When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.īut everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Eleanor uses Polly not to think about Marianne, but once Polly is gone, Eleanor realizes that Marianne and the painful feelings she induces within her were there all along at the periphery of her consciousness.No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. Having Polly to project onto falsely convinces Eleanor that denying the past is the same as erasing it, but Polly’s absence teaches Eleanor that the opposite is true.
Polly’s absence leaves Eleanor without an external object onto which to project her grief and guilt, and she realizes that she is woefully ill-equipped to internalize and take ownership of her pain. As Eleanor becomes increasingly consumed by social obligations, she neglects to take care of Polly, and Polly dies. Marianne is too painful a subject for Eleanor to acknowledge on a conscious level, so Eleanor denies her existence, projecting Marianne and her own guilt onto Polly as a way of lessening her pain. Keeping Polly alive enables Eleanor to maintain some semblance of self-worth in the face of her other lingering insecurities.īut Polly also symbolizes Eleanor’s tendency to project her insecurities onto external objects as a means of denying her traumatic past.
Eleanor’s failure to protect her sister from the fire and from Mummy’s abuse induces feelings of shame and guilt within Eleanor, who sees Marianne’s death as proof that she is cannot be trusted to love other people because she will only harm and disappoint them.
Caring for Polly is Eleanor’s way of proving to herself that she is capable of protecting another living thing. To Eleanor, Polly the Plant symbolizes her dead younger sister, Marianne, who died in the house fire that Mummy started in an attempt to kill her two daughters.
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