When Women Were Dragons

“I was never allowed to be angry, was I? My ability to discover and understand the power of my own raging was a thing denied to me.”

The repression of feminine rage and desire can only be successful for so long. In this quote, the spiritual imprisonment of such raw emotional power causes Marya Tilman’s transformation into a dragon. Marya finally acknowledges the rage she stifled for so long as she suffered at the hands of an abusive husband and a willfully ignorant mother. This quote foreshadows the coming events in the novel, showing that women might transform out of rage in an attempt to reclaim their innate power of expression.

“I think, perhaps, none of us ever really know our mothers, not really.”

In a reflective comment on her own mother, Alex Green suggests that mothers possess some unknowable quality they keep from their children. In Alex’s case, this conviction arises because she never sees Bertha Green as being a true individual until much later in life. This quote represents the complex and fraught relationships that mothers sometimes have with their children: one of self-abandonment and self-sacrifice, both of which are key themes throughout the novel.

“And yet.”

Recurring at key moments throughout the novel, this innocuous phrase comes to represent the possibility that contradictory realities exist simultaneously—a theme that pervades the novel as dragons both do and “do not” exist, depending on how firmly one follows the societal compulsion for denial, or how deeply one believes that mothers could both love and leave their children.