51 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen King, Richard ChizmarGwendy's Button Box
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Mr. Farris’s Hat
Mr. Farris’s hat is a recurring motif that represents the theme of The Weight and Isolation of Secrets. Gwendy describes the hat as “a small black neat hat” (2). The appearance of Mr. Farris’s hat serves as a repeated reminder to Gwendy of the power of the button box. Following the beginning of her relationship with Harry, she begins to rely on the button box less and less, distancing herself from it. At the height of her happiness with Harry, Mr. Farris’s hat appears, reminding her of the weight of the button box’s secret. The fact that Gwendy sees Mr. Farris’s hat and Harry doesn’t underscores the isolation Gwendy feels as the keeper of the secret:
[Harry] doesn’t notice the black hat coming in their direction, not moving with the wind but against it. He doesn’t notice the hat slow down as it approaches, then suddenly change direction and swoop a complete circle around his horrorstruck girlfriend—almost as if kissing her hello, so nice to see you again—before it skitters off and disappears behind the bleachers that run alongside the third base line (133).
This appearance of the hat also foreshadows Harry’s upcoming death at the hands of Frankie Stone and the button box.
Mr. Farris’s hat also appears at times when Gwendy reaps the benefits of the button box, leaving her constantly aware of the presumed source of her good fortune. When she attempts to sell one of her Morgan silver dollars for the first time, she thinks she sees Mr. Farris in the crowd:
Leaving, she saw a man looking at her from across the street, a man wearing a neat little black hat. Farris—if it was Farris—gave her a fleeting smile, and disappeared around the corner. Watching her? Keeping track? Is it possible? She thinks it is (61).
In this case, the hat’s appearance momentarily lessens her isolation, reminding her that someone else knows about the button box, and simultaneously deepens it by appearing disembodied, always just out of sight.
Gwendy’s Button Box
The button box is a recurring motif, embodying the novella’s thematic interest in Fate Versus Free Will. When Mr. Farris first gives Gwendy the box, she feels immediately infatuated with it:
He pulls it open and removes a beautiful mahogany box, the wood glowing a brown so rich that she can glimpse tiny red glints deep in its finish. It’s about fifteen inches long, maybe a foot wide, and half that deep. She wants it at once, and not just because it’s a beautiful thing. She wants it because it’s hers. Like something really valuable, really loved, that was lost so long ago it was almost forgotten but is now found again. Like she owned it in another life where she was a princess, or something (8).
The button box dispenses animal-shaped chocolates and valuable Morgan silver dollars that provide Gwendy with social benefits and financial security.
Gwendy grows to resent the button box because she’s never sure if her talents and popularity are the result of her hard work or the button box: “Buttons aside, coins aside, little chocolate treats aside, the box has given her…well…powers” (100). Additionally, Gwendy constantly wrestles with worries that the button box—and her use of it—causes the deaths, both of people in her life and people she’s never met (for example, the residents of Jonestown, Olive, and Harry). Gwendy’s arc sees her moving through this tension, learning to distinguish between personal responsibility and misplaced guilt for the actions of others.
The Suicide Steps
The Suicide Steps are a recurring motif representing the painful struggle to fit into prescribed social standards of beauty and popularity, especially during adolescence. King and Chizmar first introduce Gwendy as she runs up the Suicide Steps in an attempt to lose weight before starting middle school, establishing her personal stakes. The button box ultimately helps her achieve her goals of weight loss and increased popularity, and she believes her life drastically improved. Simultaneously, her best friend Olive’s life grows increasingly fraught as she is bullied at school and abused at home. After Gwendy’s friendship with Olive crumbles, Olive takes her own life at the Suicide Steps, reinforcing its symbolic connection to the pain (and, in Olive’s case, trauma) of adolescence. To avenge Olive’s death, Gwendy uses the button box to destroy the Suicide Steps, ensuring no one ever dies at the site again.
Although Gwendy believes the button box to have saved her from a similar fate, Gwendy remains haunted by Olive’s death by suicide:
[Gwendy’s] halfway across the park before she realizes she doesn’t want to go to the Suicide Stairs at all. In fact, she never wants to see them again. Because—this is crazy, but in the dark it has the force of truth—what if she met Olive halfway up? Olive with her head half bashed in and one eye dangling on her cheek? What if Olive pushed her? Or talked her into jumping (110).
Gwendy’s fear highlights the internal conflict she feels about her own good fortune in contrast to Olive’s hopelessness and despair. The stark differences in their social trajectories when they were once so similar—and the dissolution of their friendship as a result—produce deep guilt in Gwendy that forces her to reckon with The Murky Line Between Selfishness and Selflessness.
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