Stage 3: Work Backwards to Find Your Formula
Claim:
The Healer is most definitely magical and worth remembering. Although Bender and Faber’s ideas of quality differ, it still fits under Faber’s idea of a quality book through a more indirect way and values different notions.
Question:
What is so magical about The Healer if it clearly doesn’t fit under Faber’s idea of a quality book?
Trouble:
Faber claims quality books need to be realistic, magical, and “worth remembering,” but Bender’s story is so childish yet so magical.
Status Quo:
Faber has a very strict idea of what a quality book is – it has to have details, be complex, real, etc.
Reorder your sentences (S-T-Q-C)
Faber has a very strict idea of what a quality book is – it has to have details, be complex, real, etc. Faber claims quality books need to be realistic, magical, and “worth remembering,” but Bender’s story is so childish yet so magical. What is so magical about The Healer if it clearly doesn’t fit under Faber’s idea of a quality book? The Healer is most definitely magical and worth remembering. Although Bender and Faber’s ideas of quality differ, it still fits under Faber’s idea of a quality book through a more indirect way and values different notions.
Stage 4: Leads and Text-Explorations
“She spent most of her non-school time at the hospital, helping1 sick people. She was a great soother2, they said. Her water had healing powers3” (Bender 28).
1: Word Definition/Word Choice: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, helping refers to “a means of help, an aid.” It seems to be pretty interesting that the ice girl appears to willingly choose to help people with her ice hand. How would the story be different if she was obligated to do such a thing… or maybe even if she didn’t do it at all?
2: Word Definition/Connection: The OXE says that a soother is “one who or that which soothes, calms, comforts, etc.” To me, this connection between ice and soothing definitely does make sense. From personal experiences, ice always was able to numb anything that was painful. Although I wouldn’t say the ice healed my bruises, it certainly was able to help the pain go away. Such a connection appears to be very realistic, proving that some aspects of Bender’s short story are indeed true and magical.
3: Word Definition/Word Choice/Connection: When something has the power(s) to do something or is powerful enough, it generally means that something has the “ability to act or affect something strongly; physical or mental strength; might; vigor, energy; effectiveness.” I think it’s very interesting and important how Bender seems to correlate water with powers. Water is usual, ordinary, and plain, while we think of something to have powers or be powerful to be strong, unusual, and complex. Similarly, Bender’s writing style is very simple and plain, yet she does use the word “power” so often, almost as if she is trying to tell us that her story is meant to be more specific and detailed.
“There was a whole group of scar people who walked around town now. I asked them: Does it hurt1? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful2, they said. For one long second3, it felt like the world was holding them close” (Bender 35)
1: Word Choice/Connection: When something hurts, you feel a pain and usually not a pleasant and delightful type of pain. However, in this case, the scar people don’t deny the fact that they are in pain of the scar, but they seem to associate this type of pain as wonderful. This makes me wonder why does it make them feel wonderful and if maybe there is such a thing as “pleasant pain.”
2: Word Definition/Word Choice/Connection: The word wonderful usually associates with “Full of wonder; such as to excite wonder or astonishment; marvelous; sometimes used trivially = surprisingly large, fine, excellent, etc.” Although wonderful is usually said and referred to something positive and joyous, here, the townspeople are calling the burn mark on their face as giving them a wonderful feeling. How could that possible be? How can a scar make someone feel wonderful? This kind of use of wording appears to give us more questions than answers.
3: Word Choice: It seems to be very important how Bender basically contradicts herself when she says “long second.” We all know that a second is short, yet the author chooses to call such a moment a “long second.” Why didn’t Bender just say that these people felt like the world was holding them close with the scar rather than timing how long they feel this for?
Stage 5: Flesh out your Claim
Claim:
While many can say that Aimee Bender’s story The Healer is impractical and not at all magical or “worth remembering” because of Faber’s strict sense of a quality book, from my experience, this short story was magical in its own way of quality. Although Bender may have been childish and very plain in her writing, she was able to certainly build upon major elements of reality. She expressed relative issues in a mischievous way, yet still she proved that her work is unordinary and that we can find quality that is magical and unforgettable within anything, even if we have to dig deep first in order to find it.
The Healer: Is it Magical and Worth Remembering?
Aimee Bender’s short story The Healer is based on two teenage girls, one with a hand of fire and the other with a hand of ice. The rest of the townspeople appear to have normal, human-flesh hands. Both of the hands seem to be a burden to each girl, but the fire girl has it worse. While the fire girl is considered dangerous, everyone is amazed at the ice girl’s healing powers. The story’s resolution remains unresolved and unhappy. Unlike the usual happy endings of all fantasy stories, The Healer is so childish that it also doesn’t seem to fit under Faber’s idea of a quality book. In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Faber, an English professor, claims that books are only seen as magical through what their words say. Nothing else in the book would matter. These quality books have “… stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us…” (Bradbury 83). Emotions, lessons, and important facts are examples of things we wouldn’t want to forget, and thus, we would store them into books. Faber strongly believes that these quality books, which hold such unforgettable memories, are significant. Furthermore, he describes a quality book as having “…texture… pores…features… truthfully recorded details… telling detail, [and] fresh detail” (Bradbury 83). Ultimately, if a book, or story in this case, doesn’t have these characteristics that a quality book should have, it does not fit under Faber’s idea of a magical and “worth remembering” book.
Aimee Bender’s story The Healer surely has an unsatisfying ending, but that may make the story even more realistic. The plot is also very simple, yet has so many convincing underlying concepts. Bender’s writing style is extremely bland and she provides only thin details for her readers. Especially from the first sentence of her story, “There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice,” we are just told to accept what is happening as it is, with no explanation of why we should believe it (Bender 27). In addition, the tone and word choice is playful and childish, particularly towards the end of the story. However, even though Aimee Bender’s short story isn’t the exact definition of Faber’s idea of quality, it definitely felt magical to me. So, if The Healer is in fact tasteless, simple, and the direct opposite the idea Faber presented of what a quality book is supposed to be, then why was I able to have such a magical experience with this story?
Evidently, the most obvious “magical” effects in The Healer are the girls’ fire and ice hands, the two hands normalizing each other as they touched, the ice hand being able to cure and heal all diseases, the rest of the body taking on the fire once the fire hand is chopped off, and the feeling of nothing caused by the hand of ice. Right from the beginning, the story became intriguing to me. The use of fire and ice as a trait for the two main characters caught my interest, as I knew to expect a thrilling and “worth remembering” story. I was astounded by the magic that was performed for the townspeople by the two girls. It was exceptionally odd to figure out that the ice girl did so many good deeds but didn’t have the ability to feel any emotions towards her actions – “…but I feel nothing. I just feel ice” (Bender 34).
Despite the actual magic going on in Bender’s story, there are hidden perceptions that interestingly enough are unusual, and in our world anything that is out of the ordinary or simply weird is something magical and worth cherishing. First of all, the author appears to conceal the notion of isolation. Most importantly, the fire girl and ice girl are secluded from the rest of the town with their mutation. They are the only two in the town who have such a supernatural power. She also readily depicts the fire girl as lonely. “[The fire girl] didn’t keep the smokers company; she just did her duty and then walked home, alone,” showing that the girl was an outcast and people were only amused by her hand (Bender 28). Besides the fire girl’s social activity in the beginning of the story, she is even excluded from the town’s limits at the end. After the girl is taken out of jail, for she was first put into jail because many believed her fire hand imposed a threat, she moves into “…a shack in the back of town by the mountains” (Bender 34).
Fascinatingly enough, the townspeople seeking for pain is alarming yet alerts me to believe that they are really seeking for something more… something maybe magical. Many came to visit the fire girl in her shack made of metal just so the fire girl can “…remove her blazing arm from the ice bucket and gently touch their faces with the point of her wrist” (Bender 35). It appears to be that the pain of a burn on their face makes them feel alive. Undoubtedly, the pain of the scar on their face felt wonderful, as “for one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close” (Bender 35). The reason all of these people come see the fire girl seems to be because they are searching for anything that can make them feel less lonely. This sort of pain caused from the burn looks to feel better than the feeling of loneliness or the feeling of nothing. The scar happens to unite the individuals who are feeling distant from the world. As there becomes a group of people who walk around with the same scar made for the same reason, they are able to recognize others who feel the same way they feel themselves. The townspeople become less lonely as they are now part of a group of many. Magically enough that a scar is what is needed to bring a group of independent people together, it is even more magical that the burn makes this group of people feel wonderful.
Lastly, although there happens to be an unsatisfying ending to the story, Aimee Bender takes on a new and different approach to the purpose of a fairytale. We expect the usual type of fairytale, such as Cinderella, to have a happy ending where all the problems are resolved. Nevertheless, The Healer offers an alternative ending where the issues remain unresolved or just get worse. Bender leaves us only knowing that the ice girl leaves the town, disappearing without any news of why. Perhaps such a problem shows the real aspects of our life. We all imagine everything to have its purpose as well as we always want to know why things happen the way they do. But, sometimes, things aren’t so easy to understand and we are left without explanation. Bender is able to include such a vital quality of life, and I suppose this is an aspect of a story that is as magical and “worth remembering” as Faber says it is.
Therefore, while many can say that Aimee Bender’s story The Healer is impractical and not at all magical or “worth remembering” because of Faber’s strict sense of a quality book, from my experience, this short story was magical in its own way of quality. Although Bender may have been childish and very plain in her writing, she was able to certainly build upon major elements of reality. She expressed relative issues in a mischievous way, yet still she proved that her work is unordinary and that we can find quality that is magical and unforgettable within anything, even if we have to dig deep first in order to find it.
