The Orchard Symbol Analysis

“Recitatif” is filled with symbolic settings, including Twyla and Roberta’s bedroom, the chapel, Howard Johnson’s, the gourmet market, and the Newburgh diner. However, none is as important or meaningful as the orchard at St. Bonny’s. Twyla introduces the orchard when she explains that the gar girls used to hang out and dance there. She goes on to observe that she used to frequently dream about the orchard. She describes it as 2-4 acres large and filled with apple trees, which were “empty and crooked like beggar women when I first came to St. Bonny's but fat with flowers when I left.” Twyla’s description of the apple trees in winter makes a clear connection between the trees and Maggie, who is “crooked” because of her disability and whom Twyla describes as an empty shell with “nobody inside.”

Indeed, the orchard takes on further resonance as the site of Maggie’s assault by the gar girls. The orchard is thus an Edenic symbol (related to the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden)—a place where childhood innocence gives way to the “sins” of cruelty, vanity, and adolescent sexuality. Twyla is too young to fully comprehend the significance of the orchard while she lives at St. Bonny’s, and thus is confused as to why she dreams about it so often—“Nothing really happened there. Nothing all that important, I mean.” However, as Twyla grows older she is confronted with the sinister significance of the orchard and her own complicity in wanting to hurt Maggie there, and thus by the dark side of her own personality.