59 pages • 1 hour read
Gild
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Symbols & Motifs
Gold
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, emotional abuse, animal cruelty and death, and death.
Gold appears as a motif and symbol throughout the novel, connecting the series to the Greek myth of King Midas and his gold touch. Although gold is the prevailing aesthetic in Sixth Kingdom, the gold touch itself kills any living thing it touches, including the plants and a pet bird that Auren named Coin. The only exception is Auren herself, as she is the only living being who has survived Midas’s gold touch.
Gold also symbolizes Midas’s greed and obsession with power. The novel implies that Midas compulsively turns everything he owns to gold because nothing he has is ever enough to satisfy him, and Auren herself comments on the gaudy and excessive décor of the gold castle. Moreover, everyone’s gold attire—from Auren’s fur coat to the guards’ armor—makes them all the more conspicuous outside the castle and places them in enormous danger from poverty-stricken mobs and violent raiders. Yet this excessive show of wealth and power is the entire point for Midas. The gold is an outer representation of his inner greed and his lust for power, both of which fuel his control of Auren and his scheme to murder Fulke and take over Fifth Kingdom. However, while Midas’s gold touch illustrates The Damaging Effects of Patriarchy, Auren’s use of this same power at the novel’s end reflects The Importance of Self-Discovery and Empowerment, as she uses her gold touch not to subjugate others but to release Rissa from the depredations of the violent Fane. Thus, depending on the context, the motif of gold can be linked to corruptive abuses of power or to an oppressed woman’s determination to rise above her circumstances and reshape the world around her.
Auren’s Ribbons
Auren’s ribbons symbolize her innate power, even though she has long denied this inner truth, and throughout the course of the novel, the ribbons’ slowly intensifying appearances reflect Auren’s gradual reassertion of her agency and empowerment. Throughout the novel, Auren keeps the nature of her ribbons secret from all but Midas. Though the ribbons are an intrinsic part of her body, she hides them and denies their existence and their power, succumbing to her fear of judgment and to her misguided belief that she is Midas’s possession. Because Midas has convinced her that he owns her, he also owns the secret knowledge of her ribbons.
However, as her faith and loyalty to Midas begin to crack, she begins using the power of her ribbons in more overt ways, as when she wraps them around herself like a corset to alter the appearance of the dress that Midas ordered her to wear. This moment is the first time that Auren directly defies Midas’s wishes and expresses her growing need to reassert control over her own body. The scene therefore connects the ribbons to The Importance of Self-Discovery and Empowerment. The narrative solidifies this connection in the second half of the novel when Auren explores the world beyond her cage. The farther away she travels from the castle and her imprisonment, the more she uses her ribbons.
Finally, the ribbons reflect Auren’s full potential after she and the saddles are captured by Captain Fane and the Red Raids. At this point, Auren reveals the ribbons’ capabilities to outsiders for the first time, thereby taking a major step toward regaining full agency and empowerment. She initially acts to stop the pirates from defiling Sail’s body, and she later protects Rissa and herself from Fane’s violence. After the first incident, Fane ties Auren’s ribbons into knots, inhibiting her ability to fight back; this act is designed to represent The Damaging Effects of Patriarchy and violence against women, as Fane literally uses Auren’s own physical attributes as chains, seizing control of her body. When Auren eventually works the knots loose, this moment indicates her determination to regain her physical and spiritual power. The climax of the novel comes when Auren kills Fane with her own gold touch and uses her ribbons to throw his body overboard; she uses her ribbons as the ultimate symbol of defiance and power.
Birds
Birds reappear often in the novel to highlight the finer nuances of Auren’s captivity. The first example occurs with Coin, the gold-touched bird in Highbell Castle. Auren recalls that Coin was alive and well before Midas gold-touched it and killed it, and the bird’s plight becomes an implicit metaphor for Auren’s own predicament under Midas’s control. In the early chapters, Auren speaks to the bird like a friend, confiding her feelings of isolation and her unhappiness at being similarly trapped in a cage. Auren even explicitly ties her own identity to the image of the bird when she wonders whether her organs will eventually freeze into solid gold like Coin’s, either killing her or leaving her conscious mind trapped in an unmoving statue. Auren also describes her own imprisonment as a giant gilded bird cage, further connecting the bird to Auren’s captivity.
Birds appear again near the end of the novel when Auren recalls the story of the fae. In this tale, a girl from Orea named Saira crosses the bridge of Lemuria and finds the realm of the fae, who call Saira the “broken-winged bird” because she fell into their world and could not find her way home again. Thus, the imagery of birds is once again symbolic of being trapped. However, with her fae husband’s help, Saira eventually finds a way to return home, becoming a freed bird.
In another section of the novel, Auren watches the hawks that Fane uses to send and receive messages, and she marvels at their beauty and strength. Commander Rip’s men then catch and kill these same hawks to stop Fane from auctioning off Midas’s captured saddles. Thus, the once free and powerful birds suffer an ugly demise, and this cruel imagery parallels Auren’s attempts to escape from Fane only to fall under the control of Rip and Fourth Kingdom’s army. However, because birds are meant to fly free in the open air, the narrative as a whole implies that Auren will eventually escape her constant imprisonment, and this idea is further supported by Auren’s name, which can arguably be derived from the Greek root word for wind, air, or breeze. The prolonged use of this motif throughout the series is also indicated by the title of the series’ sixth and final book, Goldfinch. This title is a direct reference to Auren, once again connecting her character development to the symbolism of birds.
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