Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breath, Eyes, Memory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma
Virginity and Violence
Home
Memory, Storytelling, and the Past
Summary
Analysis
That night, at supper, Granmè Ifé asks Tante Atie if she is going to Louise’s tonight for a reading lesson. She says Tante Atie should be taking official reading classes, but Tante Atie says they’re too far to walk to at night, whereas Louise’s is close by. The two bicker back and forth about Tante Atie’s lessons until Tante Atie, unable to take any more of her mother’s criticism, stands up from the table and begins washing dishes. Granmè Ifé says that if Tante Atie is going to leave, she should at least read to them before she goes. Tante Atie goes to get her notebook from her room, then returns to the yard and reads the poem Sophie wrote many years ago about her mother being a daffodil. Afterwards, Tante Atie tells Sophie that she has never forgotten those words.
This passage shows that even in the light of her mother’s criticisms and her own personal roadblocks and shortcomings, Tante Atie—like a daffodil—has learned to grow, thrive, and be kind to herself. Sophie’s words, and the image of daffodils as a symbol of strength and capability, have stuck with her and empowered her throughout the years. It seems that although Tante Atie and Martine were similarly traumatized as children, Tante Atie has been able to cope with her pain more effectively than her sister has.
Themes
Sophie lies alone in Martine’s old bedroom, listening to her grandmother’s snores from the next room and missing Joseph. She asks Brigitte rhetorical questions about whether Brigitte will remember this trip when she’s older, whether she’ll resent Sophie for “severing” her from her father, and whether she will inherit “some of Mommy’s problems.” Sophie wishes she could tell Brigitte a comforting bedtime story, like Tante Atie used to tell her, but can’t think of any.
Sophie has a young daughter to care for—but she is clearly very afraid of passing down her “problems” to Brigitte. This fear is so acute that it effectively paralyzes Sophie, rendering her unable to do all the things she wants to do for her daughter. This highlights the ways in which the elder Caco woman have, perhaps, done generations of daughters a disservice due to this very fear.
Themes
When Sophie gets up to open her window, she sees Tante Atie, apparently drunk, stumbling up to the house from her lesson. Sophie gets back into bed and listens as Granmè Ifé wakes up and scolds Tante Atie for coming home drunk—she claims that if Sophie sees Tante Atie in such a state, Sophie won’t respect her. Tante Atie protests that Sophie is not a child anymore and says she doesn’t “have to be a saint for her.”
When Sophie overhears Tante Atie’s refusal to act other than she is for Sophie’s sake, Sophie understands—and perhaps laments—that her own mother was never able to strip away her own obsession with perfection and purity in order to have a moment of real connection with her daughter.
Themes
