a) Alice’s perceptions of the world, as she is coming of age, make her idiosyncratic. Many of her features on how she comes to the understanding of the world are charming and eccentric. An example of this, is her discovering how the reality of the world is quite different from the books she reads. Before her father’s death, where she was isolated from the outside world, she had a keen interest in fairytales. When she encounters the mine inspector, it made her “inflations feel all warm, and my thighs too, because the power of magic connects those parts” (Soucy 54). Thus, she falls in love with him and calls him “the prince”, as the mine inspector is an educated benevolent man who owns a motorcycle that resembles a cavalier (Soucy 53). This event …show more content…
On the note about dictionaries, Alice narrates that “the rain that is welling up from the ground and will never end has already done its work on part of the dictionaries, a long and slow and inexorable work of invasion by mildew and damp is exerting its powers on our estate and the dictionaries arc dying a natural death like all the rest - corruption!” (Soucy 73). Moreover, she relates dictionaries to the trees. The water overflowing explains how the trees are going to die due to the corruption of power. A powerful presence can influence a group, the invasion” and violate and destroy all the good things. Furthermore, Alice describes a ballroom scenes where “ chandeliers that hang from the ceiling and were shaped like strawberries, with crystal eye and globes where the light got trapped and danced and laughed cheerily, really, things were moving on all sides, and with a little luck and a little wind which would come in through the broken window panes, all this was accompanied by a merry clinking as crystal-clear as a fish. But other chandeliers had fallen to the floor like overripe fruit, they had crashed to the cracked marble slabs in bunches and it made you think of some disemboweled fly, its guts full of eggs - corruption!” (Soucy 79) Yet again, Alice connects beautiful and pure objects with nature, and a force disrupts it. It shows the distant relationship between humans and …show more content…
Many key events in this story show how men are evidently more powerful and is currently a troubling issue in reality. In this novel, Alice’s father has patriarchal power over her, later on, the kid brother calls himself as the king, the mine inspector shows possibly the only sign of hope to save Alice and towards the end of the novel, the beggar tries to take advantage of her. Through Alice’s journey, it is presented that as a girl, she is portrayed to lack agency. This is reinforced with how the male and female counter body parts are named differently. Alice’s breasts are called “inflations” and women, in general, are entitled “sluts”, while for the men their parts are called “attributions”. The naming of these parts entails this discrepancy of power in society. The word inflations are often presented in a negative way and the word ‘slut’ is degrading. For example, an increase in prices is then needed to be controlled. Thus, women are intended to listen and make choices depending on the authoritative figure. On the other hand, attributions is a word presented positively, which is often given to someone to give credit or remark for something. Thus, men are assigned to a greater role in society. However, when Alice faintly remembers her sister, the Fair Punishment, and mother, and her discovery of being pregnant, presents the importance of femininity. It’s this discovery that