“The Hand” is a short story written by Colette that is centered around a newly wedded couple lying in their bed in their new home late at night. The woman lies awake admiring the small details of her sleeping husband who she had met just a month before this night. As the woman goes through the individual parts of his body, relishing in each one, she stops at his large hands. She notices his hands and her feelings towards them and her husband shift from the hands being something like an animal’s and then they turn monstrous and vile to her and she can’t stand to look at the hand and has to turn away where she eventually falls asleep. The next morning, her husband brings her breakfast in bed and the hand still disgusts her as it holds …show more content…
This woman just married this man a little over two weeks before this moment. She also only knew the man a month before they joined their lives together. She lies awake noticing little things about him that if she had waited to marry she would’ve learned before. She noticed his eyelashes and “she also praised his mouth, full and likable, his skin the color of pink brick.” Their relationship, if it can be called that, does not have a foundation to be built on. They do not know each other and anything about each other and their marriage is between two strangers looking to satisfy the outsiders around …show more content…
There are even more symbols in “The Hand” but these are the biggest ones seen in the story. This is a story a woman learning the flaws of the stranger that she married and how she learns to accept and maybe even love in the future. Manly Hall once said, “Symbolism is the language of the mysteries. By symbols, men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language.” The author uses the symbols in their writing to tell a different story than what the words written on the page say to the reader. How each of these individual readers interprets the story is the difference between reading and understanding the