How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"And if Mr. Hook should ask me [to marry him], I'd say no. A person from as poor as we are has no right to marry a wealthy man like him." (41.49)
There's that class card again. While Polly Ann's experience with poverty has given her good qualities like independence and a strong work ethic, she also defines herself by it and lets her poverty determine what is or isn't possible for her. It takes Tom reaching for his dreams for her to realize poverty doesn't have to limit everything.
Quote #8
As near as he could make out, the houses were mere shanties, all of them one-story with one or two rooms, built close to the road. Even though there were quite a lot of them, it seemed a lonely place. On the damp, still night air, he could smell poorly tended privies. It wasn't the kind of place he would ever want to live in. (49.13)
Here, Tom and Polly Ann are driving down the Irish Settlement road, and Polly Ann explains that Irish immigrants came to the area to help build the Black River Canal (a true fact), and after the construction work, couldn't afford decent farmland and fell into poverty. A worse state than Tom's, too—these people don't even have the resources to meet basic hygienic needs (vocab alert: privies were outhouses). Tom never has to experience this dehumanizing level of poverty, but Polly Ann suggests that she did when she says, "I guess they are as poor as us Hannaberrys used to be" (49.14).
Quote #9
Knowing you have money in the bank makes all the difference in how a man feels and thinks, but only somebody like Tom, who had never had anything like that in his life, would know how much the difference amounted to. It wasn't that the work of building the barn up again had changed. He and Birdy worked just as hard. It was the fact that now he could see that certain definite things were going to be in reach in the time ahead. When they were poor, time had to go from one day to the next; the future was a cold gray curtain just ahead and frightening—not because of what might be going to happen beyond, but for what you knew could not happen. (55.1)
With the Breen money in his savings account, Tom no longer has to live his life from one paycheck to the next; he can blow it all at once on a trip to Cancun. He doesn't though—not because Cancun wasn't the tourist destination then that it is now, but because he has longer-term plans for the future in mind. The lesson here: Tom wouldn't appreciate the money and the liberty it brings if he didn't have the perspective he gains from his humble beginnings.