The Girls in the Stilt House

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of racism, gender discrimination, pregnancy loss, illness and death, and emotional abuse.

“The swamp. It stretched before her as if she had arrived at the utter end of a dismal world.”

This simile compares Ada’s return to her home to someone arriving at the end of the world, emphasizing how sad, dreary, and even dreadful it feels to her. This helps to establish the somber and ominous mood by illustrating her feelings and what a defeat this feels like for her.

“Each morning, just before the sun broke the horizon, they woke with the same otherworldly racket, eventually lifting off in unison, a shivering black cloud against the pale light of the new day. Ada hated the starlings.”

The starlings, birds often associated with community and family due to their flight patterns, that nest in the canebreak near Ada’s house are symbolic of her feelings about family. The birds are noisy and dirty, just like her father, and their loud din makes her uneasy. In addition, she associates them with his torture of her as a child, how he’d shoot them and make her retrieve their little bodies, picking through the swamp and their feces.

“Everyone has their moral limits, Ada supposed, her father’s being not shitting on the spot where her mother had died.”

This description indirectly characterizes Virgil Morgan. It is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but this tone helps it to establish just how callous and unfeeling Virgil’s character is. He may be an abuser, but at the very least, he won’t defecate where his wife died. However, this presents a rather low bar for his character’s morality.