Initial Analysis of Potato in Dearth

Potato is the central symbol of the story Dearth, and potatoes are humanized as newborn babies. The lonely woman seems to be going through a dark period in her life. Her boyfriend dumped her, and her mother, father and brother died. She is quiet and depressed. Potato is the symbol of hope and new life after painful experiences in life. The writer describes seven potatoes as babies who come into form in nine months.

At the beginning, the women hated potatoes and tried to get rid of them. However, she failed even she tried to bake them, mail them to Ireland and fired them. The first moment is on the twentieth day, the potatoes “had grown sketches of hands and feet.” This was the moment that the potatoes got the women’s attention, as the text shows, “her heart pulled its curtain as she held each potato up to the bare hanging lightbulb and looked at its hint of neck, its almost torso, its small backside” and “each of the seven had ten very tiny indented toes and ten whispers of fingertips.” The former part of rejecting potatoes is actually the process of denying possibilities of life and rebirth. When the woman first saw the humanlike potato, she was totally freak out and trembled, and she still tried to press down all the emotions and desires to change. “She sliced all seven potatoes up with a knife as fast as she could,” but she was terrified by the arms and legs, which suggest her upset facing the first emergence of hope.

The moment that the woman “brushed away the tears sliding down her nose and put a hand inside the pot, stroking their backsides” is the burst out of emotions and the struggles with inner depression and hopes. The inner struggle is whether to accept the newborn hope in her heart or continue refusing the coming hope. When the woman saw her neighbor going well with her life, she admired and thus shivered and inner hope grew more in her heart. Though she ate one of the potatoes, her desire to realizing love, hope and beauty was blooming. And when two other potatoes were expelled from the pot, “she didn’t want to put them outside, bare, in the cold” and carefully buried them under nasturtium seeds. She began feeling the love from potatoes and caring about the potatoes.