19 pages • 38 minutes read
Alice WalkerRoselily
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Stream-of-Consciousness Narration
“Roselily” is a stream-of-consciousness story that represents the inner monologue of its main character. Much of what happens in the story happens as an internal reaction to Roselily’s surroundings, which introduces commentary on the marriage ceremony and also diverges from it to focus on Roselily’s past and her place in society. The effect is of listening to someone whose mind is racing and conflicted. Walker uses this narrative style to produce “theory of mind” in her readers: the ability to empathize with and conceive of another person’s interiority. The story takes place within the temporal boundaries of two sentences of a wedding ceremony, yet its narration style enables it to encompass Roselily’s entire life. The stream-of-consciousness style combines with the third-person narrative voice (“she,” not “I”) to emphasize Roselily’s self-consciousness: in this moment of ceremony, she is well aware that she is being perceived from the outside by her family, the preacher, and the groom, and the story models that feeling by presenting her thoughts in third person.
Juxtaposition
Each phrase of the wedding ceremony in “Roselily” is immediately followed by a full paragraph or more of Roselily’s internal monologue. The juxtaposition of these two voices—one official, formal, and terse, the other roaming, emotional, and conflicted—underlines the contrast between the person society expects Roselily to be and who Roselily really is. There are several places where enjambment allows for double meanings, as Roselily’s narration can be read as both a continuation of the preacher’s words and a reaction to it, such as when the preacher says, “we are gathered here,” at which Roselily thinks, “Like cotton to be weighed,” referring both to the wedding guests and to picking the twigs and leaves off of her wedding dress. The interplay between the ceremony and Roselily’s thoughts structures the central tension of the story.
Imagery
The story frequently uses the imagery of bondage or slavery to drive home the constrained position that Roselily is in. In the opening moments of the story, she thinks of cotton, the crop that drove the industry of enslavement in the South. The bonds of marriage are literalized as “ropes, chains, handcuffs” (4). Her husband’s hand is “like the clasp of an iron gate” (8). In each of these instances, the imagery helps the reader understand that Roselily is fully aware of the ways she has been and is oppressed in her life as a Southern Black woman. The word choice creates a link between the doubts that Roselily expresses and her constant awareness of Blackness as a core piece of her identity.
Related Titles
By Alice Walker
