Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Natasha Trethewey's "Saturday Matinee," the act of watching a 1959 movie, "Imitation of Life," serves as a point of departure for a poignant exploration of identity, aspiration, and the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. The poem captures the intimate experience of a mixed-race young girl grappling with her own sense of self as she watches a movie in which she finds a character she can relate to-a "mixed girl" like her. Yet, the scene also serves as a backdrop against which the complexities of her home life unfold, offering a multidimensional portrayal of how personal and social contexts intersect and influence perceptions of self.

The poem begins by drawing us into a world of cinematic glamour, filled with blue satin and falling diamonds. This shimmering screen forms an alluring escapism, a "sparkling world" that contrasts sharply with the humdrum realities the speaker experiences. The speaker places herself in the narrative, becoming a "Hollywood starlet stretched across my bed," basking in the imagined light of celebrity and ease. Her immediate surroundings are an amalgamation of fringed brocade and golden canopies, relics from her grandmother's job-perhaps suggesting a lineage of women who have similarly stitched together lives from the fragments of their environments.

While the television screen radiates a vision of perfection, the speaker's attention oscillates between the cinematic and the real world. Down the hall, her mother and stepfather's argument forms a counterpoint to the screen's allure. The friction between her parents is captured in a static of muted voices and unsettling sounds-the "dull smack, the stumbling for balance, the clutter of voices."

The movie within the poem serves as a lens through which the young girl evaluates her own life, particularly her relationship with her mother. When she watches Lana Turner-"golden-haired among the crowd"-she is struck by the difference between Turner and the black maid in the film, who happens to be the mother of the mixed girl character. The mixed girl's desire for Lana Turner as her mother reflects the speaker's own silent judgments about her mother, who is involved in an evidently complicated, perhaps abusive relationship with her stepfather. It suggests the speaker's internalized longing for a mother who embodies societal standards of beauty and grace-a mother "always smiling from a fifties magazine."

However, this longing is fraught with contradictions and unresolved tensions. Even as she envies the mixed girl in the movie, the speaker seems aware that the reality she wishes to escape to is largely illusory. The poem ends with a note of both aspiration and resignation: she dreams of becoming "Sandra Dee, and Lana Turner, my mother," even as she acknowledges the emptiness of that screen-a "pale blue, diamonds falling until it's all covered up."

In weaving these intricate threads together, "Saturday Matinee" becomes a rich tapestry that encapsulates a young girl's complex emotional landscape. It underscores how media and social contexts shape perceptions of identity and familial relationships, offering no easy answers but leaving us with a poignant understanding of the complexities involved.

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