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Living in the house of nightmare
She always dreams a future of her own
Dating with different men and women
Lucy of the Caribbean island
Lucy as a maid of the house of betrayal
The house of Lewis and Maria
Lucy as a girlfriend of a photographer and a worker
She hates her mother out of profound love
She finds her identity and still in lost and doubt of the ability of loving people.
Oh! Lucy you!
You are just like what your mother have said, the female form of Lucifer.
Who made you this way?
Can a lucky grass change your fate?
Peace.
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Lucy is an expression of pstcolonial resistance and ambivalence to the colonial culture, in the search for an identity that need reconstructed. The young woman who comes from Antiguan, West Indian, has been deeply influenced by the experience and history of colonialism. She tries her best running away from her mother and motherland of colonialism, but on the other hand she also refuses to accept American culture, so she is an exile figure that cannot identify with either culture. The confrontations caused in her ambivalence towards both cultures trapped her into casual liaisons with different men and her cynical attitudes the relationships between people. I would like to discuss issue of identity for reflection.
The identity problem seems to be a central issue in the novel. As a hybrid subject, Lucy on the one hand resists her heritage culture that she has deeply influenced and cultivated; on the other hand resists U. S. culture, which attracts her at the first beginning. Just at the beginning of the novel, the first-person voice is clear to us—we know that Lucy is a young woman who doesn’t hesitate to speak all the detailed observations and the most honest feelings. The subtle observation of her own situation and self-consciousness can be read here:
I was no longer in a tropical zone and I felt cold inside and out, the first time such a sensation had come over me. (6)
I was only an unhappy young woman living in a maid’s room, and I was not even the maid. I was the young girl who watches over the children and goes to school at night. (7)
In a passage where she finds the origin of a nightgown, a postcolonial subject is found:
I found it just where a label usually is, in the back, and it read “Made in Australia.” I was awakened from this dream by the actual mind, a woman who had let me know right away, on meeting me, that she did not like me, and gave as her reason the way I talked. I thought it was because of something else, but I did not know what. As I opened my eyes, the word “Australia” stood between our faces, and I remembered then that Australia was settled as a prison for bad people, people so bad that they couldn’t be put in a prison in their own country. (9)
Also, in the eye of Lewis, the white, northern, American, privileged, and in a cultural political perspective, a complicit with the colonial system, Lucy is a “Poor Visitor (14).” But ironically, Lewis and Mariah have figures like robbers in Lucy’s dream (14-15). The images towards each other, as well as the interpretations or misunderstandings of each other, have composed a very tense relationship that has once existed between colonial and postcolonial history.
Lucy is “a very angry person (96)”, both for Maria, for her family, and for herself. The origin of this anger is understandable, from her impotent situation as a minority. In the passage when she finds it’s easy for her to understand the an artist’s yearning and wanting for something completely different from what one is familiar with, and happily identify herself with this French artist’s diasporic situation. “He had the perfume of the hero about him (95).” She suddenly finds that the truth is that her situation is in fact worse than the French man. “I was not a man; I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left my home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantle of a servant (95).” I regard Lucy’s anger is a resistance towards the environment that made her so impotent.
As a novel revealing the growth of a postcolonial girl, Lucy’s transformation can be observed form the following passage:
I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence (133).
She also didn’t quite understand the person she has become or is becoming, but she understands that the difference is the ability of self-invention—the change of the idea will change the identity—she finds herself beautiful only because she “decides” she is beautiful (133). The importance of self-inventory identity is also emphasized by the identification as a creative worker:
I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know. I did not have position, I did not have money at my disposal. I had memory, I had anger, I had despair (134).
The history of the island has also been told, and in the ridiculous narration about the mailing between two different colonized islands (one is British’s, and the other is the French’s), the life of colonized country is vividly cruel. Through the political historical narration, we can understand the how all the “restlessness”, “dissatisfaction with surroundings”, and “skin-doesn’t-fit-ness” occur. She choose to exile in order to run away from her own mother land and she finally finds it impossible to assimilate into a different culture, especially when the culture is used to colonize her own culture. The documents she has to keep in America seems to showed everything about her, and “yet they showed nothing” about her. The name Lucy Josephine Potter showed her personal and family history, too—a failure family member (uncle Joseph), and a slavery history (master Potter). Thus she hates the name and wanted to rename herself. The reason why her mother named her Lucy is also trembling, full of hatred or curse. Thus, in this last breaking or revelation, the former misunderstanding about Lucy’s attitudes towards her “god-like (153)” mother has been understood.
Lucy seems to find happiness at the end, though she is also lack of friends:
I was now living a life I had always wanted to live. I was living apart from my family in a place where no one knew much about me; almost no one knew even my name, and I was free more or less to come and go as pleased me. The feeling of bliss, the feeling of happiness, the feeling of longing fulfilled that I had thought would come with this situation was nowhere to be found inside me. (158)
But this freedom and reclaim of self-identity was achieved through some sacrifices. And the most evident is the lost of the passion to love people, as she look at her own name and write nothing but “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it (164).” Maybe the regain of a postcolonial subjectivity will cost the paradoxical lost of the southern primitive passion for love, but maybe this is another beginning for another search for a new identity, a transformation of a postcolonial identity.
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