When the Moon Was Ours

In When the Moon was Ours, Anna-Marie McLemore uses the glass motif as a symbol of Transformation. Glass appears in two major ways within the novel: in the pumpkins turning to glass in the Bonners’ fields and in the decorative stained-glass coffin where the sisters imprison Miel. Both of these bring a wider cultural context to the story as classic fairy tale motifs. The glass pumpkin points to the story of Cinderella (referenced directly in the novel via the “Cinderella pumpkins,” one of the agricultural varieties grown on the Bonners’ farm), who transforms for a night, allowing others to see her true self rather than the version defined by her family’s perceptions and abuse. The glass coffin references the Snow White fairy tale, where Snow White, like Miel, is imprisoned in a glass coffin that serves as a kind of chrysalis from which she emerges transformed.

Initially, Miel sees the glass as a symbol of weakness and vulnerability—the power of the Bonner girls rendering her weak:

It had slid out here, creeping over their family’s fields, this land they would inherit. It was seeping into the pumpkins so that each one now held a little storm spinning it to glass.