Strange Sally Diamond

Toby the teddy bear is a symbol that gains increasing significance as the novel progresses. While it is in Denise’s possession, the bear symbolizes the only evidence of her life before her captivity: a life that was happy and safe. While she languishes under Conor’s control, Toby represents those memories and is the only piece of the outside world that Denise is allowed to pass on to her daughter, Sally. Decades later, Sally receives Toby through the mail, and seeing the toy unleashes a flood of repressed memories. Thus, in this moment, Toby becomes a symbol of the hidden horrors in the family’s past, as well as a source of foreboding and a potential threat, given Sally’s new fears that Conor may be trying to harm her once again. In the Epilogue, Toby again symbolizes a threat when Amanda receives the bear in the mail, for this detail implies that her biological father, Peter, is now stalking her from afar and may have darker designs upon her future. Thus, no matter which time frame the toy appears in, it always carries the weight of memory and trauma, and its reappearance down through the years emphasizes the nature of inherited trauma to continue in younger generations well after the events that first initiated it.