In the short story “Janus” by Ann Beattie we learn about our desires and dislikes with life through the character of Andrea and her ceramic bowl. Beattie heavily enunciates Andrea’s obsession with the bowl through the use of literary devices of symbolism, allegory, and tone. Beattie uses these tools to show how her relationship with the bowl displays her true desires.
In the story the main example of symbolism would be the cream colored bowl she got at a crafts fair. The bowl represents many aspects of Andrea’s life; from her successful career to her affair with her lover. Although it is described as “mutt who has no reason to suspect he might be funny” and it isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing bowl, but to Andrea “The bowl was perfect”(Beattie …show more content…
This shows how attached she is with the bowl and the relationship can be compared to one even more in intimate than those between parents and their children. Andrea becomes more and more dependent on the bowl as she sees it as a item of fortune and success. The bowl also represents the affair she had. It is revealed towards the end of the story that Andrea did not buy the bowl herself, but it was given as a present by her lover. The bowl itself almost seems to embody the lover as she becomes more obsessed with the bowl. “Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved”(Beattie 123), and this exemplifies how she chose her stable life with her husband over the lover and over time it seems as if she clings more to the bowl because, although she claims otherwise, she truly desires the lover over her husband. Sarah Madsen Hardy in her critique “Overview of ‘Janus’” Hardy identifies the bowl to represent Andrea’s innermost self. “There is emptiness and secrecy in Andrea's marriage, which the bowl comes to both represent and compensate for,”(Hardy). Hardy also states that the bowl represents what is now gone in …show more content…
We as people tend to hold onto what makes us pleased. Even from childhood we had our favorite toys of memories which we try to hold onto. We also try to hide our dissatisfactions with our lives and try to be “normal” by doing what “must” be done. According to society we “must” go to college or we “must” act one way based on labels placed onto us such as race, gender, age, socioeconomic class, and so on. We become two-faced and have two separate personalities from what we truly desire and what we believe we must do to have a stable and “normal” life. We all are like Andrea and her bowl to a certain extent. We have dissatisfactions with our lives and we have desires which remain hidden to others and sometimes even to ourselves. We create these masks which we hide our true faces behind and hope that the mask doesn’t break and reveal the unwanted truth to
In the story the main example of symbolism would be the cream colored bowl she got at a crafts fair. The bowl represents many aspects of Andrea’s life; from her successful career to her affair with her lover. Although it is described as “mutt who has no reason to suspect he might be funny” and it isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing bowl, but to Andrea “The bowl was perfect”(Beattie …show more content…
This shows how attached she is with the bowl and the relationship can be compared to one even more in intimate than those between parents and their children. Andrea becomes more and more dependent on the bowl as she sees it as a item of fortune and success. The bowl also represents the affair she had. It is revealed towards the end of the story that Andrea did not buy the bowl herself, but it was given as a present by her lover. The bowl itself almost seems to embody the lover as she becomes more obsessed with the bowl. “Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved”(Beattie 123), and this exemplifies how she chose her stable life with her husband over the lover and over time it seems as if she clings more to the bowl because, although she claims otherwise, she truly desires the lover over her husband. Sarah Madsen Hardy in her critique “Overview of ‘Janus’” Hardy identifies the bowl to represent Andrea’s innermost self. “There is emptiness and secrecy in Andrea's marriage, which the bowl comes to both represent and compensate for,”(Hardy). Hardy also states that the bowl represents what is now gone in …show more content…
We as people tend to hold onto what makes us pleased. Even from childhood we had our favorite toys of memories which we try to hold onto. We also try to hide our dissatisfactions with our lives and try to be “normal” by doing what “must” be done. According to society we “must” go to college or we “must” act one way based on labels placed onto us such as race, gender, age, socioeconomic class, and so on. We become two-faced and have two separate personalities from what we truly desire and what we believe we must do to have a stable and “normal” life. We all are like Andrea and her bowl to a certain extent. We have dissatisfactions with our lives and we have desires which remain hidden to others and sometimes even to ourselves. We create these masks which we hide our true faces behind and hope that the mask doesn’t break and reveal the unwanted truth to