Phases In The Life Of Melinda In Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

Phases in the Life of Melinda Mr. Freeman said “Be the tree.” to Melinda in Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak. Melinda’s growth is described through her artwork, and other forms of the trees in this novel. In this story, Mr. Freeman, the art teacher, passes around a globe full of subjects for the students to work on for the entire year. Melinda reaches inside, and pulls out the slip of paper that says “tree”, at first she thinks that the subject is stupid and boring, but it ends up helping her cope in the long run. In Speak, Melinda goes through three main phases in her artwork, the confused phase, where she is trying to find a voice, the dead phase, where she thinks speaking up will not help in her situation, and the healing phase, which

Work. Melinda is attempting to find a sense of self while she is planning her tree project, and she says, “I look for the shapes in my face. Could I put a face in my tree, like a dryad from Greek mythology? Two muddy-circle eyes under black dash eyebrows, piggy-nose nostrils, and a chewed-up horror of a mouth. Definitely not a dryad face. I can’t stop biting my lips. It looks like my mouth belongs to someone else, someone I don’t even know” (Anderson 17). When she says this, she is facing who she thinks she is, and it really shows how she views herself at this point in time. This period is called the confused period because she does not know who she is yet, because after the night of the rape, she could not see herself in the same light, due to her hurting on the inside, because she does not know how to tell anyone about it. Another piece of artwork she makes is a picture of a tree being struck by lightning. 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

She describes this fact with her last piece of artwork. It is not symmetrical, it has a sick branch, the scars of what look like initials in the bark, and knobby roots that stick out of the ground. The branch represents the sickness of the mind that Melinda has started to develop due to her not telling anyone about the rape, and keeping the emotions from that night bottled up. The scars either represent the possible budding relationship between Melinda and David Petrakis, or in a slightly darker turn, it might symbolize the ending of the torture that Andy had been putting on Melinda. The roots are sticking out of the ground and pointing towards the sun, which is a symbol of Melinda’s growth and her looking forward to a future without Andy. The branches do the same thing as the roots, but it is what is in the branches that means the most, there are a couple of birds, which mean that she is ready to speak up and tell someone about the night, also that she had decided who to tell. At the very end of the book, Melinda begins to tell Mr. Freeman, about her experience. Mr. Freeman had been an inspiration for Melinda ever since her first day of art class, so it is only fitting that he is the one Melinda