Books: The Mermaid Chair
What releases creativity? How do we make break throughs in our art? Do we need a violent catalyst, some disasterous event? Can true expression ever come from happiness? This is what I found myself thinking about while reading "The Mermaid Chair" by Sue Monk Kidd.
Jessie Sullivan, housewife, mother, assemblage artist, is 42 years old and drifting along through her life. Her only child is at college, she and her husband -- a psychiatrist named Hugh -- are living in a large, drafty victorian house somewhere in Atlanta. Jessie is drifting through her days, sleepwalking through her life. She has no energy to break free -- indeed, isn't even certain she wants to disturb her routine, although she doesn't want to continue the way she's going, either.
Then, out of the blue, a call comes that Jessie's mother, Nelle, has done herself a fairly serious injury and Jessie must return to the tidewater island she grew up on, and had eagerly left behind her. It's been years since she visited her mother, a rather intensely religous woman, and at first it seems that this book will be about the resolution of a difficult mother/daughter relationship.
Once Jessie arrives, however, the story starts to unfold in a totally different direction. While visiting the garden of the monastary where her mother works, she meets Brother Thomas, a noviate monk waiting to take his final vows. They fall instantly, almost violently, in love. At this point, it seems, the story will become a standard love story about this man and woman, fighting convention and god to be together.
And then, as her relationships with her mother and Brother Thomas start to develop, and change, we learn that a great deal of Jessie's life has been spent mourning the loss of her father when she was only nine. It is after his death, for which she blames herself, that she comes to hate the island and yearns to leave it. And it seems to become a tale all about Jessie resolving her guilt and finding her father's love again, and moving on.
And all these elements do come into play: Love, guilt, secrets, daddy worship, women's power. But I found the most intriguing part of Jessie's story to be the development of her art.
As her relationships with her mother, her lover, her husband, and her dead father start to unravel, evolve and metamorphize, Jessie's art starts to do the same. She bursts out of the tight little boxes she has painted her soul into and incorporates light and color and personal expression she'd never brought to her work before. I only wish that the book had been illustrated because the descriptions of the "Diving Woman" series of paintings that Jessie begins after some of her most cherised illusions are shattered sound absolutely beautiful. They are described in terms of being Chagall-like in choices of subject and colors, but the symbols described in Jessie's paintings are personal and include the pieces of her married life, the flora and fauna of the island, and the island monastery's mysterious mermaid chair -- an object around which much of the hidden and difficult parts of Jessie's life revolve.
I found the ending to the book to be very interesting, and not at all trite or predictable. But mostly, I found the book got me thinking: is my art and creativity -- my life -- trapped in a box of my own making? Am I even aware of what that box may be? And I found myself wondering if I could do something wild and mysterious to help me break out and fly free.
Recommended.
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