“LOOK AT TEACUP”

“LOOK AT TEACUP”

              “Look at Teacup” is a complicated essay with a great deals of hidden meaning to be read in between the lines. The essay abounds with rich as well as vivid description of China dishes especially tea cups and scattered information about the writer’s parents, her relation with mother and her views.

              As for the tea cups, they were made in Czechoslovakia and bought in 1939 by her mother. These cups which have been given to the author have a tiny “Czechoslovakia” stamped on the bottom. Each piece is thin and transparent having the palest water-green shade. One can see thin bands of gold around the edges of the saucer and cup. There is also a band of gold on the inner circle of the saucer. Inside the cup, flowers are depicted in different falling attitudes. It seems that as if someone had scattered a bouquet and the flowers appear to be caught in falling motion. One tends to notice a special significance attached to the cups because frequent references are made throughout the essay. In one place, the writer admits that there is a slur of recollection about the flowers, something imprecise, seductive and foggy, but held together with a bright bolt of accuracy-perhaps a piercing glance from a long dead uncle, whose face, all the features has otherwise faded. In another occasion, she wonders if someone with an important black umbrella had considered the future of teacups. A Prior to that she refers to an English politician his shaking a nation away while furling his black umbrella. Further she alludes to the falling of bodies, bombs and countries. Once can see a thread of associations. They indicate the degeneration that took place in Europe in general and disintegration in Czechoslovakia in particular during the Second World War. The teacups with the painting of falling flowers are relies of the disintegration process that began in Czechoslovakia with Munich Agreement signed on 29 September 1938 by the leaders of UK, France, Germany and Italy. Under this pact, the country was compelled to surrender its Sudetenland to Germany, Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain and his policy of appeasement failed to prevent the war. The umbrella he carried to Munich with him was called as the taint of Munich. The writer seems to suggest that the English politician with an important black umbrella also played a role in the disintegration of Czechoslovakia that is in the fall of Flowers from bouquet.

              The close association between the cups and a country is obvious in many expressions. One can notice it in the following expressions that “the cps was discontinued because a country was discontinued” and a country” lost its pure science of flinging glowers into the sides of teacups. Hence “the cup” stands for the relic and the evidence of the mid-century bonfire that is Second World War.

              The second aspect of the story is concerned with the unusual treatment of marriage, family and mother – daughter relationship. The writer is said to have been married in 1939 at the offing of the Second World War. This helped her escape the magnitude of history by retreating into pragmatism. Hence the writer associates the marriage with the fall of the flowers.

              At one place in the essay, she mentions that her mother’s cello voice was drowned somewhere in the sound of falling flowers, in marriage, in the thought of bombs falling on women with flowers, with teacups. Her marriage was the old bow pulled across the cello followed by the long low moan of another generation. On account of such association, the writer uses the word “fall” as the synonym of marriage and refuses to marry at all. Her announcement “We don’t get married anymore” indicates that she is not alone in having such interpretation. Likewise, one can see the similar treatment given to the concept of family and mother-daughter relationship. For the mother, family is the most important thing in the world where as for the daughter, the writer; the work is the most important thing. In spite of such an opinion, mother’s voice sounded a farewell, the first of all those good-byes mothers say to their daughters. She seemed to know that family and separation would always go together. Mothers and daughters are bound to say good-bye to one another. Their relationship ends with parting. The writer’s mother illustrates the same point by saying that they did not have any emotional relationships with their mothers.