The missing mother
The natural course of life is typically that a child will grow up generally trusting their parents. This is helpful the child because that gives them a free-flowing income of new knowledge and information, but Beryl's parents are both untrustworthy and reserved. Beryl's natural desire to learn from her parents how to be is also stunted by her mother's abandonment of them in Beryl's early childhood. As a missing figure, the mother symbolizes the influence of maternal hatred in Beryl. We learn later that Beryl actually inherits this quality from her mother.
The patriarchal antagonism
The patriarch of Beryl's early life is a symbol for her mistreatment among the men. She is so chronically oppressed by her excuse of a father that she begins moving away from her own family, trying to escape through marriage to some other home where at least she might be able to live in some relative peace. As a symbol, the father represents a weak tyrant desperately clinging to what little power is available to them. The father enjoys his power over Beryl and afflicts her with it.
The abusive neighbor
As a response to the problem that Beryl faced back home, her first husband is a quite horrifying replacement. By this symbolic first marriage, the novel develops Beryl's character, opening her mind to the true nature of suffering, that it actually can get worse. So horrible is Beryl's experience of men that she basically gives up on romance and just uses men for sex. She only feels any emotional attachment to the man from her family's village who once drugged and violently raped her. These symbols show an extreme level of dissonance between male and female.
The damaged, abandoned child
Eventually, a man lures Markham out of her sexual escapades and into a family. She figures, perhaps it is worth a shot. Then, the scene unfolds and becomes a symbolic portrait of the generational aspect of human life. The symbol is a completed circle; as a child, Beryl was abandoned by a selfish and heinous mother. Now, she has become a selfish and heinous mother who does not flinch to abandon her child and husband. She does it callously, not realizing that she has become her absent mother.
Her love for Finch
This novel uses a kind of Stockholm Syndrome to demonstrate symbolically how Beryl's relationship to men was affected by her experience of childhood. Markham was once drugged and raped while unable to defend herself. The rapist's name is Finch Hatton. Ironically, she does not relate to Finch as a thief of innocence or as a violator of her human dignity. She views his behavior as essentially positive and helpful to her. In other words, she has a fantasy of sexual intimacy without respect or love. That symbolizes her psychological damage in a fairly straightforward manner.
