Red Skirt Symbol Analysis

In The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Jenna Fox’s red skirt represents her friendships’ influence on her growing and changing identity. As Jenna slowly begins to recover her memories following a near-fatal car accident, she recalls that her favorite color is blue—but that her friend Kara once persuaded her to buy a red skirt to break up to the monotony of her all-blue wardrobe. At this point, all Jenna’s clothes are blue again because her mother Claire purchased a new wardrobe for her after her accident (which altered her height) and assumed that Jenna would want clothes in her favorite color. Claire’s failure to recognize the significance of the red skirt shows how Jenna’s parents don’t realize the importance of Jenna’s friendships to her developing identity as she grows up. After remembering the skirt, Jenna tears through the boxes in her garage trying to find it but can’t, a scene indicating that her connection to her friends has been damaged by her spotty memory after the accident. Yet when Jenna tries to demand what she really needs from her mother, one of the first things she asks for is a new red skirt, showing that despite her spotty memory—and Kara’s death in the car accident that maimed Jenna, which Jenna eventually remembers—Jenna’s friends’ influence on her isn’t fleeting. Rather, Kara and Jenna’s other friends fundamentally affect who she is.