Stone Soup an Essay Written by Barbara Kingsolver

Madurodam has been the smallest city in the Netherlands since its inception in 1952. Its tributaries and canals measuring no more than a finger’s width. Its ornately crafted Dutch gabled houses would make amiable summer residences for rodents. Its immaculate portrayal of railway lines would have any train-spotter paralyzed with awe. This war-monument-turned-amusement-park steals the imagination of children and adults alike. There is a certain human tendency to associate affection with objects of a reduced size. Maybe it is this affection that serves as the reason almost all of the toys we make for children, as Roland Barthes puts it, â€Å"are essentially a microcosm of the adult world [...] reduced copies of human objects,† (â€Å"Toys† 689).†¦show more content†¦It is because of this education that society forces onto children to cultivate ‘user-ready’ minds that Barthes believes â€Å"the child can only identify himself as owner, as user , never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it,†(89); the child is allowed to discover only those aspects of the world that would further his or her assimilation into it. The child’s actions are always induced imitation, never original adaptations. Giving a child a Barbie and a Ken doll which represent femininity/masculinity and family dynamics, or a Baby Krissie doll as a vaccine preparing the small girl to become a mother (always hinting at the parasitic nature of an unprepared motherhood), in Barthes’s view, is society intentionally directing children to enter the world through a user-oriented, preconceived path. But what if the child fails to comprehend society’s pruning and interprets toys to bring further meaning to ideas that were of his or here own conception? Personal experience and the teachings of immediate elders influence a child’s understanding of the world, and this is why children of idiosyncratic families would interpr et toys differently: their situation demands it. A child with lesbian or gay parents could associate different relationships between the Barbie and Ken dolls, just likeShow MoreRelatedSummary Of Barbara Kingsolver s Stone Soup Essay1251 Words   |  6 Pageswidespread? Author Barbara Kingsolver tries to explain this in her essay: ‘Stone Soup’. She claims it’s because society is so traditional and primitive in the way we idealize what a family is supposed to be: two married parents and their children. But that’s not really the case anymore. The main idea of her essay is that the definition of family needs to be reimagined to define more of what a family means, rather than what its terminology implies. What is a family? As a young child, Kingsolver played inRead MoreStone Soup By Barbara Kingsolver1687 Words   |  7 PagesThe way we treat others Barbara Kingsolver wrote â€Å"Stone Soup† â€Å"which is taken from High Tide in Tucson: Essays for Now or Never, published in 1995†. Some views she conveys in her essay are these. Kingsolver explains that not all men are the prince that you fall in love with a â€Å"live happily ever after,† he may be very feminine and be more like a princess. On the other hand, you may have looked in your box of crayons. You pick out a color that your parents may not approve, even though you see