Sexual assault will change a person. And more often times than not, for the worse. In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the protagonist and dynamic character Melinda Sordino was sexually assaulted by It, at an end-of-summer party. Post-rape, Melinda suffers a conflict within herself, a conflict that she battled with throughout the course of her freshman year and the novel. In Speak, the mirror motif reflects Melinda’s mental state and her growth throughout freshman year. In the first marking period of Speak, Melinda struggles immensely with even the thought of her rape. She no longer recognizes herself, she is broken but is not sure where to begin to fix herself, so she hides from the truth. As stated in the novel, “A cracked mirror tilts over the sink with dead roaches crocheted together in cobwebs”(Anderson 26). The dead roaches represent the parts of Melinda she has lost. But she is still holding onto these pieces by threads, by ‘cobwebs’. Just like the mirror, Melinda is broken, distorted, beyond repair. She is in a very poor mental state, she’s spiraling down a dark path, without help from the ones she needed the most. In the third marking period of Speak, Melinda begins to make an effort face the truth. She no longer runs from the mirror, she…show more content… In the first and second marking periods, Melinda tried to suppress the memory of her rape, but It was always around to haunt her, so hid from the mirror. In the third marking period, Melinda stopped running from the mirror, from the truth. She began to show growth in this part of the novel. In the fourth marking period, Melinda made her voice heard. She defended and protected herself against Andy Evans, and she channeled all of the anger and hurt from her scarring end-of summer experience towards him. Sexual assault changed Melinda Sordino. But she learned from it, and she is a much stronger person
