Caitlin Connolly: I GOT IT FROM HER AND SHE GOT IT FROM HER

THE STORY: I love Connolly's titles. As a novelist, sometimes I find that landing on the right title takes more brainpower than plotting fifty pages. This one is called I Got It from Her and She Got It From Her. We see three women at different stages in life, presumably a daughter, mother, and grandmother.

THE ANALYSIS: The three women become one entity below their necklines--their torsos are joined together in the same symmetrical print dress, with no differentiation between one woman and another. This merging emphasizes the title of the painting--"I got it from her and she got it from her." Their faces have a similar silhouette, and their closed eyes invite the viewer to look at the image and scrutinize their figures for similarities and differences. Even their hair merges into one mass.

The three generations of women do have differences. The grandmother has a higher neckline; the youngest woman has more of a distinguishable figure with breasts. Their necks are different lengths; their profiles are slightly different. Their mass of hair changes from a young reddish-blond to an older brown and the grandmother's gray. The youngest woman seems to be the focus of the painting, since (besides the title) her blowing hair makes her the largest presence on the canvas.

I really love how these figures invite us to ponder the ways we are similar to our mothers (and daughters). The ways we are just. like. mom are represented by the conjoined pattern on the dresses, and the ways that we resemble our mothers but still look like ourselves is shown in the echoed faces and hair. The abstract background puts all visual focus on these three figures.

PERSONAL IMPACT: This painting is particularly meaningful to me these days because I've been working on a project assembling stories of my female ancestors. I call it "Our Mothers," and it is for me and my one daughter and all the other women in our family (and men. They need to know them, too. But it began as a labor of love for my daughter). I have found that my fathers' stories tend to be better known, and more of them wrote their own stories. I've had to dig more to find my mothers' stories. And yet, I hunger after them. I have always been close to my grandmother, and I grew up hearing her tell me stories about our history, and I just feel this urgency to preserve our mothers' stories.



There is something powerful about recognizing our attributes repeated in other generations. My grandma loves a story about her great-great-grandmother Domitile, who crossed the plains twice in her 60s as she traveled from France to Utah to check on her children and decided to stay. She was packing up her home in France to cross the plains a third time when a painting fell on her head and killed her. My grandma always says that she could have done that (she hiked mountains into her 80s), but that her frail twin sister would not have been able to. I think she saw some of her own determination and strength in Domitile and found it inspiring. As a child, a story about an old woman didn't interest me very much. But as my grandma ages and her mind declines, I find myself thinking more about the stories that mattered to her.

Our mothers matter. Their stories matter. It helps me face the future with strength when I realize what qualities my mothers have already demonstrated.

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