literary+critique

It wasn't until recently that a law has been made against bullying. Before that law was made, children spent their free time picking on students they don’t like. Often in literature, bullies were often shown to be aggressive towards other characters, causing the reader to feel empathetic towards the victim. Throughout Ray Bradbury’s story //All Summer in a Day//, he explicitly portrays the setting of Venus as gloomy and depressing in order to shape the conflict between Margot, the new girl in the school, and William, the class bully. An example of his aggression towards Margot was sometime before the plot of the story, when Margot wrote the poem describing the sun as a “flower that blooms for just one hour.” William then responds to the poem with much sarcasm when he says “Aw, you didn't write that!”, because he refuses to believe that what Margot wrote was true and maybe that she was just exaggerating the facts. In reality, however, Margot //had// been telling the truth about the sun, and that maybe she had used that vivid description about the sun from living on Earth sometime before she moved to Venus. This shows that even though what one might believe is wrong, it turns out that they had told the truth.

William had said that the sun will never come and he tells the other students that the scientists are wrong because they are jealous of her knowledge of the sun that they are struggling to find since Venus has rain for seven years. A reader might wonder: Why hadn't Margot stood up for herself or at least told her teacher or the principal (or maybe lack thereof) in the story? Maybe Margot was so traumatized about doing so, that she was afraid that she will be considered a tattletale if she told the teacher about William’s selfish acts. It might be why the author described her as “… An old photograph dusted from an album, withered away, and if [Margot] spoke at all, her voice would be a ghost.” (Bradbury, 1950, p.290) This shows that Margot is //fearful// of William, not courageous like most of the other students who are bullying her anyway. Because of her shy personality, she is picked on continuously throughout the story, culminating in the wanton act of William and the other students pushing her into the closet.

This story especially saddened me because as an autistic child, I have mocked occasionally for the new hairdo I had back in 2011, or mainly my disability altogether. Recently, I have been a more futuristic “Margot” when I sit down at my lunch table to encounter the terrors of a certain girl who I bear a grudge with since elementary school. Whenever I try to let her know that whatever she spits out of her mouth, she would always retort “No //you// shut up” and I will shut up, for I fear I will be beaten to death. Although a myriad of characters have been bullied because they are of a different race, religion, disability, or another cause, none have been bullied so grotesquely than Margot, or the “future” Margot, myself.