Ellen Foster

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Santa Claus

Santa Claus is invoked by Ellen as a creature of magical capabilities and the image of a generous, beneficent adult who doesn’t exist. While at her first home with her birth parents, Ellen imagines her father thinking of himself as a kind of king or Santa Claus, but instead of granting wishes, he imposes his wishes on his family to their discomfort. Her knowledge that Santa is a made-up personage demonstrates that Ellen’s childhood innocence has been shattered early.

Her cousin Dora’s belief in Santa Claus, later, draws the uncomfortable parallel that other girls Ellen’s age have been sheltered and protected, allowed to retain fanciful, childish beliefs. Ellen, who envies the stories that Dora is told, imagines one of them being that her father, who died of illness, went up to the North Pole to become Santa’s helper, a confusion of Santa with Ellen’s version of God. At her aunt’s house, Nadine’s invitation to see what “Santa” brought her is an illusion Nadine quickly dispenses with by explaining that she got Ellen nothing more than paper because Ellen is too difficult to buy for. Ellen realizes the illusion that she might at last have found a family is as fanciful as believing in Santa Claus, the symbol of her vanished hopes.

Ellen’s Microscope

Ellen’s microscope, the present she buys herself the first Christmas after her mother dies, becomes a source of entertainment, distraction, and wonder. It symbolizes Ellen’s curiosity about the world and her wish to understand how it works. She likes to fancy herself a scientist on the verge of discovery; this interest in knowledge distracts her from her own situation, much like reading the encyclopedias in her parents’ home. At Nadine’s house, Ellen’s microscope becomes a way Ellen tries to prove her sophistication over Dora, claiming it is a gift from a boyfriend—Ellen’s made-up story to show them that she is valued and cared for by someone, if not her family. Dora’s interest in the boyfriend rather than the microscope reveals she only wishes to feel superior to Ellen and is not interested in Ellen herself. The microscope is plastic and has only three slides, which highlights that it was not an expensive purchase. However, it represents Ellen’s ambitions to move beyond her restricted life and do, be, and have more.

The Ocean

Though the reference only appears twice, the ocean is a powerful metaphor for the different, better world Ellen imagines is beyond her lived experience. She never describes personally seeing the ocean, but when her grandmother is dying and Ellen sits at her bed attempting to nurse her, she imagines the blankets of the bed as a vast ocean—an image of approaching death. Ellen concludes that her grandmother has never seen the ocean because seeing the ocean would make an imprint on a person that her grandmother clearly has not had.

When she contemplates the subject of the picture she will create as a present for Nadine and Dora, Ellen considers and discards one of the “experiment pictures” she calls her “brooding ocean” (105). To Ellen, the ocean looks “strong and beautiful and sad at the same time and that is really something if you think about it” (106). The ocean symbolizes something important and stirring for Ellen, a complex emotional experience with several textures, in contrast to the cats she chooses to draw and of which she says, “once you look at it one time you have seen and felt everything you will ever see and feel about those cats” (106). Ellen perceives that she herself is capable of, and might prefer, a more complex frame of emotional reference than Nadine and Dora, who seek to self-soothe with sentimental artifice.