The Ice Queen

"People hide their truest natures. I understood that; applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe." - Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

The Ice Queen is one of my favourite books, so I wanted to use something from that. I really like this particular extract because of the imagery and the use of rhetorical repetition to build up the sense of chaos that living without a ‘cloak’ would bring. I agree with the sentiment too – that we all act differently according to social etiquette and the rules enforced upon us that silently dictate how we must act if we wish to live in a civilized way. I think it would be really interesting to see peoples ‘truest natures’ at first (at least there'd be loads of stuff going on), but I don’t think it would be sustainable, and this passage makes you question how open you really are about yourself. It makes you wonder what really would happen if people acted on their every whim - kissed strangers, hurt enemies, 'revealed themselves'.
   It's kind of a sad extract, because the speaker admits you can never live without a 'disguise', but I like that it makes you feel something. The verbs within it aren't just sad though, they're passionate - 'kissed', 'smacked', 'wept'. I like that the actions being written about are extreme, because the ideas in the extract are also extreme. No one is as they seem.