“I think of them as coalescences of black fire, I mean they’re dark and bright at the same time. There was one that looked a bit like a black, electrified jellyfish” (59).
“She might see it while walking with Leonard in the square, a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but whole, like a jellyfish” (70).
Cunningham uses these two passages to show the similarities between Richard and Virginia Woolf. Both of these characters struggle with mental illness and using a jellyfish to describe both of their struggles creates that connection. Here, Richard is discussing the images and voices that he sees and hears and Virginia is describing her “headaches.” Cunningham uses the symbol of a jellyfish in both cases since a jellyfish, due to its radial symmetry, has the ability to see all around itself. Richard and Virginia, though labeled as being mentally unstable, are clearly very intelligent; they are both very talented writers who both are known for their brilliant words. Society labels Richard and Virginia as being “handicapped” just as jellyfish may appear to be underdeveloped, but in reality, they are very advanced. Even though Cunningham is using these passages to point out the similarities between Virginia and Richard, he uses the color of these jellyfish to reveal the different ways people can feel pain. Virginia’s pain is expressed through a “silver-white” jellyfish and Richard’s pain through a black jellyfish. This color symbolism seems to represent day and night. Virginia feels as though she is stuck in daylight as she “prays for dark the way a wanderer lost in the desert prays for water” (71). On the other hand, Richard is trapped in the dark as Cunningham describes his face as “[seeming] to rise up out of the darkness like a sunken sculpture hauled to the surface” (58). Through this, Cunningham suggests that too much of anything causes people to feel trapped, whether it be light or dark.
Work Cited:
Whitaker, Daved J., Rachael King, and David Knott. “Jellyfish.” Sea Science. 2006. South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. 4 Oct. 2010 <http://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/pub/seascience/jellyfi.html>.
Photo Credit:
Jelly Fish. Web. 25 Oct. 2010 <http://www.jellyfishs.com/>.
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