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Melinda's Growth In Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

844 Words4 Pages

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you're not.” (Andre Gide) In the book Speak By: Laurie Halse Anderson the main character Melinda calls the cops at a party over the summer. When school starts Melinda as a freshman is hated for stopping the party. What they don’t know is why Melinda called the cops. Melinda has to overcome the past and learn from her fears to thrive. In the book the tree symbolizes Melinda's growth, to overcome fears and to progress you need to learn from the past. To start, the journey of Melinda’s growth she chooses a topic for her art class that she will be working on all year. When Melinda pulls her topic out she is disappointed. “I plunge my hand into the bottom of the globe and fish out my paper. "Tree." Tree? It's too easy. I learned how to draw a tree in second grade.” (12). After this Melinda tries to pull out a different piece of paper but, Mr. Freeman (Melinda's art teacher) pulls the globe away not allowing Melinda to choose again. Some of the biggest problems in our life seem easy and like no big deal in the beginning but become hard trials in our life later on. Melinda saying her tree is to easy is refusing to let herself grow and …show more content…

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. In her life Melinda is trying to make new friends and is trying to figure out how to tell people what happened to her at the party and why she called the cops. This relates to the theme because Melinda is facing her fears and she is starting to

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The quote above is from the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. It is said by Mr. Freeman, the art teacher, to Melinda in the high school art room. In this novel, Melinda, an anxious freshman girl, is shunned by her friends and peers because she called the cops to a summer party after something traumatic happened to her. The students at Melinda’s high school are quick to judge her because they don’t know what actually happened, which ruins her social and mental stability.

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Anyone who has ever worked hard has heard the saying, “It builds character.” For example, say someone went to college. They worked hard to graduate with a degree, and finally got their dream job. Two months in they get laid off. Their first job is gone, but still must move on.

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In Mary Pipher’s passage, Saplings in The Storm, Pipher claims that young big-hearted girls are changing as they age. She claims that the nature and source of these problems come from the fairy tales, which capture the essence of change, and approval of others. The elements of language that she uses are tone and rhetorical devices. This passage is made in order to appeal to the audience about the situation and to get them interested in the situation. As adolescent girls grow up they start to lose their inner kid that was once inside them.

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Speak Journal Response The book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson creates many connections; whether they are real world, virtual or personal. This journal will explain those connections, and show my thoughts on them, as well as how they have impacted my view on different, related, topics. My first connection is about Character, between Melinda’s parents, and Qibli’s (Key-Bee) parent’s in the book Wings of Fire.

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In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda gives a really good example of character development throughout the story. Melinda just starts her freshman year at high school. Over the summer her and her friends went to a party and Melinda gets raped by a boy named Andy Evans and ends up calling the police, she didn't tell anyone why she called the police, causing her friends and everyone at the party to reject her. Melinda’s only friend is a new girl named heather. Melinda gets depressed and starts expressing her pain through stuff like biting her lips and her nails, and not talking.

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A different place in the book where Tree learns that

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This emphasises the enormity of the task Ofelia is about to embark upon and also her vulnerability as the tree’s dominating presence fills the frame. The fig tree itself is symbolic in its representation. Firstly, the entrance of the tree resembles that of a female’s ovaries, with its curved branches replicating the fallopian tubes. Moreover, the tree’s sickened state mirrors Ofelia’s pregnant mother’s own fragile condition.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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