Critical Review of Ellen Foster
...letta’s family loved Ellen, but she was afraid to accept it, because of the social standards she was brought up with. By the end of the novel, Ellen invites Starletta to her new mama’s house, and has her new mama embroider an S on the towels for Starletta to feel special. She apologizes profusely about her past behavior and says that to prove her love she would even lick Starletta’s glass. When Ellen moved in with her art teacher, Julia, she began painting “brooding oceans.” The idea of the ocean fascinated her, because of its churning depths, mystery, and power. With her grandmother, Ellen found it inconceivable that such a woman could ever go to the ocean, because a woman so foul would be humbled by the ocean’s power. These oceans represented something in Ellen equally as mysterious and churning. When she lived with her aunt and cousin, she decided she should paint them a picture for Christmas, but deemed an ocean too deep for them. She painted cats. These cats represented their mannerisms. Cats are adorable on the outside, but manipulative and sneaky creatures. They liked to put on a face of being better than they actually were. Ellen’s artwork was a sign of how accepted she felt in a given place. She was encouraged to continue with her art by Julia, who bought her a set of oil paints. Her aunt Nadine, however, thought her cats were a childish gift, and although she pretended she liked them, Ellen heard her telling Dora that after Ellen went to bed they could take the painting off of the wall and get rid of it. Shortly thereafter, Ellen was thrown out of the house. Death and “the afterlife” are important themes in Ellen’s life. Her first experience with death was her mother’s suicide. Through the rest of her life she blamed herself for allowing her mother to die, instead of stopping her. When her grandmother died, she surrounded her with flowers, and hoped that, although she was evil, she would be accepted in heaven. Her father also died, of an alcohol related aneurysm. Ellen didn’t like the idea of her grandmother and father being in the same heaven with her mother, but she hoped that getting her grandmother into heaven would make up for her wrongdoings in the past. Throughout this novel, as Ellen gets older, she becomes more critical of herself. While she’s at her grandmother’s house, she has to deal with constant reminders that she looks just like her father. The grandmother believes that Ellen is just like her father, and seemed to vow to make her life miserable because of it. At times Ellen has to look in the mirror to be sure she hasn’t changed into someone as horrible as her father. Luckily for Ellen, she befriends Mavis, a farmhand on her grandmother’s farm, who tells her she looks like her mother, and teaches her how to work in the fields. Mavis’ family is happy, and Ellen decid...