The Absence of a Mother in Salvage the Bones Anonymous College

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones depicts the Batiste family, a poor, black family in southern Mississippi living in a crater in the earth called “The Pit.” Plagued with an invading red tint‒similar to that of hell‒and disarranged structure, The Pit is reflective of the Batiste family’s life: dysfunctional and deplorable. The mother of the family is not physically present, yet the father of the family, though physically present, offers no parental guidance to the children. In any case, the family’s true issue is the absence of a mother figure. Throughout the novel Ward takes a psychological approach to present symbols for the different types of mothers in the world. In her novel Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward offers insight on the negative effects an absent mother places on families.

Ward utilizes different characters and animals in her novel to demonstrate that without a mother, family relationships are tarnished and, ultimately, ruined. A study conducted by Qingbo Xu, a doctor of gender studies at The University of Helsinki found that children with an absent mother “s[a]nk into [a] nonchalant and avoidant state [due to] anxiety, terror, rage, or desolation due to their mothers’ disappearance (Xu 150).” Xu also claims that...