Magic tricks: Conjuring meaning/emotion through figurative language in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You
Throughout Everything I Never Told You author Celeste Ng masterfully employs figurative language as a conduit for deeper meaning. Her chosen imagery, be it used singularly or as a recurring motif throughout, allows the audience insight into both the interior worlds of her characters as well as the function — or perhaps more aptly, dysfunction — of the Lee family.
Marilyn — who we are first introduced to as grieving matriarch upon her daughter Lydia’s disappearance — has her life recontextualized through back story showing she had envisaged a future for herself as a doctor. In lieu of this path, detailing Marilyn’s past experience as a chemistry student, ‘the only girl in a room of fifteen men’, Ng’s omniscient narrator employs a key simile:
Her solutions never bubbled onto the counter like baking-soda volcanoes.
Ng crafts her story purposefully such that this image delves deeper than it appears — its meaning far beyond expressing Marilyn’s aptitude for science. The term baking-soda eliciting Marilyn’s loathed domesticity, coupled with volcano presents a palpable danger — a symbol of the fragility of Marilyn’s aspirations. She plans to insert herself in a life of academia but she, like a volcano, is under pressure. This is both internal; to be a doctor, and external (inherited from her mother and society); to succumb to a life of domesticity.
Marilyn’s immersion in domestic life presents the recurring motif of the egg, referenced 25 times in the text, becoming a symbol of domestic life and reproduction as is demonstrated by Marilyn’s mother’s cookbook:
It behooves a wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways.
Here, eggs are a representation of children as Marilyn is cast as chef, both literally and metaphorically as she attempts to make her children, particularly Lydia, behave. When Lydia bends to her parent’s wills, ‘yes, yes, yes’, Nath obliges this dynamic whilst Hannah embodies the unacknowledged; perpetually ‘under the table’ in a both literal and figurative sense. She is both living breathing child and the personification of Marilyn’s lost dream of being a doctor, as Marilyn returned home due to her pregnancy. Yet as Marilyn ultimately refuses to cook, eggs or otherwise, on her return, Ng has her accept motherhood whilst rejecting conventions of domesticity and labour. This tension culminates in the treatment of Lydia, on whom Marilyn disproportionately places her desires:
…guiding Lydia, sheltering her, the way you tended a prize rose.
By comparing Lydia to a rose Ng depicts Marilyn’s relationship with Lydia as one in which control and love are irreparably conflated. Roses are traditionally symbolic of innocence, love, longing, and desire all of which are attributed to Lydia, herself becoming innocence corrupted by the love and desires of her parents. The creation of roses in Greek mythology as one of trauma, is also highly relevant to the Lee family. The death of Adonis, the deity of plants and rebirth, is said to have created roses from his spilled blood. Hence Ng’s metaphor of Lydia as a ‘prize rose’ sees her as the culmination of her parents’ collective pain — Marilyn’s failure to craft a different life and James failure ‘to fit in’. In this sense Lydia’s death is sacrifice, like in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it takes tragedy for those left behind to forgive and grow. James and Marilyn unite whilst Nath is allowed freedom and invisible Hannah is finally allowed visibility, no longer scavenging for trinkets of love.
Ng’s usage of figurative language — combining metaphors, simile, symbolism, and personification — conjures emotional resonance for the audience. Ng’s imagery adopts complex meaning viewed through the lens of other literature or philosophies. In my own writing my use of figurative language can be very insular, as I include it unconsciously, I often fail to reflect on how it contributes to the text overall. I also commonly risk forsaking clarity in quest for originality, unlike Ng who ensures original figurative language is clear yet thought provoking. When using more common imagery she does so in surprising ways which are highly specific to intended meaning. Ng’s writing inspires me to be more conscious of meaning when using figurative language.
References:
Ng, Celeste (2014) Everything I Never Told You, Penguin Press, United States
Article by FTD Fresh on Rose Flower Meaning and Symbolism (2016) https://www.ftd.com/blog/share/rose-meaning-and-symbolism accessed August 16
