Themes and Meanings
The central theme of Lucy concerns Lucy’s coming-of-age in a new land. That process forces her to define her relationship with Mariah, her mother, and her homeland, while at the same time she must learn to recognize her self. In some ways, Lucy seems always to have had a clear understanding of who she is and what she wants, but her anger at her mother dramatizes her real confusion.
From soon after Lucy’s arrival in New York, it becomes clear that she was very angry when she left her homeland and family. She says that she had never expected to miss them and that they had never shown regard for her feelings. She ridicules the fears of New York that her mother expressed in the few letters that Lucy opened, just as she ridicules the paltry news of island life that her mother is able to report. In the course of the novel, readers also see Lucy’s anger at her father for his endless infidelities to her mother, as well as her anger with her mother for enduring the succession of mistresses and illegitimate children his love affairs have produced. All that anger boils over when, after months of refusing to open her mother’s letters, Lucy learns of her father’s death. She is angry at her father for being the sort of man he is and at her mother for putting up with him, for allowing herself to end up widowed and penniless. Although Lucy sends her mother money, she accompanies it with a harsh letter. Later, she sends a kinder one, but she also tells...
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