They didn't have our affliction so they could not learn what it aught us, did not posses what it gave us.
-- Narrator (Part I)

Importance: The author utilizes this quotation, in Part I, to illuminate the fear of strangers that propagates the isolated town’s insular culture. Vera mistrusts Ruth, and all women from elsewhere, because she believes that the affliction is a unique and vital experience. She does not consider that her own identity and life will one day be at risk of erasure if she stays in her hometown. By lauding their affliction, she is able to dispel her doubts and fears.

But after she went, we saw clearly the inimitable narrate of her mothering, how her love had curdled into obsession.
-- Narrator (Part I)

Importance: Throughout the novel, the women in the town judge one another and critique the mothers’ maternal decisions. The author enacts their dissection of the other women’s lives in order...