42 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy GrealyAutobiography Of A Face
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Crying
Unable to truly help her daughter, Lucy’s mother attempts to do so by telling her to be brave and encouraging her not to show pain or fear about her illness and medical treatment. Lucy accepts this and makes every effort to suppress her emotions when she is around her mother, remembering her “first visit to the emergency room” where she had “been praised as good for being brave” which she took as “a formula for gaining acceptance” (30). Symbolically, this is highlighted by her attempts to not cry, with her again focusing on the time when she was “courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good” (21). She develops this into the most important component of her adopted code of conduct, that “[o]ne had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (29-30). Time after time, she fails to stop herself from crying before, near the end of her two and half years of treatment, she finally stops weeping during chemotherapy. However, this comes at a cost. While her mother praises her “for being so good,” Lucy’s repeated efforts to deny her need to engage with her emotions, and release her pain and fear through crying, leave her feeling “absolutely nothing” and “only a void” (137).
Masks
Masks are symbolically significant in the play, signifying reflecting freedom, liberation, and Lucy’s perceived need to hide herself from the taunts of others, in order to feel confident. Lucy’s self-perception is profoundly affected by the cruel taunting that she experiences daily at school and out in public (which, ironically, includes the direction to “take off that monster mask” (118)). As much as she tries to dismiss it or insult the bullies back, it becomes “harder to take,” and Lucy finds herself “changing, becoming more fearful” (145). This fear and self-doubt shape her actions, making her reclusive, anxious, and depressed. She realizes the full scale of this at Halloween, when she puts on an “Eskimo” costume that includes a scarf that covers her face. In this moment, she feels “wonderful” (119) and realizes that it is because “No one [can] see me clearly. No one [can] see my face” (120). As she finds herself “waltz[ing] up to people effortlessly and boldly,” she realizes quite “how meek” and “how self-conscious” (120) she has become, and how much people bullying her has restricted her freedom. She experiences the same thing the following year when she goes out in “a plastic witch mask” (127). Again, granted the anonymity of the mask and able, for once, to interact with people normally, without fear that they will insult her or stare at her face, she feels “bold and free” (127). It is at once a moment of liberation but also a painful reminder that it is “[her] own face” that keeps her “apart” from other people, making her conclude that her face is the “tangible element of what was wrong with [her] life and with [her]” (127). Much later, when Lucy begins “dressing provocatively” (207), she acknowledges that her new look is “just as much a costume as dressing androgynously had been” intended to hide her “fear of being ugly” and allow her to “use [her] body to distract people from [her] face” (208). In this sense, the “provocative” outfits operate in a similar way to the masks, symbolizing Lucy’s effort to hide her face and her fear and allowing her to appear confident and free.
Mirrors and Reflections
Mirrors and reflections are a source of torment for Lucy for much of the book. When she goes to a wigmaker, she spends much of the visit avoiding looking at her reflection and when forced to do so, begins to think that she“might look much worse than [she] had supposed” (111). Later, when she decides to “very carefully, very seriously, [assess] [her] face in the mirror,” she is horrified by “the ugliness” (111) that she sees reflected there, and is filled with “a profound sense of shame” (112). Even after a pair of new operations manage to successfully reconstruct her face, she cannot “conceive of the image as belonging to [her],” and entirely avoids looking at her reflection “for almost a year” (220).
Importantly, however, this was not always the case. When Lucy looks in the mirror shortly after her operation, she does so “with a preoccupied preadolescent view” (104), looking at herself but not judging herself. It is only after she is routinely teased for some time that she learns to see her reflection as something ugly and unacceptable and so sees mirrors as threatening and upsetting. Ultimately, then, it is other people’s cruelty that truly serves as a mirror for Lucy’s perceived ugliness, distorting her self-image until she believes she is entirely unattractive and unlovable. Significantly, by the end of the book, Lucy realizes that “for all those years,” she had been “hand[ing] [her] ugliness over to people” and has “seen only the different ways it was reflected back to [her]” (222). As such, she reveals that what people’s cruelty is reflecting is her own negative self-image. As she works this out, she is finally able to confront her reflection again.
