Chapter 1 - Genesis

Personal Reflections

To start off, we're thrown into the deep end a little bit. Technically the narration is starting at "the beginning" with her own childhood from when she was 7 years old (evoking the Biblical story of God's creation of the world in 7 days), but there are so many digressions and flashbacks where we cut from one scene to another that the narrator is reminded of that it can be hard to keep track of the current thread without re-reading the past few passages. We still do get a sense of forward progression, it just takes a while to complete some framing scenes (such as the narrator walking up the hill with her mother and then travelling through the valley of the Factory Bottoms to pick up some pest control items from Mrs. Arkwright). The overall result of this style is a very rich portrait of the narrator's life around this time, including the people and setting around her; it reminds me of Proust a lot. Even though going into this book with the knowledge that the author is a lesbian and that it is semi-autobiographical has me imagining that some queer content will be present, I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be a big feature of the text immediately. There are some glimmers of this theme (besides the clear religious motif and associated themes) already, though; in particular, the scene where the narrator is told by a fortune-teller that she will never be married seems like a clear case of foreshadowing. In the rest of the scene she thinks about some other women she knows who were never married and ran the paper/comic shop she used to frequent. However, when they offer to let her "go to the seaside with them," her mother says "firmly and forever, no" and they stop going to that shop anymore. When asked why, she refuses to explain to her daughter beyond saying to other adults that they "dealt in unnatural passions." The narrator (still a child at this point) doesn't know what this means, but as an adult reader, it's clear that we're meant to read this line as indication that her mother is concerned about the two women being gay because of their lack of husbands. This leads into my critical focus for today.

Critical Response

I would like to focus on the element of character, specifically that of the mother. We can see in the above passage that she is concerned about any threats to the godliness of herself and her family, particularly when it concerns her and her daughter's purity as good, heterosexual women. We also learn more about her backstory in this chapter in the scene where she adopts the narrator. This passage notes that on the night she was converted, she decided that she "would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord." Then, after making the child her own, the narrator states that her mother "had a way out now, for years and years." Related to an earlier passage where we learn that the mother is not a great cook (despite her desire to be undisputed champion of domestic tasks within their family), we can see in this scene that she sees bringing a "foundling" child into her home represents an opportunity to literalize her own spiritual rebirth, to perhaps atone for her own perceived failings by taking a child and vicariously living through her, on the assumption that if the narrator is able to be pure and holy from a young age in the way that her mother was not able to be (at least, from her own religious perspective) then maybe she can take credit for saving the girl's soul and so redeem her own in the eyes of the Lord. That's my interpretation of this passage, at least. In any case, it seems that the mother feels that raising her daughter in the "right" way may help her to compensate for any of her own perceived lack in terms of feminine and spiritual qualities. I'm curious to see how this theme develops through the rest of the novel, especially as the narrator starts to grow up and gains new awareness of herself, her mother, and the world.