“You can’t speak, or wake, the Bible opens and opens, unburned, no last page in sight. The voice doesn’t come again. But most of it, you know, began a long time ago. Began without voices. Began with you.”
The presence of the Bible daunts the occurrence of the voice. Psychoanalytically, the Bible embodies the religious philosophies which sponsor the suppression of Ruth’s voice. Ruth faces the alternatives of electing the Bible or the Voice. The voice’s non-appearance surmises that she opts for the Bible in lieu of the voice. Accordingly, she curbs her innate voice by way of Biblical standards.
“I thought about how, since forever, amen, she had been the light and the truth and the only decision. When I was a child, there was no choice. She made good the very bread she set out at our table, every fat, white loaf of it. These are the Saturday nights I recall. Me, by the window, reading some romance about pirates and treasures and the shining sea, a tale I’d sequestered from the Inez Public library. A book hidden inside the sacred covers of the family Bible, which she thought I was reading Genesis to Revelation and back. Wash up, she would say, and I’d go to the kitchen where my father would stand at the sink, scrubbing his hands with a bristly brush until it hurt to see. He would wink at me over shoulder, as if to say such pain was nothing to a man. Then he would sit at the head of the table, ready to pass the steaming bowls…she made me see how I didn’t deserve any of it, potatoes, the cast iron pot of tender squirrel bones and gravy. The scent of the food caused a sickness in me. The words made me feel smaller and smaller, made me feel so light and hungry for something I couldn’t hold on the table at all.”
Ruth, (Andrew’s mother) sets tremendously extraordinary religious canons which she anticipates him to submit to unconditionally. Ruth is a model overbearing parent who exploits religion to torment her son. She is a perfectionist who presumes that her son should be utterly flawless too. Besides, she induces him to employ façades based on how he secretes the non-religious book using the cover of a Bible. Andrew has no liberty to lead a sovereign life. Andrew’s father is cognizant of the emotional pain that his mother subjects him to. Ordinarily, ‘scent of food’ would have activated Andrew’s hungriness, but the sickness it aggravates validates that Andrew is typically unhappy at his home especially during meal times. Ruth gratuitously exploits religion to demean and belittle her son to the degree that he deduces that he is an inconsequential being.
“Choice, that mystery. As far back as I can remember my dreams were about choice. In one dream I woke thinking I heard a summer storm. Still in that tenuous place between sleeping and waking, I sat up asking what, what? The sound of storm gave way to the sound of waves, that sound I’d heard from a would-be genuine hardware store seashell .And then , gently, as if the voice rode the crest of a wave, something said, I have need of you, I want to know you. I went back to sleep, choosing any place other than a huge unknown.”
Andrew’s concession in this passage establishes that his unconscious longing is the sovereignty to select his predilections. Andrew’s dream epitomizes the muddle that has marred his life as a result of lacking a voice due to his mother’s religious stimulus. Besides, the deficiency of self-determination prompts him to quash his longings. The voice proclaims the unconscious longings which Andrew would fancy to exploit independently; his unconscious hankering is that he should apprehend himself instead of quashing his needs.
“Home from all those nights I slipped out to meet Henry Ward. It was forever itself, those nights. Me, escaping the house. Its five rooms. Me, tiptoeing from my own room down the dark hall with the light bulb hanging from the frayed cord.”
Based on the Queer theory, Andrew is in love with Henry Ward. However, he is terrified displaying affection in public because it is regarded as an abomination. The night bids darkness which obscures Andrew’s endeavors. His enigmatic sneaking infers that his motivation is beyond the conventional acquaintance; if it were an orthodox friendship he would not have endeavored to camouflage it using darkness.
