Memory’s Essence in Jodi Picoult’s "Vanishing Acts"

Written By: Cleo C.

Date: 25 Aug 2022

Table of Contents:

Memory’s significance through Delia

How Did the Theme Contribute to Loss of Innocence?

A Memory’s Purpose: Forgetting and Remembering

Memory’s Value: How does it serve as Delia’s paradigm of reality?

Conclusion

Works Cited

Pictures, videos, and dreams are three sources that contribute to humanity’s necessity to store memories. Whether or not it provides a direct image of someone or something, a simple item could hold a vital recollection of a person’s life. An author demonstrates this through a novel that centralizes memory and its impact on the human condition. Jodi Picoult’s Vanishing Acts focuses on a woman named Delia, who loses a remembrance of her childhood and aims to discover it amid a normal and tranquil life. Her journey begins when her father faces a restraining order for kidnapping her old self, Bethany Matthews (Picoult 2005). The story introduces the cruciality of remembrance and its effect on a person’s perception of life. Through this, Picoult’s novel explores the concept of memory in Delia’s journey by emphasizing its role as a paradigm of reality.

Memory’s significance through Delia

At age six, Delia perceived one fun day with her father as a simple vacation. Little did she know, he accomplished kidnapping her daughter to start a new life in New Hampshire (Picoult 372-375). Years later, Delia fails to retrieve these events, leaving her clueless about her real name, Bethany Matthews. However, Picoult’s usage of symbolism proves how memories signify a fundamental gateway to one’s true self. Since the protagonist could not recall vivid details of her past, she develops recurring dreams that leave clues to her lost childhood, “I am little, and he has just finished planting a lemon tree in our backyard… I want to make lemonade, but there isn’t any fruit because the tree is just a baby…He comes over and takes my hand. Come on grilla, he says.” (Picoult 18).

The symbolism occurs through the vision, where the lemon tree and the word grilla resemble a remnant of Bethany Matthews. Picoult’s method infers memory’s essence as a preliminary key for self-discovery. Delia knew that lemons could not grow in New Hampshire, so defining the image’s purpose lingers annoyingly in her thoughts (Picoult 22). As for the term grilla, knowing that it was not a common phrase in the region leaves Delia with more unanswered questions, “What does grilla mean?” (Picoult 19). To appear incessantly in her consciousness indicates vital information for the protagonist to discover. Based on how these elements did not correlate to any New Hampshire source, they imply that the truth exists elsewhere. As it signifies a mysterious paradigm of her reality, she unlocks a key that will give answers about her lost childhood.

How Did the Theme Contribute to Loss of Innocence?

The theme’s prevalence contributes to a loss of innocence using her memories. Her life in New Hampshire was the only aspect she knew about herself. When she questions her father about her mother’s existence, he lies by declaring her dead (Picoult 88). Delia took every word from him as the truth until an arrest warrant from the police entered their doorstep (Picoult 25). Although she insists, he admits to the crime and confirms her real identity as Bethany Matthews (Picoult 26). At this moment, Delia’s clear view of her life turns opaque, unable to process what has been revealed. The world she once knew now seems strange, realizing how most of it was almost a lie. Such events made Delia evaluate a paralleled situation to her loss of innocence:

“Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughter’s eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. Your poor girl, they say. All of those things— the ocean, the whale, her eyes— they’re green. You’ve gotten them mixed up. You’ve had it wrong all along.” (Picoult 92).

The following text analogizes Delia’s issue as seeing blue represents her old perception of life. But the person correcting the judgment could parallel her father’s arrest and the following events that share her actual existence. Delia then learned that entering Arizona holds a handful of answers to her identity, and unhealed wounds that she did not remember existed. After her father’s arrest caused a change of view, the events enhanced her loss of innocence by revealing the reason behind the kidnapping. While her father stays confined in Arizona, Delia follows and uses her visit to regain memories from the past (Picoult 74). This process had to begin with meeting her mother, Elise. After receiving her parent’s perspective of her old life and correlating it to her dreams, Delia analyzes the motif that drove his father to commit a crime.

According to the text, she discovered that her mother had a past addiction to alcohol after a miscarriage (Picoult 146-147). Elise’s circumstances then radiated towards young Bethany, where teachers noticed negligence in the child’s appearance, “Sometimes Bethany came to school disheveled or wearing dirty clothes.” (Picoult 247). Another sign of neglect includes a scorpion-biting incident that Delia’s fiancée, Eric, retrieved from hospital records as his father’s lawyer (Picoult 257). The following document stated Delia’s “difficulty breathing, nausea, and double vision” after a scorpion sting in her left shoulder (Picoult 257). Amid her critical condition, the document also stated that Elise entered the hospital intoxicated (Picoult 259). The incidents show how her mother’s addiction led to child abuse, which was why her father had to take her away. Knowing that her kidnapping involved brokenness in her family caused an emotional toll, “For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget” (Picoult 272). The juxtaposing statement expresses confusion between Delia’s recollections and each parent’s confession. She consciously knew that she could not remember the events, yet her memories revealed much of what she once was. An attempt to recover her childhood led from one controversy to another, and trying to merge what she remembers and what she once felt as Bethany was overwhelming.

As she perseveres through each piece of information, a discussion with Elise’s current husband unlocks a critical answer to her disappearance. This solution refers to the lemon tree dream, where Delia heard grilla through Victor. Once Victor said it, an elaborated version of the same memory appeared:

“Grilla. I am watching him plant the lemon tree. I’ve gotten tired of dancing around it. I want to make lemonade, already…He comes over and takes my hand. Come on, grilla, he says…He swings me up onto his shoulders. He clasps the backs of my legs, to steady me. His hands are butterflies on the insides of my thighs.” (Picoult 398)

Upon her recent recollection, she verifies the meaning of the word with Victor, “Grilla? Victor repeats. Cricket. It’s a …how do you say…term of endearment.” (Picoult 398). The new memory elucidates a father’s indignance that was enough to run away and take her child with him. Bethany’s emotion when Victor touches her thighs implies tension on previous experiences of sexual abuse. Before the revelation, Andrew confirms this evidence in his testimony at trial, “He was abusing my daughter. [He] was doing it then, and he was still doing it six months later when I took her away from him.” (Picoult 383). This truth clarifies how the absence of her childhood memories turned out to be for the best, for it meant saving her from reliving such trauma. This answer thus alters Delia’s impression of his father’s crime by viewing his wrong decision as something Bethany needed. Because of her memories, Delia, once blinded by an illusory life in New Hampshire, now obtains a clearer outlook on reality. Her loss of innocence through the events pushed the character to endure the facts in her recollections, as each question revealed a broken childhood. Therefore, memory prevails as one’s paradigm of reality by allowing individuals to face the truth, regardless of how joyful or painful.

A Memory’s Purpose: Forgetting and Remembering

Delia’s journey shares the theme’s effect on one’s life by forgetting and remembering. Memories have a primary feature to store information in the human brain by influencing a person's “perception, attention, and learning” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). In addition, the presence and absence of our knowledge enhance this function of learning about life and its aspects. The protagonist demonstrates this idea through her journey. Retrieving and forgetting information contributes to Delia’s evaluation of reality. As she tries to understand an unknown past, her memories guide her to acknowledge the truth.

For Delia to recollect something, she must first forget. The quest begins once her father confesses his intentions to save her daughter from a mother’s abuse (Picoult 146-147). Delia then realized that she never recalled anything about her parents’ accounts of her childhood. She acknowledges the absence of a specific memory, but why she would forget those events remains a mystery. It was not until Eric, her father’s lawyer, mentioned in the trial that it pertained to a sense of trauma (Picoult 406). In Bethany’s mind, Elise’s alcoholic behavior and Victor’s sexual harassment resulted in the brain to imprint this as something frightening. Along with these actions, her mother’s negligence detrimented her well-being and considered most of her childhood as traumatic. Such aspects were mentioned during Andrew’s trial with Dr. Rebbard.

During the expert witness’ testimony, Eric questions the profundity of Delia’s amnesia and correlates Dr. Rebbard’s knowledge with the evidence of maltreatment (Picoult, 404-406). Eric analyzes how Delia’s cause of forgetfulness could lie in the center of Elise’s and Victor’s abuse. For an individual to repress memories from one phase in her life entails a legitimate reason why she could not recollect its images whenever desired. Dr. Rebbard confirms her situation to involve dissociative amnesia, which refers to one’s incapability to remember events that are “usually of a traumatic or stressful nature.” (Picoult, 404-405). Eric then proposes a theory implying that it was not her choice, but her consciousness: “What if, to Delia, the kidnapping wasn’t something frightening? What if she considered it a relief, a way out from the sexual abuse?” (Picoult, 406). A source from Encyclopaedia Britannica supports this notion, where “one’s memory of an emotionally painful experience leads to severe anxiety, [where] forgetting may produce relief.” (2020). Dr. Rebbard’s cross-examination infers Delia’s amnesia to associate a form of escape from an event her mind deems detrimental. Comparable to a car crash, the impact on one’s emotional and physical well-being caused a defense mechanism by repressing the negative recollections (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Although not all minds may work this way, Delia’s memories happened to conduct this out of escaping a harsh reality; in her mind’s defense, they were trying to save her.

The retrieval phase of Delia’s journey shows another pivotal aspect of the theme by going in the opposite direction. As forgetting the past drove her forward and avoided years of emotional abuse, retrieving the memories pulled her backward to seek the missing pieces of her reality. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, an individual can recollect a memory at a later time due to a “‘retrieval cue,’ which elicits the [vision] of the experience.” (2020). The retrieval cue in Delia’s dream poses a significant role in understanding her past. As the lemon tree did not signify any part of her life in New Hampshire, its occurrence hinted to the character that her reality exceeds the borders of the region. Dr. Rebbards agrees with Eric on how retrieval cues offer the first step for renewing lost information, “So a triggered memory isn’t planted, so to speak. It really does exist, and has just been waiting for the right time to break free.” (Picoult 405).

In Delia’s situation, her sudden remembrance of the past serves as a triggered memory due to mandating a similar object, phrase, or idea to induce the renewal. As the lemon tree appears in her mind, a present image before the recollection contributes to this: “I sit down on a mossy log while Greta sniffs around the periphery. Above me, something dangles from a branch, full and round and yellow.” (Picoult, 18). Sitting down under a tree that bears a yellow object was the retrieval cue for the memory to appear. Her mind registers a resemblance between the yellow color and lemon due to “a physical setting that is naturally associated” with her past life (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Her conversation with Victor on the word grilla is another prominent example since hearing him say the words unleashed more information about the dream. Through this, Delia shows how the process of forgetting and remembering became an essential role in discovering her true existence. With the mind serving as a guide to the truth, the protagonist considers how her memories know much more of herself than she ever will.

Memory’s Value: How does it serve as Delia’s paradigm of reality?

While a memory’s attributes to understanding reality, its value offers another element of significance. Although Delia learns that her memories intend to share the truth, noticing its value centralizes on the effect made in her perception. Seeing her father arrested magnified a wake-up call by her doorstep. The present life she vividly remembered now feels deceptive, and she questions her father’s intentions. But as Delia dives deeper behind his kidnapping, her memories clarify Bethany’s story through a different view. What she received from her questions emerges a broken family, where a little child endures an alcoholic mother and a man’s licentious conduct to her innocence (Picoult 384).

Despite the pain she obtained get from discovering the truth, knowing why something so precious but now unfamiliar was essential. Her life in New Hampshire concealed her true existence, which she later perceives as an illusion. Amid its incoherence, she leans on her memories that guided her disordered outlook towards the solid truth. Memory’s value occurs through this reliance, as her brain defied any character’s judgment on her past and convinced Delia that understanding Bethany lies within herself. For instance, Delia was the only character, aside from Victor, that knew the term grilla. And that was because the term in her dream poses as a nickname for Bethany (Picoult, 398).

This knowledge bestowed on her vision demonstrates Delia’s unique outlook on her past. Because her memory offered a key that Delia only knew, she discovered a new path to realize the truth. She confirms the theme’s value by saying, “There isn’t one truth, there are dozens. The challenge is getting everyone to agree on one version.” (Picoult 418). To decipher the actuality of life was what Delia learned by thinking outside the box. While other characters convinced her to look at one view, her memories pushed her to perceive another direction and persuade others of its validity. After gaining all the knowledge from her journey, she understands how a citrus fruit symbolizes a child who endured a traumatic upbringing. Through the lemon tree and the word grilla, the memories became her paradigm of reality.

Conclusion

Delia’s memory proves the theme’s significance as a person’s model of the real world. The symbolism of the lemon tree proved memory’s relevance as Delia’s key to the past. As her father was arrested for kidnapping, she realizes how her vision provides a foreshadow of a concealed truth. She thus loses her innocence when a memory alters her perception of reality and clarifies her entire existence by retrieving its events. The theme also proves how producing a paradigm of the truth includes a process of forgetting and remembering, where Delia endures these crucial aspects to understand her mind’s intentions. Through this process, her dependence on memories shows how its value relies not on the ability to seek one form of truth but on the angle that stands out in other interpretations. Through Delia’s journey, a memory’s value as the paradigm of reality allows the beholder to seek a life with their choice of perception and embrace its ideals that compel them to move forward.

Works Cited:

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Memory.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Mar. 2020, www.britannica.com/science/memory-psychology. Accessed 11 Jun 2020.

Picoult, Jodi. Vanishing Acts. Washington Square Press. 2005.