Brief Summary Of Saplings In The Storm By Dr. Mary Pipher

Young girls are naturally assertive and energetic. They are interested in the world around them and many have “tomboyish” personalities—basically, they are mentally healthy. However, the same cannot be said about teenage girls. Teenage girls across America are renowned for their self-critical and depressed behaviors. Movies, books, and society in general consistently portray teen girls as insecure and dim-witted. So what happened to the assertive, curious young lady? That question is what Dr. Mary Pipher intends to answer. In this Saplings in the Storm, an excerpt from her book, Reviving Ophelia, Pipher reflects on the problems manifested by adolescent girls and attempts to explain how and why young girls mentally “die” when they hit puberty.

In a much more somber undertone, she uses words with deathly connotations to contribute to the analogy of death that is prevalent in Saplings in the Storm from start to finish. Pipher describes her pre-teen clients as “elusive and slow to trust.” They have erratic and abnormal behavior. “One week they love their world and their families, the next day they are critical of everyone.” Eating disorders, school phobias, self-inflicted injuries, and depression are not uncommon among them, but this range of problems, Pipher notes, has a deeper and more complex source. In order to offer a straightforward example of the plight befalling adolescent girls, Pipher uses the story of Ophelia and how she endeavored to appease both her father and Hamlet. As the majority of girls turn into teenagers, they tend to lose their sense of independence. They stop living for themselves and instead begin to seek the approval of others. In the ensuing struggle to please

She uses words with deathly connotations (crash and burn, wreckage, poisoned, destructive forces, collapse, etc.) and flat-out mentions death several times (go down, die, fall asleep for a hundred years, drowns, etc) in order to create a serious, dreary mood that reaches out to the readers’ emotions, to the readers’ pathos. As Pipher gains a grip of her readers’ pathos, the analogy she is making becomes much more effective and her readers’ subliminally begin to want to rescue these girls from the death that is staring them in the face. Pipher even goes a step further and explicitly states the analogy she is making: adolescence is as life-threatening to girls as The Bermuda Triangle is to planes and ships. Once that analogy is clear, once Pipher has stirred a call to action in her readers, she changes tactics to emphasize the problems themselves, instead of the consequences of the problems. She uses parallelism (sensitive and tender-hearted, mean and competitive, superficial and idealistic, this week the good student, next week the delinquent, and the next, the artist) and antithesis (confident in the morning and overwhelmed by anxiety by nightfall, rush through days with wild energy then collapse into lethargy) to accentuate teenage girls’ erratic behaviors. By using a combination of these two, Pipher gives a sense of balance to her reflection and proves she is a