Saturday’s Hunt-01 July 2017

Welcome back to Saturday’s Mix.  Today we’re going to look at emotions and personification, ascribing human qualities to non-human things.  There’s a wide range of emotions out there, and authors often use personification to illustrate their point.  We’ve probably all heard the stereotypical description of jealousy as “the green-eyed monster.”  However, what  would the emotion look like fully personified?  Would its hair be fiery red to show how fickle it is?  Would it have long black smooth hair to show its depth?

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Shirley Jackson is known for looking at the depths of human behavior and exposing its dark side.  In “The Possibility of Evil“, Jackson takes a character that does not at all seem to fit what we would think of an evil person, but throughout the story, she shows us that evil comes in many forms.  This is just the beginning of the story, you’ll have to read the rest to truly appreciate how she masterfully illustrates the possibility of evil found within humans.

Miss Adela Strangeworth stepped daintily along Main Street on her way to the grocery. The sun was shining, the air was fresh and clear after the night’s heavy rain, and everything in Miss Strangeworth’s little town looked washed and bright. Miss Strangeworth took deep breaths, and thought that there was nothing in the world like a fragrant summer day.

She knew everyone in town, of course; she was fond of telling strangers – tourists who sometimes passed through the town and stopped to admire Miss Strangeworth’s roses – that she had never spent more than a day outside this town in all her long life. She was seventy-one, Miss Strangeworth told the tourists, with a pretty little dimple showing by her lip, and she sometimes found herself thinking that the town belonged to her. “My grandfather built the first house on Pleasant Street,” she would say, opening her blue eyes with the wonder of it. This house, right here. My family has lived here for better than a hundred years. My grandmother planted these roses, and my mother tended them, just as I do.”…

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Your task today is to choose an emotion (love, hate, fear, joy, etc.) and fully personify it.  You can do this in prose or poetry.

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As always feel free to use one of the images.

Once you’ve written your piece please tag your work Mindlovesmisery’s Menagerie and Saturday Mix then either ping back or put a link to your work in the comments below.  To make things simpler you can add your link to the Mr. Linky app below so everyone will be able to quickly find your work.

Teresa

About Teresa

I am a woman with many hats--teacher, farmer, photographer, writer.

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