The Importance Of Trees In Anderson's Speak

Trees in Speak In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a young girl named Melinda is raped at a party over the summer and calls the cops. The party is busted and everyone blames Melinda for ruining the fun, even though they did not know the full story. When school starts again, she is friendless and bullied. Nobody knows that she was raped; they think she called the cops because people were drinking. Melinda rarely talks because she is afraid of what people will think when she speaks. The only place where she feels like she can truly be open and be herself is in her art class. When her teacher, Mr. Freeman, assigns her with drawing trees for the whole year, she thinks it is going to be an easy task. What she comes to understand is that for the tree to be a great piece of art, she needs to put all of her emotions into making it. As Melinda draws her trees throughout the stories, she is constantly changing the way she is drawing them because they are not perfect. But as the story progresses Melinda …show more content…
She’s learning how to put expression into her art and make it her own. The image in her mind is changing, becoming something more realistic. The first time she feels good about a tree she draws is when she says, “I sketch a cubist tree with hundreds of skinny rectangles for branches. They look like lockers, boxes, glass shards, lips with triangle brown leaves” (119). This is the moment when Melinda specifically makes references to her own life. The lockers represent the school and the glass shards is foreshadowing to when she tells her attacker no by holding a shard to his neck when he tries to rape her again later in the story. Melinda comes to an understanding that her tree does not have to be normal and perfect. She recognizes that the more imperfect her tree is, the more Mr. Freeman likes it. Melinda finally realizes that she is not perfect and she can be herself and still be