Motherless Children
MOTHERLESS CHILDREN
After a decade in New Orleans, Lafcadio Hearn went to the West Indies. He fell in love with the beautiful island of Martinique and lived there for two years. During that time, he did what he did best. He observed everything with the eye of a lover, perceiving every nuance of character, every hidden beauty, every mundane wonder. He produced the second of his two novels during this chapter of his life.
Both novels are rich with Hearn’s picturesque descriptions of exotic landscapes and his astute rendering of the language and legends of the people who live there. Both novels tell stories of young women orphaned in early childhood. And both extol the life of harmony with nature in contrast to the artificial and alienating ways of refined society.
Chita is an impressionistic sketch of Last Island with the girl Chita but a small figure within the vast landscape. Youma is a traditional narrative with Martinique as the geographical, historical, and cultural setting.
Chita is not really about Chita. It is about Last Island. And it is not really a story. It is too poetic, too dreamy, too abstract to be a story. It is, as Hearn calls it, a memory. In contrast, Youma is about Youma. It is a story and it is her story. It reads like hagiography, like the golden legend of a martyred saint.
Youma is also a personal book – a window into the soul of Lafcadio Hearn. And that is how I like to read it.
Like Chita and Youma, Hearn was an orphan. But his parents did not die. They abandoned him. First his mother, when he was six years old. Then his father, when he was seven.
It was the loss of his mother Rosa and all that she represented that deeply affected the intelligent and sensitive boy. He did not resent her abandonment. On the contrary, he understood her need to escape from her dreary environment. Rosa was a dark-skinned Greek beauty with gypsy blood and a love of blue skies, clear waters, and the glorious sun. Transplanted from her sunny Mediterranean island to her husband’s home in Dublin, she withered like a tropical flower in a cold northern climate. So she fled.
Hearn immortalized her in his two novels. First subtly in Chita and then unambiguously in Youma.
Chita is taught to pray to Señora de Guadalupe – the Mexican apparition of the Immaculate Conception. Soon she comes to love the dark-skinned Virgin. As the years go by, she grows to be a beautiful sun-tanned child of nature.
In an autobiographical fragment written late in his life, Hearn reminiscences about his early childhood – an infant paradise reigned over by his dark and beautiful mother. In another fragment, the mother from his childhood idyll becomes the image of the Virgin Mother – just like in Chita.
Thus is Chita’s Mexican Madonna an image of Rosa. And Chita, grown up, a young woman, vigorous and healthy, brown and free, living in harmony with nature, is Rosa in her sunny island home. Rosa in the beginning, celestial and pure, like Our Lady of Guadalupe.
These images that are presented separately in Chita are united in Youma. Youma is both the orphaned child who longs for a mother and the mother of an orphaned child. She is the idealized Madonna of Hearn’s reminiscences. She is the Immaculate Conception who crushes the head of the serpent beneath her heel and the Virgin Mother who shelters the child Mayotte under her mantle.
When Youma dreams of her mother, it could be Hearn dreaming of Rosa. When Youma strains against an artificial environment that constricts her like the coils of a serpent, it could be Hearn again.
Youma is Hearn motherless in a strange land where he is forever alien, where his language is foreign, his ideas peculiar, his nature misunderstood. But she is also Rosa, straining against the gloom that must have seemed part and parcel of the marriage from which she made her escape.
Chita is Rosa in Greece. Youma is Rosa in Dublin. But Youma is an idealized Rosa. A Rosa who sacrifices herself for her child, for Mayotte, little Mayotte, who is Lafcadio at six years old. A courageous Rosa who stands with her foot upon the serpent’s neck, who stands radiant in golden light, wrapping her foulard around the frightened child’s head.
Chita and Youma and Mayotte – all motherless children – just like Hearn. I believe Hearn longed all his life for his long lost mother.