A Comparison of the Heat and Cold Imagery Used in Woman at Point Zero and Thousand Cranes

A Comparison of the Heat and Cold Imagery Used in Woman at Point Zero and Thousand Cranes

In the books Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, and Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, both authors use various forms of imagery that reoccur throughout the works. These images are used not to be taken for their literal meanings, but instead to portray a deeper sense or feeling that may occur several times in the book.

One type of imagery that both Saadawi and Kawabata use in their works is heat and cold imagery. In the works, Woman at Point Zero and Thousand Cranes, Nawal El Saadawi and Yasunari Kawabata each use heat and cold imagery to portray the same feelings of love and fear and /or the lack thereof.

In both works, the authors use heat and cold imagery in order to portray the presence and/or lack of love in three different forms. These three forms of love that are illustrated through the use of heat and cold imagery are protection, comfort, and intimacy.

Heat and cold imagery is used repeatedly in both works to provide a feeling of love in the form of protection and security, usually having the presence of heat or warmth representing a feeling of protection and security, and the absence of heat representing a lack of security or protection. In the following lines from Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes, it is a memory of Mrs. Ota that provides Kikuji a sense of security during a conversation with Fumiko: “Mrs. Ota’s warmth came over him like warm water. She had gently surrendered everything he remembered, and he had felt secure” (Kawabata 36). In Woman at Point Zero, Saadawi uses the warmth of Firdaus’ uncle’s arms as an image for love in the form of protection in the following lines: “During the cold winter night, I curled up in my uncle’s arms like a baby in its womb. We drew warmth from our closeness” (Saadawi 21). This passage provides an even greater sense of protection through Saadawi’s use of the simile, “like a baby in its womb” (21).

The second form of love expressed through the use of heat and cold imagery in both works is comfort. In Woman at Point Zero, heat is used in order to provide comfort to Firdaus who is “shivering with cold” and “soaked in rain” (63).

The third and final form of love expressed through the use of heat and cold imagery in Thousand Cranes and Woman at Point Zero is that of intimate relations. It is f...

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...ng used simultaneously with the cold imagery. Both in the beginning of the book when she first sits down to speak with Firdaus and when she is about to get up, Saadawi refers to there being a “coldness which did not reach my body”, and says, “It was the cold of the sea in a dream. I swam through its waters. I was naked and knew not how to swim. But I neither felt its cold, nor drowned in its waters” (107). Perhaps after analyzing these two matching passages, one could make a claim that we must first humble ourselves in order to become insensitive to the coldness of this world.

In the end, whether it is protection, comfort, intimacy, uneasiness, or death that Nawal El Saadawi and Yasunari Kawabata are portraying through their usage of heat and cold imagery in Woman at Point Zero and Thousand Cranes, we can easily see that both authors use heat and cold imagery as the dominant reoccurring literary device to portray feelings of love and fear and/or the lack thereof.

Bibliography

Kawabata, Yasunari. Thousand Cranes. Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. Vintage Books: New York, 1996.

Saadawi, Nawal El. Woman at Point Zero. Trans. Sherif Hetata. Zed Books: London, 1983.