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Fleur Archetype

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When women characters or archetypes and water are given significance within a single text, many of their meanings run together. Bodies of water unconsciously mimic the emotions of women, as seen as the storm that kills Fleur’s rapists or the continual drowning of others in Fleur’s place. Water provides a sense of security and community to a woman with children, as they are both life giving beings. When women are bound to household chores and tending the home they use water much more often than the men of the text, through washing and cooking—purification and supplying life. Throughout the works of literature we have studied during this semester, water is also women’s first choice for death, providing another archetype of the “drowned woman.” The drowned woman is in herself an …show more content…

As she feels the stillness of death on page 214, however, Ada makes another choice. This choice is made not just in the presence of water, but surrounded by it. She kicks off her boot and returns to the surface, only to think fondly of her piano and sometimes herself lying at the bottom of the ocean later on in her life. This return to life could be figurative rather than literal, but if Ada does choose to live, the water that “kills” her also becomes a baptismal image of resurrection as she returns to the surface. It also brings the whole story full circle, as after her rebirth, Ada ends the book as she began it, traveling by water to a new life.
Death by water also plays a large part of Louise Erdrich’s short story “Fleur,” in a much more immediate and dramatic way. The story opens with a drowning in the same way that The Piano opens with a journey by water; the drowning, however, is not only

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