A Bird in the House
...ieves that she has full conceptual understanding of love until she sees her Aunt Edna deal with the struggle of love. After observing the events of her Aunt Edna and Jimmy Lorimer, she realizes that her ideals about love are all wrong. Then I heard her voice, and the held-in way she was crying, and the name she spoke, as though it hurt her to speak it even in a whisper. […] There arose in my mind, mysteriously, the picture of a barbaric queen, someone who had lived a long time ago. I could not reconcile this image this image with the known face, nor could I disconnect it. […] I thought of the story in the scribbler at home. I wanted to get home quickly, so I could destroy it. (78) From this experience Vanessa realized that her characters were not complex enough and her writing is too simplistic. She is discouraged from her current story and the many others because of this realization thus she destroys another of her stories, just like the many others that had been abandoned. Vanessa starts to write a story about pioneers, “The Pillars of the Nation” (29), when she is told by her Aunt Edna that her grandfather was a pioneer. This concept of her grandfather being linked to her story discourages her from continuing that idea. She wants her ideas to be exotic and exciting and she feels that her family, especially her grandfather and his life is not of these characteristics. Through this experience she unknowingly gains knowledge about her grandfather and family but does not think that it is useful or relevant until later. At her grandfather’s funeral, Vanessa truly hears the story of her grandfather for the first time. “ […] the fact that Timothy Connor had been one of Manawaka’s pioneers. […] Suddenly the minister’s recounting of these familiar facts struck me as though I had never heard any of it before.” (188). From this experience Vanessa realizes that her grandfather could have been story potential but she had taken the facts for granted. Vanessa also finds that other people that had touched her life held great potential for stories and that ignored these ideas because she felt her life was uneventful. Vanessa spent time with her cousin Chris. She was inspired by him because he impacted her thoughts and imagination. To Vanessa, Chris brought forth a world of his own. He lived his life in a ‘dream world’ and this was something that intrigued Vanessa because she wished that she could think like that for her writing; to think of a world of excitement and adventure, yet everything seeming wonderfully natural and realistic. Vanessa enjoys the topics of love and death gaining majority of her information from the Bible. “ I thought about the story I was setting down in a five-cent scribbler at nights in my room. I was much occupied by themes of love and death, although my experience of both had so far been gained principally from the Bible […]” (65). Later she realizes that love and death cannot be understood fully by reading but only by their pure experience. She gets discouraged because she cannot develop the complexity of these events in her stories. She cannot seem to get the sense of reality into her ideas of love and death until she experiences them first hand. Throughout the story she sees the effects of love with the events that take place with her Aunt Edna. She experiences the concepts of death in many instances especially her father and grandfather. Through these experiences she can accurately see the affects on her family and she gains experience from these events. Vanessa encounters several problems with her writing. She questions the relevance and reasoning, realizing that her details cannot always be linked with her imaginative plots. […] I was planning in my head story in which and infant was baptized by Total Immersion and swept away by the river which happened to be flooding. (Why would it be flooding? Well, probably the spring ice was just melting. Would they do baptisms at that time of year? The water would be awfully cold. Obviously, some details needed to be worked out here.) (24-25). Vanessa needs her writing to be exciting for her to be satisfied with it. For example, when she is writing about the events of her story based in Canada, she cannot make links with her characters or plot to make it fit her exotic ideas. She has an awareness of reality, “What was the use, if she couldn’t get out except by ruses which clearly wouldn’t happen in real life?” (165). Vanessa hopes that she can contr...