The Power of Stories Theme Analysis

Although young Adeline stumbles into writing stories “by accident,” she immediately falls in love with it. She is compelled by her newfound ability to reshape the world around her and to hear other people express many of the pained emotions she has long felt but been unable to voice. Story-writing, Adeline discovers, offers her a reprieve from the “horrors of [her] daily life,” allowing her mind to focus entirely on the process of crafting a new story. For Adeline, reading and writing stories becomes a way to escape from her dismal childhood, demonstrating the power of stories and how they can play an important role in helping individuals process and handle abuse or trauma.

As a young child, Adeline uses her written stories to reimagine herself as bold and powerful rather than powerless and afraid, showing how storytelling can help traumatized individuals counteract the negative messages they receive from others. Beyond just escaping her real life, Adeline discovers that she can use writing to re-envision herself. Though her parents and siblings demean her and make her feel powerless, Adeline writes stories about herself as the strong and courageous warrior, Mulan. These stories become a way for Adeline to help counteract the negative messages she hears about herself from her family. Adeline is able to share these stories—and their positive ideas about herself—with her friends, who love them and eagerly await each new episode. In this way, Adeline not only mends her own self-image but also shares that strengthened identity with the people around her. This further suggests that Adeline, or any other traumatized individual, has the ability to reshape their perception of reality through story-telling and use that new reality to form positive connections with others.

Expressed in the stories of others, Adeline finds the secret pains that she herself has yet to voice. This suggests that reading literature can also offer a reprieve from the emotional isolation of trauma and help give voice to emotions that may seem too heavy to express. One of the most poignant examples of this is the sadness Adeline has for the defeat that Grandfather Ye Ye must feel. Ye Ye has been completely disempowered as the family’s patriarch by Niang’s dominance and viciousness and reduced to a sad, silent man waiting out the end of his days. Reading Shakespeare’s King Lear, Adeline cries with both sorrow and relief for how well it describes Ye Ye’s pain and position within the family, feeling as if Shakespeare had written the story as an ode to her grandfather to give voice to Ye Ye’s sorrow. The profound effect that King Lear has on Adeline illustrates the way in which, especially for people who have witnessed trauma and tragedy too great for them to yet express, literature and the stories of others can help to give voice to those feelings and offer solidarity with their pain.

Indeed, Adeline’s own memoir is written for this very end. In the author’s dedication, she expresses the hope that her story will encourage other children in a similarly difficult situations and show them that others have felt just as they do. The author writes in her preface that she has the “…fervent wish that [they] will persist in trying to do [their] best in the face of hopelessness…to transcend [their] abuse and transform it into a source of courage, creativity, and compassion.” Adeline’s story of pain, perseverance, and eventual escape may give voice to unspoken pain for other children who feel such things but do not yet know how to express them.

Adeline eventually learns to tell her own story in the form of a play, Gone with the Locusts. The play expresses all of her life’s pains and trials, and it both symbolically (by giving her an outlet) and literally (through the playwriting competition) helps her to escape the trauma of her home environment. When Adeline writes her play, she confronts her trauma head-on and uses her main character to finally voice all of the pain and fear and anger that she had been holding inside for so long. “Into her lips I injected my loneliness, isolation and feeling of being unwanted. To my heroine I gave everything of myself.” Through the mouth of a written character, Adeline discovers that she can finally describe her world and her family as they truly are, finding a symbolic escape from the secrecy of her abuse that she carried for so long. This suggests that, more than simply telling new tales, writing stories can also be a way to honestly and frankly tell the truth and find new freedom in it. Gone with the Locusts wins an international competition and convinces Father to let Adeline study in England, thus escaping the abuse of the family home. In this way, Adeline’s storytelling also brings her a literal escape from the trauma she has endured.

Able to finally speak the truth about what she feels—even if readers of the play do not surmise that the story is truly about her—Adeline symbolically releases herself from the hidden cruelty of her childhood through the power of story. Despite her traumatic childhood, Adeline’s use of storytelling to escape and overcome her circumstances offers a compelling testimony to the power of stories to help someone cope with trauma and perhaps even escape from its overbearing grasp.