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Lavender Lady Sparknotes

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Perspectives in Barbara Callahan’s “Lavender Lady.” Everyone has a different point of view when it comes to a traumatic experience; in some cases one could use a filtered perspective to cover up what really happened. In Barbara Callahan’s short story “Lavender Lady,” the protagonist Miranda Smith had repressed memories from her childhood in which she covers up with a puerile outlook. Miranda is a famous folk singer, or rather has a famous folk song titled Lavender Lady. Along with the fame she had gained due to her top hit, she had also gained a great amount of sorrow which drains her energy at the end of each show she performs. The overall theme of perspectives in this short story is prevalent throughout the context and represents how easy …show more content…

Miranda avoided singing her top hit because it did bring back some harsh memories from the death of her beloved nanny, some she knew were true but “casts them off as untruths” (Weinman 66). Within the third and fourth paragraphs, she had described how she had fled the stage after her performance and actually hid herself in her dressing room closet to avoid playing the song. She had grown so emotionally indisposed due to the song bringing back vivid memories that she started to piece together what ‘could have happened,’ that and her manager Milo had spoke about how the Lavender Lady “had a silver pocket knife with her to kill a kid who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth” (Callahan 75). Although Miranda believes Milo’s words are simply just lies spewing from his mouth, she also took a great offence to them. She deeply does not want to believe his perspective of her nanny's true motives from that day, so much that she keeps this false ideology of the silver pocket knife to be a silver …show more content…

She talks about how she had remembered her nanny to be in alliance with a cruel man, Jim, who had obviously disliked the child enough to have “raised his arm to hit [her]” and hold her captive in an awful house (Callahan 71). This man was not just cruel to her but to her nanny as well. Since Miranda was just a child when she had experienced this sort of activity, she had not known the relationship between her nanny and Jim was a prime example of a domestic violent relationship. Even now that she is grown, she still does not understand that Jim had pressured her nanny into many awful actions. Maybe if she were to disregard her distorted and naive perspective she would finally start to understand their real

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