This Life Belongs to Clara
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Clara—the cinder girl of this Cinderella story—is a bit much to take on the subject of how awful it is to be attractive. The angst she burns over the trials and tribulations of being born beautiful is almost enough to make you think she had a really very serious problem. And, of course, she does also have that. But this imagery is one of the few times her complaints actually seem almost worthy of being openly expressed:
“What is mine? These are mine: the song of birds, though you can’t always see them. Pouncer the cat, when he wants to stay with me. Sometimes he doesn’t. Look, the flat sky that sits on the garden walls like a leaden roof. Some snails. The same old bushes. Soon there will be enough dead leaves to have a fire, and then smoke will be a rope up into the sky. That’s mine. It’s all I have.”
What is Beauty?
Beauty is a big topic of conversation among the characters in the novel. Of course, as indicated, an ungodly amount is expended on the topic of what a burden is to possess, but elsewhere imagery is engaged to explore more profound issues:
“How can you compare one beautiful thing to another?” says Iris the Ugly.
“Good question. Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence—fleetingness—a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color—the lilies of the field!—more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women’s grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures.”
Green Grass
Come to think of it, there is a lot of complaining about a lot of different things by the characters. And yet of all the disparage individual topics, an overarching theme begins to rise to the surface which connects them all. There is an awful lot of complaining about one’s own very green grass rather than whining about the neighbor’s being a more vivid hue. The problem is that despite having greener grass, they still complain with the weird part being they complaints aren’t about the neighbor’s lawn situation but their own!
“Only he with the hobbled foot knows the beauty of running. Only he with the severed ear can appreciate what the sweetest music must sound like. Our ailments complete us. That we in our sinful souls can ever imagine charity- 'She can't go on for a moment. 'We may not always be able to practice charity, but that in this world we can even imagine it at all! That act of daring requires the greatest challenge,”
The Master’s Art
A character known as the Master spends the least amount of time working himself into an angsty froth over what he has. This is because his art is sublimation. He sublimates his angst into artistic expression. Needless to say, not everyone is crazy about the results of this sublimation:
“A naked woman with the head of a bird is trapped in a glass bubble. Two men without clothes blow trumpets whose crowns disappear into one another’s smooth behinds. A girl looks out over the lip of a huge sunflower, trapped there. A man shits gold coins onto a hunk of bread that a woman is busy trying to cram into her mouth. A baby with a bishop’s miter pushes a man backward into a well. Demons cavort carnally with men, women, bear cubs, and plants. A sweet girl on her hands and knees seems to have a vine growing out from between her legs, and from the vine dangles a pear, an apple, and a violin.”
