Preview

Discuss How Yolen’s Perspective on Personal Discovery Is Conveyed in Briar Rose.

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
968 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Discuss How Yolen’s Perspective on Personal Discovery Is Conveyed in Briar Rose.
Discuss how Yolen’s perspective on personal discovery is conveyed in Briar Rose.

Jane Yolen conveys the idea about personal discovery by taking the reader on journey with the characters. This journey helps the characters find out who they are and where they belong. It is not easy trying to understand oneself. Throughout the novel the readers see the characters form strong relationships with one another, and stick together through the hard and good times. This helps the characters find out who they really are.

Every character has their own dark past which they to keep hidden. But in the novel Yolen shows the readers it is always better to come out of the wardrobe then to stay hidden and not be found. Becca’s editor Stan says, “I don’t think you’re going to be happy until you find out who your grandmother was, Becca”. Since Becca was little her grandmother, Gemma, told her stories about Briar Rose. Becca was always interested in these stories. Stan believes that Becca will not be able to know her own identity until she discovers the truth about Gemma’s astonishing claim “I am Briar Rose”.

Nobody understands why it is so important to Becca to find the truth about Gemma’s identity. Not even her sisters who tell her “It’s a goddamned fairy tale princess, Becca”. However, for Becca the knowledge of oneself comes from discovering the truth about past family history, and also a personal promise. Gemma made Becca promise to find the truth. Becca announced, “I’m going to find the castle and the prince and reclaim our heritage…I promised Gemma”. Only by discovering and revealing Gemma’s true identity can Becca begin to discover her own.

It is typical of every fairy tale that there is a prince. In Briar Rose the prince is the man who saves Gemma, Josef. He suffers his own tragedy as he is sent to a concentration camp during the Holocaust. This is not only physical tragedy, but Josef also suffers from a loss of identity. Josef is a homosexual man; he is not a

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    From her troubles with the abusive Reed family, her friendships at Lowood, her love of Mr Rochester and her time with the Rivers family, Jane 's character remains strong and vigilant despite the hardships she endures. Through the course of the novel, Jane 's character changes slightly but moreover reinforces itself as Jane uses people, situations and her personal experiences to gain knowledge, and assist her gaining her full character.…

    • 862 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    my work

    • 373 Words
    • 2 Pages

    1. Where does this story take place? How do we know (provide evidence from the story)?…

    • 373 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Briar Rose

    • 1429 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In Briar Rose, the author Jane Yolen, introduces the audience to a variety of significant ideas that she portrays throughout the text and uses interesting techniques to convey these ideas. She reveals the concept of parallelism by intertwining the stories: Sleeping Beauty and the Holocaust. She uses symbolism to highlight the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust. Yolen uses postmodern ideas with the use of flashback of the past to retell a fairytale version that Becca’s grandmother Gemma told her growing up. Becca the protagonist discovers this story to be an allegory of the Holocaust.…

    • 1429 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jane, she decided to break free of this norm and embark on her own search for understanding and identity,…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fictional literature of the Holocaust the reader opens a diverse number of stories about this tragic and gruesome historical event. Fictional stories explore a sensitive topic with respect, it gives honor to the survivors of the Holocaust by informing new generations of the adversities the Jewish people experienced. Fictional Nazi genocide stories solve the limitations present in autobiographies and survival testimonies about the Holocaust; Anna Richardson mentions one of these limitations in The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation, "survivor testimony can never express the full Holocaust experience, as by definition those who survived did not go to the gas chamber"(7). In reality, the authentic stories about the holocaust…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Jane Eyre is a classic coming-of-age novel, using the popular format of a character reaching maturity through a series of obstacles, similar to both Mark Twain's ‘Huckleberry Finn’, and J.D. Salinger's ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. However it creates a more complex picture through clever crafting of the novel incorporating the physical movement and growth of Jane with her spiritual development. One of the strongest influences on her movements is the notion of the family. As Jane is an orphan, she must ‘create’ her own family. Her choices reflect her need to find her own family. Jane Eyre is a novel which has no firm setting. As the locations change, Jane herself is affected in…

    • 2665 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    As the novella unfolds, the author reveals various characteristics that the protagonist simply cannot achieve due to her physicality and ethics. For example, many female characters show the desire for security in their lives as seen when Irene admits that “security was the most important and desired thing in life” (76). Both Clare Kendry and Irene…

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A fairy tale needs a handsome, courageous prince which the readers love and becomes the hero of the story. In The Sleeping Beauty... the prince is destined by love and honor to conquer the thick woods and go find the princess and bring her back to life. In the Briar Rose, Josef is known to be a handsome man, He is shown as an accidental hero, who joins the partisans when he finds and joins some prisoners planning an escape. His adventures with the partisans enable him to become a hero. He is the one who persuades the rest to attempt to save some of the Chelmno victims - and thus is responsible for helping save Gemma, the Ksiezniczka. Eventually, when Gemma's young husband Aron has died and she is pregnant, Josef helps her escape.…

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Briar Rose Analysis

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages

    An appealing story is one thats engaging and keeps the reader hanging on to every word of the novel, wanting to find out what comes next. ‘Briar Rose’ by Jane Yolen is one of those stories. It keeps the reader wanting to find out more, it is a mysterious, puzzling story told as a fairytale but having a deep and meaningful history to uncover about the Holocaust, that Yolen hides within a fairytale. Jane Yolen uses a variety of features to ensure a captivating story for her readers.…

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The development of the character Lily on her journey to learn about her mom shows the reader how much she has grown…

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mirror Image Analysis

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Danat commented on how she really enjoyed that the protagonist, Alice, developed and learned to accept herself through the course of the story. This reminded me of myself as a teenager and all the stages that I have been through and continue to go through. I thought of how I changed, developed, gained wisdom, faced new challenges, all of this being part of my journey, as I try to find myself, just like Alice.…

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Generation after generation, the compelling power of Fairy Tales had placed an overpowering spell on young girls; swept them off to a fantasyland and held them captive ever since. Hidden behind an innocuous mask, fairytales perpetually enraptured and entranced young maidens of the world without relent. It only took the first ‘Once Upon a Time…' bedtime story to spellbind each little soul; casting them into a sanctuary of dreamworld fantasies.…

    • 915 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the story Miss Brill, details such as the fur Miss Brill wears and how she spends her Sunday evenings shed light into her characteristics and lifestyle. Her point of view shows her to be an unreliable narrator, reality being much different than it appears to Miss Brill.…

    • 599 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Love and Old Lady

    • 3946 Words
    • 16 Pages

    In conclusion, dark secrets only make life difficult. The evidence in the story has shown us that. Any dark secrets we have, may destroy our lives. We may lose the people we love. Always be true to ourselves and do not take advantage of others. Always think before we act.…

    • 3946 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    <br>Amanda has chosen to hide from reality by trying to relive her past. She is living in the unreality of her youthful memories and sees herself as still being as young as Laura when she says to her, ‘No, sister, no, sister – you be the lady this time and I'll be the darkey' (p 237). She reminisces about ‘one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain' (p 237) when she received seventeen gentleman callers, and then tries to relive this through Laura. She arranges for Tom to bring home some nice young man for his sister. When Tom brings home a gentleman caller, Amanda wears ‘a girlish frock of yellowed voile with a blue silk sash' (p 276), the dress that she wore as a girl for her own gentleman callers. The reader can see from this that Amanda is definitely living in the past. Another way that Amanda hides from reality is that she tries to deny anything that she does not want to accept. She denies that Laura is crippled, saying ‘Nonsense! Laura, I've told you never, never to use that word.' (p 247). Amanda believes that if she denies something so much, that it will not be true. This also occurs when Laura thinks that the…

    • 1264 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics