The tyrant father
Marie Rogers is in a difficult situation from the first moments of her life to the end of this novel. Her relationship to men is painful and as the plot shows, she is liable to be taken advantage of. This is the case because of a tyrannical patriarchy that devalues the humanity of women, symbolized most importantly in Marie's own father. As her personal patriarch, he dominates the women in the home with terroristic threats and abuse. The mother can barely survive in that environment and often becomes violent with her children, Marie included. The imbalance causes both parents to become harmful.
The unacceptable aunt
When Marie's father kicks out her Aunt Helen for prostitution, that is a symbol for his lack of empathy. He assumes the worst of her character and never entertains for a moment that she might be on hard times in an economy where she is literally forbidden employment because of her gender. Instead of realizing Aunt Helen as a victim and martyr of a broken system, the tyrant father excommunicates her, throwing her out and making her homeless and desperate. What is shown through the aunt's story is judgment without empathy or mercy.
The declined marriages
Marie fell in love once, but the family is so poor she literally could not afford to marry. This is symbolic. It shows that their home is so broken and dysfunctional that Marie cannot afford to exit the family. She feels a kind of horror or doom in her familial identity. By the end of the book, she has turned down three marriages and when she accepts marriages, it is often a nightmare. She is left by two men for licentious reasons, making a total of five ex-boyfriends—not unlike the Woman at the Well. The symbolism points to systemic disenfranchisement.
The abortions
The abortions that Marie gets are proof of continued dysfunction in her home life even after leaving her father's tyrannical dominion. The abortions are symbols of family that did not survive, so they are also a commentary on the marriage, which makes Marie crazy with anger and injustice, but her husband is so busy with keeping up appearances that she ends up just leaving him, because he would not treat her as family. This failed marriage is a symbol for the continued damage caused by Marie's imbalanced culture.
The rapes
The motif that best symbolizes the absolutely unacceptable cultural assumptions in Marie's world would be the rape. Marie is raped several times in the course of this novel. In one case, she is accepted by a new man who cares for her, but she cannot bring herself to marry him (his name is Big Buck). The last time she is raped, she is raped by a man named Diaz who is simply a terroristic man with ulterior motives. When Diaz brags to Anand Menvekar that Diaz raped his new bride, Anand leaves her, symbolizing his compliance with the hideous and broken misogyny of their culture.
