The house (motif)
“The House” is more than a title, and more than a physical place. Shire creates an extended symbolic metaphor of a woman’s body as a house with many rooms. A woman will spend her entire life dealing with men who want to get into the rooms; sometimes using keys, sometimes using hammers. The house is a symbol of how a woman's body can often feel like an object in light of how men perceive it, how it can be a home and a place of love as well as a place of horror and trauma, how it always contains more than it appears to from the outside.
Since the house does not symbolize one thing only in the poem, but rather works as a complex running theme that recurs again and again in different lights throughout, it is more of a motif than a symbol, a continuously occurring and mutating idea used to express many different varieties of the female experience.
The keys and the hammer (symbol)
Both the key and the hammer symbolize different ways that the speaker's mother warns her that men might try to get into her body, her heart, or both. Keys are a gentler way of entering or perhaps a trickier one; perhaps those who enter with keys were given those keys by the woman herself, perhaps they stole the key somehow and tricked the woman into entering, like Johnny with the blue eyes from later in the poem, who uses tools and tricks to make his way in.
The hammer is the more violent of the two methods of entering, and the image of a man entering the house of a woman's body is almost certainly a symbol for the violence and chaos of sexual assault. Both methods have negative connotations, and both are to be feared, according to the speaker's mother.
The pig roast (symbol)
One of the most striking symbols in the poem is the image of the speaker’s father laid out on the dining table like a roast pig, complete with apple in its mouth. On the surface, this image might be a symbol of the way that both the speaker and her mother want to reclaim their power over their father, who presumably caused them great harm.
Apples are ancient mythological symbols, stretching back to the apple of knowledge in the garden of Eden; so perhaps the apple here is a reference to original sin, an acknowledgment of human evil.
Regardless, the symbol of the father trussed like a roasted pig on the kitchen table is—like the later image of the man castrated in the bathtub—a wish-fulfillment, an opportunity for women to take power over men who have wronged them, to reduce these men to their true, weak forms—if only in the dominion of imagination, or poetry.
This symbol also might not be entirely imaginary: perhaps it symbolizes the mother finally reporting the father to the police, and him finally being damned for his actions. This is likely because later on in the poem, a social worker comes to the speaker about the abuse she experienced, indicating that something changed and the abusive presence—most likely the father—has been removed.
Locked rooms (symbol)
The locked rooms in "The House"—kitchens of lust, bathrooms of apathy— are symbolic representations of secret spaces of private emotion that women hide. They are used to represent the ways that people sometimes compartmentalize emotions, locking them away secretly either to protect themselves from the advances of others or to protect others from these rooms.
