Miriam's home

Miriam's home represents the pain of her past, and her inability to interact with the world. Miriam still lives in the house where her mother Frances raised her. This is the house where she caught her mother and the Headmaster together, as well as the house where she composed letters to her grandmother and then lost the right to do so at the hand of Frances. This is the house where Frances hit her with a book, and the house where Frances told her not to speak. The home represents such loss for Miriam, and yet she is stuck within it. She is stuck within it's actual walls, and also stuck within the barriers her mother forced upon her when she was a child.

Though Miriam desperately wants to break some of those barriers, and does so throughout the book, she remains in the house. At one...