Abstract
Laurie Halse Anderson’s young adult novel Speak concerns the rape and subsequent silence of ninth grade protagonist Melinda Sordino. By relying on extensive literary allusions involving trees, rape, silence, and transformation, Anderson creates a young adult problem novel that is both of the moment and timeless in its themes. The intertextuality of tree imagery in Speak can be placed in conversation with the rape and subsequent silence of women in classical myth and Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus. Grounded in Ovidian imagery, Speak has the appeal of an updated adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a girl is raped by the high school equivalent of a god. She changes from typical adolescent to a withdrawn teen suffering from selective mutism. Yet Anderson allows a second metamorphosis: her protagonist is able to transcend her trauma through art, unlike the tragic nymphs of old whose stories ended upon their violation and subsequent transformations. Anderson’s imagery, deeply indebted to literature’s past but speaking to psychotherapy’s present, offers a distinct venue for readers to grapple with trauma and trees, and their long literary correlations.
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Notes
Speak’s critical recognition includes, among other awards and nominations, a National Book Award Finalist in 1999, an Edgar Allan Poe Best Young Adult Award Finalist in 2000, a Printz Honor Book in 2000, and it received the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Fiction in the same year.
Speak contains almost as much bird imagery as it does tree imagery, a point that also brings to mind classical and Shakespearian discussions of rape victims.
From Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths (1957), which offers interpretations and evaluations of the myth based on Servius on Virgil’s Eclogue 7.61.
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Jessi Snider is a graduate student working on her doctorate at Texas A&M University. Her areas of research include young adult fiction, gender studies, and gothic literature.
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Snider, J. ‘Be the Tree’: Classical Literature, Art Therapy, and Transcending Trauma in Speak . Child Lit Educ 45, 298–309 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9221-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9221-3