Now I am going to talk to you about bondage in Alice walker's short story "Roselily"
The word bondage which I will be talking about has the meaning of restraint or being used a slave therefore not having free will. This is what the main character; Roselily will be subjected to in the short story.
Alice Walker ingeniously structures and skillfully tells the story in the sequence of wedding vows.
Roselily is about a rural African American from Mississippi trying to escape poverty and disgrace by marrying a Muslim man believing that he will be able to "free" herself. Roselily is conveyed to be an independent woman of the late 60's or early 70's who is apart of the outcome of the American civil rights movements where African American woman did not get a significant increase in equity.
In the opening paragraph of the story Alice walker writes "A small girl in her mother's white robe and veil, knee raised waist high through a bowl of quicksand soup."
English: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President ...
English:
Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the...The word quicksand is given a stronger meaning showing that she is being held back, sinking into the sand and therefore helpless. The subject of the robe and the veil persist through the story which connects to the Muslim religion, the first sign of bandage.
*The cars whizzing past shows signs of mobility that Roselily desires, that she wants to have the freedom of going wherever she pleases she wants to move on in life and escape the past.
Roselily marries a Muslim and does not know much of his religion; he believes that her children have been taught from the wrong god. Roselily marries this man because she feels that he will be the "key" to her freedom, to be released from slavery of the factories and become an independent woman.