26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Leap
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Symbols & Motifs
Kisses
Throughout the story, kisses symbolize the connection of loved ones. The role of kisses in the Flying Avalons’ act is repeatedly emphasized. After successful shows, “Harry Avalon would skip quickly to the front rows and point out the smear of my mother’s lipstick, just off the edge of his mouth” (Paragraph 5), proof of their mid-air conjunction and their love. Newspaper accounts of the disaster dwelt upon the air-kisses that proceeded the final act, when “they puckered their lips in mock kisses, lips destined ‘never again to meet’” (Paragraph 6). In the final line of the story, the narrator “[feels] the brush of her [mother’s] lips” (Paragraph 25)—a kiss that celebrates, as in the trapeze act, the miraculous meeting of the two participants, in this case mother and daughter. The motif thus supports the theme of The Unlikely Miracle of Life, suggesting that each moment in which loved ones cross is as extraordinary and unlikely as the midair kisses of trapeze artists.
Avalon
The names of Harry and Anna Avalon and their circus act, The Flying Avalons, comprise a motif that alludes to the Isle of Avalon, a mythical island in Arthurian legend. Since the island is traditionally hidden in mist and often associated with a female figure, either Morgan or the Lady of the Lake, another circus act, “The Lady of the Mists” (Paragraph 4), further supports this reading.
The Isle of Avalon is traditionally a magical place that can hold death at bay and provide for its inhabitants without their laboring. As a stage name for the Avalon family, it imparts an aura of enchantment and royalty due to its association with King Arthur, and it symbolizes the Avalons’ status as an idealized, misty past in the narrator’s mind. As a glorious, irretrievable past the narrator feels her mother sacrificed, it is among The Compromises From Which People Make Their Lives.
The Leap
Anna Avalon makes many leaps in her life. Every time she performs with Harry, she jumps into her husband’s waiting arms. She makes these leaps competently and fearlessly, just like the “leap through the ice-dark air toward that thinnest extension” that she makes to save her daughter (Paragraph 23). These two leaps, which roughly bookend the story, provide cohesion to Anna’s life and identity.
The story also posits (but ultimately questions) a distinction between leaping and falling. The narrator describes one stunt in which Harry would catch Anna in a dive—an intentional fall—and Anna herself invests the act of falling with agency, telling the narrator that she would “be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling” (Paragraph 9). The phrase suggests a metaphor for life as a continuous fall, particularly when coupled with the narrator’s remark about “hang[ing] on [to life] so dearly” (Paragraph 17). The story, however, does not accept this vision of life as a decline; what the narrator at times suggests is a “fall”—her mother’s exchange of her life as an illiterate, globe-trotting circus performer for one as a wife and mother on a New Hampshire farm—the story casts as a “leap.” Like her seizure of the guy wire, it is an unplanned and risky “jump,” but one that ultimately reaps rewards. Because one cannot “hang on” to life forever, the story suggests that such “midair” maneuvering ultimately makes the difference between a fall and a leap.
Fire
Two major events in the story revolve around fire: A lightning strike ignites and collapses the circus tent, and a house fire of indeterminate origin nearly kills the narrator as a child. This backdrop of flames enhances the drama the narrator associates with her mother, but the motif also figuratively links two events that are already psychologically connected for the narrator. The narrator views these two occurrences as moments when her mother “saved” her, though Anna only did so directly during the house fire. This speaks to the narrator’s vicarious nostalgia for her mother’s circus days, which she likes to imagine as part of her own story. The image of the narrator “sewing with a needle of hot silver, a thread of fire” underscores this point (Paragraph 2). Though on the surface a reference to a traumatic flashback, the language anticipates the description of Anna grabbing the guy wire during the circus accident: “She managed to hang on to the braided metal, still hot from the lightning strike” (Paragraph 9). The parallel suggests the narrator is “stitching” with fire while telling the story: yoking together various events through the shared motif.
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By Louise Erdrich
