Critique of "Xmas, Jamaica Plain"

Light and dark imagery is a major motif in Melanie Rae Thon’s story “Xmas, Jamaica Plain.” The story begins with the dark description of a home invader rifling through closets and drawers. Within the first few paragraphs, a comparison is made between the narrator’s “dark hands” and the “pale woman underthings” belonging to the middle-class owner of the house. Additionally, the phrase “dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone” adds to the light and dark theme. This imagery immediately sets a boundary between the narrator and the faceless owners of the house.

            As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator and her transgender friend, Emile, belong to an ethnicity with darker skin, as the narrator states, “enough hands as dark as mine, enough faces as brown as Emile’s.” Contrastingly, the owners of the house are of the Arian race, as the little boy in the pictures is described as having blue eyes and blond curls. This light and dark imagery sets up a class dynamic. The narrator and Emile are so impoverished that they are forced to break and enter a house belonging to a privileged upper-middle class family for food and a place to sleep. All over the house, photos of a “blue-eyed boy float on the wall,” and Emile says that the boy scares him. Emphasizing this difference in skin color and the implied feelings of each party towards the other highlights the class struggle in racial terms.

            Later, the opposing light and dark imagery begins to represent life and death when Emile commits suicide. Images such as “snow fell like pieces of broken light” and “the butterflies between his bones” draw the themes of life and death uncomfortably close together. The word “broken” brings a dark connotation to the word “light,” and the bruises on Emile’s abdomen are described a “butterflies,” a symbol of rebirth and happiness. Additionally, these images push the light and dark imagery until they begin to collapse, questioning whether life or death is preferable. Death frees Emile from the torments of his gender, yet while the narrator still desires life, she remains trapped by her poverty. Thus, the light and dark imagery drive home both the unfairness of class structure as well as the unfairness of life and death.