Wrinkle in Time Essay Example for Free

Wrinkle in age EssayIn A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LEngle (1962), 14- stratum-old Margaret ( meg) Murry finds herself in untune and miserable. Her beloved fetch has disappeared, her five-year-old brother, Charles Wallace, is the object of ridicule, and shes having enormous problems at school. Then, one dark and stormy night, she meets a woman with the odd name of Mrs. Whatsit, who seems to know more than she lets on and who leads one thousand thousand, Charles Wallace, and a popular boy from zillions school, Calvin, 14, on a quest to find trillions father. This quest takes them to other orbiters and into with child(p) danger as they pass behind an evil presence called the Black Thing. The children and their extraterrestrial helpers, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, manage to compensate Mr. Murry from a prison planet, but leave Charles Wallace behind during the attempt. Mr. Murry uses a technique called a tesseract in social club to jump from one planet to ano ther to make their escape one time the children free him from his prison cell. rightful(prenominal) because Mr. Murry is greatly inexperienced at tessering, which is how he ended up on a prison planet in the first place, trillion is almost killed.Once she recovers, she understands that only she can return to the prison planet by herself to rescue Charles Wallace because the two of them are very close. In the end, Meg is successful and the family is reunited back on Earth. I decided to select this book for my fictional character review because I remember no other book from my childhood enchanting me the way A Wrinkle in Time (LEngle, 1962) did when my ordinal grade teacher read it aloud to us. The opportunity to look at Meg from a antithetical signalise of view intrigued me. Is she gifted? Does she have some winsome of illness?Perhaps she has dysthymic disorder, a kind of low-grade, long-term depression? Does she meet the criteria to be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Di sorder ( ridiculous)? Looking at the story from this point of view opens up a whole new way of seeing this character, and the task of analyzing what Meg is experiencing and what her spawn and teachers could have done differently to support her is what I hope to accomplish. One thing that the staff at Megs school and even Megs mother have failed to deal with is Megs grief over the loss of her father. Mr. Murry was a physicist who disappeared while doing top secret experiments for the government.Hes been gone for a year, and the government will provide no information about where he is or when, or even if, he will ever return. Megs mother lives in a kind of denial, expecting him back at any time, and so Meg has nowhere to turn to express her grief. She tries to obnubilate her experienceings like her mother does, but they just back up on her as she turns them inward. Perhaps because of this, I feel that Meg fits the criteria for a diagnosis of dysthymic disorder. For a child or a tee n, two or three criteria must be met for a period of at least a year in order to qualify (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, 2000, p.311). I believe that Meg meets five of these criteria. Meg for certain suffers from low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy. She calls herself a monster and a delinquent. She thinks that her 10-year-old twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, are the only everyday ones in the family. She feels her plainness acutely, with her mousy hair, her thick glasses, and her braces, and she compares herself unfavorably to her mother, who is a great beauty. Her teachers also compare her unfavorably to her brilliant parents right to her face. Meg feels that she is doing everything wrong. (LEngle, 1962, p. 7) some other criterion of dysthymia is feelings of pessimism and despair and a kind of hopelessness. Meg has been dropped to the lowest section in her class, and her teachers chastise her frequently for not trying and not being swank enough. Sh e is grieving the loss of her father and his loving support. She is also subjected to nasty town gossip, such as once overhearing a townsperson say, Ive heard that clever people often have subnormal children, and that the unattractive missy was not all thither (LEngle, 1962, p. 13).All of these things have culminated in despair and hopelessness for Meg. She also suffers from immanent feelings of irritability or excessive anger (DSM, 2000, p 775). She talks back to and even shouts at her teachers and her principal, Mr. Jenkins, when they criticize her or bring up her fathers absence. In addition, when a boy a year older and 25 lbs. heavier than she is called Charles Wallace her dumb baby brother, she call on the carpet him up so badly that his mother called to recoil (LEngle, 1962, p. 8). Another symptom of dysthymic disorder is Megs inability to concentrate on her school work.She faithfully does her homework every night, but when she gets to class, she can no longer remember wha t she read. I also feel that Meg meets the criteria established for Oppositional Defiant Disorder, although it is very hard to know exactly how much of an impact her dysthymic disorder has had on her ODD sort since there is often some relationship between the two diagnoses and there are some areas that overlap. With Oppositional Defiant Disorder, there is a pattern of negative, hostile, defiant or disobedient behavior towards adults and/or authority figures that lasts for six months or longer (DSM, 2000, p.100). I feel that Megs ODD manifests in six different ways. The first three criteria suggest that she suffers from ODD because she frequently loses her temper, is quite ticklish or easily annoyed, and she argues with adults who are in authority. At school, as I mentioned before, she talks back to her teachers and to the principal, she gets black and shouts at them, and there was also the incident on the way home from school in which she beat up an older boy. She also has a patt ern of actively refusing to comply with the rules of adults.In this case, Megs mother believes that Meg has set up a mental block about math. For most of her life, Megs parents tested her IQ and played a distribute of math games with her. They know that she is gifted, and they taught her a lot of short cuts in math, so that Meg can actually do math that is two grades higher up her. However, in 9th grade, the grade that Meg is in, the math teacher wants Meg to show her work she wants Meg to do the math the long way so that the teacher can see that Meg knows how she arrived at the result.This annoys Meg to no end as she thinks it is a total waste of her time, so Meg refuses to do it. Another criterion of ODD that Meg meets is doing things on purpose to aggravate other people. For example, when Meg is called into the principals office, Mr. Jenkins starts asking her questions about her missing father. Meg starts shouting at him and when he asks her to keep her voice down, she refuses and just shouts all the louder. Lastly, Meg blames others for her misbehavior. Its the teachers recess, or the principals fault, or the fault of the boy who taunted her.She does not take responsibility for her own actions. Its unfortunate that Meg has not true the mental wellness treatment that she needs. But its important to remember that the setting is 1962, and that the guidelines for these mental health disorders had not yet been established. School officials and teachers were often working in the dark and had no idea how to take problem children like Meg. Her teachers berate her for not trying and the principal tells her that she must face facts about her fathers absence.Megs mother is doing her best to hold her family together in the face of bruise rumors and the loss of the man she loves. Because of her own grief, it no doubt never occurred to her that Meg could use some lord help. In conclusion, one would hope that these days, Megs grief, her dysthymia, and her ODD wou ld be identified by her teachers or her mother, and addressed by the school social worker. She should definitely be receiving help from a mental health professional.If the topic of the loss of her father is too sensitive for Meg to discuss with anyone at school, such as a school psychologist, then she should be offered the chance to talk to someone from another town. As it is, her of import confidant and her emotional rock is her five-year-old brother, Charles Wallace, and although he is smart and mature for his age, he cant bear that burden for her. References American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistics manual of mental disorders (4th ed. , Text revision). Washington, D. C. American Psychiatric Association. LEngle, M. (1962). A wrinkle in time. New York Farrar, Straus, Giroux.