Stardust

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1999

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9-10 and Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Love, Infatuation, and Desire

Several romantic relationships take place within the novel. Its original subtitle was Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie, which suggests that the love between the two protagonists takes central attention. Tristran and Yvaine’s love grows organically throughout the story, beginning with a disastrous first meeting and evolving to one born of shared experiences and mutual respect. Initially, however, the story is set up to be one about Tristran winning the heart of Victoria Forester. As he’s only a teenager at this point, his infatuation for her is all he understands of a much broader concept. What he believes to be love incites his journey to retrieve the fallen star, which in turn leads him to discover love of a different scope.

However, Tristran’s fate is put into motion much sooner when Dunstan Thorn is promised his “Heart’s Desire” in exchange for a good turn. This leads him to spend an evening with Una. There are a few different ways to view this transaction of desire, since Dunstan gets several things out of the bargain. It may be argued that his “Heart’s Desire” was to meet his true love or to become a father to a strong and honorable son who goes on to achieve great things (since no sons were born to Dunstan and Daisy, it’s implied this would not have happened any other way).

It is perhaps most likely that his Heart’s Desire was not all that different from Tristran’s: the chance to have an intense lived experience beyond the limitations of his small village home. The novel juxtaposes the vivid descriptions of Dunstan’s romantic experience with Una against his chaste and subdued kiss on Daisy’s cheek (which is met with uproarious outrage); this suggests it might have been Dunstan’s one sole experience with true unrestrained passion and sensuality. Even as he remains in Wall living a small and predictable life, he’s able to carry this memory with him always and know that in that moment he was completely alive.

Conversely, there is no mention of any physicality in this way between Tristran and Yvaine. The only allusion is when Yvaine confesses that she doesn’t believe they’ll be able to have children together. Their love is something beyond what Dunstan shared with either Una or Daisy, or what Tristran felt for Victoria. Notably, none of these relationships were built on any kind of friendship. Yvaine and Tristran fall in love because they face danger and travel throughout Faerie building up a cache of shared memories. When they finally recognize it for what it is, Tristran understands that the emotion transcends what he had previously believed love to be: “Tristran’s heart pounded in his chest as if it were not big enough to contain all the joy that it held” (254).

When they return to the market at Wall, they cross paths with the man who initially promised Dunstan and his descendants their Heart’s Desire, who says, “Which is all the thanks I shall ever get from them, I’ll wager” (252). The true nature of Tristran’s Heart’s Desire is left to interpretation, though it may parallel Dunstan’s simple need to feel alive.

Freedom and Restriction

Much of the novel deals with freedom, restriction, boundaries, and what those mean to different people. The clearest and earliest example of this is the wall that lines Tristran’s home village; the wall is always rigorously guarded by two men who prevent anyone from crossing it. This serves as a type of political control; the villagers are not trusted to make their own choices about their place within the two worlds, so they are restricted to one side for their own safety.

The women central to the novel all suffer from restriction in different ways. Una is bound to the witch Madame Semele by an enchanted chain “fashioned of cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight mixed in with the silver” (29). After her betrayal with Dunstan, she is forced to live most of her years inside a cage, lacking the freedom of both the outside world and the ability to embrace her true form. Ironically, her son uses the same type of enchanted chain to entrap Yvaine in a similar way: “The usual. Cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight on a millpond, melted and smithies and forged by the dwarves” (108-109).

In this way, Tristran may be responding to his cultural understanding of gender dynamics as well as his limited understanding of the faerie world. When Tristran and Yvaine first meet, the first thing he does is capture her and bind the two of them together. This dynamic is echoed again later when Tristran saves her life, and she becomes bound to him in a new way: “[N]ow that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go” (185).

Victoria also experiences the juxtaposition of freedom and restriction in her own life, much of which stems from being a woman in a small village in the late 19th century. Like other women her age, she is beholden to both her parents and to the idea of marriage. She makes a promise to Tristran for her hand and then is forced, by her own personal morality, to remain true to that promise. Even though she loves Mr. Monday, her self-imposed restriction prevents her from beginning a life with him for several years—until Tristran returns and, through his personal growth and evolution, is able to free them both. This shows that constraint can come in many forms, from an enchanted chain to a blood debt to a promise.

Physical and Spiritual Transformation

As a classic adventure story, Stardust features numerous physical transformations—whether this is an enchantment or from one state of being to another—as well as the dynamic, internal growth of the protagonist. Within the context of the novel’s magical world, transformation is a reality of life. In addition to the central characters, references are made to other stories outside the scope of this one. For example:

A fieldmouse found a fallen hazelnut and began to bite into the hard shell of the nut with its sharp, ever-growing front teeth, not because it was hungry, but because it was a prince under an enchantment who could not regain his outer form until he chewed the Nut of Wisdom. But its excitement made it careless and only the shadow that blotted out the moonlight warned it of the descent of a huge grey owl […] (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom). (74-75)

These story threads illustrate the way transformation is constant, woven into the landscape all the time.

On his journey, Tristran also meets a wood nymph who was transformed into a beech tree, and Brevis, a boy who was turned into a goat and a young woman to serve the witch. The witch herself undergoes a circular transformation along her own journey. She begins as an old crone who uses the last of her magic to make herself young again; as she extends herself past her capabilities, she slowly loses her stolen youth and becomes the old woman once again.

Una spends much of her own life’s story transformed into a vibrant bird, “as large as a pheasant, but with feathers of all colors, garish reds and yellows and vivid blues. It looked like a refugee from the tropics, utterly out of place in this green and ferny wood” (203). Una later observes that Madame Semele brings out the animal within a person. Una’s magical shape, then, is indicative of her bold and ostentatious personality. This is demonstrated when she initiates her romance with Dunstan, as well as when she stubbornly returns to her home of Stormhold on an elephant-drawn palanquin.

While Tristran spends time under an animal enchantment also, his most dynamic change comes when he grows from an awkward, uncertain teenager into a brave adventurer. This is illustrated in the evolution of his clothing: “Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before” (106). Later, “the sun burnt Tristran’s face to a nut-brown and faded his clothes to the hues of rust and dust” (201). Although his clothing does not affect his change—in other words, the spiritual transformation is not directly born of the physical—it does create a parallel with the arc his characterization has taken.