Negative Emotions of a Written Image

In Calvino's discussion of visibility he explains the relationship between visual art and culture. Visual art being the way we express feeling, knowledge, convey values and beliefs, entertainment, representing ideas of controversy, and images that evoke an emotional sting; the abstract feeling that a concrete image gives us. Images surround us everywhere; we are constantly bombarded with visuals that stir up our emotions and thoughts. Each image effects people in different ways all because of the variety of images each individual has seen before. The image I have chosen for this post from Coover's Briar Rose, may bring different feelings and emotions to other readers than it did for me, and I think that's the beauty of images.

"...she wraps her naked shame in her own hug and drifts tearfully into the nursery or the kitchen, looking for consolation or perhaps some words of wisdom (maybe there are some babies around), but finding instead a door that is not a door. She opens it to the hidden corridor on the other side, which leads, she knows (it's all too familiar, perhaps she wandered here as a child), to a spiral stair case up to a secret tower.... At the top, behind a creaky old door, she finds a spinning room and an old humpbacked womanin in widow's garb, sitting there amid a tangle of unspooled flaxen threads like a spider in her web" (44).

Coover's words paint a solemn,yet haunted picture in my mind. I remember reading this section for the first time and getting goosebumps on my arms, grabbing a pen and underlining the passage. The images I created in my head were similar to images I had seen before. For example, "she wraps her naked sham in her own hug," I visualize a friend's painting of a lonely girl lying curled in a ball, bare and alone weeping. The spiral staircase in my mind takes me back to the steep short steps of a lighthouse at a lake near my hometown. The creaky old door leading to the spinning room actually makes me think of scene in Disney's Sleeping Beauty when Rose pricks her finger, dark, black, with red overtones. And the similie of the crone to a spider is a stunning depiction bring images of a black widow spider snickering at her pray trapped in her web.

It is amazing to think one passage can send so many different images flooding over us. Images that mold and shape the literary work into something meaningful and attractive even if the image it creates is a negative one. The attraction to images such as this one is unexplainable; perhaps it is relatable to everyone, or simply great writing that one cannot help but be drawn to.