Sophie began her childhood like most of the children within the combines of her village in Haiti. She was young and innocent. Her aspirations were simply to enjoy the pleasantries of being a child. Education, love, and a strong family bond were the essence of her sweet beginnings. All that she had ever known was the unconditional love of her Tante Atie. It was an unsettling, but eager sense of unwavering devotion that forced her to leave her almost perfect world in an effort to regain and rekindle a relationship with a biological mother that she hardly knew, nor initially wanted to know. The circumstances of her maturation, once she arrived to her new world, eventually weaved a tangled web of dark secrets and improprieties that eventually would cost her vast amounts of mental and physical anguish that in turn was reciprocated through those that she eventually came care about. Sophie’s existence was eerily patterned after events that were relayed through three Haitian folktales within the novel; the story of the inseparable “Marassa” told to her by her mother, the story of a woman who visited a deity in an effort to end her uncontrollable hemorrhaging, and the story of a man who consummated his marriage while eventually committing murder. These occurrences initially caused her to keep secrets, yet may have been the eventual causes that led to her freedom.
Her mother told the story of the Marassa to Sophie at the time that she was experiencing the beginnings of a new type of love – a love different from that of a mother and daughter. Sophie was engulfed in a quagmire of mixed emotions because of the unyielding and blinding power of this new type of love. It was unfortunate that the new love she was feeling was for a man – an older man. In discovering that Sophie’s love was being compromised, the jealousy that overwhelmed her mother, because she realized that her daughter was deceiving her, forced her to revert to performing an ancient Haitian tradition of what is now considered sexual child abuse by today’s standards. In “testing” Sophie, her mother believed that she was exercising her parental right to protect a daughters’ purity. “The love between a mother and a daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before.” (p. 85) The Marassas were inseparable. According to the legend, they were the same person, duplicated in two. They were identical in every facet, and while that type of relationship is what Sophie’s mother intended to strive for, the inceptions of utter humiliation experienced by Sophie, because of the fondling, eventually had a reverse effect than intended. “You and I we could be like the Marassas. You are giving up a lifetime with me.” (p. 85)
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After weeks of constant “testing”, the insurmountable pressure of yielding to her mother’s touch became too much for Sophie, especially since she had never lain down with a man, nor ever had intentions of doing so. Embarrassment and the feelings of violation and betrayal eventually led to a decision that would ultimately propel Sophie’s life into a tornado-like abyss of repressed emotions that she could not escape. Haitian folklore talks of a woman who had a curse-like imperfection that caused her to bleed uncontrollably from all the orifices and extremities of her body, even though her skin was never broken. Several attempts to use conventional methods of healing failed, and she had no choice but to seek guidance from a deity, who eventually told her that she had to sacrifice her womanhood and become something else. In what appears to be the sale of her soul, she becomes a butterfly, and thus, the hemorrhaging ceases. “A butterfly you shall be, said Erzulie. The woman was transformed and never bled again.” (p. 88) In an act very similar to this legend, Sophie chooses to become something else – an impure woman. “My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it.
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I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. I took the pestle and the bloody sheet and stuffed them into a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s finger back every time she tested me.” (p. 88) Why does she choose to undergo this tortuous episode? Could it have been to reap revenge? Revenge upon her mothers’ acts of arduous cruelty, even if it fit within the mold of Haitian tradition? Was she scared of the “testing” she was continuously to endure? She seems to alter her body in an effort to submit to something, and in her submission, she subjects others, including her mother and future husband to a form of torture as well. Sophie’s act of rebellion, while vengeful, lacked thought for future considerations. She seems to exorcize the demons that haunted her directly, but now will follow her in an indirect and uncanny manner for some time to come, and at a price that eventually deprives her of natural womanhood. She is now a butterfly, and must live with the consequences.
Sophie’s husband is quite an understanding and patient man, and seems to love her wholeheartedly, yet it is difficult for Sophie to comprehend this, because she feels that she does not perform well in her sexual obligations as a wife to her husband. “When my husband is with me now, it gives me such nightmares that I have to bite my tongue to do it again.” (p. 156) This negative outlook on sex is translated thoroughly through a rich Haitian man’s quest to consummate his marriage to a virgin. The man prepares his bedroom with pure white sheets so that when the female hymen is broken during the act, the blood that is shed is compared to a medal of honor. The man will then drink a drop of blood mixed with a prepared glass of milk. The bloodstained sheets are then paraded through the village so that the community can also share in the celebration of the consummation and welcome the new couple into the community. If there is no blood, then the wife was impure before the marriage and the humiliation experienced by the man would lead to scandals.
“The man had his honor and reputation to defend. He could not face the town if he did not have a blood-spotted sheet to hang in his courtyard the next morning. He did the best he could to make her bleed, but no matter how hard he tried, the girl did not bleed. So he took a knife and cut her between her legs to get some blood to show.” “The blood kept flowing like water out of the girl.” “Finally drained of all her blood, the girl died.” (p. 155)
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Sophie’s inability to perform sex at an emotional level is comparable to the inability for the virgin to shed blood in an effort to help mark the husband’s legacy. Sophie seems to convey concern that in some fashion her own husband will feel the same humiliation of not being able to “make her bleed” because she chooses not too, or cannot, and thus, he will not be able to mark or leave his own legacy.
Sophie simply wanted to lead a normal life. She seemed to have wanted to continue the life that she had while still a child in Haiti. She picked daffodils for fun and possessed the drive to learn. She loved her Grandma I’fe and her Tante Atie unconditionally. She wanted no part of the outside world, but welcomed it like any other challenge in her young life. “Accept your new life. I greeted the challenge, like one greets a new day. As my mother’s daughter and Tante Atie’s child.” (p. 49) It was as if she knew that something bad was going to happen, and the negative signs immediately began to surface as she entered the airport and the airplane. She displayed immense courage, but within the act of this courage loomed events that she eventually would not able to control, and subsequently her life skewed way out on a tangent, that most other adults could not begin to imagine. In her exhausting efforts to live a life opposite that of her mother’s, she mirrored it almost identically. The more she tried to run away from her life, the more she ran right into it. Sophie came to realize this at the unfortunate expense of her mother’s life by way of suicide. “My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave into her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was just like me.” (p. 234)
After her mother’s burial, while trying to communicate with her late mother’s spirit, Sophie was asked, “‘Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter? (p. 234) Was she? Could she ever be? Will she ever be?
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Works Cited
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory: A Novel. 1994. New York: Second Vintage
Contemporaries Edition, May 1998
