![]() ![]() ![]() Or the love that's mixed with piss and can't be separated from it. Frog Music is the best kind of historical fiction: as authentic in its emotions and characterizations as it is in its archival details. Donoghue is so gifted at depicting the fraught blessings of motherhood: "Pressing her boy to her," Blanche feels a "surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. As in "Room," however, the redeeming legacy of a terrible sequence of violence is the bond between a mother and a son, and it's in the tentative moments of love between Blanche and P'tit that "Frog Music" is at its best - heartfelt, affecting, and real. ![]() ![]() It's partly this choice that leads to Jenny's death. When Blanche takes the time to discover the true circumstances in which P'tit has been living, in a brutal baby mill, her uncertain maternal instincts are kindled, and she brings him home. ("She's just done forty days for those pants," Blanche tells Arthur on the night she meets Jenny.) That explains their affinity, and also why in their brief acquaintance Jenny galvanizes Blanche to question her life, most pointedly by asking about her neglect of her son. Both Blanche and Jenny are examples of this, women of independent thought and sexual feeling, and both - like the doomed protagonist of the excellent "Slammerkin" - forced to find expression for it in part through clothing. Donoghue's career shows an abiding interest in the ways that history has found to punish women for being themselves. ![]()
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