“I didn’t feel awful; I realized I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head; since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn’t understand what was being said.” (Atwood, p 106)
“I watched my self grow larger... I was in most of the pictures, shut in behind the paper; or not me but the missing part of me...
I could find myself always, I was the one smudged with movement or turning the other way...
The last pages of the album were blank, with some loose prints stuck in between the black leaves as though my mother hadn’t wanted to finish. After the formal dresses I disappeared; no wedding pictures, but of course we hadn’t taken any. I closed the cover, straightening the edges.
No hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or, no something minor like a severed thumb, numb.” (Atwood, pp 108-109)
What strikes me immediately about these passages is that for the first time, the narrator speaks directly about her isolation and disconnection from reality, she has been “shut[...] into [her] head”. Her choice of wording is interesting, however, comparing herself as closed off inside of her head to a child without the senses of sight or hearing, both of which manifest entirely within the head. Also, these senses serve to transmit external stimuli to the brain, whereas the narrator has shut off communication signals within the brain. She is very much alert to the outside world, the people and places around her, but she has no clear idea of what goes on inside of her (“I didn’t feel much of anything”).
Upon realizing that something within her is not as it should be, the narrator peruses her mother’s photo album in search of evidence of the separation point. She is unable see herself clearly, she is “smudged with movement or turning the other way.” One has to wonder whether the photos actually fail to capture her as the subject, or if she is purposefully filtering out the images, obscuring her vision “like having vaseline on [her] eyes” (79). These blurred impressions of herself as child are not recognizable to the narrator as herself, they are “the missing part”, a person separate from her present self. Yet she seems to be ignoring the obvious point at which she ceased to be the stranger from her childhood: her marriage. There is a distinct absence of photos from her wedding, and she overlooks this poignant detail as a redundant fact. The photo album itself seems to illustrate this as the point at which she loses herself as its pages become blank. She mentions earlier that she “didn’t know what [she] had to let go of” when she got married (44), and that after she gave birth to their child, she felt as if “[a] section of my own life [had been] sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled” (45). Clearly the experiences of her married years had a profound and negative effect, but they have been so effectively and forcefully repressed that even in the face of the obvious, the narrator cannot recognize the truth.
Near the beginning of this passage, the narrator states that her “neck must have closed over”. Earlier references to her throat closing up pertain to the language barrier she experiences as a non-French speaker in Quebec. How has this physical reaction manifested metaphorically in the narrator’s inability to cope with her emotions? Could the feeling of cultural alienation have affected her later feelings of emotional isolation?
The narrator believes that because she “noticed the absence” of emotional reactions, she must have felt emotion at some point in her life. Is this necessarily true? Could she be measuring herself against others in noting her difference of reaction? How does her line of reasoning change throughout this paragraph?
How does this passage, in which the narrator seeks to trace her separation from herself, further illuminate this rift?
What does the woman in the bathing suit reveal about the narrator’s relationship to the narrative’s other characters?
The following is in response to your third question:
ReplyDeleteThis passage is one of many that highlights the fact that the narrator feels as if she's been separated from some ambiguous part of her original character. She mentions this idea many times throughout the novel, especially whenever she talks about her divorce (which she compares to amputation) or her child. This passage itself illuminates the prominent rift within her soul that she is separated from some sense of feeling. In the first passage mentioned she clearly discusses how her lack of feeling is comparable to a baby (provided was born deaf) feels sound. This is a very interesting comparison, because it implies that she's completely forgotten feeling in general. It isn't like she's just lost it, she's implying that as far as she can tell it was never there in the first place. In the second passage she is very clear about the absence of something. In her memory (according to the second passage), she feels she had an accident which left her split in half. However she later says that she is the "wrong half", the one that is just a head. This implies that her half is the one conscious, having to deal with the knowledge that something is missing in her character. By combining these two passage i think it is clear that she has lost feeling. She has become cold and not necessarily heartless, but detached from compassion, empathy, and other purely human emotions. Thus, both passages help illuminate that the narrator clearly isn't whole; that she is lacking feeling.
My response is to the final question of this post.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator describes herself as the woman in the bathing suit as described in the above passage and she includes that when she was "sawn apart" the half that she became was the wrong half. "The other half...was the only one that could live." In this passage she is admitting that she is not living. This shows that all of her relationships are meaningless. If she can't find meaning in herself than it is impossible to find it in her relationships with others. She mentions earlier on page 75, "I'm not sure when I began to suspect the truth, about myself and about them, what I was and what they are turning into." She is realizing that they are fake people and that her relationships with them are not real. They represent the American society that she is trying to be a part of. These are the people that she is supposed to be friends with and so she pretends to create these bonds when in reality she has no emotional attachment to any of them. I think that one of the reasons why she has returned home, apart from looking for her father, is to look for the other half of herself. The half that is capable of living but is locked away. It seems that even though she talks of her home in Quebec with a negative tone, she is beginning to understand that this was the only place where the other half of her was present. This was the only place where she ever truly lived. She wants to reconnect with herself so that she can live and create meaningful bonds and relationships with herself and the people around her.
While the narrator traces her self-separation she reveals many intriguing details about her psyche. The simple fact that she has observed that there is something fundamentally wrong with how she processes emotions is an improvement from her attitude at the start of the novel. Although she may not yet be consciously aware of where her separation originated, she does seem to connect the moment of her amnesia to the time when the pictures in the album disappeared, at her wedding. In addition, this passage shows that while the narrator has become disconnected from her emotions she still has the rational to realize her dilemma and investigate her past.
ReplyDelete