Lecture 14 c: Claire Keegan’s Foster Part 3

In part three, Kimberly discusses the spare richness of the prose, figurative language, desire, and the close of the novel.

[carmendeee]

Thank you so much for posting this lecture! I immediately rushed to find a full analysis after finishing. I could easily listen to another 90 minutes of you talking through this book!

[TomBrzezicki]

In reading “Foster”, I was puzzled by the trips to the well that Edna takes with the little girl narrator. After all, the Kinsellas have indoor plumbing, so why the need for the daily after supper walks across the fields to get a bucket of water for the kitchen? Maybe the answer is obvious to other readers, but it wasn’t to me, but after recently reading Claire Keegan’s short story collection, “Antarctica”, I think I may have come across a possible explanation.

In one of the stories set in Ireland called “The Burning Palms”, a grandmother lives in a dilapidated cottage with no indoor plumbing. One day, a county engineer comes to visit and tries to persuade her to move to “a grand new house somewhere else with a little bathroom and electricity.” After all, he continues, “wouldn’t it be nice not to be dragging well water for the rest of your days?” The grandmother rejects the offer and explains, “There’s no water makes tea like well water. Would ya not agree?”

A quick check on the internet confirms the grandmother’s opinion that purified water or “quality spring water” brews the best tea. So this is probably the reason for Edna’s trips with the little girl to get water from the well each day.

[TomBrzezicki]

Thank you for posting this lecture on Claire Keegan’s “Foster” and giving us the benefit of your insights into this wonderful story of childhood, parenthood, and the importance of kindness towards others. Just looking at a few notes I made while watching your video, I wanted to point out the significance of the steel-toothed comb that Mary uses on her daughter’s head. Obviously, this is a lice-comb designed to remove head lice and their nits and eggs, and signals that it is not so much physical neglect that Claire Keegan’s little girl suffers from at home as it is emotional neglect; her parents are too harried and busy—like her mother—or too indifferent—like her father—to give her the attention and overt expressions of love she needs.

As for the little girl being the victim of physical/sexual abuse, I don’t think the evidence is there. It sounds brutal, but speaking as a retired child protection/family services worker, if Dan were a real sexual abuser, he would have had his daughter sitting next to him on the front seat of the car so that he could grope her one last time before dropping her off at the Kinsellas for the summer. He would also have used the opportunity to threaten her with the terrible things that might happen if she ever told anyone about their “secret”. So I don’t think that Dan abuses his children, and the fact is, the story doesn’t require that dark of a background component in its structure; it works better without it. I also have to admit that I don’t like to think of our nameless little girl as being an abuse victim. Even though she’s just a fictional character, I still feel protective of her and want to spare her such grief and trauma.

I strongly agree with you when you point out the importance of John giving the child the gift of reading. Improved reading skills will not only benefit her in school, but will open up to her the joy and companionship to be found in the world of books. Books at her age will be as beneficial as spending the summer with the Kinsellas, by offering her other ways of looking at the world and providing her with a temporary escape from the dismal realities of her home life.

As for the final scene, the final paragraph, and the final words of “Foster”, their roots can be traced back to the middle of the book around the time the Kinsellas take the little girl to the wake and then leave her in the care of their friend Mildred. Mildred peppers the child with questions about John and Edna, and eventually tells the child whose clothes she’s been wearing and how the Kinsella boy lost his life.

The little girl stands up to Mildred’s aggressive interrogation, and shows she has the inner strength to absorb the news of the death of the Kinsella boy without flinching until John finally arrives to take her home. There then follows the scene where John takes her to the shore of the Irish Sea, where they see first two, then three lights shining on the horizon. It is difficult to interpret this sign in any other way than to conclude that, in the eyes of God or the Universe or the gods and goddesses of Irish mythology, the little girl is now part of the Kinsella family, a fact confirmed when John takes her into his arms “as though I were his own", a foreshadowing of the final scene where the child takes John into her arms, as though he were her own.

The rest of the story, it seems to me, is centred on our little heroine’s efforts to control her life and shape her own destiny, within the limitations of her status as a child. We see this when the letter from her mother arrives instructing the Kinsellas to drive her back home. The child makes her position clear and goes on the record in stating that she doesn’t want to leave. When she asks Edna, “I have to go back, then?” it’s obvious that she’d rather stay with the Kinsellas. By stating her own wishes so clearly, she forces Edna and John to confront their own desire to keep the little girl in their care. John, in fact, seems to find the idea of losing his newfound daughter so upsetting that he leaves the room. By means of her simple question, the child has clarified how the three of them feel about the splitting up of the family they have made of themselves over the summer.

The day arrives when the little girl is to go home. But through an accidental set of circumstances, she is given the opportunity to perform one last service for the Kinsellas. Although she knows John and Edna would not approve, she decides to go to the well on her own to get a bucket of water for the kitchen. It is one last thing she can do to show her love and gratitude to the couple who have cared for her over the summer, and to demonstrate that she is still a contributing member of her family. This independent-minded child is a far cry from the little girl who first arrived at the Kinsellas weeks ago and was bathed, dressed, and cared for by Edna as if she were an infant.

In the process of filling the bucket full of water from the well, the little girl tumbles into it and almost drowns. However, through her own efforts she escapes her watery grave. She has shown grace under pressure and so cheated death. If she can survive this harrowing experience on her own, she should be able to withstand whatever forces of parental neglect and indifference may be waiting for her at home. Incidentally, from a brief skim of Irish mythology I’ve learned that its lore includes a long tradition of sacred groves and enchanted wells with magical powers.

You mentioned, Dr. Ford, that the bath Edna gives the child on the day of her arrival could be seen as a form of baptism, a ritual to introduce her to life at the Kinsellas’ dairy farm. Perhaps falling into the well is another form of baptism, intended to fortify the little girl for her return home and the next stage of her life.

After her dunking, the child spends a few days in bed recovering from the chill she caught. During this time, she reads her books, “following what happens more closely and making up something different to happen at the end of each, each time.” Using her imagination to formulate different endings for the stories she’s reading reflects what the little girl is trying to do with her own life; that is, come up with an ending that preserves her connection with John and Edna despite her return home.

And I think she succeeds. When she’s sitting in her kitchen back at home and suddenly sneezes and her mother asks her if she’s caught a cold, she replies, “Nothing happened.” These are the same words she overheard John use with Edna in explaining why there was no need to tell Mary or Dan about their daughter’s near-death experience at the well. It is the little girl who takes the initiative in this situation to conceal the truth from her mother in order to protect the Kinsellas. After all, Mary and Dan are her parents and if anyone is going to take the responsibility for lying to them, it will be herself.

The final scene offers another example of the child seizing the opportunity to shape events so as to nudge her life’s trajectory in a more positive and healthy direction. She refuses to allow John and Edna to give her a hug and a kiss goodbye and then simply drive away. She realizes the three of them love each other and are grieving inwardly at their separation, yet so far none of them has openly expressed what they are feeling inside. So, before it is too late, she runs after the Kinsellas’ car and throws herself into John’s arms, calling him “Daddy”.

This one word “Daddy” carries so much weight. Not only does it signify the love between a daughter and her father, but also as the responsibilities a father bears to care for and protect his daughter. By making a public declaration that she views John as her “Daddy”, the little girl has not only bestowed a great mark of honour upon him, but also a tremendous responsibility, a responsibility he cannot lightly dismiss or walk away from. To do so would betray the love that he and the child hold for each other, as well as the spirit of the family that he, Edna, and the little girl created during their time together over the summer. Having lost their own son, John and Edna will not readily abandon another child now that she has become such an important part of their lives.

For this reason, I find that “Foster” ends on a hopeful note. Through her own actions, our child narrator has pushed matters past the tipping point and brought the love between her and the Kinsellas out into the open where it has to be acknowledged and accommodated. The child can’t unsay and John can’t forget that he is now her “Daddy”. It is on that basis that relations between John, Edna, Mary, Dan, and the little girl they share will have to go forward, and I’d say the odds favour the child and the Kinsellas.

[TomBrzezicki]

I promise, Kimberly, that this will be my last effusion on Claire Keegan’s “Foster”. It’s just that I’ve reached the stage in life where you realize you have more regrets about the things you didn’t do than the things you did do, so here goes.

The way that the little girl has changed by the time John and Edna drive her back home at the end of the summer made me consider that she is not the same child that her father Dan dropped off at the Kinsellas months earlier. She understands that she has “learned enough, grown enough” to begin developing her own identity, her own “secret place in her heart for herself”, to quote the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly.

So, in a sense, she is a changeling child. And if you consult the Wikipedia entry for “Changeling”, you will find that in Irish and European folklore there was a belief that fairies would sometimes kidnap human babies and substitute their own fairy babies to be raised by human families, much like cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests (and if you listen closely while watching “The Quiet Girl” you will hear the sound of cuckoos calling periodically in the background throughout the film).

As the Wikipedia entry informs us, one way of identifying these changeling fairy children was by their “ravenous appetite”. Any family suspecting it had a fairy child on its hands would naturally want to unload the burden on to someone else. Some element of collective folkloric memory may be at work, therefore, when Dan delivers his daughter to the Kinsellas and warns them, “She’ll ate ye out of house and home”.

I know it sounds fanciful, but I thought of “Foster” as having an echo of the Greek myth of Persephone. This idea came to mind in the opening scene of “The Quiet Girl” where Catherine Clinch, as Cáit, stands up in the grassy meadow where she’s been hiding and appears to rise up out of the earth, like Persephone arising from her home in the Underworld, to facilitate the annual planting, growing, and harvest season, before having to descend into Hades again at the end of the year. The little girl in “Foster” is also taken away from the dark, dismal underworld of her family home to spend a few months in the sunshine and light of the Kinsellas’ farm, before having to return to her own particular Hades in the fall, albeit and stronger and more self-reliant individual.

I also thought of the little girl in “Foster” as fulfilling the traditional three-part Hero’s Journey. First, she is taken away from her own home to a new and strange place. Second, she meets two mentors in the form of John and Edna, who teach her how to live as part of a loving, caring family. The little girl also confronts and overcomes adversaries such as Mildred the nosy neighbour, and dangers such as her escape from a drowning death in the well. Third, the little girl returns home, a wiser and stronger person, better able to deal with the forces of parental conflict and indifference within her own family.