The story’s title word is repeated throughout the story. The common understanding of sweat as a product of hard labor plays into the broader theme about work and the results of that effort. Delia earns her livelihood, and Sykes’s, by the proverbial sweat of her brow. Sweat also symbolizes Sykes’s neglect and Delia’s standing in, or sympathy from, the community. When Sykes flirtatiously offers another man’s wife some pecans from the yard, the woman turns them down and remarks that “Delia works so hard ovah that washtub she reckon everything on de place taste lak sweat an’ soapsuds” (Paragraph 36). Although the sweat of work is righteous and gives Delia ownership of her things, the story also makes clear that Delia’s is too much. She has to work much harder, and suffer much more, than any woman really should.

Some anthropologists speculate that a fear of snakes is instinctual in humans due to the threat they posed to our ancestors. In this story, however, the rattlesnake serves several other symbolic roles.

Snakes are symbols of death and danger in many cultures throughout the world. Particularly in Western culture, the snake is a longstanding symbol of evil, owing to its appearance in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.