45 pages • 1 hour read
Maggie O'FarrellThe Hand That First Held Mine
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Universality of Motherhood
Content Warning: This section references traumatic childbirth and the traumatic loss of a parent.
As Elina and Lexie experience first-time motherhood, they share certain observations and experiences. These shared experiences suggest that elements of motherhood—the physical trauma of labor, the hormonal fluctuations of pregnancy and the postpartum period, and above all, the fierceness of maternal love—transcend time and societal expectation.
The novel focuses in particular on how motherhood reorients one’s life and identity. O’Farrell quickly establishes that Lexie is fiercely independent, refusing to live on any terms she does not set for herself. Yet even Lexie, who resists any romantic relationship that would impinge on her freedom, finds that motherhood has tied her irrevocably to another person: “When she leaves the house […] she senses a thread that runs between her and her son […]. By the end of the day, she feels utterly unravelled, almost mad with desire to be back with him” (237). That even Lexie ends up living for someone beyond herself underscores how transformative motherhood is, irrespective of individual culture, personality, etc.
Elina and Lexie both have moments in early motherhood where they must navigate this complete transformation. In both cases, they find themselves imagining asking other mothers they see for advice or understanding. Lexie “eyes other mothers when she passes them in the street […] but what about the washing, she wants to say” (236), while Elina “sometimes gets the urge to stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it?” (251). They both have a sense that other women will understand, and the narrative repetition reinforces that their sense is correct: If the similarity of Elina and Lexie’s experiences is any guide, other mothers would recognize what they are going through.
This universality unites Elina and Lexie across 30 years and beyond death. It also connects them to the novel’s other mothers. Ferdinanda is so devastated by the loss of Innes that even when he returns, she can’t come back to a reality in which she believes her son to be dead. Felix’s mother, Geraldine, moves beyond her judgment of Felix and Lexie for having a child out of wedlock to support her son and take care of her grandson. Even Margot feels the primal pull of motherhood when Ted asks if she is his mother. Motherhood’s centrality to the novel is evidenced even by the title—a direct reference to the primacy of a mother in her child’s life.
The Transformative Power of Art
Art is a major force throughout the novel. From Innes’s initial sight of Lexie, who reminds him of a painting, to Felix attempting to give Innes’s collection to Elina at the end of the novel, art is crucial to the plot’s progression. This narrative influence underscores art’s power to shape the world and influence the development of society. The novel suggests that art can do everything from trigger a memory or evoke an emotion to highlight a political problem and critique societal norms. Art’s importance even informs the novel’s setting; Soho was a hotbed of art and counterculture in the 1950s.
Soho is also the backdrop for Lexie and Innes’s relationship, which speaks to the novel’s particular interest in art’s ability to mediate relationships. Elina’s identity as an artist is what allows her to heal after a traumatic C-section, but it is also what initially causes Ted to fall in love with her. Like Innes watches Lexie in the garden in Devon, Ted watches Elina at work in her studio. Innes sees Lexie herself as a work of art and falls in love with her, while Ted responds to Elina’s absorption in making art—how it transforms Elina into her own person, separate from the world. After the birth of their son, it is the experience of once again seeing Elina become that focused private person that allows Ted to believe that everything will be fine. That security in his relationship in turn facilitates his personal development, allowing him to follow the memories and emotions that have been resurfacing to uncover the truth about his past.
Innes’s paintings represent art’s power to connect people and spark individual growth. Innes uses the sale of a painting to hire Lexie; art buys her independence. Art also rescues her after Innes’s death, as it is her knowledge of art and artists that catches the attention of the editors at the Courier and prompts her promotion and subsequent career. Art buys Lexie’s independence from Felix when she sells one of Innes’s paintings to buy her house.
Given the paintings’ prominence, it is all the more noteworthy that they fade from the narrative in the final chapters. When Felix tries to give Elina the paintings, she is able to identify their value but resists taking them home with her. While her concerns are partly pragmatic—she feels the paintings should be in a museum, or at least treated with more care than she can devote to them at the moment—they speak to the intensely personal role of art in The Hand That First Held Mine. Valuable as the paintings are, Elina recognizes that they are not the art Ted needs: Ultimately, it is only Lexie’s writing that can heal him.
The Effect of Trauma on Memory
There are two primary traumas in The Hand That First Held Mine—Lexie’s death and Jonah’s birth. The trauma of Lexie’s death affects Ted most directly but also has a rippling impact on Felix and Margot. As Elina’s memory loss after her caesarian establishes, the mind sometimes suppresses traumatic experiences to protect itself. In Ted’s case, the memory loss that begins with the trauma of his mother’s death is nearly permanent. It is only the new trauma of Jonah’s birth that begins to trigger his childhood memories, bringing the trauma back to be processed.
What links these two experiences (and thus begins the recall process) is the fear of losing a loved one. Ted believes Elina is going to die. Further, he believes that Jonah is going to lose his mother. It is clear from Ted’s panic when he can’t find Elina when she’s in the studio that Ted has a deep fear of losing the woman he loves. This fear has become part of his identity because of the unprocessed trauma of his mother’s death, but it is an unexamined part. Ted believes he knows who he is, but he is missing an important piece: Lexie.
The novel suggests that strong relationships are vital in healing trauma-induced memory loss. Elina heals from her trauma in large part because she has Jonah and Ted and can assimilate this new traumatic experience into her preestablished understanding of who she is. By contrast, Ted was left alone to deal with his trauma as a small child. Felix says to Ted that after Lexie’s death Ted “sort of forgot” that Lexie died and that Margot wasn’t his real mother (319). This is only half the truth: Ted’s forgetting was a trauma response, but Felix and Margot embraced it rather than helping Ted to process and rediscover his identity. Consequently, Ted is nearly incapable of remembering what happened or coping with the fallout of the trauma even as an adult. He attempts to avoid remembering Jonah’s birth and lashes out at Elina when she tries to get facts from him to resolve her own memory loss. However, once the memories begin to come back, his coping strategies—ignoring and forgetting—no longer work. His attempts to suppress the memories result in physical symptoms: He must discover the truth and feel and process the trauma he avoided for most of his life.
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