47 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganFoster
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wind
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death of a child, implied parental abuse and neglect, and separation of a foster child from their preferred family.
The natural element that the narrator records most is the wind. It is a consistent symbol of the girl’s emotional state. While she can express her questions and some simpler feelings, both the narrator’s age and the trauma that she’s experienced due to parental neglect render her unable to articulate more complex reactions.
Wind parallels breath and creates sounds that are often compared to human expressions in literature, with verbs such as “sighing” or “wailing.” While Keegan avoids personifying language, the breeze sometimes creates sound when the quiet protagonist does not. From her first arrival at the Kinsellas, “a queer, ripe breeze is crossing the yard” (7), mimicking the girl’s simultaneous excitement and apprehension, sense of abandonment and sense of possibility. It drops in temperature when Da leaves, just as the tension does.
After the trip to Gorey, the “wind rushing through the car” mingles with the chat between the Kinsellas (48), signifying the girl’s well-being as she eats candy gifted by Kinsella. In contrast, after the narrator learns that she has, on some level, replaced the Kinsellas’ dead child, “the wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully through the dry boughs” (62), mirroring her agitation. Upon learning that she is to be sent home, the girl reverts to an earlier version of herself and does not let herself cry. Echoing this, as the narrator clings to her foster father knowing that they will be parted, “a sudden gust blows through the trees and shakes big, fat raindrops over [them]” (87)—the wind shedding tears for her.
The Lost Heifer
The narrator first encounters the lost heifer on her way to the wake with Edna Kinsella. Cows are herd animals, so the heifer is alarmed by its solitude, which symbolizes the challenge of being without one’s family. This beast “who panics and finally races past [them], lost” is purely reactive (50), foreshadowing the narrator’s disorientation and distress in her interaction with Mildred. Keegan emphasizes the association by having the girl see that “the same heifer is still lost” as she walks with Mildred to the shabby cottage (56).
While ill after falling into the well, the narrator dreams “of the lost heifer panicking on the night strand” (78). As she only remains in the Kinsellas’ house due to Edna’s insistence that she recover from her cold, the return of the heifer emphasizes the narrator’s suppressed panic at having to return to her biological parents and leave her chosen herd. The animal’s place on the beach at nighttime resonates with Kinsella’s story of the colt pulled from the ocean, who recovered through simple rest and care—comforts that the girl is about to lose. Accentuating this is the dream “of bony, brown cows having no milk in their teats” (78), symbolizing the lack of nurturing and insufficient resources at the girl’s original home.
Light
Light’s presence or absence in Foster is a motif that correlates with openness versus repression. This portrays the narrator’s associations with the adults around her, accentuating the complex theme of The Power of the Unspoken. Light first appears when Edna creates a rapport with the girl, and the entrance of Kinsella and Da interrupts their sense of ease. The narrator observes that “it grows momentarily dark, then brightens once again when [the men] sit down” (9); the darkness reflects a pause in open relationship building.
At her first bedtime at the Kinsellas, the girl prefers “the light of the day […] still shining bright and strong” to the darkness (24). However, at this point in her emotional trajectory, the narrator is scared to even articulate her fear of the dark, paralleling the impossibility for her to imagine an open and affectionate parent-child relationship. Although this is something that the Kinsellas offer, symbolized by the two lights at the beach becoming three at the end of Chapter 5, the brightness of the Kinsellas’ honesty also obscures the unsaid truth of their dead son. The light underlines this in Gorey, where while enjoying herself with her foster parents, the narrator still “wishes [the strong sun] would go away, that it would cloud over so [she] could see properly” (45).
When the girl walks with Mildred, “the day feels like it isn’t ending” (56), suggesting that the young narrator has had enough of the older gossip’s free divulgence of fraught information. After this upsetting experience, Kinsella and the girl take a walk at night. The moon is so full that they don’t need a lantern, and as they progress to the sea, “the sky, everything, seems to get brighter” (62), illustrating Kinsella’s frankness in their conversation. The light also draws the narrator to her sweet gesture of going to the well for the Kinsellas one last time, “a watery light […] shining off the zinc bucket” (75), which ends in her dangerous fall in the water. This highlights the fact that the openness of the Kinsellas did not save the girl from returning to her neglectful environment.
Names
People, events, and emotions often go unnamed in Foster, and names, as a motif, have great significance. The characters of the novella use generalities to refer to each other in order to avoid the dangers of attachment.
Throughout the text, the narrator refers to Edna and John Kinsella with indirect epithets, chiefly “the woman” and “Kinsella” (the sole last name is how people casually refer to others in their social milieu). The girl cannot refer to the couple by their first names, nicknames, endearments—or least of all versions of “mother” or “father”—because the child is emotionally guarded due to her parents’ neglect. Edna reflects her foster child’s behavior, though her resistance to meaningful names results not from inexperience but from profound knowledge of the pain that can be caused by loving connection to a child. After two brief initial instances of fond naming—“a Leanbh” (8) and “Girleen” (16)—Edna cleaves to simple referents like “Child” (27) and “the girl” (53). For his part, Kinsella does not guard against affection as carefully as his wife, winding up with the playful moniker “Long Legs” (33-34) and eventually the tender nickname “Petal” (59). The girl ultimately replies in kind, her attachment to her foster father becoming so clear and definite that she calls him “Daddy” at the end (88), marking a huge shift in the language of the novella.
