Magic For Beginners Rhetorical Analysis

Three Threads and a Thesis Worksheet
Magic for Beginners: The Faery Handbag

1. The title itself, The Faery Handbag, introduces the reader to the magical world of fairies. Handbags, as well as hats, are the tools usually used by the illusionists who access through them into a hidden world--no by chance the collection is titled "magic for Beginners." At the beginning of the story seems a fairy tale for children, but after a few lines, one realizes that the story touches sensitive topics such as nostalgia for lost and lost innocence, death, and life beyond life.

2. The author transforms a secondhand clothes shop in a place that transcends the reality.
"The Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate.”

The author uses the personification to talk about the concept of immortality that is given to both the good and the bad.

The reference to the dead clothes that reincarnate when they begin to have your smell suggests that those who die live within us somehow become part of us and vice versa.
“But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard."
I believe that this passage is crucial to understand the long-life journey to search for the meaning of life and death that the author explores masterfully using the fictional style. Also, there is a clear allusion to the fact that research requires a keen eye and

determination.

3. The bag represents the gateway to the inner world and is endowed with a life of its own as shown by these lines,
“ The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.“
A hairy handbag suggests a human semblance, thus alive. The black color alludes to something mysterious, disturbing and somewhat dangerous. There is no light capable of revealing its content as if one is trying to gain access to something impenetrable, and therefore incomprehensible.
“If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian of the purse (the dog whose skin had been sewn into a purse) lived.”
The bag represents life. Depending on how one perceives and faces it can lead to experiencing diametrically opposite experiences. The questionable actions (wrong way) that go against one’s conscience or inner wisdom (the guardian) inevitably lead to destructive consequences.