Dread
When describing Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, one is likely to say that it begins with the accidental drowning of a child. In fact, the drowning does not arrive until page 19. The retrospective impression that two-year-old Lizzy Collins dies on page one is due, at least in part, to Hamilton’s skill at building a sense of dread right from the opening sentence: “I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident” (p. 3). The narrator, Alice Goodwin, amps up the foreboding even more in paragraph two: “I opened my eyes on a Monday morning in June last summer and I heard, somewhere far off, a siren belting out calamity.” A siren is never a good sign, particularly when it is paired with a word like “calamity.”
On the next page the author continues the use of ominous language to prepare us for the tragedy to come:
The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves. (p. 4)
Notice the words: burned out, fierce, dirges, slaves, and the repetition of no. This is immediately followed by a description of “the jewel of the Goodwin property,” the pond where poor little Lizzy will soon drown. We don’t know yet that something awful will happen there, but the narrator’s palpable sense of irony about the pond (“I often had the fanciful thought that the pond would save us”) and its supposed innocuous qualities (“There were no leeches, no film or scum or snapping turtles, no monstrous vestiges from the Cretaceous Age lurking in the depths”) lends the pond a dark power.
Not content with building a sense of dread through description, Hamilton fashions characters and dialogue that ooze portent. On page 5, Alice’s three-year-old daughter, Claire, “banged her spoon on the table and announced, ‘I’m going to die when you do.’” (This declaration also serves to misdirect the reader, since it’s not Claire who drowns but her friend, Lizzy.) The tension escalates even more as Claire’s five-year-old sister, Emma, acts up at breakfast, testing Alice’s patience. In this scene, we get our first inkling that Alice is, at the very least, overwhelmed by the challenges of motherhood, and at most, too unstable to withstand the trauma we sense is on the way. When she notes that “Outside, the air smelled as if it had been cooked, as if it had been altered by the heat and was no longer life sustaining” (p. 8), we begin to understand that all the dread she is establishing has as much to do with her fragile state of mind as it does with the awful events to come. (Howard, her husband, later points out Alice’s tendency to exaggerate, a harmless habit that suddenly seems much less benign given the bizarre accusations leveled at her.)
After a several-page section of exposition, during which Alice skillfully paints an unflattering portrait of the townspeople who will eventually turn on her, she returns to that fateful Monday morning. First, Lizzy and her sister, Audrey, are dropped off by their mother, Theresa, who is Alice’s only friend (that Alice has only one real pal further hints at her unsettling “otherness”). Alice then lays out her plan for the morning, an idyllic jaunt to the pond with the four girls, composed in the conditional tense. “I would walk down the lane,” she begins, and then proceeds to pollute the whole tranquil enterprise with one simple, sarcastic sentence that screams DOOM: “The simplest thing in the world” (p. 16).
Next, Alice puts the milk away and retrieves some butter from the freezer, perfunctory details that, in this context, nevertheless carry portent. While searching for her bathing suit, she’s distracted by the map of the world she made as a kid, which she finds buried in a drawer. While she rhapsodizes about the map and her active childhood imagination, we’re thinking, “Uh-oh—what’s going on with the four very young children on their own downstairs?” Sure enough, once Alice finally puts the map away and locates her swimsuit, she comes down to find only three of the kids in the living room. Still, it’s several more paragraphs before she wonders, “Where’s Lizzy?” and even then she pauses to pull a hanging thread from her shorts (“It was tickling my calf” p. 18). Her cluelessness, combined with the carefully constructed suspense, creates even more tension in the reader. Finally, Alice searches for Lizzy and, seeing the wide open screen door, her feet feel “like two flabby erasers” (p. 19). At last! So she runs outside “like a blind person, stumbling over my own heavy limbs,” until she comes to the pond:
When I came to the clearing I couldn’t see past the single glaring point of sunlight, dancing on the water. I put my hand on my forehead, to make a visor, and still it took me a minute to find the pink seersucker bottom just beneath the surface, about fifteen feet from the beach.
This odd description of a drowned child—just a “pink seersucker bottom”—is startling in its emotional distance. Alice then takes a step even further back, framing her subsequent actions (running into the pond, attempting resuscitation) with this introduction: “When I am forced to see those ten minutes as they actually were…”
Why this distancing? Throughout the novel, Alice and Howard regularly speak of these events having occurred “last summer,” which places their current vantage point somewhere in the following year. Past-tense novels do not typically specify how long ago the action took place, so Hamilton does this for a reason. Perhaps concretizing the time difference allows her narrators, especially Alice—and especially Alice at this traumatic juncture—the specific distance necessary for tolerating the powerful emotions involved. And yet the emotions shine through, as does the dread that permeates those first 18 pages, so that the reader, looking back, sees the drowning as inevitable.
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