Desire Vs. Duty In Alice Hoffman’s Marriage Of Opposites

Hoffman’s books illuminate the magic and beauty of the everyday as found in the lives of women. Sometimes this can be categorized as magical realism, yes, but other times it merely feels metaphorical, a different mode of expression. A bad boyfriend leaves a destructive spell in his victim; the swan in a mother’s book is actually a portrait of the family angel; a lovingly tended garden holds repressed desires.
Hoffman’s works are perfect to turn to in times of strife or anxiety, because her characters experience grief, sorrow, and tragedy and come out the other side—her words are like life rafts when one is unmoored in an emotional ocean. Her latest books have been a departure from her earlier work, taking on a historical slant; they are both extensively researched and richly detailed. Her newest novel, The Marriage of Opposites, features long descriptions of main character Rachel’s island home, St. Thomas. Soon I was deeply absorbed in the story, drinking it in like the characters did their rum and limewater.
Rachel is a girl growing up in the Jewish community in the port of Charlotte Amalie, destined to be the mother of Camille Pissarro, himself one of the fathers of Impressionism. While Hoffman’s books have sometimes focused on destiny, putting into place rules and prophecies that haunt or provide hope to her protagonists, she uses a lighter touch here. Though the mother of 11 children, Rachel is her own person; the story is both about her loving but tempestuous relationship wiht her son, and about her as an individual, with her own hopes, desires, and often thwarted will.
One of the main tensions in the book is how Rachel, Camille and everyone that surrounds them must contend with the life they want versus they life they have a duty to live. Despite having fought for her own life as she wants to live it, Rachel cannot seem to understand Camille doing the same with his art.
Hoffman delves into the intricacies of the Jewish community, including the ways buried secrets can infect children’s lives, as well as the lopsided racial and socioeconomic dynamics of the island, which no longer allows the slave trade but keeps exploiting the labor of enslaved people. Rachel’s best friend, Jestine, is the daughter of her family’s in-house maid, Adelle, and she’s closer to them than to her own mother and community. Their loving friendship, with its bumps and cracks and mends, is the one constant throughout the novel. They exchange stories about the island, like the turtle-woman and the healer they visit in times of worry, and the pirates’ stolen wives who covered the island with the blood-red flowers of their grief. The novel only glances upon the pain of colonialism and slavery, but the most compelling story of all is the legend of the werewolves, thought to be Dutch families who were cursed for owning slaves.
The book spans decades, starting in 1807 and ending in 1866, so we live whole lives with our sprawling cast of characters. Now that the book is over, I miss them. In the end, Hoffman manages to make these historical characters human in the most empathetic way possible: by helping us feel what they feel.