Study Questions

"In the Waiting Room"

Questions for Understanding & Analysis

1. This poem presents the experience of a six-year-old girl as she goes to the dentist's office with her aunt. Can you describe in your own words the experience that she has? Have you ever had a similar experience? What does the girl see in the magazine? How does she respond to what she sees?

2. When the girl hears her aunt cry out in pain she thinks ¡§that it was me: / my voice, in my mouth¡¨ and ¡§I was my foolish aunt, / I¡Xwe¡Xwere falling, falling¡K.¡¨ Why do you think the girl confuses and mixes herself and her identity with that of her aunt?

3. In the second stanza the speaker tries to stay calm by reassuring herself that she is all right, yet a new awareness of her own identity keeps returning to her mind:
   But I felt: you are an I,
   you are an Elizabeth,
   you are one of them.
   Why should you be one, too?

   What insight about herself is the girl just discovering?

4. The girl comes to recognize herself as a female. What does that mean for her? Why does it frighten her?

5. What does the girl in this poem come to realize about herself as an individual and a female in society?

1. Have you ever had a similar awareness with the girl's (see the above quote)?  How different is this girl's sense of identity from the speakers in Whitman's "I saw in Louisianna a Live-Oak Growing," Dickensen's "I'm Nobody? Who are you?"  or Frost's "Mending Wall"?

2. The girl gets a sense of self-identity partly from reading the magazine National Geographics.  When surfing on the web, what do you feel about your self-identity?  A Taiwanese, or citizen of the world?