`IN THE WAITING ROOM

Becoming A Woman 1 BECOMING A WOMAN AND ACCEPTING IT Becoming A Woman And Accepting It (Student Name (School (Instructor 's Name (Class )Becoming A Woman 2

Becoming A Woman And Accepting It

At first reading , Elizabeth Bishop 's In The Waiting Room ' is a world full of wonderful imagery . I did not care what it meant , I just enjoyed the way she described what she saw in the National Geographic while waiting in a dentist 's room . I can perfectly see in my mind when she wrote about the inside of

a volcano , black , and full of ashes then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire . Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string (Bishop , 1977 . The second reading I began to wonder what she meant with But I felt : you are an I , you are an Elizabeth , you are one of them . Why should I be my aunt , or me , or anyone ' I thought maybe she has an identity crisis or something like that so I reread it again . This time , the phrase I said to myself : three days and you 'll be seven years old ' stuck on my mind . And that 's when everything clicked . I felt that with her seventh birthday coming on (for me , this is an idiom for a woman 's rite of passage like her eighteenth birthday or another significant event , Elizabeth feels she 's finally becoming a woman . When I say becoming a woman , it 's the transition from being a carefree girl to an adult female with responsibilities . She 's quite agitated by it , not quite sure if she could be like her aunt and the rest of the adults . Elizabeth is anxious and is not ready to become a woman , but whether she likes it or not she 's a woman already . Thus , she said , I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened , that nothing stranger could ever happen ' After questioning how she became a woman , Elizabeth finally accepted that she is one . In the end of the poem she said , The War was on ' If you were a kid , a teenager , or someone who doesn 't care for responsibilities , a war is not something you 'd think about . But Elizabeth now does think about it . She has finally accepted she is a woman with responsibilities still scared about it but willing to face whatever that might come her way . Well , at least , that 's how I see it

Becoming A Woman 3

Reference

Bishop , Elizabeth (1977 . Geography III . New York : Farrar Straus Giroux...