Thursday, April 15, 2010

A Simple Mountain Girl

"He shut the suitcase again and, resting one hand on the lid like a Christian taking a solemn oath, he declared: "With these books I shall transform the Little Seamstress. She'll never be a simple mountain girl again."

"In combination with her new hairstyle and her immaculate tennis shoes, the nifty jacket with its mannish details made her look unfamiliarly stylish and sensual. The lovely, unsophisticated mountain girl had vanished without a trace."

"She said she had learned one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price."

Just as the narrator and Luo fall in love with the hidden suitcase full of books, the Little Seamstress does so also. And just as Luo says he will do, he changes her. He changes her completely. She goes from being a "simple mountain girl" to a sophisticated city woman. However, her changes stem from those of the narrator and Luo. As they begin reading the books and absorbing that new information, they change themselves. They are no longer uneducated, simple working people; they are thinking constantly and imagining things all the time. One could say that, in the end, it was Luo's own fault that the Seamstress grew up and moved on. He introduced her to the new, incredible lives of the characters in the stories he read her. The narrator and Luo learned from the novels, but so did the Little Seamstress: "a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price." She outgrew the Mountain at the Phoenix in the Sky along with the two boys who gave her that opportunity.

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