Their Places And Spaces As A Means example essay topic

310 words
The spaces and places represented in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King are important to the development of the characters and their conflicts with one another. Marshall draws two opposing great-grandmothers by making them and the spaces they occupy, their homes, significant to who they are. For instance, U lene, Sonny's West Indian great-grandmother lives in a slovenly house that is harsh to look at and she is hard to handle, as the inside of her mind has begun to match the inside of her home. Then, in the same vein of space as a character representation, there is Florence Varina Mccullom-Jones Sonny's American born maternal great-grandmother, who lives on the opposite side of Macon Street. Her magnificently overdone home and meticulously painted and primped physical exterior represent who she is as well, someone overdone, putting on airs so to speak, in an effort to escape her surroundings and sad life story.

Places and spaces are consistently means of escape for the characters central to The Fisher King. Paris is an escape. Florence Varina's Macon Street "palace" is an escape. Edgar Payne's house on Long Island is an escape.

The characters are using their places and spaces as a means to escape their past and the memories that haunt them. In the end, Hattie is forced to allow Sonny to face the shared past of the characters. He must remain in the United States and leave Paris, where Hattie hid him from all that transpired on Macon Street. Edgar Payne's rebuilding of his old neighborhood is a means to change a place that haunts him, to better it in his mind. Marshall uses places and spaces, imaginative geographies, as a means to develop her characters. She changes places, and as such changes the lives of her characters.