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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Love
Storytelling, Censorship, and Control
Memory, Forgetting, and the Future
Sorrow vs. Hope
Summary
Analysis
The parent gruffly agrees to tell their child a story that they insist will make the child cry. It’s about a castle in the woods where good witches and wizards live. The woods at this point aren’t dangerous—the Witch cursed the wood some time after this. One day, the Witch rides in on a dragon, wearing big black boots. As she does, the rivers boil and the Bog becomes toxic. People die as ash and smoke cover the sky. One wizard stands up to the Witch. He runs at her, throws her off the dragon, and tosses the dragon into the volcano, stopping it up. The Witch kills him, and this is why it’s no use being brave or standing up to the Witch. The parent insists that the story is true and threatens to send their child to the Witch if they don’t behave.
The castle is, presumably, the same one that Xan remembered flashes of in the previous chapter. This makes it clear that like the parent’s other stories, this one is likely true in some ways, but seriously altered in others. By blaming the horrific events on the Witch, whoever is promoting this story is able to remain in the population’s good graces, and instead channel their fear and fury at the Witch. Finally, note the moral of this story: that being brave is useless. This means that the population is being conditioned from an early age to believe that they can’t free themselves from the Elders.
Themes
