PLOT SUMMARY
Silver Water is a heart-wrenching and
heart-warming short story of a family and how they come to terms with the
illness of the eldest daughter, Rose. The story is portrayed through the eyes
of the younger daughter, Violet. Rose has her a psychotic breakdown at fifteen,
after which they see a steady stream of psychiatrists, whom they mock, till
they find Dr. Thorne, who takes in his stride all the weird quirks (such as
licking the hair on her arm) and phases that Rose goes through as she tries to
grapple with the voices in her head. Rose really takes a shine to the doctor
and starts getting better.
However, upon Dr. Thorne's sudden
death, she loses control and quits all treatment. Eventually due to insurance
issues, Rose has to return home where she is taken care of by her parents, at
the time of which, Violet is elsewhere working. The family asks her not to
worry and that she should continue leading her own life. Violet visits over the
weekends and one weekend, which starts nicely enough, ends with Rose losing
control and hurting her mother, for which the former feels terribly ashamed.
Later that night, Violet goes into the woods in search of Rose, who wasn't in
her room, and finds her sprawled on the grass under the moonlight with an empty
pill bottle. Her final words were "It's closing time."
THEME
The theme of the story for me is about
family; how the members rally together to support one another in times of
crisis. It is easy to fall apart under such circumstances and yet the crisis seemed
to sort of keep them together, tighter. It is about acceptance that comes in a
family; where they accepted Rose for who she was and also Violet for the very
different person that she was. There is also the obvious theme of mental
health and how people respond to it.
One of the other themes that came up
was the sense of permanent loss that Violet expresses in terms of losing the
relationship she had shared with Rose, before the latter’s breakdown.
SETTING
The setting of the story is basically
in United States of America, in Texas I think, where mental health it seemed
was accepted in a matter of fact manner. The family is well educated, and
considering the father himself is psychiatrist, it is not surprising that Rose
got the appropriate medical attention and also a holistic support in other
areas.
CHARACTERS
Apart from the family, there are many
characters who come and go for a brief period.
Galen, is the mother of
Rose and Violet. She is described as an eccentric and talented piano player. It
was she who identified that Rose had a problem and needed medical attention.
She is portrayed as a strong, sensitive, matter-of-fact/ non-nonsense kind of
women who is very devoted to her family and also her passion of piano
playing.
David is the father,
who is a psychiatrist by profession but he doesn’t recognize the signs of his
daughter’s mental illness when it is actually the mother who notices the signs
first and informs him. However, he is portrayed as a supportive sensitive
father and husband, who rallies to get things done for his family. Violet
describes her father as “a kind, sad man”.
Rose is the main
character in the story. She is described as a large girl who was beautiful when
she was younger and a talented singer, which the family encourages by getting
her to join a choir, where she sings solo because of her skill and
ability.
She is mentally ill and finally takes
her own life possibly out of guilt and shame for troubling and hurting her
family and not being able to deal with the illness any more. She is portrayed
as vivacious, talented and caring with a lot of spunk, based on the answers she
provides to the doctors the family is screening while choosing on
psychiatrists.
Violet is the sister of Rose. She is said to have been an awkward and
lonely teenager, who grows into a sensitive, introverted adult teaching
English. I would the loneliness was because her sister's psychotic breakdown
took place just as Violet was entering her teens and all the attention of her
parents would be focused on Rose. Violet is very close to Rose and she
describes Rose as her guide to the world and their mother! The story is
beautifully written to portray the sense of permanent loss she feels in not
being able to connect with her elder sister the same way. But she loves her
sister despite possibly feeling that her parents probably love Rose more.
Dr. Thorne is the psychiatrist that the family finally zeroes down on.
He is described as a large, with black cowboy boots and a string tie. He makes
an immediate impression on Rose who is very happy with him and makes tremendous
progress under his guidance and care. However, he dies half way through and
seven days later, Rose loses control again.
Addie Robicheaux is a boy in the Prospect Street choir who sings solo with
Rose and becomes Rose’s friend over choir practice. .
Dr. Walker is the psychiatrist that the family saw him just before
meeting Dr. Thorne. The entire family mocked him because he kept talking of
Rose in third person. Rose tended to use inappropriate behaviour to weird out
the doctors and to probably who would work past that and see the actual
problem, I believe.
GENETIC CRITICISM
Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist by
profession from the USA. She is currently not fully employed but divides her
time between her writing and her practice, where the latter has reduced since
she began writing. She maintains that the inspiration for her stories are all
derived from her real experiences with her family and friends and that she
maintains the privacy of her patients[1].
She considers herself “cheerful and
realistic”[2], when she is talking about
her children’s book, The Little Sweet
Potato. She also has a book on cross-dressers, transsexuals and other
marginalized groups called Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross dressing Cops,
and Hermaphrodites with Attitude.
One of her
interviews says that most of her books tend to be centered around
unconventional relationships and situations (“unconventional crossings”) to
which Amy Bloom responds by saying “all intimate relationships are
crossings. No matter how conventional the frame, I think to know and engage
with someone intimately is always a crossing of a border, always fraught, even
if you’ve been married fifty years”. She also says, “Paying attention
and knowing people intimately tells you who they are. Everything else, I
suspect, is a gross generalization[3].”
Another
interview describes her writing is said to be largely about human relationships
and the moral complexities they entail[4]
and it would seem that these are the issues she contemplates and cares about in
her life as well. Amy Bloom responds in the same interview “I would actually
say that the things I cared about led me to being a therapist and also emerge
in my writing. I think that, to some extent, good therapists are
born, not made—born deeply curious about other people, with a capacity to
listen, a sense of humor, an emotional resiliency and a kind of effortless
compassion”.
In that sense, Silver Water
sits in cohesion with the other stories she has created. Silver Water talks
about an unconventional illness that doesn’t necessarily sit well with all
parts of society. Also, Rose is portrayed as someone who doesn’t necessarily
behave appropriately and the family as a whole doesn’t deal with people in the
normal/ ‘polite’ manner.
FORMAL CRITICISM
The story
itself is beautifully worded that tends to evoke strong emotions in the reader.
The situations and characters are described aptly to create an image with just
the right amount of words rather than being overly descriptive. Amy Bloom
writes in a way that gets the reader to remain deeply engaged with the story
and the characters.
My favourite part of the story is the
following excerpt, which describes a poignant moment in the story after Rose
has a breakdown and physically hurts her mother unknowingly in the process and
runs up to her room distressed. Violet describes the scene after her father
comes in on hearing the commotion - “He made my mother a cup of tea, and all the love
he had for her, despite her silent rages and her vague stares, came pouring
through the teapot, warming her cup, filling her small, long-fingered hands.
She rested her head against his hip, and I looked away.” It beautifully
reinforces the theme of the story, i.e. of family, love and acceptance through times
of severe crisis.
The logic of the
title is something that eludes me and is something that we couldn’t get to
during group discussions as well. We could only vaguely connect it to the
references to silver in the text. Violet in the first line describes how she
wants therapists to remember Rose as follows: “My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the
clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond
your body.” Here she makes a reference to water in a silver pitcher. Later
when she is talking of Rose and Addie singing in the choir, she describes it in
the following manner “how laid out their
gold and silver voices and wove them together in strands as fine as silk, as
strong as steel”.
TEXT-TO-TEXT CRITICISM
As a group we were able to
connect the story with the movie/ book, “The Sister’s Keeper” which has a
similar situation of a family rallying around their elder daughter’s situation
of having terminal bone marrow cancer. The younger daughter is said to have
been designed in a test tube so as to be match for her sister, to donate bone
marrow cells. The movie culminates with the younger daughter suing her parents
for putting her through a battery of tests and donation procedures her entire
childhood. This we learn in the end is something her elder sister put her up
to, so that she can go in peace. The elder daughter does not want to undergo
anymore tests and treatments. The family is faced with this harsh realization that
their daughter has accepted her situation and now they must too.
SOCIO-CULTURAL CRITICISM
The story, as
mentioned earlier, is set in a Western context. In the literary circle, we were
able to discuss how the same story in the Indian setting would probably pan out
very differently. In the Indian context, mental illness is not accepted to be
like any other illness requiring treatment, as was seen in the case of Rose.
Additionally, advanced treatment is also not easily available and not
financially accessible to all in India. It was seen in the story that David was
able to get insurance for Rose, which is possibly not yet taken on in India.
The
additional gender dimension is something that came up in discussions, in terms
of marriage. Rose was 25 when she took her life. Yet, till that point, she
stayed in her parents’ house and was taken care of ungrudgingly. This was
possibly unique in both Indian and Western contexts, according to my limited
understanding. In the Western scenario, children move out of their parents’ by
the time they are seventeen or eighteen. It is not looked upon lightly when a
person stays with their parents or is supported by their parents beyond that
age range.
In the Indian
context, the question of marriage would have come up quite early on in the
girl’s life and there is a common perception in many places across the country
that a daughter is a burden on the family she is born into. Group members
shared their experiences that they knew of cases where families married off
their mentally ill daughters without telling the boy/ family, just to wash
their hands of her responsibility.
LITERARY CIRCLE PROCESS REFLECTION
The group met twice, once guided, and once
internally initiated. Discussions were guided by the questions provided,
although not in the order. The group made three kinds of connections –
text-to-text; text-to-world and text-to-self. There was a lot of sharing around
personal experiences whose memories were triggered from the text. This served
as an interesting way to also get to the know the people in the group.
There were no uniform interpretations on anything
and there was no need felt to converge on a shared meaning. But we did build up
on ideas that were thrown and talked to the text accordingly and tried to
provide evidence from the text to support arguments.
Overall, the literary circle arrangement was
helpful in gleaning nuances of the story and interpretations of the same.
Additionally, sharing my own interpretations served the purpose of
crystallizing the same in my own mind. It
allows for making a range of connections from the text to the world and other
kinds of texts/ literature.
It however, remains to be seen how this may work
for children, probably for an older age range, it may work; where ideas can be
developed. However, in the case of younger children, this kind of forum can
possibly be used to get children to begin reflecting on and expressing their
thoughts on the text.
[1] Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-2695800024/silver-water.html#A; accessed on September 4th 2014.
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/nyregion/writer-amy-bloom-ventures-into-the-realm-of-children.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss&; accessed through http://amybloom.com/about/interviews/ on September 4th 2014.
[3] http://www.clal.org/clal_garland.html; Accessed through http://amybloom.com/about/interviews/ on September 4th 2014.
[4] Same as before.
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