1) How does romanticization of both the past and the future influence Lucy's immigrant experience?
2) In what ways do Mariah and Lucy differ? How do these differences contribute to their seemingly opposite world views?
3) Lucy speaks of tongues with such detail and frequency in the third chapter. What do they represent to her?
I think when you look at all of the novels we've read thus far, there is a level of romanticization in all of them. With Bread Givers, Sara was romanticizing what freedom from her father would look like, (literally anything was better than living with Reb Smolinsky) In No No Boy, Ichiro was romanticizing his own depression, in that he had thought it so intractable as to be a sort of character martyrdom for his life, and in Brooklyn, Eilis romanticizes the hell of of Ireland when she's in America, and to a lesser extent, Ireland when she's in America.
ReplyDeleteThe romanticization of the unknown seems impossible to avoid, and I think all of us have a bit of rose coloring on our glasses for some aspects of our past. The fictionalization of that aspect of memory and insight is quite heightened, though. Especially in Lucy. She has such disdain for her mother, yet, still, she has this weird internal discourse about their similarities--which seems to be a cleavage for her. There is this "island" past for her, and these people live on that island, separate from Lucy, and compartmentalized in the same way an island is compartmentalized within itself apart from other bodies of land. As for her romanticizing the future, I feel as though she has to work through so much sepulchral mental events before she can even step back and say "maybe it won't be terrible." Look at the first few pages of the novel compared to the last twenty. In the beginning, even the sunlight is cold to her, but by the end, she can see the beauty in the sunny daffodil, but her own issues act as the cold in that instance.
I think when you look at all of the novels we've read thus far, there is a level of romanticization in all of them. With Bread Givers, Sara was romanticizing what freedom from her father would look like, (literally anything was better than living with Reb Smolinsky) In No No Boy, Ichiro was romanticizing his own depression, in that he had thought it so intractable as to be a sort of character martyrdom for his life, and in Brooklyn, Eilis romanticizes the hell of of Ireland when she's in America, and to a lesser extent, Ireland when she's in America.
ReplyDeleteThe romanticization of the unknown seems impossible to avoid, and I think all of us have a bit of rose coloring on our glasses for some aspects of our past. The fictionalization of that aspect of memory and insight is quite heightened, though. Especially in Lucy. She has such disdain for her mother, yet, still, she has this weird internal discourse about their similarities--which seems to be a cleavage for her. There is this "island" past for her, and these people live on that island, separate from Lucy, and compartmentalized in the same way an island is compartmentalized within itself apart from other bodies of land. As for her romanticizing the future, I feel as though she has to work through so much sepulchral mental events before she can even step back and say "maybe it won't be terrible." Look at the first few pages of the novel compared to the last twenty. In the beginning, even the sunlight is cold to her, but by the end, she can see the beauty in the sunny daffodil, but her own issues act as the cold in that instance.