When Can I Forgive Myself?
Set in the small, desert town of Grace, Arizona Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams deals with the complex past, present, and future of Cosima “Codi” Noline on her journey of self-discovery. A medical school dropout who has not returned to her hometown since her high school graduation thirteen years prior, Codi has since failed to find a place and relationship of belonging. Raised a “motherless girl” by her emotionally distant father, Doc Homer, along with her younger sister, Hallie, Codi from youth was left to raise herself unable to turn to a community from which her family had been ostracized (53). She is only able to receive unconditional, expressed love from her sister, never from an adult or male figure. This more than likely led to her desperate high school relationship with Loyd Peregrina, which resulted in a pregnancy ending in a self-inflicted miscarriage. For the past seventeen years the death of her child has haunted her increasing the fear that those she love will leave her. She has lost her mother and child and has held on to the subsequent emotions of loss, pain, culpability and depression which she uses to justify her nomadic lifestyle. When Loyd re-enters her life however he becomes a strong, loving figure instead of a contributor to one of the most traumatic moments of her life. Through the past and present relationships Codi has formed with Loyd and her miscarried child she is able to free herself from the bonds of self-punishment, guilt, and despair in order to blossom into a bright, purpose-driven woman.
By the age of fifteen Codi’s relationship with her father is practically nonexistent. She is six months pregnant; hemorrhaging in the bathroom from a miscarriage and neither one is able to successfully communicate with the other. In the meanwhile her stillborn child lay bloody on the bathroom floor. She asks Hallie for their mother’s black sweater in order to have a proper funeral before she buries her...