Essay Questions

Provide a psychoanalytic analysis of Iris’ response regarding her unsuccessful sixteenth birthday ceremony.

Melody asserts, “I don’t get it. This is my ceremony and you’ re trying to be stuck about the music. You blew yours, remember-“ Iris responds, “No, the baby in my belly blew mine. Remember?” First, Iris depicts an unconscious aspiration to live her sixteenth birthdate through Iris. Her selection of the music, which is divergent from melody’s, is a pointer of the music she would have favoured for her ceremony. Second, Iris employs Displacement when she blames the baby (Iris) for her ruined ceremony. Iris is still wounded for the failure of her ceremony and she Displaces her displeasure on Iris calculatedly as a mechanism to mitigate her antipathy for early motherhood which deprived her of the prospect of an exceptional ceremony equivalent to Melody’s.

Deconstruct these assertions: “I hid you from them, you know…That’s how you got here. They were hella good Catholics back then, but you would have been dust.”

Iris utters these words to sanction that her parents were not cognizant of her pregnancy. The assertions insinuate that Melody’s grandparents would have endorsed an abortion for the sake of conserving their repute as steadfast, religious people. Dust is emblematic of the terminated pregnancy which would have quashed Melody’s odds of being. Manifestly, duplicitous religion emboldens facades of purity and religiosity.