Perspective. Simply put, it means that events in our own lives shape the way that we react to new events, situations or knowledge. We all have a slightly different way of seeing things. In Alice Walker’s “Roselily” the main character is about to be married, she is about to experience a major event in her life, but she is not excited. The main character’s outlook in the story was quite a challenge to my own view of marriage. I have always thought of a wedding as something joyful and exciting, but this was not the case for Roselily. She was fearful, and she second guessed her decision, emotions that are not surprising to see in someone who is about to be married, but her reasons for these emotions were. Roselily was not marrying out of love but rather out of need. I cannot imagine being in that sort of situation. This is not to say that I thought that every wedding was a happy event, I know that this is not the case. However, to have insight into the feelings of a bride who is marrying out of necessity rather than desire was interesting for me in that is challenges my own perspective, I had to think outside of my own views in order to understand the main character’s emotions.
One of the things that really drew me into this story was the way that Walker placed lines of the wedding ceremony between the paragraphs. At first I had a difficult time understanding exactly what the point of this was. Why? Why bother adding this to the story if it did not really affect what was going on? After all, it was not difficult to grasp the point of the story by itself, without the lines of the ceremony. It was not until halfway through the story that I began to understand the reasoning behind Walker’s choice. Without the lines from the wedding ceremony, the story is clear, the emotions of the main character are apparent and the information about her past is not difficult to understand. The story could survive all alone, but it would take on a slightly different meaning. I think that Walker’s point in adding these lines was to give the story depth. They make it seem as though all of Roselily’s thoughts and emotions are happening while the ceremony is going on. With the lines, the reader gets the feeling that Roselily is standing, just moments away from being married, doubting her decision.
The main character mentions several times that she feels she is too old. In paragraph eleven it says that she is “finally being married.” The thing is, age is relative. What is considered old for one person is not considered old for another. Exactly how old do you think Roselily is? Is she really “too old” or are her feelings of insecurity about her age a result of her second-guessing her decision to marry?
Personally, I thought it was really cool how every interspersed line the preacher delivered directly correlated with the thoughts going through Roselilly's mind at the time. I agree that it really does give the reader a better sense of how many thoughts she has in such a relatively short amount of time.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, while I was reading I kept assuming the story was set in the late 1800's or so probably because the idea of marrying for necessity seems like such an ancient idea to me. It was not until I reread the story that I took notice of the cars driving by on the highway which places it somewhere after 1956 since that was when Eisenhower signed the Highway Revenue Act. I was so immersed in the author's nearly poetic writing style that I completely missed that crucial part of the story. So what era do you think the story is set in?