Discussion Topic
Melinda's experiences and reflections in her bedroom closet in Speak
Summary:
In Speak, Melinda's bedroom closet serves as a sanctuary where she processes her trauma and isolation. It is a space for reflection, allowing her to express her emotions through art and graffiti. The closet symbolizes her desire to hide and her struggle for identity, ultimately becoming a place of empowerment as she begins to reclaim her voice.
What does Melinda store in her bedroom closet in Speak?
In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the protagonist is a girl named Melinda who is struggling with her identity throughout the book.
One moment that is symbolic of this is the day a few weeks after the school year starts when she comes home from school and looks into the mirror. She has been biting her lips hard, damaging them.
This lip-biting, a self harming behavior, may be symbolic of her silence concerning what really happened the night of the party the summer before. She will not speak about it to anyone, and both literally and metaphorically "bites her lips."
She feels at this moment that her mouth does not belong to her anymore, a sign of her feeling disconnected from her identity. She then puts the mirror in the bedroom closet.
What thoughts does Melinda have in her closet in the novel Speak?
When Melinda returns to school, she often finds the academic aspects challenging and the...
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social pressures and bullying unbearable. The first time she enters the closet, she is seeking an immediate, temporary release from an unwelcome conversation with a teacher. The unhappy girl soon realizes, however, that no one on the school staff regularly uses or even inspects this space. She begins to visit it regularly and turns it into her refuge
One issue Melinda deals with is her difficulty in accepting her own appearance, and another is the inability to speak. She deals with these problems symbolically by covering the closet mirror with a poster of Maya Angelou, the writer who chronicled her own muteness following trauma.
Having this hidden space allows Melinda a small measure of privacy and security in her very unsafe world. As she begins to develop ideas for her art project, she uses the closet to collect and display the tree images that figure into it. The sanctuary becomes more valuable when her friend Heather abandons her and her social circle almost disappears.
When her friend Rachel shows interest in Andy, the rapist, Melinda retreats to the closet to review a possible course of action and writes an anonymous note. Later after she finally tells Rachel the whole truth, she no longer needs this refuge. It becomes the setting of her showdown with the rapist when he attacks her again.