The speaker finds, in addition to the blue dress, a photo album which depicts “faces behind plastic film, the young couple framed with black corners” (6-8). They are photos of a moment artificially preserved, the exact illusion that the child themselves has used as a smudged lens to view her parents and their marriage. Just as the photo is encased and imprisoned, so too is the speaker’s mother. As was the case in “The Grecian Urn” by John Keats, “she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss” (19). The illusion of the mother, truly already dead, has been preserved like leftovers in cellophane wrap and asphyxiated from the lack of
The speaker finds, in addition to the blue dress, a photo album which depicts “faces behind plastic film, the young couple framed with black corners” (6-8). They are photos of a moment artificially preserved, the exact illusion that the child themselves has used as a smudged lens to view her parents and their marriage. Just as the photo is encased and imprisoned, so too is the speaker’s mother. As was the case in “The Grecian Urn” by John Keats, “she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss” (19). The illusion of the mother, truly already dead, has been preserved like leftovers in cellophane wrap and asphyxiated from the lack of