Sometimes my girlfriend picks up my hand and places hers against mine to measure the vast difference in mass and size between her hand and my hand. “You have really big hands.” She’ll say and I can’t agree with her more. A man’s hand is his tool. It should be strong enough to work and protect and at the same time gentle enough to caress and pleasure. I think the title was named “The Hand” because the hand is a symbol of her dilemma about the situation the narrator has got herself into.
According to the story, the narrator seems to have ran away from home and fallen into the hands of apparently the loveliest stranger known to man. Well he should be lovely if she had the guts to marry him within a short period of time. She writes, “…To meet a handsome, blond young man, recently widowed, good at tennis and rowing, to marry him a month later” (line 5). To her, it seemed right and exciting at first but after a while she starts to panic. She starts to realize that hand she lays next to is not the hand she held when she was little, nor the hand that feed her, nor the hand that spanked her when she did wrong. This hand is the head of the household, it’s the same one that will carry her baby and also the same hand that will spank her, well this time for an alternative motive though. The hand in this story symbolizes the power and control her husband has over her. As the saying goes, “do not bite the hand that feeds you,” Even though the narrator feels trapped and u