“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage (Ward, 255).”

This passage does not reveal the similarities between Esch and Medea so much as their increasing differences. There is a theme of birth and death as intertwined opposites to living, to fighting, to surviving, throughout Salvage the Bones. Esch and Medea begin their respective tales in a comparable place. They have power over others, but then someone comes along and gains control over them. Esch wonders, when in Manny’s presence, if “Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking” (7). Esch, smitten with Manny, desires only for her love to be reciprocated, but it never is. Manny becomes more detached from Esch, and Esch is distanced from her family by her pregnancy, alone, “an exile” (225) like Medea once Jason abandons her. Maternity is typically viewed as warm and kind, whereas Ward presents a harsher, lonelier view on motherhood, particularly in this passage. Esch no longer needs Medea as her maternal role model, her “murderous mother” was Katrina, bringing a new dawn, a new life, while Medea remained caught in the past. Esch overcame her challenge and looked forwards; that was her power. Her path deviates from Medea’s as Esch fights past her isolation to live, to survive. Esch is stronger for having fought and endured and accepted. The only way to move forward is to look to the new horizon and “salvage" what is left. 

This oil painting is titled Jason swearing Eternal Affection to Medea and the artist’s name is Jean-François Detroy. It was painted in 1742-1743, depicting Jason vowing to stay true to Medea forever and requesting her help, after she was visited by Eros, son of Aphrodite, to compel Medea to fall in love with Jason, since the Golden Fleece would have been impossible to obtain without her. The illustration was made by Detroy for a cartoon for the Goeblins tapestry works in Paris. 

I thought this image seemed symbolically resonant with Esch’s character on multiple levels. Firstly, I think the sunrise is representative of moving forward, surviving, which is Esch’s mindset at the end of “Salvage the Bones.” The colors of the sunrise, to me, seem reminiscent of fire, perhaps an indicator of the hardships Esch and her family have faced, or that she has been made who she is by forces of nature. I think the tree is a symbol of strength, facing the new day bravely. I based the tree on images of “mother trees,” not only because, aesthetically, it gives the impression of a bygone storm, but also as a mark of Esch’s acceptance,   so that the audience “will know that (Esch is) a mother” (258).