Memoir and the Construction of Narrative: Look at a Teacup by Patricia Hampl

Historically, memoir has been defined as a subcategory of autobiography. While the art of memoir is nonfiction and written from the first-person point of view (much like autobiography), memoir is differentiated in form from autobiography. Rather than summarizing a life in whole, the memoir offers a much more narrow form. An autobiography tells the story of a life, while memoir tells a story from a life. Memoir is more about what can be gleaned from a few years or a moment in the life of the author, than from the author's life as a whole. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."

The word memoir shares the same root as the words memory and remembers. A memoir captures memories and comes from remembering. Unlike an autobiography, which describes in great detail the writer’s life, memoirs usually focus on a particular time, like childhood, or a particular moment, like the first day of school. These writings not only reveal memories from the author’s life, but they also reveal the author’s thinking and feeling, reactions and emotions. Memoirs may validate our lives. A memoir is a mere slice of ordinary life—a certain time period, a special relationship, a particular theme or angle on life written about the author of the piece. “We write memoirs to remember, to construct meaning from our lives, so that others may witness what life was like for us because this makes us feel more “real.” We write memoirs “to pass it on” and to record what must never be forgotten. We may write memoirs to better understand our lives.

In Look at a Teacup, Hampl has recalled her bygone days with the curves and slurs of the teacup given by her mother.  In narrative, she gives a personal definition of the art of memoir. She begins her memoir with the history of the teacup “she bought the teacup in 1939, of all years.” 1939 is historically unforgettable date in European history which excavates the memories of the brutal World War II, echoes of women’s cry, separation of family members, subjugation of patriarchy in the family, society and the whole world.

   The term memoirs have often been used to describe works that are more properly defined as autobiography, than the literary memoir. Memoir has been used interchangeably with autobiography or "memoirs", generally referred to in the possessive, "my memoirs" or "his memoirs", which were much like a collection of different memories from the author's life and thrown together. Patricia Hampl not only has recorded her memories, but also the memories of her mother. “My mother’s face, which has fallen into sadness, nothing tragic ever happened to her-nothing big, she will say.” Here, her mother’s memories are graver and almost blurred which she doesn’t like to scratch. She submerged into the ditch of marriage and family accepting them as the priorities of her life. Hamp remembers her conversation with mother when she was ten:

“I know the most important thing in the world”, I told her when I was ten.”

 “Well, what is it?” she asked.

“Work. Work is the most important thing.”

Her face showed fear. This fear is the manifestation of her inner thoughts. “No, family is the important thing. Family, darling”, her mother says. Her voice seems repressed and timid. She is the product of the male dominated society where women are reduced as a pet and domesticated living with perpetual fear. Her image can be reflected on the teacup “sometimes it’s so pale it doesn’t seem green at all.” Her face is pale with fear and she has lost natural color forever. The flowers of her life are all scattered which symbolically presented in the description of the cup, “inside the cup, there are the flowers, as if someone had scattered a bouquet and it had tumbled into separate blossoms.” Hampl further writes, “There is a slur of recollection about them, something imprecise, seductive, and foggy.” Here, the words ‘slur, seductiveu and foggy refer a blemish on the image of her mother by the ‘Male’- everyone who were involved in creation of this discourse and waging the war.

The Tao says,” true words aren’t eloquent; and eloquent words aren’t true”. Hampls words aren’t eloquent because it carries the bitter facts of the private life and makes it public as a mirror in front of their faces:

“… one day when dad came up behind her in the kitchen. He kissed her on the back of her neck. She thought they were alone, but my brother and I had followed him into the kitchen. He kissed her neck just where the hair stops. She turned from the sink […]. Her eyes were closed […] gave her lips a clownish kiss […] No, no she said. No, no to any joke.” (60-68)

The image of her father is shown no lesser than a rapist who attempts sex without caring the feeling of his wife and blinding himself with the circumstances. She dares to bring it to the public in order to demonstrate the reality of the male dominated society and to pose question to the so called marriage institution.

During the Second World War, many women become widow and they were compelled to do immoral acts by the force of time. So many of them were raped, brutalized and dragged to the streets by the nation’s policy. She writes “many things fell that year, for those brides- not only flowers into teacups. Their bodies fell, paired with other bodies, on beds together for the first time.” This crud statement juxtaposes marriage bed with the death bed for women who married at that year. Marriage is a recreational process which provides security and satisfaction in human life. But it has been appeared as a trapping black holes to many innocent girls at the time of buds. The horrible image of the war and its impact on female can be seen in her memoir:

Bodies fell that year in Madrid, too. In the cities of Spain, women looked up at the sky in terror. In Barcelona, almost for the first time in history, a woman carrying home a branch of forsythia wrapped in waxed paper ran for cover hiding from the air. In that war, bombs fell on women from the air, and it was planned. (60-67)

The war was planned by the male because Hitler was the male and the initiator of the war. Besides, the decision makers of the war from the initiative countries were all male. Here, she seems more radical in her thought because the long-life victims of the war were women and children. Hampl says that she tries to forget the history but every bits and fragments drives her into the past. She writes, “How can I ride forward on her errand when the entire world, even the smallest object sends me back, sets me wandering over and over about our own strange life and country, always trying to understand history and sexuality.”

In every family, women live like a stranger and a perpetual outsider. Their hands are chained by marriage, custom and rituals. Their voices are subdued and manipulated. The history of sexuality is like the discontinued pattern of the teacup. So she says, “Mother, the cups were discontinued because a country was discontinued.”

With her strong determination and an acute sense of revision of the past, Hampl criticizes women who say more than do. “We sit around a kitchen table, my friends and I, and try to describe even one thing, but it flies apart in words. Whole afternoons go. Women often waste time this way”. But she is sensing the importance of changing the history written by the males. She says, “History has to get written somehow. As Foucault says, history is written by those who are in power and it needs to be changed. “There are all these souvenirs in our houses. We have to wash and dust them,” appeals the writer. Since they don’t have their written history, all these souvenirs like her teacup are the documents of the history. It can speak more loudly then the musty history books written by the males sucking the blood of the women.

In this way, Patricia Hampl records her memories of World War II, along with the narratives of the history of sexuality and mother- daughter relationship. It only captures the bits and chunks of her past and shades sparks on the specific events colored by her own perspective. This memoir has many things to say as her mother always asks, “Darling, look at the teacup. It has more to say.”