In ‘Your Shoes’ the mother deals with her daughter leaving home by trying to lock herself away from the world rather than her daughter, but she describes how when her daughter was there she was overprotective, although she didn’t see herself that way. She shows this by her treatment of the shoes that symbolise her daughter throughout the story, ‘I locked the wardrobe on those rebellious shoes.’ The mother’s monologue is the entire story, and throughout it she becomes increasingly nervous and irrational. At the very end she goes into what seems to be a mental breakdown, ‘I knew you’d come back, I knew you’d come back to me’, although the daughter has not come home.
In ‘Flight’, I think the author is trying to say that if you hold something too tight then they will try and rebel against you, but if your let it have freedom then it will return. She does this through symbolism, using the pigeon as a symbol of the granddaughter. In ‘Flight’ the granddad lets the pigeon free, for a few minutes, to spread its wings, which shows that the granddad is willing to do the same for the granddaughter as long as she comes back. I think the author is also trying to say that marriage can be constrictive, as the granddad has obviously had bad experiences of it through his daughters and granddaughters being taken one by one away from him through it. He also seems to have had bad experiences of his own through marriage, which may be the reason that he is reluctant to let his girls marry. He blames his daughter for letting his granddaughters go, ‘Why do you make your girls marry? It’s you who do it.’ The author uses the third person to narrate this story as it shows the granddads motives clearly without being hampered by being biased.
Through ‘Your Shoes’ I think the author is trying to say that by giving your child ‘everything money can buy’ you are not doing the right thing, in that you cannot buy love. She does this through using the first person and us getting only the mother’s perspective. Although we only get one point of view, the reader can see through this to the daughter’s views and opinions. For example, ‘Funny, you never did like these curtains …’, this passage shows that the mother did what she wanted without consulting the daughter, even to the daughters own things, ‘… exactly what I’d have wanted as a girl.’ The first person narrative may not always be reliable as the mother becomes increasingly irrational as the story progresses. The author uses the shoes as a symbol of the daughter, both of whom the mother sees as pure and white, ‘They are perfect because they are new, they’ve never been worn.’ She also says ‘I’ve tied the shoes laces together so they won’t get separated or lost.’ This shows that the mother thinks that things are only useful as a pair, so her daughter is nothing without her. The shoes are also a symbol of running, which is what they daughter has done, run away. At the end of the story, the mother holds the shoes and treats them as though they are her daughter when she was a baby, before she was ‘spoiled.’ The quote, ‘They are perfect because they are new, they’ve never been worn’ shows that the mother thinks her daughter has been ruined with age.
In ‘Flight’ I think the author makes you respond to the story by using colours, light and shade. For example, she uses the colour red repeatedly to describe the youth that the granddaughter is seeing. Red is a violent colour that indicates danger and blood. This shows that the granddad is scared for the future of his granddaughter and himself. She also uses the light to emphasise points, for example, ‘Her hair fell down her back in a wave of sunlight …’ This shows that the granddad thinks she is golden and special. It also shows that he compares her to sunlight, rather than darkness. An example of where the author uses shade to stress a point is, ‘In the brittle shadows of the frangipani tree his granddaughter, his darling, lay in the arms of the postmaster’s son …’ This shows that he relates shadow and darkness to the youth because he is taking her away. The ending to this story is rather confused or open to interpretation. It leaves you sympathetic towards the granddad rather than the granddaughter because the granddaughter has the youth to rely on and be with and the granddad is being left alone with a daughter that he doesn’t really get on with.
In ‘Your Shoes’ I responded to the story with sympathy for the daughter who has an overbearing mother who grew too unbearable to live with, so she was forced to run away. The writer creates this sympathy for the daughter by using symbolism. Within the story the mother suffocates and controls the shoes, which is a reflection of how she treated her daughter before she ran away. The mother also tells the reader of situations when her daughter was angry with her (the curtains) from a very narrow minded perspective, which makes the reader think that the daughter didn’t get much say and her opinion wasn’t counted. The author shows that the mother was selfish by the curtain episode and how she didn’t support her daughter when her father called her ‘…a dirty slut…’ I think she didn’t support her because she didn’t want to get into an argument with her husband, so she just stood by and watched. The mother also makes her daughter running away about her, saying that she did it just to get at her, not for her own reasons. The author tells us some of the mother’s family history, which shows that she didn’t take the side of her mother either, but went onto her father’s side.
In ‘Flight’ and ‘Your Shoes’ the characters deal with the similar difficulties very differently. Both authors use symbolism to emphasise the difficulties or dilemmas, pigeons are used in ‘Flight’ and trainers are used in ‘Your Shoes’. The symbols in both stories relate to travelling or a journey. I think that the symbolism is effective in both stories but more so in ‘Your Shoes’ as the shoes represent several things; the pureness that the mother wants the daughter to have, the overbearing nature of the mother, the mother’s obsession with order and the fact that the mother can communicate better with a pair of shoes than she can with her own daughter. In comparison, I enjoyed ‘Your Shoes’ far more and found it more interesting.
