Genre 2: Artistic Genre
This genre seeks to explore how Tara's changed perspective regarding medicine changes her family's perspective of her. Tara's family believes in holistic medicine and rarely visited hospitals or doctors, outside of one instance when her brother fell off of scaffolding. Her family's tenacity towards this style of healing causes catastrophic consequences resulting in traumatic brain injury for several family members. Tara eventually embraces modern medicine and this acceptance of pills and modern medicine estranges herself from her family. This genre seeks to explore this divorced perspective of Tara from her family through word clouds that reflect their perspective of modern medicine, as well as the family's changed perspective of Tara and Tara's changed perspective of herself.
This is a symbol of a pill bottle which embodies Tara’s sense of self divorced from her family’s collective identity. The medicine bottle represents Tara’s distance from her family’s ideological beliefs as Tara takes painkillers to dull her jaw and nerve pain despite her family's tenacity and belief in an approach to holistic medicine. The medicine bottle and painkillers are significant as it is one of the first moments where Tara begins to redefine herself and reconcile with her family’s skewed belief system that endangers her.The language constructing the pill bottle is language that describes Tara’s redefinition of her belief system and her larger sense of self (independent, truthful, reticent, earnest, educated, rational, individually minded, resilient). These words all carry a positive connotation which directly contrast the language that describes her family and her family’s perspective of her. However, the positive language contrast with the symbol that is stigmatized in society; however, here it carries a positive connotation as it shows that Tara recognizes the healing nature and power of modern medicine. This contrast of language emphasizes the emotional estrangement between Tara and her family and that she had to seperate and redefine herself and her beliefs to free herself from their collective, corrupt identity.
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This image is a representation of the family that Tara eventually estranged herself from to develop and solidify her unique sense of self. The flower represents Faye’s (Tara’s mother) and the rest of the family’s support of an approach to healing oneself holistically that carries detrimental and catastrophic results. The family rejected modern medicine in lieu of herbs and natural remedies to heal one’s body; this approach to healing caused catastrophic, almost deadly results for the family. This approach to healing caused undiagnosed brain trauma to her brother, Shawn, after a bad car accident and a refusal to go to a hospital. The words comprising the image are both ways to describe Faye and her family (ignorant, paranoid, protective, distrustful, loquacious) and ways to Tara’s family negatively characterize her (selfish, inconsiderate, discourteous) . The words all carry a negative connotation which not only convey the corrupt nature of the family, but the family’s eventual anger towards Tara for her rejection of their beliefs. This negative language is in direct contrast with the symbol of a plant that carries positive connotations, but shows that bad intentions can carry disastrous consequences. This symbol and language represent the family’s willingness to blindly follow each other and support each other’s flawed and skewed perspectives.
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