The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“‘When we come back we’ll have our baby with us,’ she said. ‘Our world will never be the same.”’

The author foreshadows the problems to come with this statement from Norah. Although babies irrevocably change the structure of a family, Norah’s statement represents a much more ominous look at their family’s collective future. She is correct in that they will return with a single child; however, it is the unknown child that creates tension between David and Norah. Much of the narrative plays with the idea of knowledge, both in secrets and facts or truths that people learn. In this way, although the characters cannot foresee the difficulties they will face, the audience can read into this simple statement to realize that the future will not shape out as the characters intend. The loss of a previously unknown daughter shakes the family to their core, eventually disintegrating the familial structure. The idea that something unforeseen can alter one’s life in this great of a way demonstrates life’s unpredictability, a theme prevalent throughout the novel. No matter how much these characters, especially David, attempt to control their own lives, there will always be unforeseen circumstances which prevent the future from appearing as they imagine it will.

“You wouldn’t know, Caroline thought. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Caroline had given her an eight on the Apgar.”

This quotation demonstrates the importance of knowledge in relating to the external world, especially to other people. However, this knowledge appears to be a double-edged sword: although David knows that Phoebe has Down’s Syndrome merely from looking at her, it also leads him to make his tragic decision that affects many people for the rest of their lives. Caroline’s thoughts make it seem as though Phoebe’s life would potentially have been much different if David hadn’t known from the outset that she had Down’s Syndrome. In fact, if it had been another doctor delivering her, or if David had not had a sister who died prematurely as a result of complications from DS, all of their lives might have been completely different. However, it is David’s knowledge that seems to poison him against his own daughter, allowing him to dispose of her as something that does not fit within his conception of the perfect, happy family. In this way, it is possible that the author suggests that knowledge can also make one incredibly callous and unable to develop emotional attachments with other people. This is certainly the case for David, whose knowledge of both his sister’s pain and his secret knowledge about his daughter creates an insurmountable wall between himself and the other members of his family.

“Caroline remembered the baby, left sleeping in a box [...] Phoebe, Norah Henry had said, just before she went under from the gas. For a girl, Phoebe.”

At first, Phoebe does not even have a name; she just seems to be an amorphous thing that people forget about. It is not until Caroline effectively names her that she begins to care for and consider Phoebe as a person. However, this lack of a name also foreshadows a larger problem threaded throughout the narrative: namely, that Phoebe is given little agency, if any, in her own life. Phoebe only seems to exist within the minds of the people around her. She is not an active character, but rather passively is acted upon by those around her. She is not permitted to tell her own version of events. Unlike Paul, Phoebe is not afforded the opportunity for the audience to connect with her. Therefore, although she is arguably the most important character within the story—especially as the titular character—she is incredibly one-dimensional, a child whose DS definitively informs the rest of her life.

“It was 1964 and he was her husband and she had always deferred to him completely. Yet she could not seem to move, not feeling as she did, that she was leaving behind some essential part of herself.”

Here, readers begin to understand how integral the societal context is to the nature of the narrative. Although society dictates that she follow her husband and agree with his decisions, Norah feels conflicted, recognizing—perhaps for the first time—that her husband is not infallible. She knows intuitively that he is not taking her thoughts and feelings into account, and so by following him she would be leaving behind a part of herself. In this way, Phoebe becomes almost an extension of her mother, more or less symbolizing her mother’s rebellion against patriarchal familial structures. Phoebe’s death becomes the impetus behind Norah’s decision to stray from her husband and, by extension, to stray from patriarchy. Norah feels constricted by the tension between these two different selves, as though she herself is bifurcated as a direct result of patriarchy. The twins then reproduce this bifurcation, as Norah both lives with her son and dies with her daughter. This quotation also demonstrates how one-dimensional patriarchy requires women to become as they lose parts of themselves which do not fit within its power structures. In order to attain her true self, then, Norah must break free from her husband.

“The disorder of the house pressed on her like a weight, as if the very sunlight had taken on substance, gravity. She didn’t have the energy to fight it. What was more, and more distressing, she didn’t seem to care.”

Norah feels the house and her position as a housewife as a burden to the point that even the sunlight feels weighted and heavy as a result of her grief. She also realizes the falsehood of the 1960s ideal that she originally thought would bring her happiness. While David works at a high-powered, well-paying job as a doctor, she is stuck, burdened by the house which reminds her of the loss of her daughter. She realizes that all of the things she cared about before losing Phoebe, all of the things that society tells her she must care about—like making sure her house is clean—are irrelevant in the face of tragedy. Tragedy pushes back all of society’s illusions, as she realizes that none of what she is doing matters. Norah is feeling the typical depression and oppression indicative of 1960s housewives as written extensively by Betty Freidan, among others; however, the emptiness and apathy that Norah feels is also compounded by her grief at the loss of her daughter. This tragedy catapults her into realizing the restrictions of social norms, although she does not seem to know what to do about it just yet.

“Years from now Norah would remember this evening, the gloomy disappointment and Bree bearing shimmering tokens from another world; her shiny boots, her earrings,her energy like a kind of light. How beautiful these things were to Norah, and how remote, how unreachable. Depression—years later she would understand the murky light she lived in—but no one talked about this in 1965. No one even considered it. Certainly not for Norah, who had her house, her baby, her doctor husband. She was supposed to be content.”

Norah feels the weight of expectations which sharply contrasts with Bree’s light. Bree represents a kind of freedom for Norah, specifically a freedom from the oppressive constrictions of patriarchy. However, at this moment, Norah is unable to see how she might obtain Bree’s level of freedom; she believes that that light is unreachable, just as she cannot see a way to free herself from her marriage. Much of Norah’s depression is owed to the societal context itself. Because she lived in 1965 when depression was not widely spoken about and grief was ardently suppressed, Norah feels these negative emotions and restrictions even more deeply. Although depression is still a controversial subject, Norah would have been more likely to seek help or at least, her feelings would have had a greater chance to be validated within the more progressive modern context. Therefore, this quotation demonstrates the importance of the social context within which this novel takes place, as the plot trajectory might have been greatly altered if it was set in a more open context.

“It was only on her way downstairs that she realized her foot was bleeding, leaving a splotchy trail: grim hearts, bloody little valentines. Norah was shocked and also strangely thrilled at the damage she had managed to inflict.”

Norah seems divorced from her body in this quotation as she examines the imprints her bloody foot leaves on the ground. Although she does not seem to feel the pain—most likely as a result of being drunk—she conflates the ideas of love and pain, as though the two cannot be extricated from one another. The audience sees her macabre thrill at her own potential for damage; she seems excited that she has the agency to alter her environment, which she does not usually feel in her day-to-day life. She is pleased to have a negative effect on her environment, as though she feels that she is usually a passive subject rather than an active agent in her own life. As such, she enjoys leaving the evidence of her own pain for other people to find as she is mostly required to suppress this pain.

“He had seen her grief, the space it had left in her heart, when he’d developed the spent roll of film in his new camera: room after empty room in their old house, close-ups of window frames, the stark shadows of the stair rail, the floor tiles, skewed and crooked. And Norah’s footprints, those erratic, bloody trails. He’d thrown the photos out, negatives and all, but still they haunted him. He was afraid they always would.”

It is only when David sees the photographs that Norah has taken of their old house that he realizes the depth of her pain. Even though she repeatedly communicates with David how unhappy she is and tries to articulate her grief, David cannot understand Norah’s grief until he sees her photographs. It is as though David suffers from some sort of emotional block concerning words; he does not seem to attach emotional value to their conversations or to the things Norah says to him despite her repeated attempts to communicate her depression. Pictures become hallmarks of volatility as David can easily see what the other person—in this case, Norah—is feeling based on the images she chooses to photograph. David in turn captures all of his emotions within his photographs and seems to use these exclusively to communicate with other people. This illustrates the silence of the house, as silence is required accompaniment for photographs. David’s silence then becomes communication in and of itself. The author may be suggesting that David is stunted in some very real emotional way as he is completely unable to communicate his feelings with words, instead relying on pictures—much like a child—for his primary mode of communication.

“Kay was the sort of mother Norah had always imagined that she herself would be, handling every situation with a relaxed and instinctive calm. Norah admired her, and she envied her too. Sometimes she even caught herself thinking that if she could be more like Kay, more serene and secure, her marriage might improve; she and David might be happier.”

To Norah, Kay represents a kind of golden ideal of 1960s housewifery and motherhood: Kay is not overly emotional but rather almost detached, a discrete handler of difficult situations. However, Norah does not realize that Kay, too, is probably enormously unhappy with her life or, at the very least, with her marriage, as Kay gets drunk and kisses David at one point. Kay puts on the appearance of the perfect life, which is exactly what 1960s society was concerned with: the appearance of happiness and normality. This façade of appearance is therefore something that Norah feels like she has control over, as though she is entirely responsible for her happiness within her marriage. As a result,Norah feels like she is at least partially to blame for the nature of her marriage to David even though he is clearly the problem in their relationship.

“She touched Norah’s arm and they exchanged a long look, connected for a moment in a way that excluded everyone else. David watched with a rush of longing and with a sudden memory of his own sister, the two of them hiding under the kitchen table, peeking through the folds of the oilcloth, stifling their laughter. He remembered her eyes and the warmth of her arm and the joy of her company.”

Norah and Bree share a kind of bond that David does not have, partially because he is the only surviving member of his immediate family. However, David also keeps people at a distance, preventing this kind of emotional connection. As sisters, Norah and Bree can communicate even in silence, something that David cannot do. Although he imposes silence upon his family, it is an uncommunicative silence, a kind of silence that prevents emotional bonds from growing. He remembers the last time he felt that kind of emotional bond with his sister, June. However, her memory is incredibly painful, and so it seems as though David associates that depth of emotional bond with pain. Even in happy memories, such as this one, David also feels the pain of June’s absence, much in the same way that Norah is reminded of the loss of her daughter Phoebe when she looks at Paul. David desires and yet abhors this level of interconnectivity, as he remembers the pain it leaves behind when the relationship dies. In this way, this quotation demonstrates the conflicted nature of David’s very existence, whereby he both strives towards and prevents himself from obtaining emotional connections with other characters.

“He moved around the edges of the party, smiling and saying hello, shaking hands, drifting away from conversations to catch moments of the party on film. He paused before Kay’s tulips, thinking how much they really did resemble the delicate tissue of lungs and how interesting it would be to frame shots of both and stand them next to each other, exploring this idea he had that the body was, in some mysterious way, a perfect mirror of the world. He grew absorbed in this, the sounds of the party falling away as he concentrated on the flowers, and he was startled to feel Norah’s hand on his arm.”

David exists on the periphery of society, although this isolation is entirely self-imposed. He uses photography in order to distance himself from other people, preventing that level of emotional connection that he both desires and is wary of. It seems as though David believes that the only way in which he can control his emotions is to suppress them by abstracting his environment: he considers how various objects would look as pieces of art, failing to consider the objects themselves as real. Instead, he connects them to other things via abstraction without realizing the real relation they already have to the other objects or people in their surroundings.

“Don’t do it, Norah thought; David couldn’t seem to see how much Paul recoiled at David's suggestions for his future. Don’t. But David pushed on [...] Why couldn’t David understand that the more he pushed basketball, the more Paul would resist.”

This quotation illustrates the nature of three of the novel’s main characters—Paul’s rebellious nature, in that he usually does the opposite of anything his father suggests, as well as David’s lack of connection to his son. The scenario is illustrated through Norah’s point of view, suggesting that she is greatly in tune with the emotions and characteristics of other people. Unlike David, she understands and can empathize with other people, enabling her to predict their reactions. However, this quotation also demonstrates the nature of silence, namely defining it as a kind of contrast: silence seems to exist in the very conflict between words that are said and those that are left unsaid. Through the delineation of Norah’s thoughts, silence becomes not an absence but rather a presence. Silence does not represent the absence of words but rather the weight of those that are thought rather than spoken.

“Now and then when she went into an office in Lexington, Norah would find a photo, anonymous yet eerily familiar too—some curve of her body or a place she had visited with David, stripped of its original meaning and transformed: an image of her own flesh that had become abstract, an idea. She had tried, by posing for David, to ease some of the distance that had grown between them. His fault, hers—it didn’t really matter. But now watching David, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn’t for years.”

This quotation demonstrates a turning point in Norah and David’s relationship in which she realizes that he knows nothing about her. However, the way in which Norah chooses to communicate this is through sight, implying that sight and knowledge are inextricably linked to one another. In order to know someone, Norah suggests, one must truly see them. This also implies that female nature is in some way related exclusively to appearance, as the men never consider whether or not they are seen properly. Rather, it is the women who desire to be seen, usually as objects within the male gaze. However, Norah also reacts against this objectification as she realizes that it makes her feel disassociated from her body, as though her body is no longer hers but something that David can capture in his photographs. David’s gaze strips Norah of all agency and self-possession, rendering her an object to be positioned for male enjoyment and the communication of male beliefs. David uses Norah’s body in order to demonstrate his belief in interconnectivity; Norah becomes a literal pawn in David’s photography, something to be placed on a landscape surveyed by the male gaze.

“He had given their daughter away. This secret stood in the middle of their family; it shaped their lives together. He knew it, he saw it, visible to him as a rock wall grown up between them. And he saw Norah and Paul reaching out and striking rock and not understanding what was happening, only that something stood between them that could not be seen or broken.”

Within this context, David’s secret emerges as a barrier to shape the lives of his family. Although his secret is made from rocks and thereby natural, the implication that it exists as a kind of rock wall suggests that it is not entirely without artifice; that is, there is simultaneously the implication that this secret was beyond and within David’s control. It is also something that only he can see, whereas his family members are blind to it, again giving him an agency within the relationships of his family that the other members do not seem to have. David seems to be the impetus behind the tension within his family, whereas Norah and Paul can only react against it.

“He’d wanted to connect with Paul, to have a moment when they understood each other, but his good intentions had spiraled into argument and distance [...] the world was made of hidden things, of secrets; built of bones that never saw the light. It was true that he’d once sought unity, as if the underlying correspondences between tulips and lungs, veins and trees, flesh and earth, might reveal a pattern he could understand.”

Despite David’s desire to connect with his son, he cannot seem to conquer the distance that he has created between them. He believes that the world is made of secrets, thereby attempting to eliminate some of his guilt for creating and maintaining the secret that is responsible for this emotional distance: David’s abandonment of Phoebe. Here, David conflates secrecy with distance and bones, demonstrating his desire for interconnectivity. However, this interconnectivity seems inherently limited, as he can only connect inhuman things. His desire for interconnectivity really emerges not as an attempt to understand people or things as individuals but rather to see patterns in behavior or events, thereby enabling him to predict the future. In this way, he is not as concerned with emotions but rather desires omnipotence in order to read his own future, illustrating how self-obsessed his worldview really is.

“He glimpsed Duke in flashes, like photographs hanging in his father’s darkroom, all those moments from his father’s life like glimpses from a train. Trapped and caught. Rush and silence. Like this.”

The audience sees a likeness emerge between Paul and his father, who both conceptualize the world in similar ways. However, perhaps this is a result of David’s seeming ubiquity in Paul’s life as Paul cannot seem to divorce himself from his father’s overwhelming gaze. Paul begins to see the world as his father does, trapped in photographs that attempt to encapsulate a moment in time. David represents such an overwhelming force within Paul’s life that his worldview is shaped by that of his father. Paul feels “trapped,” even as he attempts to rebel against this. As a result, Paul seems destined to make the same mistakes as his father, perhaps foreshadowing the end of Paul’s relationship with Michelle.

“Caroline thought of Phoebe, how she loved to clean and organize, how she sang to herself while washing the dishes or mopping the floors, how she loved music with her whole heart and would never have a chance to play the guitar.”

Although Caroline advises others not to underestimate Phoebe, Caroline actually imposes restrictions upon Phoebe herself, such as suggesting that she will never play the guitar. Caroline’s entire perspective and the reason that she fights so hard for educational equality is that it seems inadvisable to hold the same temporal expectations of Phoebe in comparison to other people, for example, her twin, Paul. However, to say that she cannot possibly play the guitar is to fall into the same trap that Caroline routinely reacts against. In this way, the audience sees how Caroline has unintentionally internalized some of society’s stereotypes about people with Down’s Syndrome, namely, that they will never live a normal life. Phoebe is kept silent throughout the majority of the novel, despite being the alleged main character proposed by the novel’s title. She cannot become a fully formed character because she only exists within the confines of others’ gazes. She is reduced to her relation to other people: Caroline’s daughter, David’s secret, Paul’s twin. She is rarely allowed to have a voice but rather only seems to exist in order to propel the conflict of the novel. In this way, the author uses Phoebe not as a character but as a plot device.

“But his last name, McCallister, had been lost. He had never told anyone. He had gone off to college and registered, and no one ever knew. It was, after all, his true name [...] as David Henry he was meant to go to college, a person with no history, unburdened by the past. A man with a chance to make himself anew.”

When David goes to college, he loses a part of himself, becoming a man with no history. Although most people would find this problematic, David seems to be relieved as he conceptualizes the past as a burden. He believes that if he loses his name, he will be able to be free of the trauma of his past, perhaps even forgetting that these traumatic experiences—such as the death of his sister—even occurred. However, the audience sees that David is not able to divorce himself from his past; even if no one else knows who he is, David still remembers this trauma and tailors his behaviors accordingly. For example, David’s decision to abandon Phoebe is a direct result of the trauma he and his parents experienced when June died. As such, even if David believes he can unburden himself from his past, he can never be free of it as those memories will continue to shape his life as long as he remains alive. In some ways, these memories and his history actually outlive David himself, as they result in actions whose ramifications continue to affect his family members after he passes away.

“The secret had worked its way through their marriage, an insidious vine, twisting; she drank too much and then she began to have affairs [...] he’d tried not to notice, to forgive her, for he knew that in some real sense the fault was his. Photo after photo, as if he could stop time or make an image powerful enough to obscure the moment when he turned and handed his daughter to Caroline Gill.”

Instead of being an inanimate and manmade structure, the secret now appears as an animate being with a life—and possibly an agenda—of its own. David can no longer control the secret he has created, as the secret has worked its way through his marriage in ways that he could not possibly conceive. Here, we see David as fallible, despite his self-conception as the primary character with agency within the novel. Even though David has tried to control and manage the secret, he is not omniscient as he originally believed. Despite his agency, he is unable to affect change within his familial relationships in the way he desires due to the unforeseen consequences of his actions. Despite this inarguable fallibility, David still believes himself to be the center of the universe as he is inherently responsible for ruining his family. He cannot turn back time by taking photographs and he refuses to admit to his family what he has done, leaving himself in a kind of tense limbo wherein he is distanced from his family members. He blames himself for everything, including his wife’s drinking and affairs, never considering that she is a fully formed human being with her own desires and character flaws. David’s main character flaw is that he does not conceptualize other people as having agency, thereby believing that anything that happens is inherently his fault.

“He’d discovered music and played his heart out into the silence of that house, into the hole his sister’s death had made in their lives, and that hadn’t mattered either. He had tried as hard as he could to make his parents look up from their lives and hear the beauty [...] yet all this time they’d never looked up, not once, not until Rosemary had [...] cast a new, revealing light on their lives, shifting the composition. After all, a picture could be a thousand things.”

Paul tries to use his music in order to counteract the silence of his house, which is explicitly associated with Phoebe. However, Paul is unable to break the silence of the house, even by filling it with music. In this way, the silence is something that extends beyond the bounds of morality as it transcends the literal into the metaphorical. Silence becomes the very nature of the house, something that cannot be altered. However, silence can be broken with light, which seems to be related to femininity, as Rosemary is able to break the house’s silence in her positionality as Phoebe’s surrogate. This implies that part of the reason for the silence is as a result of an imbalance in the house, which is restored by Rosemary’s presence. In this way, light can also be seen as being associated with balance, which seemingly are both at odds with silence.

“David never touched [Rosemary], hardly even spoke to her except to ask if she needed anything. And yet Norah sensed something between the two of them, an emotional connection, alive and positively charged, which pierced her as much, perhaps more, than any physical affair would have done.”

Despite the silence that Norah witnesses between David and Rosemary, she senses and is pained by their emotional connection. However, she does not realize that David has used Rosemary in order to break his silence and thereby establish the emotional connection Norah longs for. Norah believes that the emotional connection can be made in spite of silence, which the audience knows to be untrue. The dramatic irony between what the audience and what Norah knows allows for Norah to continue to believe that she must be lacking as a receptacle for David’s emotional connection. He has not chosen her for this,despite living in the same silence she perceives David and Rosemary to live in. Again, she does not understand that the silence has already been broken between them, thereby establishing the witnessed emotional connection. Norah then believes that there is truly no hope for her marriage, and Rosemary becomes a kind of impetus behind the marriage’s dissolution.

“She was reminded, unhappily, of those early days with Leo in this same house, as if time were not traveling in a straight line but circling around instead.”

As Caroline cares for Al, she is reminded of the time she spent caring for Leo. Much of Caroline’s life, it seems, has been devoted to caring for other people, at least according to her self-conception. In this way, it makes sense that Caroline is uncomfortable with the notion of allowing Phoebe to become more independent; Caroline might not know what to do with herself without someone else who she must take care of.

“There were pictures everywhere: caught in the rhododendrons, plastered up against the foundations, stuck in Paul’s old rusting swing set. Flashes of arms and eyes, of skin that resembled beaches, a glimpse of hair, blood cells scattered like oil across the water. Glimpses of their lives as David had seen them, as David had tried to shape them. Negatives, dark celluloid, scattered on the grass. Norah imagined the shocked and outraged voices of the curators, friends, of her son, even of a part of herself, imagined them crying out, But you’re destroying history! No, she answered, I’m claiming it.”

Norah realizes that the photographs represent David’s attempt to order their lives in some way, that his quest to demonstrate interconnectivity was really a desire to impose his worldview upon his environment. By defenestrating these photographs, then, Norah is attempting to break free of the constrictions that David placed upon her life. In this scene, she returns the photographs of herself to their environment, effectively re-contextualizing them in order to demonstrate her own agency. Although she knows that many people, including a part of herself, does not understand this action, she knows that she must destroy these photographs to eliminate the control that David has over her life and her past. This is the first time in which Norah truly breaks free from David’s control, which in the past merely objectified her, casting her as a series of body parts instead of a whole being. Therefore, not only is this destruction a method by which Norah breaks free from David but it is also a method by which she regains control over her body. Her body is no longer his to be cut apart and positioned as David wants; rather, it is Norah’s own body to do with as she wishes.