Seeing Metaphors
The purpose of my senior thesis is to help high school students see metaphors with the help of book cover design. These covers allow students to explore, interpret, and understand the overall meaning and messages of the stories they read in their literature classes.
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the wallpaper itself is a metaphor for the suffocating and nauseating life women had at the time, be it through the men in their lives, or societies standards and expectations. The wallpaper fills the scene behind the woman, a large mass that grabs, covers, holds, and hides.
TRIFLES BY SUSAN GLASPELL
Trifles is a story about two men and their wives investigating a murder. The women are constantly seen as of little importance to the investigation but end up finding out the truth themselves. The story tells a sad tale of an abusive marriage and how it can chain a person down, using the combination of handcuffs and ring to showcase that concept.
THE LOTTERY BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
The community in The Lottery starts off as a normal one, nothing to suggest the sinister and twisted consequences of winning their traditional lottery. It’s a metaphor for scapegoatism and the cruelness of targeting innocent people. I used the head of a goat as a literal point of being a scapegoat, covering the head of a little girl skipping rope, to tie back to the innocence.
CARD GAME
To go along with the covers, I also designed a card game for students to play with and use as a learning tool in the classroom. The objective is to match common metaphors and learn about what they mean.