Aug 03 2008
Changed by the Written Word
I know I’ve written before about wanting to change people through my writing, to truly help them see problems in their own lives, or help them realize truths about themselves they had not realized before.
I suppose I have this dream because, as a reader (and theatrical audience member) I have found myself altered after certain meaningful or unusual works. Let me give you a few examples…perhaps they will illustrate a bit more about me than you like (or than I am comfortable with). Hopefully, they will stir up your own memories, and remind you of works you found especially profound.
The first work I remember truly affecting me was Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. I had curly blonde hair…she had curly blonde hair. Okay, so that’s where the similarity ended, but I still identified with her enough that I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be the poor waif in the woods who becomes a princess someday. Even more, I wanted someone to fall in love with me as the poor waif, not knowing yet how great I truly was. It was silly, yes, but I took it seriously enough to cry on my sixteenth birthday, when nothing happened.
A second, much more meaningful work was The Cat Who Went to Heaven. It won the Newberry Medal in 1939 or something (forgive me for not looking that up right now…I’m on a roll!). Every time I checked it out from the school library, I took it home and read until I sobbed. My mother actually asked me one day, “Why do you read it, if it makes you cry?” For me, the cat’s situation was glorious, to be utterly misunderstood, yet to know in your heart your true worth, your good character, despite all the lies others tell about you. Who knew, years and years (and years) later, that I would cling to the same truth, while many people misunderstood, lied about, and judged me based upon the lies?
Other works speak to various parts of me…Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, since it deals with getting out of a horrible situation, rather than suffering through it; pretty much anything by Shakespeare except Macbeth, mainly because he understood human relationships better than most psychiatrists today; Beauty by Robin McKinley, since it was the first retelling of a fairy tale that made the beast truly sympathetic and didn’t stereotype the two other sisters as “selfish,” “vain,” or “jealous.” I also found the train sequence of the second Spiderman movie compelling, mainly because of its ending: Spiderman tries with all his might to stop the train, to the extent that he passes out once the train is safe. That level of vulnerability is something I find appealing in characters, to have them be found out and yet be loved for the very things they’ve been hiding.
I know I have hundreds more…from Amadeus to Immortal Beloved, from Harry Potter to Anne of Green Gables. What has spoken to you, through theatre, through books, or through the cinema?
