Way Home For Eva example essay topic
491 words
Alice Munro's "The Found Boat" is a retelling of the Biblical tale of Noah's ark where the trip that the children take ends up re-confirming the gender boundaries. The flood, in one sense, can cause the demise of civilization or, the beginning of life. This flood in particular, brings Eva, Coral and the three boys together, similarly to how the flood in the bible brings God's creations together. The quiet way that the children walked home with the boat can be seen as a unity like the animals would have had on the Ark. [The boys] came carrying the boat, upside-down, and Eva and Carol walked behind, wheeling their bicycles... This was not the way home for Eva or for Carol either, but they followed along. The boys were perhaps too busy carrying the boat to tell them to go away. Once the boys completed the boat, the children took it into the water, sailed and docked it at an abandoned train station. There, they played a game of truth or dare, and the children dared each other to take off all of their clothes. 'I dare everybody", said Frank from the doorway... "What?"Take off all our clothes... ."Anybody who won't do it has to walk - has to crawl - around this floor on their hands and knees".
They were all quiet, till Eva said, almost complacently, "what first?" Before taking a dip in the water, the children are untroubled about running around naked. Their swim can be seen as a baptism, where "Baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you - not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience... ". (In 1st Peter 3: 21, NRSV) Once the children resurface and Clayton sees Eva, he becomes ashamed, or conscience, of her nakedness. By spraying water at Eva's breast, Clayton is saying that girls, unlike boys, should be covered up and not run around naked since women's bodies are vulnerable to rape and needs protection. It is Clayton and not God that gives Eva her sense of shame.
The story of Eva's humiliation, after an attempt to be one of the boys can be reduced to the old battle between individual desire and social order, and between freedom and control. Eva can be seen as wanting to be as free as the flood, instead of being confined and controlled in one place. She is the first to take off her clothes in the game of Truth or Dare, showing that she will not take a back seat. Eva wants to be let go without social and gender confinement. Unfortunately for her, as proven by the Bible and Alice Munro's story, the world operates in a way where man will always seem to be the dominant figure in society.
