How have the texts you have studied this year effectively shaped your understanding of the meaning of change'?.
Many texts explore the concept of change, whose meaning differs according to the text's context and mode of production. These varying depictions help shape an understanding of the elusive nature of change. Two poems of Gwen Harwood, The Glass Jar and Father and Child present change through the subject of changing self, as does Sky High from the Stimulus Booklet Changing', the magazine article I Had Breast Cancer at 20 and the anonymous nonfiction book Go Ask Alice. Through these texts changing self appears a phenomenon which manifests itself physically, psychologically, socially, culturally and through many opposing paradigms.
A significant aspect of changing self explored in Harwood's poems is the process in which a child's innocent mind is tainted by some experience. The naive hopes and beliefs of a child are replaced with a more mature understanding, the transformation occurring either consciously or subconsciously.
The poem The Glass Jar describes the night in which a young boy's journey into adulthood begins. .
Harwood portays his innocent mind through his fear of the dark and lack of understanding of physical laws, "his monstrance stood ready to bless, to exorcise, monsters that whispering would rise-. Creations of the boy's subconscious mind appear in nightmares, they are indefinite, relying on incomplete images of "Pincer and claw, trident and vampire fang-. He seeks safety from his "comforter-, his mother and discovers his parents love-making, a scene he sees as "gross violence- inflicted upon his mother by his "rival-, his father. In anguished incomprehension he returns to sleep and again has vivid nightmares. This time they are more definitive, a ring of skeletons are conducted by his father in a dance. This shows that his subliminal self has learned the cause of his pain, even without managing to comprehend what he has seen.
