Before you were Mine - Quotes

Question 1

“your polka-dot dress blows around your legs. Marilyn.”

Answer 1

1 - a dress “blowing” around your legs symbolises youth and freedom, like free things blowing in the wind. Suggests that the youthful nature of her mother has allowed her to be free and a symbol of youth - “shriek at the pavement”

2 - Short sentence of “Marilyn,” once a symbol of glamour and sexual liberation, yet fell to her downfall, foreshadows too her mother’s downfall, who fell to her downfall due to the speaker’s presence of being her child?

3 - she had an idealised and inflated image of her mother, showcasing how her mothers life is elusive to the speaker, alike to Monroe, she will never know her on a personal level

Question 2

motif of light & “Where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine”

Answer 2

1 - semantic field of brightness - vitality she once had which motherhood had robbed her of, brightness contrasts the despairing tone of “before you were mine”, she views herself as the reason she rid her mother of her glamour - her birth marked the end of her mother’s youthful joy.

2 - polysyndenton, endless glamour her mother beholds, emancipation her mother once had, destroyed by the likes of motherhood