Backwater Essay

Backwater

It’s not easy for everyone to understand the people around them. Backwater by Joan Bauer follows Ivy, a girl who struggles to find her place as a history lover and as a person in general, among a family bustling with lawyers. Her father can’t help but to continuously persist the importance and greatness of law upon Ivy as she grows up, which sadly pushes Ivy into a lonely corner, where these ideas are not a key part of life. It’s an isolation interrupted only by the presence of her loving and supporting Great Aunt Tib and her best friend, Octavia. But apparently, she’s not the only misfit in the family, she learns as she seeks her lost, hermit aunt Josephine, on a crazy and terrifying journey. The lesson that can be extracted from Ivy and Josephine’s experiences is that the way people act towards us constantly effects us throughout our lives.

 Ivy isn’t able to feel comfortable around her own family. For example, while they were playing “law” scrabble, a game where they draw a letter and define a law term that starts with that letter off, Ivy sits in the corner and reads. This, in itself seems strange, considering her whole family is participating. But finally, after she gets annoyed, she stands up and says quietly “P, for peace.” Everybody looks at her strangely afterward, silently (and verbally) disagreeing. This little scene suggests that it’s hard for her to feel a part of her family--and in any given situation, big or not. Furthermore, it’s not only a sense of detachment from her family that seems to hold Ivy down a lot, but also a feeling of insecurity about herself, which her dad clearly creates for her. Ivy loves history. Learning about history and specifically her family’s history is all she ever wants. It’s knowledge. It’s adventures, not her own, but of the people who she tirelessly studies and pursues. It’s what she wants out of life, to be a historian. But Ivy’s dad is not very supportive of her, being a lawyer and a person who can’t stand seeing anybody around him not one. It’s never been up to him to try to understand why anyone might not desire this in life, never mind a daughter who has her heart and soul set on a completely different career. So, as Ivy grows up, this strong attitude he holds has a big influence on her. For example, he says, “You are totally enslaved by this obsession!” “I could be on drugs. I could be smoking 5 packs of cigarettes a day. I could be—“Getting ready to study the law!” I could almost mouth the words myself. This shows that her dad doesn’t influence her in a way that makes her want to change herself to comply to her dad and her whole entire family, generations and generations of lawyers, but rather prove herself to him. She isn’t able to just be herself.

Also, the way her dad and family treats her with the little, if no respect they have for her passion influences Ivy’s feelings outside of her home, in parts of her life that have recently surfaced. Ivy is willing to hunt down a long gone hermit aunt, Josephine, who lives in the mountains--just for the chance to connect with someone who might be similar to she is, who wasn’t able to fit in within the family. And it’s all the pressure and confusion and insecurity that her dad has caused for her that have built up inside and induced the motivation, the drive that keep her going on a crazy adventure that effects her in many ways. When she finally meets her Aunt she is able to gain a whole new level of insight about her father and about life. Her aunt has this completely unusual life. She lives with birds. It would be easy for Ivy to think she’s crazy and not listen to what she has to say, but she isn’t. She’s simply different. And through her, Ivy is able to gain a lot of valuable ideas. For example, Josephine mentions that her father used to fish, as well as suggests that he has a “gentler side”. Ivy doesn’t believe this-she’s never seen her father in this light. She has only known her dad as somebody who was hard or aggressive, not gentle. Furthermore, this quote evidently helps the reader see more of not only Ivy’s father, but of Josephine. She did leave her home and her family to escape the pressures of people. However, the way she was able to say that her brother had “a gentler side” even despite all the trouble she faced with him during their childhood shows that she has a capacity to reach deeper and see more.

In conclusion, her father’s lack of understanding and appreciation of Ivy, time and time again, influences Ivy into doing something she might never thought she would do, as his misunderstanding of Josephine did to her years ago. Although for Josephine, it was something that, along with a strong tendency and need for being alone, she knew she had to go to greater measures for. Many teenagers can relate to this novel. While some aspects of Ivy might be hard for us to relate to, others can be viewed throughout ourselves more easily. Many desire the privilege of being understood--and being misunderstood by people close to us can cause a deep hurt. But above all, misunderstandings, and many other emotions for that matter, make us want to find those people who may know what just we’re going through, no matter how hard it is to reach them.