Look at a Teacup

Patricia Hampl
 Background

• Hampl was born on 1946 in Minnesota, USA.

• She wrote poetry much about her own town.
• Her first volume of poem ‘ Women before an Aquarium’ was
published on 1978.
• She was fascinated by homeland Czechoslovakia.
• Look up teacup was published in 1976, which reads about her
mother’s history in a delicate teacup.
• This essay shows how writing is a way of finding out what one
has to say of discovering significance in apparently minor
events.
• She has been attempting to escape history by fighting it.
 Summarization of Look at Teacup
• This essay shows how a simple writing helps in
finding out great events.
• The two major things of this essay are
relationship between a mother and her
daughter and a connection between past
generation and present generation.
• Both these things are represented by a
Teacup.
• The writer’s mother was married in the year
1939 the beginning of the Second World War.
• The same year she bought the teacup as gift
that was later given to the daughters.
• The cup was pale but it had a flower inside it
which looked like a real flower and it was never
in the same position.
• One day she told her mother that work is the
most important things in our life but her
mother told her that family is the most
important things in this world.
• Their parting began when her father came from outside and did some
sexual behaviors to her mother even she didn’t wanted.
• In the cup, amid the bundle of pastel falling flower at the bottom of
bowl where there was firm and thin circlet which shines just below the
most deeply submerged flower.
• The writer’s mother married in the year 1939 and passed her life with
her husband and the same tradition was handed to her daughter by
giving the teacup.
• The writer reads the history of her mother in the teacup.
• The teacup connects the daughter with her mother and teacup reminds
her of her mother’s history because her mother bought it in 1939.
• Through the cup the mother transfer the culture and
history of her time to her daughter, so the cup was
historical memory only.
• It was made in Czechoslovakia, which was taken over and
destroyed by the armies of Adolf Hitler.
• The essay talks about the Second World War which caused
a great fall in the faith of woman in marriage and family
life.
• The only difference between the writer’s mother and her
was that all the talking and the thinking that they used to
do.
• Her mother had a cello voice which was drowned somewhere in
the sound of falling flowers due to marriage in the new thought
of bombs falling on woman with flower.
• The writer starts talking fast saying how everybody knows the
world has changed a lot since the Second World War indeed, and
she was alive when Hitler was in power.
• Mothers knows their daughter try on strange clothes woman
wear and look at themselves in the full length mirror trying to
understand the future .
• Hampl thought that, if she were alone having a cup of tea, as I am
now, she would be smoking a cigarette, staring dreamingly out of
the kitchen window.
• The writer and her generation were against the
importance of marriage and family life.
• The story also speaks about the importance of
family life before the war and failure in its
significance after the war.
• Before 1939 women were passing happy married life
with their husbands and children, they tried to hand
down their possessions, culture and traditions to
their daughter but the children were against them.
 Conclusion
• This essay tells us about the intimate relationship
between the mother and the daughters.
• It shows us that how the world has changed after 1939 or
due to the Second World War.
• The essay has helped us to remind the past culture of
passing a teacup by a mother to her daughter.
• The relation between the mother and the daughter has
helped us how difference was the society in 1939 and at
present.
• Before the mothers didn’t thought about their life and
dedicated their full life to their family but in present
generation the daughters are fighting for their rights and
for their life.
• So as our culture and the traditions are very
important to us, we most try to conserve the
existing cultures and the traditions.
• We must fight for our freedom but not
forgetting our culture from the past.

Thank You