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| photo: Deborah Feingold | |
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than 30 works of fiction, including Practical Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah's Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things and The Dovekeepers. Her latest novel is The Marriage of Opposites. She lives near Boston.
What inspired the idea for The Marriage of Opposites? Were you of an admirer of Camille Pissarro's artwork, or of the Impressionists in general, prior to writing the novel?
I went to a Pissarro exhibit at the museum at Williams College and was surprised to discover how little I knew about the painter, even though I was a great admirer of his work. I discovered that he was Jewish, that he was raised on St. Thomas and that his mother, Rachel, was involved in one of the biggest scandals in the Jewish community on that island. The more I read about Pissarro the more interested I became in his family, and especially in the history of his mother. I began to think about what life experiences create an artist's sensibility, and how the actions of Pissarro's mother impacted his art and moved him toward his choices in his creative life as well as his personal life.
The central figure in the story, Rachel, is a fascinating woman, full of passion and contradictions. From a writer's perspective, what made her an interesting character to bring alive on the page?
I'm always interested in telling stories that have not been told, and very often women's stories have not been told. I could find certain facts about Rachel's life, but her essence remained elusive. For me as a novelist, it was a great opportunity to imagine her life. There seemed to be opinions about her, mostly negative, but the heart and soul of who this person was, was missing. That was what I was looking to find as I wrote about her.
So many times women's stories are lost to history because they're kept secret to protect the storyteller or the subject of the story, or because they're only shared with other women and not written down. Women's stories are most often an oral history, passed down through the generations. My desire was to give a voice to a character who had not fully been heard before and, in Rachel's case, who had been devalued and maligned because she had a rebel's soul. She acted as a man might have, and suffered for her choices and, I believe, most likely would not have lived any other way than as she did.
Tell us about the process of blending fact and fiction in The Marriage of Opposites.
I did as much research as I could, and then I just let go and imagined what Rachel's life might have been. The Marriage of Opposites is a novel based on facts, and I did my best to discover all that I could, but I hope the book, and Rachel, are given life via imagining. In some way, I think the character and the author become one being; we share a dream of what the world is like and who we are in the world. When you become so close to a character, it is a great loss to finish the book and to no longer share that world with her, and yet I feel personally enriched by entering into the world of the Pissarro family and the invented lives of their neighbors and friends
In the novel, Rachel and Camille have a contentious relationship. Was this true in real life? How pivotal was Rachel's role in her son becoming a renowned artist?
From letters and historical archives, it seems that they did have a contentious relationship, and yet they were close as well. Rachel was often portrayed as a very difficult woman, the ultimate Jewish mother who was very demanding. But she also supported her son and his family financially throughout her life, and it seems that she followed him to Paris. My sense is that she greatly affected her son as a person and especially as an artist. They both were rebels, outsiders and individuals who did not follow the rules. I think this led Pissarro to become one of the fathers of Impressionism, to be fearless in his work and in his politics and to be as true to his own nature as possible, as Rachel was to hers.
Magical realism and references to fairy tales often infuse your work. In The Marriage of Opposites, how is the Caribbean folklore tradition--which includes mystical fables featuring birds and animals--an integral part of the story?
For me the most interesting literature always consists of fairytales and folk tales. They are culture's original stories, and they're often the stories grandmothers tell to grandchildren, the stories that are passed down generation after generation. I used both Caribbean folklore and Parisian fairytales, mostly fairy stories by Perrault, using a combination to give a sense of the flow of cultures in St. Thomas at that time. And, of course, Rachel begins to record and tell her own folktales in fairytales which indicate her emotional state. For me, fairytales have always been the most emotionally true stories. I think you can know Rachel through the stories that she loves and the stories that she shares with those she loves.
Two very different settings, the island of St. Thomas and Paris, France, provide the backdrops in The Marriage of Opposites. Have you visited these locales?
I've been to Paris many times and have always been enchanted by that city, as Rachel is. I've never been to St. Thomas. But for both locations, what I was writing about was a place which no longer existed, or only existed in the past. Interestingly, Rachel studies Paris for her whole life, and when she gets there, it's not at all what she expects it to be. It's been completely rebuilt, and to her surprise what she longs for is the past and St. Thomas. --Shannon McKenna Schmidt