Analysis Of To My Nine-Year-Old Self By Helen Dunmore

We spend all the time of our lives ageing. We age as we wake in the morning and age as we sleep in our beds at night. And even though humanity is in the constant stage of ageing, so many of us are plagued by the idea of growing older, or growing old. Humanity lives with the constant threat, it could not be exciting enough, so much so, that people cling to their youth in hopes of preserving it as it slips away. In To My Nine-Year-Old Self, Helen Dunmore speaks of the disappointment her younger self would have in her, if she saw how she had turned out. She explores the guilt of growing older, the fading of beauty and grace and the sensation of time running out on us which we all experience at some point in our lives. As a juxtaposition, An Easy

She explores the idea, that her nine-year-old self would be disappointed in the woman she has become, in what she has made of herself. Ultimately the only thing worse than disappointing your parents is disappointing yourself. “I have spoiled the body we once shared.” the decided tone of voice, given to this line through the added period at the end, places blame securely in her own hands. The visual imagery of something rotten, impure and broken created by the word spoiled, suggest that Dunham feels like she owed at least part of her body to her younger self and by spoiling it through ageing, through wear and tear, she has taken something that rightfully wasn’t hers to take. This is juxtaposed by An Easy Passage, where Copus describes the beauty of the oblivion that comes with being young. Dunmore explores sadness in the regret she speaks of, she explores how regret manifests in guilt which torments us, thinking that we were never good enough for even our younger selves. “That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind as the white paper to write it on.”, the symbolism of the white paper suggests innocence and purity, where as the past tense in the first half of the statement suggests, that those dreams are long gone, their place having been taken by worries about money, family and other things, never quite living up to the potential of what a

“less and less the more we grow”, implies that, the larger and stronger the woman, the less seen and heard by society is, the weight of gender norms and sexism, weighing her down as she makes her way through her life, career and relationships. This is paralleled by Dunmore speaking of “hiding down scared lanes from men in cars after girl children”, symbolising the constant threat resting upon young girls shoulders and the price they pay as the get older. “Looks up now… at a girl - thirteen if she’s the day - standing in next to nothing in the driveway opposite, one hand flat against her stomach”, the narrator being mirrored by a young girl, standing opposite her in the driveway suggests that we all see part of ourselves in children growing up, the twinge of pain the feel at their fading innocence forever paralleled by the twinge of regret we feel when we realise what we’ve done with our lives. Her light dressing and her hand against her flat stomach symbolises the young’s preoccupation with being beautiful and being adequate in the eyes of society. Dunmore speaks very little of the preoccupation with the physical, maybe because at nine years it simply doesn’t matter, but maybe because only later in life do we become more and more aware of how judged we are on our looks by others. “Which catch the sunlight briefly like the flash of armaments”, could be both perceived as a simile, for how her beauty and her oblivion blind the narrator like the blinding light of