How Are the Themes of Innocence and Family Relationship Portrayed in When the Wasps Drowned and Compass and Torch

967 Words4 Pages
One of this story’s themes is the end of innocence. Eveline is at the end of childhood, claustrophobic and confined in the hot summer gardens which represent the narrowness of childhood. She describes herself as ‘hungry’, and says the walls seemed ‘confining’. Her moral innocence or ignorance takes a sinister note - as she conceals the murdered girl’s ring. Whether she can’t see, or refuses to see that it’s wrong, is unclear to the end. The story has a dark from the start. This first appears in the wasps’ nest which they disturb that puts to an end their ‘barefoot wanderings’. Barefoot wanderings suggest the naivety of childhood. Tyler’s reaction of ‘laughing’ and thinking it a ‘joke’ echoes Eveline’s numb reaction when finding the dead girl’s ring. Neither of them fully understand the horror, though each is reacting to an event on a wholly different level. Just as Therese doesn’t understand what she’s found, Eveline doesn’t seem to understand that it’s wrong to hide the ring and conceal what she knows. When the police officers come, she suddenly joins again with the children in ‘we all shook our heads’. She does know but she doesn’t want to. This is why she tells the children to ‘fill up the hole’. At the end of the story together with the children they back out into ‘the sunlight of the garden’. She’s on the threshold of innocence and experience and at this moment, she chooses not to cross over. Eveline seems worldly wise. She takes the children out as a substitute mother, which contrasts with sitting by the swings so she can ‘watch the boys’, suggesting growing awareness. She is ‘pouting’ at the end of the story as if a grown woman however the ‘red’ from the ‘smarties’ an image of childhood. Childhood is not, however, always the innocent thing we expect. Therese is glad at the wasp ‘corpses’ –which could be a foreshadow of the girl’s death and takes a stone to

More about How Are the Themes of Innocence and Family Relationship Portrayed in When the Wasps Drowned and Compass and Torch

Open Document