Budge Wilson’s The Metaphor renounces the effect an environment can have to nourish or deflate the spirit of an individual, influencing them in their passion and self-expression. This theme is well pronounced throughout the story but is most clearly emphasized in the liveliness of Ms. Hancock in the middle school environment, and the heavy contrast to that of her high school experience. Wilson spends time to brightly described the junior English classroom as a place for Ms. Hancock and her class where those aged by ideas of “sophistication, boredom, cruelty, drugs, alcohol, or sex” were “in the minority and made little mark upon [them]”; “[the students] were free to respond positively to Miss Hancock’s excesses without fear of the mockery of [their] peers”(Wilson, 1). It was in this sheltered environment that “Miss Hancock was able to survive, even flourish”(Wilson, 1).…show more content… The world of a high school English class was a struggle that Ms. Hancock had yet to understand; she entered the environment with the eagerness of her previous school years, “wings spread, ready to fly”(Wilson, 5). Fifteen years of success could not have prepared her for the mockery of the older classroom, they laughed at her bravado, insulting her stance with a call of “let us pray!”(Wilson, 5). No longer did Hancock have the welcome and motivation of her junior class, rather the relentless heckle and disinterest of her senior class “stripped [her] of 15 years of overblown confidence,” and in this she “offered her material shyly, hesitantly, certain of rejection”(Wilson, 5). Hancock’s later implied suicide by a school bus would as well capitalize the notion that the symbolic structure of school that used to cultivate her spirit and will for self-expression, would transform into the same structure that would break her resolve, pulling her into herself and her
