Snow Flower 021

In the book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, there are many themes that pop up throughout the story. One of the biggest themes in the book is love. I choose love as a main theme, because throughout the book Lily, the main character, is reflecting on her life. She shows how much love she has for Snow Flower, and how she wanted her mother to notice her and love her. This theme is important because it shows how finding love within your family will carry throughout your life. Another theme that is important in this story is beauty. Without beauty there is no love. That is insinuated throughout the book on how they found foot bounding beautiful. If your feet are not small or bound, then it will be hard for you to find love connecting back to the first theme, love. Beauty plays a major role in the story as Lily talks about marriage and how beauty and marriage coincide. Without beauty, it is hard for a girl to find the “perfect” husband. That is why I picked beauty as a major theme, because of how it is repeated throughout the story. The next major theme in the story would be pain. Throughout the story they mention foot bounding. Girls in the Chinese culture have to endure so a lot of pain in order to be considered “beautiful”. Pain is the equivalent of beauty. Without pain there is no beauty. Lily and her sisters, along with the other women in the family all went under the process of foot bounding. I consider pain to be major theme, because of the number of times it is mentioned throughout the story, and it has a big meaning to it. Each theme is very important to the story. I believe this, because if you do not know the themes then you may not fully understand the story. You would not understand why pain is connected with beauty, and what the importance of foot bounding is and how that connects with pain and beauty. There are more themes brought up throughout the story, but those are the main themes that are important to the story.