Red at the Bone

One of the most important themes within the text is societal lines drawn by class and education. This is most plainly represented by Aubrey and Iris’s relationship, but it appears consistently throughout the narrative.

As the novel opens, the importance of class to the central characters is marked by Melody’s ceremony. In hosting it, her family reasserts her class status, further marked by the abundance of luxurious food and the hired orchestra. The affair screams elegance and wealth, but it also highlights how out of place Aubrey feels in this world. When Iris asks him to dance, he joke about how she is following a rulebook, and her subsequent annoyed reaction communicates years of microaggressions about their class difference being shared between them.

This difference is also highlighted by their relationship to food. Iris’s propensity for judgmental elitism appears when she can’t believe Aubrey, as a teen, only ever had margarine, and how she “couldn’t see a future with someone who only knew margarine” (41). This is not about Iris’s dislike of margarine itself, but an admission that the food people have access to conveys their economic status. Ultimately, Iris’s vision of her life involves higher education and an impressive career—a vision of affluence—and she leaves Aubrey out of that vision simply because they come from different backgrounds.