The true extent of Eleanor’s horrific, traumatizing past is unknown to the reader for much of the novel, as Eleanor perpetually represses its reality, choosing instead to deny that she feels any pain—as the title suggests, she is “completely fine.” Eleanor rejects ownership of her past in two primary ways: through denying it by assuming a skewed sense of reality, and through externalizing the feelings she associates with her past, projecting them onto other people or objects in order to distance these painful feelings from herself. By denying her past and disassociating herself from her feelings, Eleanor avoids the difficult work of having to confront her past and her pain directly. But rejecting her past only keeps the trauma at bay—it doesn’t erase it entirely—and reality eventually comes crashing down on Eleanor. This results in a climactic moment of mental collapse after a fog machine at one of the musician’s gigs triggers the memory of the house fire that killed her mother and sister and Eleanor’s constructed world of denial converges with reality. Ultimately, Eleanor learns that separating herself from her past provides only temporary relief, and that she must take ownership of her pain, internalize it, and work through it if she wants to recover.
Eleanor denies her mother’s death because she is uncomfortable accepting who she is and what she must deal with in the aftermath of her traumatic childhood. Perhaps the most shocking instance of Eleanor’s denial is her failure to realize that her mother is dead. In the final pages of the novel, the reader discovers that Eleanor’s weekly phone calls with “Mummy” are merely a figment of her imagination: in reality, Eleanor’s mother—along with Eleanor’s younger sister, Marianne—perished in the fire Eleanor’s mother set in an attempt to kill her two daughters and relieve herself of her parenting responsibilities. Eleanor engages in weekly phone calls with “Mummy” which consist, mostly, of her mother mocking and berating her for being pathetic and lonely.
In reality, however, these phone calls don’t actually take place, and the attacks on Eleanor’s character are Eleanor’s own. By framing her criticisms as coming from “Mummy” and not from herself, Eleanor denies the impact her past traumas have on her current life and avoids coming to term with the fact that she is critical of how pathetic and lonely she has become.
Another way Eleanor practices denial is by forcing her mind to go blank rather than confronting painful memories directly. While undergoing an unpleasant bikini wax, Eleanor reflects more generally on the subject of pain: “pain is easy; pain is something with which I am familiar. I went into the little white room inside my head, the one that’s the color of clouds. It smells of clean cotton and baby rabbits. The air inside the room is the palest sugar almond pink, and the loveliest music plays. Today, it was ‘Top of the World’ by the Carpenters. That beautiful voice…she sounds so blissful, so full of love. Lovely. Lucky Karen Carpenter.” “Pain is easy” for Eleanor, but only because she avoids it. Venturing “into the little white room insider [her] head” allows Eleanor to pretend that her past traumas don’t exist. She invents a fantasyland of “clean cotton and baby rabbits” because it is easier to do this than to recount the memories of her childhood and feel the visceral pain that would come about as a result of reliving these past traumas.
Eleanor’s relationship to Polly the Plant, a “parrot plant” that she has kept since her childhood, demonstrates an instance of Eleanor projecting her past onto an external object in order to lessen the impact of its pain. Eleanor sees Polly as a link to her past and a means by which she may symbolically forgive herself for not being able to save her sister Marianne’s life. Eleanor regards Polly as “the only living link with my childhood, the only constant between life before and after the fire, the only thing, apart from me, that had survived.” Polly is important to Eleanor because, if she can keep the plant alive, she can symbolically redeem herself for failing to protect her sister from the fire. As Eleanor’s life becomes increasingly more complicated with social obligations, however, she fails to care for Polly properly, and the plant dies: “I’d neglected my duties these last few weeks, too busy with hospitals and funerals and Facebook to water her regularly. Yet another living thing I’d failed to look after. I wasn’t fit to care for anyone, anything.” When Eleanor insists she isn’t “fit to care for anyone, anything,” it is proof that she regards Polly as a surrogate for Marianne. Subconsciously, Eleanor seems to believe that, if she can keep Polly alive and well, she can forgive herself for her inability to save Marianne.
When Polly “dies,” Eleanor takes it as proof that she is incapable of adequately loving, protecting, and caring for others. Symbolically, Polly’s death also shows how inadequate projection is for Eleanor in the long run: she can’t project her feelings of failure onto inanimate objects like Polly because, ultimately, they are beyond her ability to control. If Eleanor wants to truly come to terms with her sister’s death, she has to internalize and assume ownership of the feelings of hurt and guilt she associates with her inability to save Marianne and, more generally, to accept the things over which she has no control.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Projection and Denial ThemeTracker
Projection and Denial Quotes in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.
I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor—I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else—there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate.
Should I make myself over from the inside out, or work from the outside in? […] Eventually, I decided to start from the outside and work my way in—that’s what often happens in nature, after all. The shedding of skin, rebirth. Animal, birds and insects can provide such useful insights.
[Polly’s] the only constant from my childhood, the only living thing that survived. She was a birthday present, but I can’t remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts.
Jane Eyre. A strange child, difficult to love. A lonely only child. She’s left to deal with so much pain at such a young age—the aftermath of death, the absence of love. It’s Mr. Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it.
I smiled at her. Twice in one day, to be the recipient of thanks and warm regard! I would never have suspected that small deeds could elicit such genuine, generous responses. I felt a little glow inside—not a blaze, more like a small, steady candle.
“But you’re not smart, Eleanor. You’re someone who lets people down. Someone who can’t be trusted. Someone who failed. Oh yes, I know exactly what you are. And I know how you’ll end up. Listen, the past isn’t over. The past is a living thing. Those lovely scars of yours—they’re from the past, aren’t they? And yet they still live on your plain little face. Do they still hurt?”
Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try.”
I realized that such small gestures—the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn’t take sugar, the way Laura had placed two biscuits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon—such things could mean so much. I wondered how it would feel to perform such simple deeds for other people. I couldn’t remember. I had done such things in the past, tried to be kind, tried to take care, I knew that I had, but that was before. I tried, and I had failed, and all was lost to me afterward. I had no one to blame but myself.
I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.
Polly the plant had died that morning. I’m fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. That plant, though, was the only living link with my childhood, the only constant between life before and after the fire, the only thing, apart from me, that had survived. I’d thought it was indestructible, assumed it would just go on and on, leaves falling off, new ones growing to replace them. I’d neglected my duties these last few weeks, too busy with hospitals and funerals and Facebook to water her regularly. Yet another living thing I’d failed to look after. I wasn’t fit to care for anyone, anything. Too numb to cry, I dropped the plant into the bin, pot, soil and all, and saw that, throughout all these years, it had been clinging on to life only by the slenderest, frailest of roots.
If someone asks how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.
All the doctor needed to understand was that I was very unhappy, so that she could advise me how best to go about changing that. We didn’t need to start digging around in the past, talking about things that couldn’t be changed.
As always, Mummy was scary. But the thing was, this time—for the first time ever—she’d actually sounded scared too.
Anger was good, she’d said, while I was putting my coat on. If I was finally getting in touch with my anger, then I was starting to do some important work, unpicking and addressing things that I’d buried too deep. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose I’d never really been angry before now. Irritated, bored, sad, yes, but not actually angry.
The singer wasn’t ever the point, really; Maria Temple had helped me see that. In my eagerness to change, to connect with someone, I’d focused on the wrong thing, the wrong person. On the charge of being a catastrophic disaster, a failed human being, I was starting to find myself, with Maria’s help, not guilty.
The voice in my head—my own voice—was actually quite sensible, and rational, I’d begun to realize. It was Mummy’s voice that had done all the judging, and encouraged me to do so too. I was getting to quite like my own voice, my own thoughts. I wanted more of them. They made me feel good, calm even. They made me feel like me.
“People inherit all sorts of things from their parents, don’t they—varicose veins, heart disease. Can you inherit badness?”
“Good- bye, Mummy,” I said. The last word. My voice was firm, measured, certain. I wasn’t sad. I was sure. And, underneath it all, like an embryo forming—tiny, so tiny, barely a cluster of cells, the heartbeat as small as the head of a pin, there I was. Eleanor Oliphant. And, just like that, Mummy was gone.
“In the end, what matters is this: I survived.” I gave him a very small smile. “I survived, Raymond!” I said, knowing I was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it.
