How Far She Went

            As promised, here is my group’s analysis of How Far She Went by Mary Hood. We believed the underlying theme to be you never know what you have or what you appreciate until is ripped away from you. In How Far She Went, Hood introduces us to two strikingly opposite characters, the girl and her granny. The girl is currently living with the grandmother. The girl hates it there. She hates everything about it as shown by the quote, “”I could turn this whole house over, dump it! Leave you slobbering over that stinking jealous dog in the dust!” The girl trembled with the vision, with the strength it gave her.” This quote highlights the girl’s burning hatred for her grandmother but also the shows the helpless feeling of being stuck there.

            As an act of rebellion, the girl runs off and finds a group of motorcyclists, who then come back and taunt the granny as they show off the girl on the back of the motorcycle. After circling the granny, they take off. The grandmother takes off as well, determined to get her granddaughter back. She chases them down in her car, corners them, and forces the girl to come back with her. She does and the two head back home, but then a chase ensues. The granny high tails the car into the woods, but soon gets the car stuck in the mud and the girl and the granny take off on foot into the woods. They come to a lake and hide underneath a dock and eventually escape the bikers chasing them with the intention of killing them.

            It is at this juncture where my group really focused in on the use of symbolism by Hood. All awhile the bikers are chasing the two women, the granny’s dog tails right behind them. He does not want to be left out of the action. When the two hide under the dock, the dos is continuously barking which forced the grandmother to drown the dog in order to save them both. The quote, “The dog wouldn’t hush, even then; never had yet, and there wasn’t time to teach him. When the woman realized that, she did what she had to do. She grabbed him whimpering; held him; held him under till the struggle ceased and the bubbles rose silver from his fur,” shows how desperate their situation was. We believed the drowning of the dog represented the end of the girl’s disrespect, loathing, and general dislike of the grandmother. When the girl see how much her grandmother actually cares about her – the grandmother risked her life to save her—, she realizes how grateful she should be for all her grandmother does for her. It took a high-speed death chase for the girl to realize that, but at least she came to that conclusion!