Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle (Napoleon Hill). In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the tree is an important symbol of growth and courage through difficult times. The main character, Melinda, went through a series of unfathomable events over the summer that put her into a troublesome position. She was raped by a boy named Andy at a party while she was drunk. Scared and confused, she called the cops to come help her, resulting in her losing all her friends. Melinda refuses to speak up and tell anyone why she called the cops that night. “Tree” represents Melinda’s growth as a character throughout the school year as she learns to deal with what happened to her. At the beginning of the book, Melinda is given an art project to work on all year. She has to pick a word from a basket and illustrate her word in different ways. Melinda picks the word “tree.” Annoyed, she goes to pick a new word, but is stopped by her art teacher. Melinda struggles with her project, unable to make her trees look alive and un-child like. “I can see it in my head: a strong oak tree with a wide scarred trunk and thousands of leaves reaching to the sun…. I can’t bring it to …show more content…
She was found in a closet by the lacrosse team crying for help. Her peers now understand the reason she called the cops at a party over the summer, and what she went through that year. Melinda is making new friends, and forgiving her old ones for the way they treated her after the incident. Melinda understands what happened to her can’t be fixed, but it will help her grow stronger. “My tree is definitely breathing; little shallow breaths like it just shot up from the ground this morning….the new growth is the best part” (196). Her tree has finally come to life, it’s breathing and flourishing. Now that Melinda’s secret is out she has her voice back. She is growing and coming to life once again just like her
There is always someone that is considered to be a catalyst of change in their lives and the lives of those that surround them. In the novel “The Bean Trees”, the main character named Taylor, who from a very young age, knows that she needs to make changes in her life if she is to not become like the other girls in her small Kentucky town. Taylor embodies a personality of progression and individuality. In the novel Taylor goes through different stages of transformation and learning toward personal maturity that can be divided into 4 major segments. Those segments being first her hometown life and when she decides to move away, second when she arrives to where she moved to, third her developments with the people she meets, and finally her final commitment she makes to
Barbara Kingsolver: The Bean Trees The Bean Trees is a novel about a young girl who becomes a young woman by overcoming a series of trials that life throws at her. Part of those “trials” is taking care of a three year old child who has been abused both physically and sexually. Taylor is able to pass each and every one of the hardships that are thrown her way. In the book you can definitely see Taylor go through the coming-of-age process.
In this novel the character's in the story, and the bean trees help us realize that there are a lot of miracles in life, and how quickly the world around us can change. The Bean Trees teaches us about the miracles in life. In chapter three, there was a series of sentences that stated,“Sure enough, they were one hundred percent purple: stems, leaves, and pods. . . . ‘The Chinese lady next door gave them to me. . . .
Throughout Speak, it is clearly shown that Melinda’s tree project has a direct correlation with how her identity progresses throughout the book. At first, Melinda is in a bad place and struggling with the pressures of going into high school after losing all of her friends and having a traumatic experience that past summer. Melinda describes her first tree attempt, “It looks like a dead tree, toothpicks, a child’s drawing. I can’t bring it to life.” (Anderson 78).
When assigned the word “tree” in her art class, she started to use art to express herself. The first tree was dark and gloomy because to show how she felt inside at the time, the second tree was more of a fake looking tree because of one of her only “friends”, Heather, had started to hang around the “Marthas”, whom were considered fake in Melinda’s mind. When it came to her last drawing, the tree become more real and gave off a stronger feel to it, this was because she had started talking to a girl named Ivy and for the first time since the night of the party that started it all she said something to her ex-friend, Rachel, giving her a lot of confidence. Drawing the trees really helped Melinda in ways not even she noticed. It helped her express herself without forcing her to do anything out of her comfort zone, like
The winter symbolizes the students’ childhoods coming to an end. As well as the dark times coming ahead with the war underway. The Suicide Tree symbolizes Finny’s fall, and later his death. It symbolizes Gene’s true colors when he deliberately jeopardizes his best friend’s life.
She at first thinks the task of drawing a tree is easy, but she soon realizes it is harder than it seems. Melinda can easily picture a tree in her mind, but she can not draw it. This relates to Melinda before and after she was raped by Andy Evans. Before the rape, Melinda is represented by the tree when she says, “I can see it in my head: a strong old oak tree with a wide scarred trunk and thousands of leaves reaching to the sun”(78). Melinda was completely fine before the rape occurred, and she was happy with herself and her surroundings.
he novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about a family in Brooklyn during the 1960s. Katie and Johnny Nolan’s family suffers from the harsh treatment and views from others due to their low social and economic status. Their children, Francie and Neely, notice but don’t fully understand why they are treated as lower class citizens. Soon both were to start school. However, in order to start school, both need to receive the proper vaccinations.
Speak In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson we see the main character, Melinda, grow as a person against great adversity. Speak is a very powerful book with relatable characters. Speak shows us another side of a story we usually don't get see. We first see Melinda as she is entering her first year of high school.
During the time that Melinda is working on her artwork she has been talking to old friends trying to fix her relationships. “My last tree looked like it had died from some fungal infection - not the effect I wanted at all. ”(92). Melinda is already starting to grow in many ways, in her artwork, and her personal life. Her artwork is improving and she is learning to make her tree have meaning behind it.
Art is way of expression. People can use actions and art or express themselves in ways other than speaking. In the book Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, symbolism holds a big significance. The trees mentioned throughout the book symbolize Melinda’s changing “seasons” (her “growing” as a person). People, like trees, go through phases, they freeze in the winter, becoming nothing but lonely limbs without leaves covered with white slush.
What she probably does not realize about the tree is that it represents herself, and the lightning represents either Andy Evans, the boy who raped her, or the hurting that she is going through. When the lightning hits the tree, a branch snaps, and that symbolizes how the rape had hurt her enough to where it has debilitated her. Once she starts to see her own emotions in her artwork she realizes how much she is hurting internally, and that she wants to tell someone about it, but Melinda does not know who she can trust
For example, Taylor uses the Fig Tree to show/describe the Logan family’s presence. Mildred D. Taylor brings out a very strong object that is symbolic to the logan family in the story. In this section the author describes the Fig Tree as resemblance of the logan family, “ that fig tree's got roots that run deep,
The writer uses juxtaposition to show how much of a tremendous age difference there is between the tree and the girl. It’s mentioned several times how she is only “small and silly” while the tree is “the last of its generation”. Due to the tremendous gap between them, they don’t understand each other at first, which leads to many obstacles that they must overcome. The struggles are often portrayed with imagery to give them a tangible threat; the old, grandfatherly pine has “sharp, dry twigs” and obstacles such as “green leaves that [are] heavy and wet with dew”. The journey is also described with similes to illustrating how the young girl imagines her situation to be; near the beginning, the tree’s branches “scratch her like angry talons”.
“Schoolteacher’s nephew represents a dismissal by whites of the dehumanizing qualities of slavery”. When Sethe is raped, schoolteacher observed how her body is exploited. The scars on Sethe’s back are so many that they resemble the trunk of a tree with its branches. Sethe bear scars on her back because she was whipped due to her try of escape. Amy Denver, a white girl that helped Sethe when she was running away from Sweet Home, calls the tree a chokecherry tree.