Lanterns & The Missing Mother

Girl with Lantern
Otto Toaspern, 1863-1940

Combining a few things I've read this month:

Tom Lake
by Ann Patchett

which opens with a dedication:

"For Kate DiCamillo
who held the lantern high"

&

You Could Make This Place Beautiful
by Maggie Smith

which opens with the epigraph:

"I am out with lanterns, looking for myself."

~ Emily Dickinson ~
[from an 1855 letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland]

&

Good Bones
by Maggie Smith

which contains the following thematically related lines

from the poem "Where Honey Comes From":

" . . . Honey
is in the hive, forbidden lantern

lit on the inside, where it must be dark,
where it must always be. Honey

is sweetness and fear. . . . " (p 44)

&

from the poem "Splinter":

" . . . Now she comes in alone from the pasture

at night, raised lantern swaying. She lies
a long time with the child, whisper-singing

some lullaby he's never heard into her hair. . . ." (p 66)

&

from the poem "Transparent"

"The girl wonders: If she held a lantern
before the woman until she went

transparent enough to read through,
would she see the child inside

like a letter full of secrets? . . ." (p 76)

[emphasis added]

**********************

Additional Connection:
The Missing Mother Figure

Smith, in the following poem, and Patchett, in her novel, have each captured the disservice to women that is inherent in this annoying theme, so prevalent in popular culture. How many movies have we seen where the mom is conveniently dead or missing from the family? How gratifying to read these well-respected writers calling out this nonsense:


Poem found in the collection
Good Bones by Maggie Smith

If Anyone Can Survive

it's the motherless children in my daughter's books,
orphaned or abandoned or garden - variety alone
with their chipped cups mied from the dump,
their day-old bread squirreled from the bakery,
their milk chilling in glass bottles behind
the waterfall so it doesn't sour. They've learned
to sew their own clothes from rags. They can tie
their own shoes, a sailor's knot, a tourniquet.
They can snare and skin a rabbit, strike rocks
into fire. Speaking of fire, where are their fathers?
At war, in jail, or fly-by-night -- what matters
is the mothers, who must be dead for any rising
action to happen. Nothing is as freeing as grief.
Motherless children -- what do they have to lose?
They're camped in the glacier-hollowed canyon,
whose ice melted millions f years ago. Even
the canyon where the motherless sleep is motherless:
an orphan is anything that outlives what made it. (p 57)


Passages taken from the novel
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

"Emily seemed able to treat him as her father while at the same time endlessly declaring that someone else was her father. She wanted them both. Two fathers and no mother would have been the dream." (p 35)

"Despite his complete lack of experience, Duke turns out to be a miracle of a father, teaching the children to read and love the lad and master carpentry. The most disappointing scene in the movie is when his wife finally shows up to rescure them from paradise. Disappointment, the children learn early on, is embodies by the mother." (p 41)

"Hugged by Uncle Wallace! [a "Bachelor Father" / "Family Affair" kind of sitcom character] Oh, but I had loved him as a child. The gruff and tender caregiver of sister's orphaned brood. The carefree bachelor, dashing in middle age, had risen to the challenge, leaving children all aross American to wonder how much better their lives might be if only their parents were dead." (p 87)

Ein Rücksichtsvoller Junge ~ A Considerate Boy
Otto Toaspern, 1863 - 1940

More connections to follow . . . "