Breath, Eyes, Memory is a story between grandmothers, mothers, daughters and sisters that have been victims of a very long chain of sexual abuse, insomnia, sexual phobia, bulimia and cancer. Edwidge Dandicat uses her main character, Sophie Caco, to narrate the issues of these women's lives. Sophie starts the story with her own transition from Haiti, where she had a relatively happy childhood with her aunt who raised her, to New York to live with a mother that she has never seen. .
To best understand this tragedy, we have to go back in history as far as possible and not only in Haiti, but in the entire world. From very remote times, the obsession with women's purity elevated virginity to the point of a sacred thing, turning it into a symbolic object to be used by someone else. To demonstrate this, I would like to cite two quotations from the book: "Your mother and I, when we were children we had never control over anything. Not even this body." (p. 20) and: .
"According to Tante Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It's wasn't her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for even before she was born." (p. 151). .
With these quotations, it's easy to realize that first, parents want to take control or preserve their daughter's purity for their future husbands. Then, issues of sexual development and education are passed through generations with obvious negative and traumatic consequences. .
One of the novel's most controversial aspects is the process of "testing". The "test" consists of inserting a finger into a vagina to make sure that the hymen is not broken and the mother will be sure about her daughter's virginity. The act is again a proof for the obsession of female purity in which a woman's body becomes a symbol of honor and pride for husbands and families.
