The Melancholy of Urban Childhood : Liminality in Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This article provides a close reading of Canadian author Madeleine Thien’s collection of short stories Simple Recipes (2001) in order to explore how the concept of liminality can be used to articulate Thien’s characters’ sense of (un)belonging, their identity negotiation and their experiences of transitions. Liminality, in the broader sense of a threshold moment, the period or place in-between, is analyzed from two perspectives: the first is temporal and relates to Thien’s elaborate anatomy of growing up, the transition from childhood to adulthood marked by a sense of loss, abandonment, and grief caused by mostly dysfunctional family relationships. The other kind of liminality relates to her depiction of liminal spaces, both in private and public settings of suburban Vancouver. The relationship between indoor and outdoor space is particularly intricate: while the domestic space is often a source of negative emotions which the young characters long to escape, the cityscape provides a seeming safety and a sense of belonging, particularly for the second generation of characters from immigrant families. Thus I argue that Thien’s stories, by interweaving these two kinds of liminality present specific aesthetics in which most characters find themselves in a transient, restless mode of living, lingering between childhood and adulthood, between indoor/domestic and outdoor/public spaces, and only rarely do they find closure or a resolution. The threshold moments and transitions, in spite of offering a temporary liberation, often lead to a state of melancholy experienced by the characters—a state marked by the difficulty, if not impossibility, to transcend loss, grief and mourning. |
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