The main point of the article deals with the examination of the mother-child relationship of Violet and Rose Dear, and Joe and Wild, as well as how the loss of the mother figure causes the displacement of the child's developing self. Both Joe and Violet sought to forget and find their lost mothers through denial and substitution. The author of the article states, "Jazz is thus a story about the wounding and healing of unmothered children."
In her first point, the author of the article starts with Violet. She brings up the description of Violet's "private cracks." She uses a long quote (however I'll shorten it), "I call them cracks because this is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light of the day... In truth, there is no foundation at all, but alleyways, crevices one steps across all the time... Sometimes when Violet isn't paying attention she stumbles onto these cracks..."
Mother and Child watching each other
Wild Fox hunting for News in the Fire Forest
Mother & The Commonweal(p.22-23). O'Reilly goes on to discuss Violet's splitting into two "persons" who inhabit one body. One is called Violet while the other is termed that Violet. The second one is a younger self; she is, supposedly, the real Violet. In this section the author delves into Violet's background, and the stories she heard of Golden Gray. Through Violet's grandmother's stories she is taught that "whiteness" and "maleness" automatically come with love and happiness. The other thing that her grandmother teaches is that, although she was forced to leave behind her daughters, the love which should have been for them was given to the white boy with the yellow curls. It's as though she used the golden boy as a child replacement for her daughters. The author states, "Her (Violet's) desire becomes not only...