Monsoon Mansion

In writing a memoir, the question of plot and the author’s power over it comes to question. The writer has no power in creating plot, only in what is included and what is left out, and how it is presented. Thinking this way, I have never felt like writing a memoir was a feat I would be able to do. It would mean revisiting the painful moments I would rather leave forgotten, and revealing the people in my life the way I see them. Not to mention depicting myself as I see me. By choosing to write about my life, a story that is already set, I forfeit my power to alter facts to suit the plot and ending. But whether or not memoirs need a plot, the narrative form will bring about one. The power authors have in writing memoirs, then, is in the style and introspection revealed. Cinelle Barnes includes recurring motifs and comparisons that encapsulate her family’s downfall living in the mansion.

Barnes’ memoir has a plot revolving around the mansion the speaker was trapped in and her experience living in it. Barnes chose to end the novel with the escape with the last chapter showing a glimpse of her life in the future. It’s a coming of age story within a despairing environment. Her family’s plight is mirrored in the house, which becomes embodied in her mother. In fact, the mansion itself, Mansion Royale, is the core of the plot alongside the speaker, detailing the rise and fall as the overall arc. The entire prologue is a description of the mansion, room for room, and its function in the lives of the inhabitants, each room a trigger to a memory. And the last word in the prologue, a one-word sentence, “Falling” foreshadows the trajectory of the mansion through the years. Barnes made a choice to integrate the mansion’s state with her life. By calling her memoir a coming of age story, it makes sense that it would end with the speaker maturing, not physically through her period and what it entails, but by leaving the mansion and her mother forever. 

One of the most intriguing recurring motifs is the orchid and the color purple, both always concurrent with the speaker’s mother. Barnes makes the connection immediately with her mother describing them as, “real, graceful, delicate, and rare. She called them ‘exotic’ and explained that the orchid’s purpose was purely ornamental” (page 27). Then with the speaker admitting that she confuses the flower’s smell for her mother’s perfume. Her mother is connect to this flower and to the house, all of them representing the ornamental qualities, and it comes up again throughout the novel. The biggest connection was in the line describing her mother, “she was part of the house. Her weeping was the mansion’s very voice” (page 87). Barnes engineered these connections to show what the speaker needed to escape. The line conflating the mother and the mansion is repeated in the last chapter, cementing the deeply rooted connection between the two in the speaker’s mind, one that Barnes needed us to make. 

Memoirs will have plot. Even if done through vignettes or mixed scenes, connecting threads will appear that weave the whole collection into a plot, straightforward and simple or not. What I pay attention to is how the author portrays, stylizes, or reveals the narrative. The author’s introspective depiction and how the scenes or events are tied together are what shine through. Barnes memoir is not only her narrative, but Mansion Royale’s and her mother’s.