Heart-Shaped Box

Heart-Shaped Box’s four parts are music references, with the titular phrase “Heart-Shaped Box” referencing the 1993 Nirvana song. These references fit Jude’s character as a retired rock star and offer a lens through which to understand his perspective. The narrator of the Nirvana song describes being trapped in his love interest’s “heart-shaped box.” Thus, Joe Hill’s allusion associates heart-shaped boxes with entrapment and embodiment. The first heart-shaped box in the novel is Jessica Price’s black box that encases her stepfather Craddock McDermott’s suit. When Marybeth tries to open the box, Jude reflects on what she imagines might be inside: “Candies sometimes came in boxes like that, although this was much too big for candies, and candy boxes were pink or sometimes yellow. A lingerie box, then—except he hadn’t ordered anything of the kind for her” (11-12). The box’s design creates expectations only to subvert them: The intimate symbolism of a heart is made sinister by Craddock’s presence, further exacerbated when Jude finds a second heart-shaped box in his closet. This is a box from his past, with bullets collected during childhood. Overall, the two heart-shaped boxes signal movement away from intimacy and toward violence.

Heart-shaped boxes resurface at the end of the novel when Jude sees them by his father Martin’s bed. Furthermore, “Craddock pull[s] himself up from inside [one such] box, as if it were a heart-shaped hole set in the floor” (313). This emergence is yet another intrusion of the past, but this time, the box in question shifts from being a receptacle to a door. The introduction of door imagery is significant, as the boundary between life and death threatens Jude and Marybeth, but their embrace of death is what allows them to defeat Craddock. In this way, heart-shaped boxes continue to symbolize a threatening past but also signify the possibility of finding ways to accept and move on from this past.