Terra Cotta Girl The poem has clear, wide-open drama while managing ambiguity and open-ended ness. A sort of modern local color piece tinted with Southern elements, it nevertheless makes its characters real and sympathetic, treats important themes that are both topical and general, and offers an apt objective relationship with universal implications. Technically a lyric, the poem filled with narrative and drama: an off-the-farm college girl, a Southerner, and perhaps a Georgian like Sellers herself, has fallen in love with a “quiet girl down the hall” (9).
The girl’s conservative mother “has seen to” (10) having her daughter seek for an expert help.
Ungraceful, conflicted inwardly, and beset outwardly by parental pressure, the girl now waits to see a counselor. No character speaks, but the role of each is well defined. At least five characters, perhaps six, come into play: two girls, their two mothers, and one or maybe two counselors. Onstage is the “terra cotta girl” (1) — and maybe her mother as well. The other, “quiet” (9) daughter and her mother, along with a counselor (perhaps the same one), running a parallel to the scene we are witnessing. Although the poem shows us the girls as living “down the hall” (9) from each other in their college dormitory, it also suggests another indirect possibility that, at the very moment of the present action, this other girl, the quiet one, is just “down the hall” waiting to see another counselor during two parallel sessions that the mothers have “seen to” (10).
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POETRY COMPARATIVE Since the beginning of the world, humankind always wondered why they were what they were, and tried to define the peculiar dream they were in. This dream was called life. It was found similar to a great deal of things, which were mostly completely opposite to each other. One would call it an endless torture and the other would call it a joyful game So when writing was invented, ...
Perhaps, the other girl’s mother is with her, too. The other girl may be “quiet” precisely because the narrator chooses not to give her a separate story. If this is the case, her “terra cotta” lover stands in as her delegate. The phrase “quiet girl” draws the image of a shy character, who may be less able to handle her current torture, and not as strong as “terra cotta girl.” Formally, the poem has thirteen short lines with different numbers of syllables and accents.
The poem is unrhymed but engages such alliterations as “flat farm feet” (2) / “furrows” (3), “soil has seen” (10), and “weep for the waste” (12).
All of the alliterated sounds are voiceless, which projects the current situation of the girls. The thirteen breath units of the poem divide into two clear sentences. With no stanza break in the poem, these sentences establish the language of the drama.
Significantly, the second sentence is much briefer than the first: the girls get nine lines and the mothers only four. The first sentence describes the main characters, using three parallel verbs: “traces furrows,”reads an existentialist paperback”, and “finds no ease.” The poem connects girl’s reading in existentialism with her search for personal “ease.” The second sentence has the mothers engaging in a short series of actions, as they first “seen to” visit of their daughters to the counselor and then “weep for the waste” (12).
The poet’s imagery cultivates a central theme of earthiness. The girl is “terra cotta” (“baked earth” Italian, from Latin), a soft and manageable but once fired becomes very fragile earthen material with useful potentials; her mother, by means of figurative speech is “home soil” (familiar ground), a group personification that include “grassroots” and “down-to-earth.” Development of this “earth” matter comes in such elements as “big flat farm feet”, “traces furrows / with her toes,” and even “sturdy hips” (12).
As a symbol of a region and its ideology, the “home soil” from which both mother and daughter have grown up is a solid union that might also be “furrowed” for planting — like the rug the girl furrows with her feet. That action, the most forceful gesture here, creates an irony by putting the girl in the role of an unproductive planter of seed.
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Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike's "A&P," the literary ...
The adjective “ripe” continues the pattern of imagery about planting. Another conflict of the poem affects the two general belief systems conservative Christianity and different views of modern society. The mother’s solid “Baptist” (11) values contrast with the open-ended relativism of young college students. Where, unformed girls are still in search mode, the “Baptist mothers” (11) who have “seen to” this visit surely think that by now they have clear, fixed answers to questions of behavioral morality. As to tone, the contents of the poem directs our sympathy toward the “terra cotta girl” partly by rounding her out while keeping her mother stereotypical. The poem’s visual imagery, along with narrative information, serves to characterize the hero: she is sunburn, stony, curious, capable of affection, alone, confused, and outnumbered.
In contrast, the mother is generic, conservative, bound by dogma, judgmental, selfish in her expectations, and locked into a narrow concept of gender roles. In given situation, even readers who usually skeptical about the rightness of lesbian love, find themselves pulled into a sphere of sympathy for this guilt-ridden girl, stigmatized by her culture and unable to find any ease of being different. Bettie Sellers’s “In the Counselor’s Waiting Room” seems skeptical about whether the girls, their mothers, counselor, or any class or book can solve the painful mystery of sexual orientation and ease the guilt that comes from being different. At once realistic, open-ended and universal, the text accomplishes what good poems supposed to do, by involving us into lives of different people and making us care about individuals in a confusing world, that includes us, our children, and the grandchildren. Finally, this miniature text offers a powerful correlation: with the sun-fired “terra cotta girl,” we all sit in the “Counselor’s Waiting Room,” where our parents or superiors have put us, hiding our own confusions, awaiting to see the expert that we hope may set everything straight.
The Essay on Aeuroedaddy Aeur Story Girl Mother
In the short story, ^aEURoeDaddy^aEUR, by Jan Clausen, the narrator is a young girl with divorced parents. She lives with her biological mother, who is now a lesbian. The mother has a female friend named Carolyn. Carolyn, s relationship with the mother is not clearly defined, but one can assume she is the mother, s new lover. Sundays are the days when the little girl goes to her father, s house, ...
