Of I Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages The short story “I Used to Live Here Once" begins with a description of a woman visiting her childhood home; one can deduce this from her description of the environment as it is and comparing it to her retrospective view. She comes across two children in a house in which she resided in the past and when she tries to greet them, they seem to ignore her. Moreover, when she finally gets close and tries to greet them again, they do not see her and one remark on the cold, they enter the house without having seen her, and that is when she realizes they cannot see her since she must have stopped living. The narrator’s displacement and apparent alienation from an environment that must have been retrospectively natural to can be compared to the writers own life of displacement. From a psychoanalytical perspective, it is possible that the writer was expressing and living out her memories in the land that was her home and from whence she was uprooted at a tender age. The fact that the narrator was female helps the reader draw an easier parallel to the writer and feel her disappointment when her attempts at maternal affection are ignored by the children giving the story an emotional edge. This underlying connection implies that since she moved from the Dominicans where she was born at the age of 17, she lost touch with her land of birth and never actually felt at home even in England and hence the general alienation of the writer is expressed in her character’s displacement. The authors past has considerable effects on the bearing of the story since she is able to portray the character’s emotional confusion, and alienation accurately, herself having been quoted in the past expressing ambivalence about her origin and the country to which she belonged. The writer takes the reader back to the narrator’s past through her reminiscing as she nostalgically remembers the place, as she knew it in the past. She remembers the stones and the dexterity needed to get across, her affection for the place is evident in that she walked with joy on the road although she described it as wider but messily expanded with trees not being cleared and trampled on. She remembers the house had screw pine, which was still there although the pine screws were gone as well as the summerhouse. The children’s color is of interest to the writer who describes them as being fair despite being in the tropics, which as a symbol of resilience the whites were forced to adopt in to survive. The idea of reaction and adaption to nature, especially on a racial perspective, can be tied to the writers past since although she was while living in a predominantly black country, she often interacted with black and admired their culture and nature. Most of the things she remembers are symbolic of the narrators past and present feeling and the writer has clearly injected considerable aspects of her life in the same. Take ether fact that she finds the road to be incomplete, this could symbolize the fact that she thought she had unfinished business with the place hence her return, besides, considering the author's history of prostitution and drug abuse. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More