I Used to Live Here Once: An Elegy in Brief - Essay Example

The exploration of the girl’s feelings of misrecognition and alienation make the tone appear melancholic and mourning. The noting of how the girl’s arms drop to her side, for instance, is a brief but poignant indicator of the tremendous chasm that exists between her and the world she inhabits. The narrative mode also allows the writer to record each of the girl’s realizations of the difference between the last time she had visited this place and her present: The screw pine was gone, so was the mock summer house called the, but the clove tree was still there and at the top of the steps the rough lawn stretched away, just as she remembered it.

She stopped and looked towards the house that had been added to and painted white. It was strange to see a car standing in front of it. The dispassionate noting of changes in the spare language of Rhys serves to intensify the isolation of the protagonist. It is as if she has lost the ability to feel except as recording of facts. This choice of tone is very appropriate to the theme of death as death is almost always dealt with in a similar manner. In our attempts at making sense of something that can be as devastatingly meaningless as death, we often try to rein it in and rationalize it as just a fact of life, we try to find solace in words, in facts and keep the pain of the actual bereavement at bay.

Something similar occurs on a structural level in this story. The fact of the girl’s death, or as this paper argues, her fundamental alienation from her newly changed surroundings, is expressed with the same restraint and dignity one associates with funerary rituals. Things on the level of symbols in the story also corroborate this. The choice of symbols in this story is economical and precise. The stepping stones, the river, the pine tree that has disappeared, are each deeply symbolic of the life process.

The river of life has had associations with rites of passage from Biblical times, with the instances of rivers like Jordan which had to be necessarily crossed in order to get to the Promised Land (Ferber, 2007, p. 170). The girl in the story crosses this river, thereby symbolically crossing over into an afterlife. This afterlife could also be interpreted as a new. Not literal death and the ghostly afterlife, but the wraithlike presence one feels when in drastically changed circumstances. The two children, one boy, and one girl, playing under a mango tree also form a very symbolic image of a new, growing life.

The images of new life growing like the proverbial grass under the girl’s feet, also include the changes in construction, the missing ajoupa, the carelessly finished road, the appearance of a car. Jean Rhys also uses color very effectively as symbols. When the girl crosses the yard to reach out to the children, the grass is described as green and yellow. Previously, the day has been described as “a fine day, a blue day”. This life-giving color scheme is instantly turned to grey when the girl tries to touch them.

Color is used in a subtle political sense too. The writer comments “as if the white blood is asserting itself against all odds”, noting the change in demographics in the Caribbean that make her, and other girls like her, feel excluded from their own homeland. Other than the melancholic tone and the symbols used, the elegiac mood persists on the diegetic as well as autobiographical levels.