Rape In Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak

Unfortunately, one out of every six women have been through an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. But, their problems don’t end when the deed has been done, seventy percent of women experience moderate to severe distress following the incident and thirty-three percent contemplate suicide. Rape is a serious problem in our society today but, the process of recovering from such a vile traumatic experience can be arduous. The novel “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson perfectly illustrates a young girl’s struggle to recover from the devastating experience that is rape. In Anderson’s novel, we enter the mind of a 14-year-old girl named Melinda. Two weeks before the beginning of her freshman year in high school, she goes to a party where

One weekend, Melinda is bored of partaking in her usual activity of sitting on the couch and doing nothing, so, upon looking at the state of her front yard, she opts for some gardening. The work refreshes her and she feels lighter as the muscles in her arms throb from hours of hard labor, her hands calloused from gripping the rough surface of the rake. She has found a hobby that she enjoys, this is important to her recovering as it gives her a distraction from the thoughts beating at the inside of her head. Aside from just a distraction, gardening can be used as a metaphor for her clearing away the things that are holding her back from speaking out about what happened to her. As Melinda begins the grueling task of clearing out her yard she says, “I start on the leaves suffocating the bushes… They look harmless and dry on top, but under that top layer, they’re wet and slimy...They snag the tines of the rake and hold them- they don’t like me cleaning out all that rot… Finally, the rake scrapes its metal fingernails along damp brown dirt… Pale green shoots of something alive have been struggling under the leaves... they straighten to face the sun. I swear I can see them grow.” (166) The leaves are described as appearing harmless at the surface, this can be associated with her appearance to the outside world, just a shy, quiet girl who is a stain on their lives for calling the cops at the party. But, if you take the time to get to know her, rake the leaves from the surface, you will see the rot that snakes through her, depression, trauma, these are things that are not visible to the outside world, but lie beneath the surface slowly eating away at her, from the inside out. Victims of rape will often rot away if they do