Previous
Book 2, Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Son, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain and Maternal Love
Travel, Fitting In, and Values
Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience
Family and Coming of Age
Community and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
Through her tears, Claire tells Alys the story she’s just remembered. Alys inspects Claire’s scar, shocked that anyone would cut a baby out of a mother, let alone a mother who was just a girl. The pain, she says, must’ve been horrible, but Claire says she felt nothing thanks to the drugs. Alys has only ever heard of willow for pain relief, and she then asks about the bleeding. Wounds like this, she says, kill people. But Claire again says that her old community had electricity, so they cauterized the wound. Alys understands this, as she burns snakebites sometimes. They both agree that Claire must find her son.
Alys’s shock is telling, particularly when it comes to her shock that a girl Claire’s age gave birth. This highlights that Claire never really had “meadow days” like girls in this village do: her childhood was spent preparing her to do her duty to her community (have babies) while still a young teen. And while this kept the community moving forward, Alys and Claire’s disbelief and grief show that this system still caused Claire to lose something really important in her youth. The women also acknowledge that despite her birth trauma and her community’s insistence on separating mothers from their babies, Claire’s love for Abe is important—and it does, and indeed should, motivate her to find him.
Themes
Not long after, Claire tells Bryn her story—and she doesn’t realize that Bethan, Delwyth, and Eira are listening outside. The girls then tell everyone in the village that Claire had a baby with no father, and “they” stole the baby from her. Some older women who have lost babies are sympathetic, while younger ones judge Claire. Tall Andras is suddenly cold to Claire. Though she tries to explain that her community’s culture was different and that giving birth was an honor, he insists she’s “stained” and that nobody will want her. Later, Alys tells Claire that people here are silly about this sort of thing. Sniffing, Claire says she doesn’t want to ever marry, like Alys. The women begin laughing.
Despite how supportive this community can be, people’s reaction to Claire’s big secret suggests that, really, people are expected to more or less fit in. The only people who can really empathize with Claire are women who have also lost children and thus understand her pain; everyone else judges her. That nobody seems able to sympathize with the fact that people forced Claire to bear a child and then took him from her perhaps suggests how ludicrous such a situation seems here, where that simply wouldn’t happen.
Themes
Bethan, Delwyth, and Eira are too young to be judgmental, so they ask Claire lots of questions. As she’s gathering firewood with the girls one day, she explains that her baby was a boy, calling him a “male.” While she uses the phrase without thinking, it sounds odd to her now, like she’s describing an animal. She tells the girls that someone took her baby because “[s]omeone else needed it.” Looking up, Claire sees Einar watching. They wave to each other, and Claire realizes he’s the only young man here who doesn’t think she’s “stained”—or perhaps they’re both “ruined.”
When Claire uses “male,” the word feels like a representation of the kind of emotional detachment that her original community modeled, and she recognizes how dehumanizing the term is in this context. Claire shows that she herself is very empathetic: she realizes that having Abe taken from her was necessary to her community’s survival—“[s]omeone else needed it”—and that she and Einar are more similar than they realized.
Themes
