“Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward (post 3): Split-Personality Metaphors, Cross-Gender Name, Plural Self-Reference, Subjective Sense of Multiplicity

This novel has three major metaphors of females with loving/savage, Jekyll/Hyde, split personalities: the female pit bull dog, the weather (benign becomes Hurricane Katrina), and Medea (of Greek mythology). The author had no choice regarding the female name given to the major hurricane she lived through, but she chose to make the bit bull female and to have her female protagonist, Esch, identify with Medea.

Incidentally, googling the name “Esch” suggests that it is rarely used as a first name, but that when it is, it is usually a boy’s name: http://www.gpeters.com/names/baby-names.php?name=Esch. So the protagonist’s name may be another split personality metaphor.

Esch identifies with Medea:

“I…imagine myself tall as Medea, wearing purple and green robes, bones and gold for jewelry” (1, p. 170). Is this her subjective image of one of her Medea-identified alternate personalities?

“ ‘I loved you!’ This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood” (1, p. 204). Is this a switch to a Medea alternate personality?

Esch recalls the story of Medea in Greek mythology: “When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons” (1, p. 205).

Plural Self-reference?

“After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying, Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying, We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked from my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run” (1, p. 206).

Comment: I can’t be absolutely certain that her plural self-reference here is not meant to include her siblings, but it is so intertwined with her singular self-reference that Esch seems to be making intermittent reference to her plurality, her multiple personalities.

Subjective Sense of Multiplicity

“My voice is so high it sounds like someone else is talking, like I could turn my face and see another girl there, lying on the floor between her brothers…” (1, p. 247).

Comment

This post should be read in the context of my previous two posts, one on this novel and the other on the author’s memoir.

Soon, I hope to read Ward’s second National Book Award-winning novel.

1. Jesmyn Ward. Salvage the Bones [2011]. New York, Bloomsbury, 2012.