Duma Key

During Edgar’s art show, Elizabeth tells him that human sorrow is “all a game” (449) to Perse. Elizabeth’s observation is linked with the motif of games, game-playing, and luck in the text. After Elizabeth’s statement, Edgar’s paintings of tennis balls and tic-tac-toe dresses reveal their full meaning: Perse has been playing a game with Edgar all along. The stakes of this game are extremely high, in the form of Ilse, Edgar’s beloved younger daughter, who in the paintings wears the tic-tac-toe dress and is surrounded by green tennis balls. Right before he learns of Ilse’s death, Edgar sees tennis balls swimming on the tide.

The motif of games builds the text’s atmosphere of horror, since it suggests that malevolent forces see humans as pawns and delight in the fear evoked by the senseless bad fortune, both natural and supernatural. Edgar and Wireman frequently refer to existence as luck-based, such as when Wireman tells Edgar that his life story is “just another version of the Powerball” (255), a reference to a national lottery. The odds of his wife and child dying on the same day were as remote and random as winning the lottery, but one day it happened. The Powerball metaphor evokes a sense of helplessness, since humans cannot control happenstance. The game imagery is bleak, but it also suggests that the human opponent could win, parrying the green tennis ball or successfully completing tic-tac-toe. Edgar can defeat Perse by beating her at her own game, though his victory is destined to be bittersweet.

Duma Key makes use of the aesthetic of surrealism, an art genre that uses the techniques of representational painting to depict dreamlike or nightmarish imagery that could not exist in the real world. Peaking in the 20th century, surrealism presents objects and their relationships in unexpected ways, treating reality as a construct of the rational and socially conditioned mind and forcing the viewer to reconsider such a mind’s limits.

Surreal images are a key motif in the novel, which even alludes to the work of famous surrealists such as Salvador Dali—whose paintings, it implies, have been influenced by Duma Key magic. The motif highlights the important themes of The Power and Perils of Art and The Link Between Real Horror and Supernatural Terror. Surrealism allows Elizabeth and Edgar to reconstruct and reinvent reality. Edgar adds a floating flower to his sunset, while Elizabeth paints upside-down birds and smiling rocking horses. The vivid descriptions of Edgar and Elizabeth’s artworks convey the paradoxical wonder and terror of their art. It is delightful, but also sinister. The sinister aspect becomes greater when their surrealist art starts channeling the supernatural. At this point, the boundaries between real and surreal, life and art collapse. Images start coming alive, such as when Edgar sees the uncanny real-life visual of bright green tennis balls floating in on the tide, when Tessie and Laura are chased into the water by a monstrous, surrealistic frog with teeth, and when Elizabeth’s inverted heron is revealed to be Perse’s spy.

Nan Melda’s red picnic basket, references to which abound, functions as a key symbol in the novel in several ways. Like other mysterious containers in literature, such as Pandora’s Box in Greek mythology, the basket holds both discovery and danger.

Its color links it with the red motif running through the novel. Red signifies both passion and danger, giving the basket a dual meaning. It is the site of love and lifeblood, since it contains the necessary clues for defeating Perse and putting the malevolent force back to sleep before she kills more people. However, the basket’s red color is also a warning that it holds violence—in this case, the harpoon projectiles that killed Nan Melda.

The basket’s vessel aspect also symbolizes hidden knowledge, both because it contains the Eastlake family’s history and because it itself has been hidden somewhere on the island. Elizabeth asks Edgar to find the basket relatively early in the narrative, but Edgar avoids it, reluctant to learn the complete story of little Elizabeth, Perse, and Nan Melda. Perse does not want Edgar to open the hamper, because it will alert him to her true menace. When Edgar opens the basket, he finds Elizabeth’s drawings and silver-tipped harpoons. The silver tips off Edgar, Wireman, and Jack to the fact that Perse and her zombies are affected by this metal, knowledge that allows Wireman to effectively use a silver candlestick to drive away zombie Emery.

The three-masted ship in the paintings of Edgar and Elizabeth is the Persephone, the ship of the dead commanded by Perse, the chief antagonist of the novel. It symbolizes terror, menace, and pure evil. The Perse is the embodiment of Perse herself, and the line between the two is blurred. Perse drowns people and lures them to her ship, forcing them into her army of the undead.

The compulsion to produce images of the ship links Elizabeth and Edgar. From the paintings in the red basket, Edgar notes that Elizabeth drew the ship just as he does, seeing through its disguise: “the boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes […] and standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing […] wearing a decayed […] red robe” (491). In the waters around the Perse, rise hundreds of skeleton arms in salute. Thus, the Perse symbolizes death, destruction, and the end of hope.

Referents for the ship are ambiguous. Possibly, the image of the ship of the dead is taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834), a long poem featuring the supernatural. In the poem, the mariner sees a ship approach which is manned by a horrifying female figure called Life-in-Death. At the same time, a ship crewed by unwilling bodies approaching the Florida Keys echoes the experiences of enslaved people during the Middle Passage. Several large vessels carrying enslaved people were shipwrecked in the ocean near the Keys in the 19th century, history that permeates the novel’s treatment of race.