The Lovely Bones Rhetorical Analysis

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Photographs capture the essence of a moment because the truth shown in an image cannot be questioned. In her novel, The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold uses the language of rhetoric to liberate Abigail from the façade of being a mother and spouse in a picture taken by her daughter, Susie. On the morning of her eleventh birthday, Susie, awake before the rest of the family, discovers her unwrapped birthday present, an instamatic camera, and finds her mother alone in the backyard. The significance of this scene is that it starts the author’s challenge of the false utopia of suburbia in the novel, particularly, the role of women in it. Susie, eager to use her new camera, hurries to the back of the house and comes upon her mother, unaware of her daughter's …show more content…

Makeup is used by woman to enhance their appearance to others. Susie as the omnipresent narrator, questions the meaning behind this. “That morning there were no lipstick marks because there was no lipstick until she put it on for...who? My father? Us?” (43). When Susie brings up the idea of lipstick and makeup, the audience is forced the question its role. The notion of an illusive mask that hides an individuals true identity is metaphorically similar to that of which was previously discussed, Abigail’s mystery. Now that the makeup is off her face, it compliments the idea that her mother is a stranger; however, it also reviews the reason women use makeup. By posing the question, for “who?”, the audience is left to wonder whether it is for her family, or just culture fixing the women of suburbia to the role of being pretty wives, instead of having individual personalities. Sebold then makes Susie, when narrating about her father’s description of Abigail’s eyes, a product of the same society that confines women to a lifestyle. “‘Ocean Eyes’ my father called her...now I understood the name. I had thought it was because they were blue, but now I saw it was because they were bottomless in a way that I found frightening” (43). Again, the author, by utilizing the metaphor of “ocean eyes” brings forward the idea that Abigail is more than just a mother and wife. The endless depth of

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