44 pages • 1 hour read
Tea ObrehtThe Tiger's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Tiger
In this novel, the tiger is presented as both a mythical and real figure: Shere Khan from The Jungle Book and a real tiger who escaped from a zoo. The tiger symbol contains many layers of meaning in this novel.
The tiger symbolizes wildness and fear; he is the extreme manifestation of the villager’s fear of others’ differences. That which is different is feared, demonized, and ultimately, must be destroyed. However, Dariša the Bear is unable to kill the tiger; even his skill, talent, and hunting prowess cannot overcome the tiger’s power and the tiger’s wife’s magic.
In modern Galina, the villagers still fear the tiger of their imaginations, though they realize that the real tiger must be long dead. The fact that the villagers teach their children to avoid going out at night speaks to the power of their generational fear.
While a feared predator both in legend and reality, the modern-day zoo tiger expresses another symbolic identity, as a war victim. He must be euthanized because he chews off his own legs in a traumatized response to the bombing. The natural world is terribly damaged by man’s horrifying actions. His cubs survive, however, living in the homes of their keepers.
The tiger is also a personal talisman for the grandfather, a representative of all that is wild and dangerous, unpredictable, beautiful, and transcendent in the world. The grandfather’s tiger is never found and never killed, but lives on. For the grandfather, the tiger represents the magical appearing in everyday life. He keeps the tiger close to him his whole life, in the form of his personal copy of The Jungle Book.
The tiger also ties the grandfather to the tiger’s wife, the woman who tamed and loved a tiger. The relationship between the tiger and his wife is perhaps the biggest mystery of all, and the most powerful testament to the magical elements of this story. The tiger and his wife triumph over the powerful hunter and the will of the village. Though she pays the ultimate price, the tiger’s wife unknowingly defeats the entire village and saves the tiger.
Secrets and Lies
Secrets and lies form a significant motif throughout the novel. Some secrets are poisonous and morally wrong. Some secrets are powerful, containing life-changing insights. Other secrets are ambiguous, expressing truths that are uncomfortable or painful. The difference between the types of secrets revolves around the reason a person keeps the secret. Secrets kept out of love or to protect others are most often “good” secrets. Secrets kept out of hate or to hurt others are clearly wrong, as when Amana’s father tricks Luka into marrying her deaf-mute sister.
Several characters keep poisonous secrets. For example, the apothecary keeps his birth name and his Muslim status a secret, revealing it only to the tiger’s wife. He ends up murdering her, ostensibly to protect her from the angry and frightened villagers, but in doing so, ends up protecting his secret as well. She sees right through the Apothecary; she sees his craven heart and his choice to put the approval of the villagers over his self-respect and honor. Similarly, Luka’s secrets, his desire for men, and his desperation to leave Galina forever poison his relationship with his wife.
The Stefanović family regularly keeps secrets from each other. Many of these lies arise out of concern for another’s feelings. For example, they do not tell each other the truth about serious health issues. Natalia helps her grandfather keep his terminal illness and cancer treatments secret from her grandmother. Still, even though they have good intentions, they regularly lie to the people they love the most. Barba Ivan’s secret—that he is the Brejevina village mora—is also a lie of this type.
The grandfather keeps the biggest secrets of any in the novel: his role in the accidental killings of Gaiša the Bear and the tiger’s wife when he was nine years old. Consequently, the grandfather sees secrets as a protection. People should not reveal to just anyone their innermost thoughts or share private events. He impresses upon Natalia the need to be judicious when sharing her stories with others. She finds out that he has led her by example. Though he provides hints about a tiger and a girl, he never reveals the story of the tiger’s wife during his lifetime. However, he leaves her clues that allow her to find the truth about his life, after his death. As Natalia says of the tiger’s wife and the deathless man, “These stories run like secret rivers through all the stories of his life” (32). In saving his most precious stories for Natalia, he affirms her importance to him.
The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling comprises several symbols in this novel. Firstly, for the grandfather as a child, it is a book from the outside world, a symbol of learning and connection to people and places outside of Galina. The book also clearly symbolizes the tiger, through the form of Shere Khan, a character from the book. Furthermore, the book acts a constant reminder to the grandfather of the apothecary, the tiger, and the tiger’s wife. Containing the memory of his lost friends, the book comes to symbolize the grandfather’s pledge to live a loving, fulfilled life, and to heal others in remembrance and redemption of his early life.
Ultimately, the book represents the ways in which magical elements pervade everyday life. The book transforms into a magical element itself when it disappears from the grandfather’s possession. Natalia refers to The Jungle Book as “gone,” in keeping with her stated belief that the book was given to the deathless man in payment of the grandfather’s debt.
Additionally, the disappearance of the grandfather’s copy of The Jungle Book exemplifies an underlying motif of unexplained mysteries that abound in this novel, such as who fathered the tiger’s wife’s baby or what happened to Luka. Not all mysteries can be explained, either in life or in a folktale.
