![]() ![]() Pearl’s true transgression might not be her hallucinatory drunken mothering but the recognition that the only way to endure the gap between what adults say and what they do is to swill gin. Does she drink to drown out a secret ambivalence for her child or to dull the company of the adults? Pearl navigates her ambivalence with a belief that her son was switched for a changeling in the aircraft wreckage. Pearl and her child miraculously survive, but her drinking continues on the island, where she is surrounded by her husband’s relatives and their children. ![]() Though her husband retrieves her, he dies soon after in a plane crash returning to his father’s remote island. ![]() Joy Williams’s novel The Changeling tells the story of Pearl, a gin-imbibing young mother who has taken her baby and fled from her husband. The secretive mothers in these six works resonate for me as nuanced characters who resist the bounds of traditional motherhood to lead unconventional lives. But Irina’s questionable behavior and quixotic career pursuit become more understandable as we learn of the terror of home and family instilled in her in Soviet Russia and consider her rigorous training at the prestigious Vaganova School of Ballet. In the novel’s most troubling secret, Irina withholds the identity of Olya’s father. Olya is forced to change schools constantly and sometimes go hungry. In my novel Away to Stay, Irina, the mother of the adolescent narrator, exemplifies the deeply flawed mother figure-in pursuit of her dream of becoming a ballerina, Irina leads an itinerant life which rarely includes a roof over her daughter Olya’s head. Examining the underlying forces compelling mothers to secrecy is essential to this process. Who can fault these mothers for keeping secret facts that might otherwise blot their reputations? Promisingly, we are beginning to reevaluate our expectations of mothers’ roles in their children’s lives. Many current tales of mothers in disrepute are portrayals of transgressions held in secret. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |