The Voice of the Great Bell

By: lafcadio Hearn

Retold by: Margaret Hodges

 I liked this book in terms of the literary elements and the way that the story was told, but I don’t think I liked what it actually had to say, and I would be hesitant to read this book or have it in my classroom. This book is about a man who is commanded by the heavens to make a bell so big that it can be heard from one hundred miles away. However, he could not make the bell, and his daughter was worried about him, so she secretly spent all her money to go to an astrologer who would tell her how to save her father. The astrologer tells her: “Gold and brass will never join one with the other, silver and iron will never embrace util a pure maiden is melted with them in the crucible.” The girl knows what she must do, and on the last day that the bell must be made, she jumps into the pot of melted metal, and sacrifices herself. The bell is able to be made. After reading this, I wasn’t really sure what the message was – and this book definitely seems like one with a message. But after thinking about it, I think the message is really pretty clear, and I don’t really feel comfortable with it. For me, the idea of this story was how this girl who is so pure of heart, sacrifices her life for her father. In the book this is made to seem a noble thing to do. There are several other references to this kind of sacrifice for her father. It says that she refused 100 marriage proposals rather than leave her father by himself. This whole book really promotes the stereotype of the girl as kind, passive, and willing to sacrifice. In one of my classes we read the original beauty and the beast, and a lot of the themes really resonated for me in this story, in terms of how beauty was passive and sacrificed for her father, and this was seen as a positive quality. It just seemed incredibly sexist to me. The part where she jumped into the metal was actually pretty disturbing. The gender roles were very clear and incredibly stereotypic. I didn’t appreciate the message of this book and I would not recommend it or read it with children