TerrificMother读书笔记.docVIP

My Understanding to “Terrific Mother” In the story Terrific Mother, the author described us a woman who accidentally killed a baby and her daily life during a trip with her husband. The writer uses a lot of metaphors which make the theme of this story pretty subtle to me. However, I would like to talk about the image of a woman in this story and Adrienne’s way of rebuilding her image as a woman. In this novel, the image of a woman can be divided into two main parts, the image as a mother and the image as a wife. In the novel, the author writes, “She let her face fall deep into the pillow, her mouth hanging open like a dog’s, and then she slept until six, dreaming that a baby was in her arm but that it turned into a stack of plates, which she had to juggle, tossing them into the air.” This dream happened at the first night Adrienne arrived the villa. As it is known to us all, one of the main “jobs” for a mother is to carry her baby, so we can come to the conclusion that the image of baby represents the part as a mother of Adrienne. Also, for most of the families it is the female takes care of the house chores and washes the dishes. So we can considers those plates as the metaphor as the jobs of a housewife. I consider this dream a very important metaphor that not only shows Adrienne’s image of a woman, which separate into the mother and the wife,（The baby represents the role of a mother and the plates represent the role of a wife.）but also shows that while Adrienne failed the role as a mother by killing the baby of her friend, she wants to be a good wife as a kind of redemption. But we also know that since the plates are easy to be damaged, and juggling them can be hard and dangerous. We can come to the conclusion that Adrienne is worried her failure as a mother will influence her role as a wife. Also, the frequent use of the image “spider” also helps to build the image of a mother. In some cultures the spider represents good wife for the spiders are good at spinnin