Isobel’s Bones Symbol Analysis

Isobel’s bones (which Tom finds 200 years after her death, hidden in a box in the house in which she died) symbolize the interconnectedness of morality and scientific inquiry. Isobel’s bones are also significant in what they lack: they are missing her vertebrae. The play never explicitly reveals how this came to be, but the audience may surmise that Armstrong dug up Isobel’s corpse to dissect and removed her vertebrae, either for scientific reasons or for his own pleasure. Body snatching (stealing buried bodies) for anatomical research was common in England until the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832, which banned the practice. Isobel’s bones thus become a symbol for the moral concerns that scientific inquiry poses.

Isobel’s bones also represent the interconnectedness of passion and rationality. In 1999, Tom, the former English lecturer whom Kate accuses of being a “romantic,” consistently refers to the bones as a body. This demonstrates his emotional, subjective view of the world. In calling the bones a “body,” Tom projects meaning onto them and suggests that Isobel’s life and story matter in a deeper, humanistic way—even after her physical body/soul ceases to exist. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife, Ellen, a veteran genetic researcher, initially can’t understand why Tom chooses to refer to the bones as a body when that’s no longer what they are. They are only a girl in a metaphorical sense—physically, they are a box of bones. Ellen’s literal treatment of the bones demonstrates her rationality: she’s a scientist and considers emotion an impediment to scientific progress (though she, unlike other scientists like Kate or Armstrong, nurses doubts about the moral implications of her research). In time, Ellen and Tom understand that their different fields have more in common than they first thought—Ellen realizes that she pursues science because she’s passionate about it, for instance, which is exactly the reason that Tom pursues literature. She also learns to recognize the value in Tom’s reverence for the past, a development that comes through in the way that Ellen eventually stops scoffing at her husband when he calls the bones a body. Finally, Isobel’s bones are important because they link the play’s 1799 and 1999 timelines. Other than the house, they are the one physical item that links the two timelines together, and they play a critical role in inspiring debates about morality and science that, too, link the separate timelines.