Second Glance at Holiday

The first time I read Holiday, I must admit, I was one of the people who thought it was extremely boring. I was waiting for the plot to turn, for violence to appear, for gender roles to be challenged…anything. And really, I felt like I walked away with nothing. I had nothing to say, an Ottilie, perhaps. It seems ironic to think back that “nothingness”— as well as her silence as an aspect of nothingness—is an important theme within this short story. Ottilie, for example, exhibits the kind of deformity that, especially in our culture, trains us to ignore. We are supposed to pretend her differences, in a sense are nothing. Nothing separates person like Ottilie from any other person; but nothing, in the noun form, is exactly what separates her. Her body is nothing. It’s irregularities, her family dismisses as less than adequate to humanness. She is, therefore, subhuman, and her body is a “nothing.” Her speech, again, in its absence truly does hinder her from existing as a member of the family despite her obvious servitude. Only when she is understood in communication, does she physically and emotionally exist as a human being.

The made me ponder the role of surrealism. Perhaps, surrealism can be represented through her silence. She exists below the surface—as does the unconscious—but her silent identity is her true identity. When you think inside your head, pray internally, or hum along mentally to music, those thoughts are still a means of communication, even if only with the self. Those thoughts, furthermore, because they are only internal understood by you, become even more important as your own perception of your own identity. What is said aloud is merely the societal craft of the internal thought. When Ottilie is understood in the “real realm” she is still not really understood… only she will ever know who she really is. But how, then, is Ottilie any different from us. Others’ perceptions of our identities are created from social stigmas, funny jokes we made in class, eloquent/nervous speech behaviors—like Ottilie, people will never know who we really are, because our real identities are found in the surrealist silence of our unconscious thoughts.