Death and Mythology
(Heads up: this post includes a number of spoilers)
The writing of my third novel Ipswich, Mon Amour led me to explore new themes, including death and the unexpected ways modern life is reflected in mythology.
In late 2021, I was finishing the final edits to my second novel, The Mahoneys of West Seattle. It’s a story about the American Dream and one particular family’s struggle to achieve it during the dot com era.
Over the course of the novel, the focus shifts to eight-year-old Nora Mahoney, with the final section of the book focused on her recovery from limb loss. When I began planning the next book in the series, I decided it would feature Nora as a young adult in a time of transition.
Ipswich, Mon Amour begins with two points of setup from the previous novel. The story opens at the top of a mountain that belonged to Nora, as she states in her journal entry on the final page. Secondly, as foretold by the Queen Victoria character in The Mahoneys of West Seattle, Nora is wearing a crown.
Inspiration for the Title
The title of the novel was another thing I’d decided on before diving into the first draft. It came from a course I took while earning my MFA at Columbia University. Every semester, I’d sign up for a writing workshop and four classes. Three of them, as required, were in the Writing Division.
For the fourth class, I was allowed to choose something in another department—film, theater, visual arts or sound art. I always chose something in the Film Division because I wanted to see exactly how a book translated to the screen. l also wanted to explore how the increasingly influential cinematic perspective could shape a novel.
One semester I enrolled in a class called Film Narrative, where we picked apart several storylines and scripts, including one for Hiroshima, Mon Amour. It’s a very different kind of story from Ipswich, Mon Amour, but the title came to mind years later as a way to make French identity prominent in my third book. And I knew the novel would be, in large part, a love story for Nora Mahoney.
The World of Death
The theme of death is introduced early in the story with the loss of Finn, and Matthew Mahoney’s brush with mortality. In the chapter set in France, death takes center stage.
The character Emmanuel is the one who acts as Nora’s guide in the land of the dead, or the underworld. It begins when the two are sitting outside Café Styx, where Nora shares the sad story of her dog Finn. Emmanuel tells her that he experienced a similar loss with the death of his dog Cricket.
As with Nora, he felt himself still connected to his dog, and found it impossible to even consider having another one in his life. He was stuck in a relationship with a creature now on the other side. He became unstuck, he told Nora, when Cricket “gave him permission” to begin a relationship with a new dog. Finn would do the same for Nora, he assured her, when the time was right. That moment does occur later when Nora returns to Ipswich.
L’Empire de la Mort
(Image from Headout Blog)
The day after their discussion at Café Styx, Emmanuel leads Nora into the strange underworld known as L’Empire de la Mort, the World of Death.
When I lived in Paris years ago, I learned of the catacombs. They’re limestone tunnels running below the noisy streets of the city. I paid for admission one afternoon, and descended the spiral staircase into the hallowed realm. As I entered the first main tunnel, I saw stacks of human bones and skulls to my left and right. Millions of them had been relocated from Paris cemeteries beginning in the late 1700s.
(Images from Taking on the World)
The underground ossuary made quite an impression on me. It wasn’t until I got close to writing the actual scenes in the first draft when I realized how integral the setting would be to the theme of death, and to Nora’s identity. L’Empire de la Mort becomes a liminal space for her as she moves from one tunnel to another, seeing the many skulls and bones, imagining who they once belonged to, and how the life journeys of people from centuries before mirrored her own.
The Threshold Between Life and Death
The catacombs are Nora’s point of access to what is inaccessible to most of us in our everyday lives. It’s where she, in a sense, is able to conjure eternity. She stands on the crossroads between the worlds of the living and the dead. Through the power of her imagination, she reaches from her temporal existence into the beyond.
It’s an immersive experience that she doesn’t fully understand right away. Here, another guide steps in, not Emmanuel but his twin brother. Edward is something of a phantom in the novel, talked about but never physically appearing in any scenes. Through his paintings, though, Edward provides Nora with a way to eventually interpret her time communing with the bones of so many strangers.
After Paris, Nora travels to the South of France hoping to reestablish lost family connections. This part of her journey is another foray into to the world of death, one where she succeeds in bringing those connections back to life. In the process, she also ends up finding herself in the form of her great-great grandmother Leandra. That kind of self-discovery could be considered, for any of us, as the ultimate quest in life.
Mythology in Ipswich, Mon Amour
The chapter set in France includes some mythological references early on. My intention was to use a light touch, a few mentions at most. It begins in Paris, where Nora’s rents a studio on Île Saint-Louis.
(Image by Moonik on Wikipedia)
The island is poised between the Left Bank and Right Bank. It as an apt metaphor for Nora standing on the threshold between the worlds of life and death, the temporal and the transcendent, living family and dead ancestors. With the Seine River flowing around her little island, it seemed a good idea to name her preferred coffee shop Café Styx.
Another reference occurs after Nora meets Tess while taking a class to improve her French pronunciation. The two spend time at Café Thetis, named for a goddess known to shapeshift. Tess is a model, and I felt that paired well with her métier. As with actors and novelists, a model is required to live within different characters or personas, a real-life version of shapeshifting. Thetis was also the mother of Achilles, another association with the River Styx and the underworld.
Finally, when Nora attends a party at the Caelum, she’s delighted to see the skylight in the ballroom painted with a host of figures from mythology. On her walk home, she passes Notre-Dame, with the gargoyles and chimeras perched along the roof seemingly on the verge of coming to life.
(Image by Pedro Lastra on Unsplash)
Enter the Greek Goddess Hecate
That’s as far as I wanted to take any direct links to mythology. But while I was researching which goddess might best reflect Tess’s identity, I kept coming across the name Hecate. In high school, I’d studied Latin and Ancient Greek, along with Roman and Greek mythology, so I’m sure I read about the goddess at some point, then forgot.
The more I read about Hecate, the more I noticed how closely she lined up with Nora’s identity. Like so many figures from mythology, Hecate has a storyline that’s inconsistent, even contradictory from one author to the next, and from one culture to another. Still, she has traits that follow her through the ages. The Collector offers an interesting summary. Of the many YouTube videos about Hecate, I found this one to be the most scholarly. It’s also pretty entertaining.
(Relief of three-sided Hecate holding torches. By Zde.)
Death, Necromancy and the Underworld
One connection Nora shares with Hecate is necromancy, the ability to communicate with the dead. This is something that Nora does on her visit to the catacombs. Although she earlier has dreams of her dog Finn, who dies before the novel begins, her experience in the catacombs is an intense immersion into the world of death. It’s where she, in a fashion, converses with those on the other side. After returning to Ipswich, she does the same with her dead ancestors.
In many versions of the Hecate myth, the goddess is responsible for guiding souls into and out of the underworld. When Nora finds her grandmother dead one morning, she considers doing what anyone in that situation would do, rushing to their phone and calling 911. Instead, she remains with her Nana’s body, staying on the “death” side of the threshold. She speaks to her grandmother, reassuring her that they’re still connected and always will be, although in a different way now.
The Greek goddess is also famous for her association with dogs, the companions that serve as guardians of the underworld and protector of the crossroads. Nora’s dog Finn is identified early in the novel as Nora’s canine soulmate. She suffers his loss the way most of us would suffer the death of a close friend or family member. She later adopts or shares Kailey’s two dogs, Jackson and Cheeto, and forms an attachment to a Weimaraner named Oliver.
(A goddess, probably Hecate, possibly Artemis, by Camillo Pacetti, c. 19th century. Source: British Museum)
These traits, by the way, were not ones that I consciously assigned to Nora’s character. It was only as I approached the end of the first draft when I realized the odd number of matches between her and the goddess.
The Moon, Agriculture and Witchcraft
Another connection is to light. Nora tells Kailey that her favorite color is orange because she associates it with the sun, our natural source of light. She sees in her girlfriend the same ability to generate illumination, referring to Kailey in one scene as “her sun and her stars” (which is also a Game of Thrones reference). Nora’s relationship with light is not as a source but rather a reflector. Hence, her association with the moon, which makes an appearance in relevant scenes.
In some tales, Hecate is also linked with agriculture and the harvest goddess Demeter, another touchpoint to Nora’s role as a farmer. Hecate assists Demeter in the search for Persephone after she’s abducted by Hades and held captive in the underworld. Persephone’s negotiated release keeps her in the company of Hades for winter months, when agricultural fields lay barren. She then returns to the world above for the summer months, bringing fertility back to the land.
One more tie between the two is witchcraft. It’s a trait that emerges in more recent interpretations of the Hecate myth. In The Mahoneys of West Seattle, a young Nora visits Salem, Massachusetts, with her grandmother. There, becomes obsessed with visiting museums dedicated to witches and witchcraft. This fascination continues in Ipswich, Mon Amour to a lesser degree. Again, I didn’t realize the connection to Hecate existed until after most of the third novel had been written.
Easter Eggs in Ipswich, Mon Amour
Finally, for what it’s worth, here are a few Easter eggs in the novel. When Nora arrives in Paris, she’s greeted in the courtyard outside her vacation rental by a girl in an apartment above lowering her dog in a basket. In my first edit of the scene, it occurred to me that the same thing happens in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I’ve seen the film a few times, and I’ve always enjoyed it as both a story and a period piece.
(The set of Rear Window, as recreated by Thomas Ripoll Kobayashi)
After Nora has dinner with Tess, the two go to a theater in the Latin Quarter and watch the same movie. In a later scene, Nora breaks into Emmanuel’s apartment in a way that mirrors the action of the character Lisa in Rear Window.
A second hidden reference involves Emmanuel, whose physical appearance and mischievous behavior are a nod to the character Puck from Midsummer Night’s Dream. He, or his brother Edward, photoshop the head of a donkey onto the image of a businessman Nora meets in the party at the Caelum.
Another item is a short line of dialogue. When Nora meets Emmanuel he asks her name. She responds, “My name is for my friends.” The line is stolen from Lawrence of Arabia, a movie near to my heart. I copped another line from the same film in The Mahoneys of West Seattle, where Matthew says, “I am a river to my people.”
Death and Mythology in Chapter One
A final buried detail that foreshadows Nora’s connection to Hecate appears in chapter one. Nora asks Tobias to name the person who is attempting to usurp her role as queen of the mountain. He declares, “It is she who has lately been referred to as the one who fears your fire.” That line is a reference to the goddess Hecate slaying the giant Clytius with a pair of flaming torches.
If you’d like to read more about the research and writing of the novel, check out these other posts:
Scenes in Paris and Southern France