize Cath’s conflict over her figurative heart—her true feelings and passions—and then appear in a more literal sense when Jest confesses his mission to steal Cath’s heart, foreshadowing Cath’s giving it away herself. The narrative’s conclusion, in which Cath’s abandonment of her own heart signifies her transformation into the Queen of Hearts, indicates love’s potential as a Destructive Force. Hearts are also symbolic of the Escaping Fate theme because they are the most iconic motif associated with the Queen of Hearts; as such, their appearance unavoidably reminds the reader of Cath’s foregone destiny, encoding her inescapable fate. The fact that the loss of her heart seals Cath’s destiny further reinforces this.

This eponymous “heartlessness” figures prominently in the narrative. Jest’s mission is to literally take Cath’s heart; for much of the novel, Cath is conflicted between how much she honors her own heart and to whom she gives it, until she ultimately gives it up for revenge. This is foreshadowed by the riddle Hatta gives Cath about hearts in Chapter 18, when Cath corrects his riddle to say that “once given I can never be taken back” (159). Later, when Cath thinks she’s lost Jest forever, she dreams of a bush with bleeding hearts (Chapter 38), suggesting that without her love for Jest, Cath literally loses the wholeness of her heart. This rings true for Cath in Chapter 53, when she gives her heart to the Sisters; they pull it from her breast to reveal it is cracked in two and filled with dust and ash (442). Thus, the converse of the motific hearts—their absence—is a motif in and of itself.

Time is a motif that represents the theme of Escaping Fate. Time is first introduced as a motif in Chapter 31, when Hatta shares his history with Cath. Hatta tells Cath that the key to escaping mental illness is to stay ahead of Time. When he speaks of Time, it’s as a personified force; Hatta says of Time, “Sometimes he moves forward and sometimes he moves backward, sometimes he goes fast or slow and sometimes he pauses altogether” (272) and speaks of it as something that is trying to “find” him. This personification of Time as a living force links it with Fate, a similarly externally directive force.

As a motif, fate is introduced in conjunction with the time motif but is primarily developed through the Three Sisters of the treacle well. The Sisters are personifications of Fate, and they are the first to suggest the characters’ own power to avoid their fates. The Sisters are also heavily associated with Time: To communicate the characters’ fates, the Sisters must first steal their “time” in Chapter 43. This is also reinforced by the fact that when Cath prays to Time to reverse Jest’s death in Chapter 48, it is the Sisters who answer in Chapter 49. This signals the two as a cooperative dichotomy and a conjunctive motif.

Time questions the inevitability of avoiding fate. The Sisters also come to personify Time in a sense; after all, it is they who ultimately catch up to Cath and steal her heart at the agreed-upon moment of Peter’s delivery, an action that seals Cath’s fate just as Time’s catching up to Hatta seals his. Hatta’s pocket watch physically symbolizes Time: When the Sisters ask for five minutes of Hatta’s time in Chapter 42, he winds his pocket watch forward to account for it. Later, in Chapter 52, the pocket watch symbolizes Hatta’s final descent into “madness”: It “suddenly, inexplicably fell silent” just after Hatta accepts mental illness as the price for his actions (436). The pocket watch represents Hatta’s mental illness taking over and thus his time running out, reinforcing Time’s motific use to question the inevitability of fate.