An American Marriage

In narratives, perspective creates theme. Who tells the story and how they tell the story determine our sympathies and how we read the implications of what happens. As a conventional narrative of a love triangle, An American Marriage could have been told in one of two ways: either as a limited omniscient narration in which one of the three characters tells the story or as a third person omniscient narration in which the author directs the telling. In both cases, the limited perspective would have almost inevitably created convenient heroes and cartoon villains. Our sympathies would be inevitably directed and controlled by who tells the story.  

Here, the story of the love triangle is shared—each of the three principal characters takes an element of the story. Celestial, for instance, tells about Roy’s arrest and trial; Dre relates the narrative of the funeral for Roy’s mother; the reunion of Roy and Celestial is shared by Roy and Celestial. Perspective shifts. We move freely into the limited perspectives of each character. Thus, the reader comes to understand each as complicated and nuanced; each character, because they talk directly to the reader in a voice that is distinctly theirs and from a perspective that reflects their stories, gains our sympathies and at times condemnation.

Because the reader understands the story from each character’s perspective, we cannot thin any one of these characters into “the” problem in the complicated relationship that Roy’s incarceration creates. Just when we want to condemn Dre as an opportunistic interloper, he speaks to us and we hear the simplicity and sincerity of his love for Celestial. Just when we are sure Celestial is heartless and selfish, she shares her memory of first falling in love with Roy. Just when we are sure Roy, coming out of prison, is a grenade with the pin pulled, he shares his visit to his mother’s grave and his heartache over how his life has been destroyed. In the end, the shared narrative strategy creates what these three characters cannot find: community and cooperation.  

The most traumatic event within the narrative of An American Marriage—the five years Roy spends in prison—is related not through the vehicle of limited omniscience but rather through an exchange of letters between Roy and Celestial. The exchange commands more than 50 pages of the novel. The risk is huge. After all, for fin-de-millennium readers a letter can seem as remote and as awkward as a rotary phone or smoke signals. Believing that extreme emotions can be shared in letters that sometimes go for three or four pages can seem artificial in a culture that measures communication in 140-character tweets and two or three sentence emails.

Although he admits he was never much of a letter writer before prison, Roy makes clear the importance of letters now that he is confined. More than the strained and public business of prison visits, letters are more intimate and their impact more lasting. Roy treasures Celestial’s letters. They guide him through his most difficult nights. Celestial’s letters become a way for Roy to maintain connection to the world outside the cellblock. Celestial turns to letter writing on nights she cannot sleep, nights when she is not sure whether she is in love with Roy. For both, letter writing becomes a way of sharing their isolation.

As a narrative device, however, an epistolary narrative creates a far more immediate and far more honest feel to the events. By contrast the limited omniscient chapters can seem rehearsed, staged, or careful. The letters sound raw and immediate, which permits a sense of intimacy, a feeling that Roy and Celestial use letters to voice to their deepest feelings and most difficult emotions (Roy, for instance, explores his devastation over the abortion of their child not during Celestial’s visit but in a letter; Celestial uses a letter to explain to Roy her decision not to continue as his wife).

In reading the letters, we eavesdrop on the characters talking to their own hearts—the voice is unguarded and immediate, the emotions honest and genuine. When after four years the letters from Celestial begin to drop off, we feel Roy’s keen loneliness and desperation because we have shared Celestial’s letters. When Roy, before leaving prison, destroys the letters (except the one in which Celestial tells him she no longer wants to be his wife), we understand the gravity of that gesture. 

Celestial first turns to crafting dolls, her poupées, in the emotional devastation after her first abortion following a college affair with a charismatic, if married, professor. She is in retreat. She is struggling to handle a complex of grief and guilt, shame and vulnerability. Her dolls are her defense mechanism, her way of coping with events over which she has no control.

Over the years, crafting her dolls—and she is quite an artisan, as her work is profiled in regional magazines and her special-order dolls fetch more than $200 each—becomes for Celestial a way to manage her emotions and empower her. With the investment help of her father, she comes to own her own specialty shop. The dolls symbolize her determination to succeed as an entrepreneur in a business world dominated by men.

In addition, she is an artist and finds in the long hours in her workshop, in the detailing of her dolls and the intricacy of their stitch work, an important outlet for her self-expression. Ultimately, however, as with pre-adolescent girls who play with dolls, the dolls come to substitute for children. Celestial even struggles with selling the dolls. Apprehensive about motherhood, reluctant to commit entirely to any man, she is fiercely protective of her cloth creations. Unlike the children she never has or the men in her life, her dolls are hers to design, control, and handle. They do not grow up; they do not change. She does not have to relinquish any element of her autonomy in producing them. She maintains her fierce sense of self and control as well as her sense of pride and accomplishment.

Her dolls, as Roy points out to her, symbolize a more complex strategy for adjusting to his incarceration. Many of her dolls, particularly the one that launches her career and wins a national design contest, is dressed in prison blues and reflect elements of Roy’s face, his style of dress, and his body type. The dolls then become a way to share her isolation with a husband who has been taken from her. Roy inspires her, a sort of muse figure, although she never acknowledges that emotional debt. She never even acknowledges her husband in the acceptance speech for the design contest. Roy assumes it is because she is too embarrassed, but the reader is not so sure.

The poupées are thus complex symbols. They become an expression of Celestial’s independent spirit and resourcefulness, the emotional debt she feels to her marriage, and her lingering grief and guilt over the two babies she destroyed.