In 1998, Mary Gordon has devoted a deep and touch essay to the ninetieth anniversary of her mother, having fused the worlds of reality and art in her narration. It is interesting to focus on the approach which she chose for the composition of her essay and the literary devices which she uses in order to express her ideas.
The author starts her narration with reminding about the Bonnard’s painting, The Bathroom, and then keeps the line of matching the matters of art to the story of her mother’s life and finding expressive analogies. Gordon says that by means of “constructing a painting around an empty space” Bonnard has embraced the secret lying deeply within “a nothing”, “a happiness which will not take place”. However, what seems mysterious and charming in art, awakes only compassion and despair in the reality, where the woman’s life is “made up of emptiness”, which has nothing in common with Bonnard’s “beautiful emptiness”.
The impression is strengthened by means of reminding about the facts from Bonnard’s biography: his beloved Renee, who inspired him and sat for his paintings, killed herself, which is terribly dissonant to the harmony of the artist’s works; as for Bonnard himself, he seems to have met his last days in desolation, which leads to the analogy between his destiny and that of Gordon’s mother.
These devices are aimed not only at making the narration more impressive; they express the author’s philosophical, contemplative perception of life and death, and a human’s destiny in our world.
Another composition device which the author uses actively is providing concise and bright details, which are the small things mentioned by her, the visualized descriptions, or simply the eloquent facts. “There are only three things to which my mother now responds: prayers, songs, and sweets”, says Gordon and thus manages to reproduce the despair of the situation by means of a few strokes; as well, these words immediately bear the sensation of a strong contrast: unlike her mother, the author herself is able to embrace an incredibly large palette of matters, emotions, feelings, and their tints.
She feels the “mystery of light” in Bonnard’s pictures, the slightly perceptible “richness beyond language and beyond visual expression” uniting her with her mother, the misery of those “in the dining room” who “are decomposing”, and the magnificence of the stream of events which have lined up between her mother’s birthday and the ninetieth anniversary.
This impression is strengthened by a short phrase, “She had no interest in painting”, which, of course, is not about a woman’s indifference to art, but about the abyss between her and her daughter. Gordon describes what food she brings to her mother, what she looks like, how the icing is smeared on her face in the dining room; a red silk dress and golden shoes which the author bought for the anniversary. These details serve to exacerbating the sensation of emptiness of the woman’s life.
She uses incredibly strong metaphor of “wilting flowers”: indeed, it does not matter how beautiful the flowers were: nobody can enjoy the beauty of a wilting flower, as well as “toothless, no woman can be considered beautiful”. This is the truth “professed” by the author, which opposes to Bonnard’s painting where his ill wife is depicted as “still attractive, still someone we want to look at”.
In her essay, Mary Gordon has used the devices of composition and literary expressiveness masterly, expressing her thirst for finding her personal “world of intense color, of prosperous involvement, of the flow of good life and good fortune”.
Bibliography
Gordon, Mary. “Still Life: Notes on Pierre Bonnard and My Mother’s Ninetieth Birthday”. Harper’s Magazine. 1998: 48-53 Print.