I Found You

Maps are a crucial element in Alice’s art. Their use represents her creative powers. This choice of medium started with her dad’s large road map: she “used to leaf through it on long journeys […] Dad gave me his old car when I was eighteen and when I sold it a few years later I found the old road map in the glove compartment” (81). In her early twenties, Alice makes a likeness of Jasmine with this old map.

Later in life, her map art becomes her livelihood. Maps represent her life’s plan. They are how she pays her bills, and they help provide security. For the people who buy her art, her maps made into flowers, the maps represent their love for the person they are giving the art to. She worries about the end of her relationship with Frank, thinking “it’s sitting on the horizon and she doesn’t like the look of it at all. It looks cruel and mean. It looks like her, sitting alone in her room, cutting up maps to make art for people to give to people they love” (197). When Alice is single, the maps symbolizing love between other people makes her feel lonely.

However, when she is reunited with Frank at the end of the novel, she uses maps to make a piece of art for his mother: a dancing peacock. Alice uses maps of where she imagines Kirsty might have gone had she lived. Alice had an “idea that [she] could somehow re-create [Kirsty’s] lost life. Give her the history she never had. Make something real” (339). Here, maps symbolize remembering the dead.

Alice chooses a peacock for her art piece because it holds symbolic significance for Frank. He and Kirsty saw the peacock at Kitty’s house multiple times. The first time, Jewell uses a simile to describe it: “On the lawn, fluttering its iridescent fan of feathers like a showgirl, stood a peacock” (77). She compares the bird with a performer, or stage persona. Mark uses Kitty, her house, and her peacock, to put on a show to dazzle Kirsty. Here, the bird represents wealth.

On a different day, Gray has a hallucination of a peacock’s fan while high on ecstasy. His “head swam with kaleidoscopic images, changing, moving, diverging, and converging, and then pulsating in time to the music into what he suddenly realized was the unfurled fan of a peacock’s tail” (174). This happens when he kisses Izzy. The peacock temporarily represents the joy of his first kiss, heightened by the drugs.

Later that night, Gray and Kirsty have a bonding experience with the peacock. They sit outside the party, still high, and Kirsty declares that the “peacock is dancing!” (184). The drugs also cause Gray and Kirsty to declare their platonic love for one another. This is their last happy moment before Mark assaults and kills Kirsty. The peacock symbolizes their love and connection in the end. This is why Alice makes maps into a peacock for Gray’s mother for Kirsty’s funeral.