how to care for your fingernails

I have a small observation to make about some of the imagery at work in Jane Gardam’s The Queen of the Tambourine. It was mentioned in class that for most of the novel the central events go unnamed. Eliza’s miscarriage, her hysterectomy, and Henry’s affair with Annie are evident only through symbols that represent the traumatic events. One example of these recurring signs is Eliza’s preoccupation with fingernails. Her frequent references to her own and others’ “chalky half-moons” (73) hold an obscured significance that fluctuates throughout the book.

One way in which fingernails are significant is with regards to the trajectory of Eliza’s mental health. Upon the first signs of her growing obsession with the elusive Joan, Eliza proclaims: “’I understand Joan now to the ends of her fingernails’ … Looking at my own fingernails at this point, I noticed a strangeness in them” (42). If Joan is a manifestation of Eliza’s ‘Other,’ Eliza’s unfamiliarity with her own fingertips reflects her growing mental dissociation. In fact, many of her subsequent episodes and hallucinations are accompanied by a comment on the uncanny vividness of her nails. During her encounter with Dr. Hookaneye, she remarks: “I examined my fingernails and found them interesting. They had a hazy green line beneath each rim, pale, marine and eerie” (55). Similarly, on a particularly wild visit to the hospice she says of her fingernails: “They have begun to look unfamiliar lately” (109).

As the novel progresses, Eliza has a number of experiences that contribute to her growing sense of autonomy. She begins to speak up for herself and to take ownership of her place in the world. After the episode when she drops Annie’s sewing bag and Henry’s money into the lake, and gives a neighbour’s baby a bizarre baptism, the fingernail imagery changes. She now calls them ‘my nails,’ writing: “I shall have to cut these pretty flowers” (205). When Barry dies and Eliza admits that the hallucinations were all her own creations, her fingernails return to normal. She says: “I looked at where number thirty-four used to stand. Nothing. I examined my clean fingernails, thin white arcs” (224). The repossession and the renewed purity of Eliza’s nails corresponds with the return of her mental health.

While the progression of Gardam’s fingernail imagery in some ways reflects linearity in the plot, its use also contributes to the sense of circularity. The fact that fingernails are comprised of half-moons or circles, that they are associated with flowers, and that they may look immobile but are always growing, has a significance for Eliza's story, where growth and escape take place within a seemingly stagnant environment.

Furthermore, fingertips are a point of mediation between ourselves and the outside world. Though Eliza's experience of madness may have been triggered by external events, her reaction to those events takes what is internal and projects it outwards. Even as the disturbing changes in her fingernails reflect the toxicity of her secrets, their regenerative growth seems to carry it out of her body.