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.
Themes
The Power of the Unspoken
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.
Unspoken events and emotions are portrayed as both protective and dangerous in Foster. Characters frequently remain quiet about emotionally weighty information in the name of loyalty, love, or self-protection.
The unspoken reality of the Kinsellas’ drowned child shapes the text. As the dramatic irony around this event develops, it gains more and more weight, building to the moment when Mildred tells the narrator that she’s been “living in the dead’s clothes all this time” (55). Mildred’s question, “Sure didn’t he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown?” (56), is frank but grotesquely flippant and jarring. The girl is rocked by this knowledge, but she has had enough time with the Kinsellas that it doesn’t destroy her relationship with them, hinting that Edna and Kinsella were thoughtful in not detailing their past earlier.
Kinsella advocates for not speaking unless it is truly necessary. His point that “[m]any’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing” speaks to the political context of the novella as well as its emotional heart (64-65). The British government withdrew the right to remain silent during police questioning in Northern Ireland in 1988 to expedite the processes of dealing with terrorist suspects (“United Kingdom: Northern Ireland: The Right of Silence.” Amnesty International, 1 Feb. 1993). This context suggests that Kinsella sees silence as synonymous with freedom, self-protection, and loyalty to a cause. The power of silence in Foster therefore speaks to the belief in and suppression of Irish Nationalism during the period in which the novella is set.
Foster is, however, ambivalent about keeping secrets. Edna’s stated belief is that “where’s there’s a secret […] there’s shame” (21), implicitly invoking the context of the Magdalene laundries. Furthermore, the girl’s parents asking her to keep their secrets forms part of their implied abuse. However, the narrator’s decision not to tell her parents about either falling in the well or the Kinsellas’ loss is framed as indicative of loyalty. The girl’s withholding of information becomes powerful in its tenderness rather than denoting shame.
Keegan offers no clear philosophy on the merits of silence but does suggest that remaining silent offers opportunities for protection, kindness, and loyalty. The novella examines its characters’ propensity for the unspoken to explore their pain and limitations as well as their love and wisdom.
Healing Through Found Family
Both the Kinsellas and the narrator begin to heal from their traumas through their relationships with each other. For the adults, living as they have been under the shadow of grief, it is a rediscovery of certain joys and worries. For the young girl, this development is new growth, salving her experience of neglect and hardship to create openness and emotional maturity. It is the latter arc that makes Foster a coming-of-age story.
Fear shapes the narrator’s initial experience of the Kinsellas, but the couple’s compassion begins to change this paradigm. A crucial example is after the girl wets the bet and Edna discovers it, making the girl want “to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over” (28). Rather than castigate her charge, Edna’s announcement that it was the mattress—“the bloody thing is weeping” (29)—allows the girl to save face. The woman offers the narrator a new experience of this childhood problem being merely a practical matter rather than a cause for punishment and profound shame.
John Kinsella’s attitude toward the narrator also enables her to open up emotionally. The first time he gives her a direct command to wash up before going to Gorey, the girl “freeze[s] in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen” (43), but Kinsella demonstrates that he is not a physical danger. By the evening of the same day, the narrator already trusts her foster father more, willingly sitting in his lap and getting comfortable enough to “put [her] head against him” (53). This is a warm interaction for Kinsella as well, given that Mildred observes that he “won’t budge as long as he has her on his knee” (54), emphasizing his consistency in contrast to the unpredictability of the girl’s father. When the narrator runs to Kinsella at the end, she is finally in touch with her emotions as she “become[s] the messenger for what is going on inside of [her]” (86), rather than suppressing them as when she tries not to cry earlier in the novella.
Ample resources and intellectual attention also help the girl to develop. Her mental acuity is ignored by her biological parents to whom her value appears to be as a source of labor. Da’s statement that “she’ll eat but you can work her” is refuted by Kinsella verbally (12). This is then reinforced by the girl’s sense that, in doing chores with Edna, the woman “wants [her] to get things right, to teach [her]” (30). Kinsella continues this education, teaching her to read. His goodbye to his foster child encourages her to continue this pursuit, telling her to “keep [her] head in the books” (85)—a prioritization of a young girl’s schooling that was not common in rural Ireland in this period. Moreover, the narrator learns greater trust in her own understanding. She moves from being uncertain about Kinsella’s joking to letting herself laugh at his words, “realis[ing] it was a joke, and that [she] got it” (66). This freedom to laugh epitomizes her healing in Kinsella’s presence.
Foster honors the reality that many found families offer more to children than their biological families are able and that foster parents can bring great richness to a household. Though the end of Foster evokes melancholy, this theme gives the novella an air of hope.
Rural Life as Shaped by Natural Rhythms
Undergirding the passage of time in Foster is the changing of the seasons and the requirements of farming. Rural concerns flavor the atmosphere of the text, while the inexorable natural rhythm of summer turning into fall lends the novella both momentum and a sense of inevitability. Through these rhythms and the forces of nature, Keegan suggests that humans do not have full power over their lives and decisions.
From the beginning, the common ground between the narrator’s biological family and the Kinsellas is farming, which is impacted by nature. At Da and the girl’s first arrival at the Kinsellas’ house, the two men first talk about “how little rain there is, how the fields need rain” before moving on to “the cost of lime and sheep-dip” (6). Later, both Da and Kinsella use the time constraints of natural light and the demands of their farms as an excuse to leave the other’s house. Da claims that “the daylight is burning, and [he’s] yet the spuds to spray” to depart from the Kinsellas’ at the beginning (14), and Kinsella explains that “[t]hese cows don’t give you any opportunity to have a lie-in” to get away from the discomfort of leaving his foster in a challenging home at the end (84). Rural affairs are the main topic of conversation for others in the community, too. At the wake, the whole community talks “of the forecast and the moisture content of corn” (53). Keegan’s attention to the rhythms of farming suggests that rural communities’ livelihoods are governed by the forces of nature and not purely by their own will.
In addition to the pressure of ever-elapsing days, the bigger-picture rotation of the seasons shapes the narrative, even in the brief few months that it spans. Early on, the difficult financial straits of the girl’s family are revealed by them being off-schedule in harvesting the hay—something that Edna can see because the demands of the seasons on farms are exacting. As Edna and the narrator make their way to the wake, the girl senses “something that might come and fall and change things” in the air (49), literally implying the onset of fall and figuratively foreshadowing the revelation of the Kinsellas’ dead son and the ending when the girl is not allowed to determine her own future. Keegan emphasizes this shift through the death that incites the wake, as autumn is the precursor to winter’s withering. Additionally, with the call for the girl to return home comes a rainy period, a dry summer progressing to the dampness of fall. This rain mimics the emotional environment in the Kinsellas’ house, the dolor of the child’s impending absence taking form. Neither the child nor the Kinsellas have the power to reverse natural rhythms and prevent the girl from returning home and back to school.
The pain of the conclusion is increased by the parallel of the girl’s time with the Kinsellas and the indifferent turn of the seasons, leaving the impression that the characters in Foster are at the mercy of forces beyond themselves.
