In his first post about State of Wonder, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky posed a series of questions about Marina’s nightmares. As the first section of the book unfolds, we learn that Marina’s childhood trips to visit her (largely absentee) father in India were accompanied by a recurring dream of being separated from him in a crowd. For me, the narrative of Marina’s abandonment by her father was crucial to fully engaging with Marina’s sense of emotional entanglement with Karen Eckman following the news of Anders’s death.
Specifically, the nightmares helped me understand that Marina feels that she and Karen are kindred spirits in many ways. Anders, like Marina’s father, has gone to another country and left his family bereft. While it wasn’t, obviously, Anders’s choice to become deathly ill in the Amazon, he wanted to make the trip to Brazil in the first place. Why? To look at birds, a ready symbol of freedom, of being untethered. When Karen calls Marina in the middle of the night to confess her wholly uninformed uncertainty as to whether her husband is actually dead, she is enacting her own version of Marina’s recurring nightmare: where is he? The first section of the book, to me, feels shot through with anxieties about men possessing a capacity for self-determination–namely, the ability to leave–that women, the bearers and nurturers of children, are denied.
And so we come to Marina’s feelings about her own lack of hometown responsibilities. One of the most powerful moments in this section comes when Anders, rhapsodizing about the potential implications of Dr. Swenson’s research, says to Marina, “You can always have children.” He is using the generic “you” here, meaning any woman at all, but Marina feels as if he’s talking to her. Marina is acutely aware of being childless; as she approaches the Eckman family home, she thinks about her financial situation with a sort of abject confusion, seemingly having trouble coming up with a reason she has disposable income when she doesn’t have children to support. But it’s also not as though Marina is clamoring to get pregnant. Instead, she just seems to have a low but incessant unease about how the life she has chosen for herself fits into the larger cultural construction of womanhood.
Sergei pointed out that the name Anders, a common Swedish name, is derived from the Greek for man. I didn’t know that until I saw his post; in my own reading, I kept thinking of the German anderes, meaning other. State of Wonder is a book very much concerned with spaces, both literal and figurative, that are predominantly or exclusively the domains of women, and for me, Marina’s nightmares of abandonment give her a foothold in one such space before she embarks on the more traditionally masculine endeavor of adventuring alone into a world unknown.
I’ll also mention, as a last thought, that the introduction of Marina’s Lariam nightmares at this point in the book displays an almost alarming amount of narrative ingenuity. We’ll get to the science later in this conversation, but I’ll say for now that it’s important to have the nightmares traced back to the pills, setting up Marina as both a proud scientist who has devoted her professional life to pharmaceuticals and someone who has personally had a difficult relationship with a drug that she was given without full information. With that conflict at her back, she’s ready to throw the offending pills in the trash can and board the plane for Brazil.
Click here for the next post in the series: Natalie Shapero, Week Two