Jitterbug Perfume

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Beets

The beet crops up throughout the narrative as a vegetable of mystery, endowed with incredible powers while maintaining a humble exterior. The beet’s virtues are extolled by exactly three voices in the narrative: Alobar, Wiggs Dannyboy, and the narrator (whom we might assume to be Tom Robbins himself). To everyone else in the novel, the beet is misused or ignored, its mysteries locked away. For instance, Alobar ascribes a warrior aspect to the vegetable and is dismayed at seeing it used as a mere dye ingredient. Meanwhile, the narrator keys it to creative practice. Whatever its qualities, they are easily overlooked; most of the other characters, and especially the women, have beets delivered to them night and day and show barely any curiosity about them. They all have inchoate desires to temper the feminine and overpowering jasmine in their perfumes, desires that could be fulfilled if only they looked to the humble beets surrounding them. The unenlightened might take a beet for granted, or view it as too common to be special.

The Search for the Perfect Taco

In recalling Priscilla’s unaccountable father, Madame Devalier says, “That’s it, those were his last words. He sighed, ‘Ahhhh,’ and said ‘The Perfect taco’” (120). As a result, Priscilla often says she is searching for the same thing. In one interpretation, the taco represents a lost father figure, one with whom Priscilla longs to reunite. Yet Tom Robbins continually points out how ridiculous that notion sounds, as when he suggests that these may also have been Albert Einstein’s last words. In other words, the perfect taco, like happiness or God, is something one longs for in life but will never achieve. The taco in this instance is arbitrarily chosen, using no criteria and achieving no end; that is the point. Upon realizing this, the reader might very well be encouraged (like other characters in the novel) to “lighten up.”

Smell as Primary Sense

About fragrance, Marcel LeFever says, “It is our strongest link to the past, our closest traveler to the future […] Fragrance may well be the signature of eternity” (228). The production of perfume is a central plot mechanism, bringing all the characters together both in vocation as well as in longing. Perfume is also perennial, existing in the same form and for the same purposes throughout history, such that the incense of Medieval India plays a similar function in human affairs as the perfume created by the LeFever family a thousand years later. Fragrance evokes memory, which is quite important for a novel that so frequently resorts to flashbacks. As a functional plot element of the book, fragrance binds together disparate stories and eras that might otherwise be difficult to link.