48 pages • 1 hour read
Jane SmileyPerestroika In Paris
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Madame’s Afghan
The afghan Madame de Mornay knits recurs throughout the novel and this becomes a symbol of human age and endeavor. Due to her age, Madame can no longer see, so the blanket becomes a mix of colors that do not necessarily go together. During a night working on her project, she observes that she has “only three small balls in there. She had stitched each section to the others, and the afghan spread out over her bed and draped to the floor on every side. It was almost complete” (216). Madame completes her project and, in her final moments, celebrates with an outing to the stores. The following morning, Conrad finds Madame has died in her sleep. Madame’s afghan and the work she puts into it symbolizes her life and the work she puts into living in modest comfort despite her infirmities and loneliness. It is a symbol of her life, as completing it becomes her final accomplishment.
The afghan also symbolizes Madame’s past experiences. Through her memories, Madame reveals that she had filled many roles throughout her life: wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother being her favorites. She represents these many roles in the various colors the blanket takes on; as she cannot see the colors that she knits into her afghan, she also cannot see the impact her work within these roles has on the lives around her. Whenever she worries about what will happen to Etienne, she turns to her work. Though she physically knits her blanket, she symbolically plans ways for Etienne to continue living comfortably after she dies, and the two tasks become intertwined.
When Madame dies, Etienne flees with Paras and his friends; he never gets to enjoy the comfort Madame prepared for him, just like he never gets to enjoy the afghan she finished knitting just before she died. Instead, he only faces “the shadowy emptiness of her yarn basket, like a hole in the ground, a drain to nowhere” (239). He cannot enjoy the comfort because he only sees the emptiness. Etienne never inherits her life work, and so he never gets to appreciate the comfort she worked to provide for him. The afghan is therefore a bittersweet symbol of love and loss.
The Pond
The enclosed pond next to the Eiffel Tower where Paras, Frida, and Raoul settle at first is a symbol of freedom, and also the dangers that freedom can bring. The pond is a haven for the animals: It is “inside a low fence” and the “grass inside the fence was rich and deep, and the water in the pond was good enough” (32). No matter how many nighttime excursions she goes on, Paras and her friends always return to the pond to spend the day out of sight. Even though the pond is enclosed by a fence, the fence is low enough that Paras can come and go as she pleases and there is no roof over her head so she can enjoy the sky. The pond around which Paras forms her friendships and serves as her safe place is a motif for the theme of The Universal Longing for Freedom and Belonging.
However, the pond is not permanently safe. Etienne follows them back and offers them food, violating their free space and infringing on the animals' comfort living around the pond. For much of the novel, the animals’ freedom depends on living separately from humans, so the pond provides them a space to hide and escape from their prior entrapped lives. Etienne wishes the animals to live with him and Para’s training means that she is unable to resist this. Eventually, Paras enters the de Mornay residence, lured there by Etienne, and her loss of permanent freedom foreshadows her return to the racing world.
Paras’s Oats and Food
The novel uses food to explore Paras’s relationship with humans and the nature of her survival both with and without them. Some of the human characters feed Paras as a means of transaction or ownership whereas others, such as Anais and Jerome do so out of altruism. They believe the animals they see are imaginary, yet they continue to feed and treat them as people because it is the kind thing to do. Jerome regularly shakes Frida’s hand and Anais uses personal funds to improve the quality of oats and feed she gives Paras. As Paras improves her life and revels in the comforts of her freedom, the quality of oats and food she eats increases as well. This makes the oats Anais feeds her, as well as the general act of feeding Paras, a motif for the theme of The Bond Between Humans and Animals.
Smiley demonstrates this by contrasting how Delphine feeds Paras oats to how Anais does. When Paras first meets Anais, she observes that Anais is “a remarkably sympathetic human—similar to Delphine in her demeanor, but requiring nothing, and not likely to pull a halter from behind her back and put Paras in a stall” (54). Although both Anais and Delphine feed Paras, their motivations differ. Anais wants to be kind, whereas Delphine expects something from Paras. Smiley uses this contrast to demonstrate the differing bonds between humans and animals. Some bonds are sympathetic, where animals and humans coexist without expectations; other bonds are commercial, where one party gives the other party something (food, in this case) expecting to get something from the fed party.
