SSRJ#2: Colette
Personal reaction:
“The Hand” by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette made me feel sad about the idea of how easily someone can fall out of love for a person. The element which Colette used the best to her abilities that seemed to the most intriguing to me was the use of symbolism throughout the short story. It reminds me of my sister who has also known a man for a month yet talking they are discussing marriage.
Literary element:
In the short story “The Hand,” Colette uses symbolism to her advantage by expressing the idea of being opposed young people rushing into marriage with falsehood idea of what they think their lover is like compared to who they really are. In the story “The Hand” Colette bases the story on a wife who has married a man she has known for a month and through one night she begins to come with the terms that she does not know who she married.In the beginning, the wife is smitten and admiring her husband as he sleeps, as time progresses in the night, Colette makes the character no longer face her new found lover, and the character begins to notice her husband’s repulsive hands. Colette then makes the hand its own individual entity as she uses it, to waking up to the sound of a screeching car. The idea of the hand having its own entity symbolizes a side of the husband his new wife did not know about. Through out the night, the hand takes shape two times the first one is an ape, apes usually symbolize falsehood, Colette is revealing to her character the man she knows is not the man she loves, and may in fact not be the man who she thinks him to be. Secondly the hand then takes in form of a crab claw, both animals crab and ape are aggressive creatures this reveals the man is himself a very dominant and aggressive. This aggression can also be shown when her husband is laying in bed and the hand has a bad dream it “dug into it (the sheets) with its curved fingers, squeezed, squeezed with the methodical pleasure of a strangler.” This startles the woman showing as she says Oh! the exclamation shows she has not seen this behavior in her husband.
Questions and comments:
Did any of you guys get the vibe that the husband killed his former wife?
I like the sybolism you pointed out about the claw and ape i missed it myself.
ReplyDeleteI think you had a good point about how easily people fall in and out of love and that may have been what was going on here. I didn't get the vibe that he had killed his ex, but everybody else is saying that, so maybe I'm a little slow on these things, LOL...
ReplyDeleteI don't think the husband killed his former wife. I wish the narrator gave us that part of the story, but I never got that vibe when I read it.
ReplyDeleteI definitely like the idea of giving the hand its' own identity, I can see that now. Throught that Colette builds a dominant role of the man and a vulnerable sole of the woman. Furthermore, i did not catch the claw and the ape which is very important. The screetching car and how that makes the hand move is also significant. As for him killing his former wife, it's deinitely a good question but i think that is excatly what Colette wanted us to ponder. I say that because that was probably what the wife was thinking too, it may have not been the case but the fact that she has only known him a month reveals how much room she has to make any type of judgements towards him, if that makes any sense at all.
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