Monday, November 24, 2008
Quarter 2, Post 3
The House at Sugar Beach takes place when the main character, Helene, is almost eight. I have forgotten, really what it's like to be that age and this is a great reminder. In my reading for this week, Cooper describes her fascination and fear of death. She explains how she would keep repeating, "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take" (23). Saying this gives her a sense of security, but it seems to help her somewhat. Death seems like an odd and mature subject for a young girl to fret about, but as you keep reading it becomes obvious why she is worried about death. In Helene's house there are many precious things because she comes from such a upper class family, things like ivory and jewels. Since they have all this amazing treasures, rouges come in at night and steel from the house. This must be very traumatizing for Helene, knowing that she is upstairs in bed while dangerous people are only a few floors below. I can't imagine how I would react to that. Helene becomes very scared and starts making stories up about the rouges. She decides, "after the rouges' third visit, I realized the rouges were actually heartmen...they weren't coming for ivory and paintings. They wanted me!" (24). Since she is only seven, Helene has a huge imagination and must be very scared, so this her way of rationalizing what she doesn't understand. With this stress and burden on her there is no way she can live normally, I know I wouldn't be able to.
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5 comments:
These quotes remind me of how confusing the whole concept of life and death once was to me. It makes me realize how hard it must be for my younger sister to understand. I think that it is also funny to see how she "makes up" what she does not understand, as I probably did the exact same thing once too.
Helene's fear of the rouges in her house and of death remind me of myself when I was her age--I used to be afraid of robbers too. I think it is interesting that we forget about these fears as we get older, because we're not actually safer now, but only more reassured about our security.
I think that at Helene's age, kids haven't experienced life long enough to understand concepts like death. It's not as if anyone can really understand death, but as people get older they can accept certain things. Like people being afraid of the dark when they are little, people grow up to find that there was nothing in the dark after all. Because her security is threatened by the rouges, her perception of how safe she is changes in a bad way.
The whole concept of death was once mind boggling for me as well. This book seems to remind one of the many childish thoughts and show that reality for a child is hard to define. This book is intriguing to me and I would want to read it, hearing all of these childlike topics makes me relive my childhood which is always interesting.
I would like to know whether Helene's fascination with death continues past her childhood, or if she remains in fear into her adolescence. I can imagine that such fears would cause a growing girl to struggle in her relationships with other people, as well as functioning normally in daily life. Helene's fascination with death reminds me of the movie "My Girl", when the young girls best friend eventually dies, and her obsession with death becomes actualized. The sadness that a child deals with when faced with death is rather different from that of an adult, because the concept of death is so difficult for a young child to understand.
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