And Sarah Laughed by Joanne Greenberg

In the short story "And Sarah Laughed" by Joanne Greenberg, Sarah exists as the only person able to hear in a family of deaf people. She is forced into a life of silence and conversational isolation unable to relate to her husband or son. When her son comes home from Chicago with his new deaf spouse who speaks in sign language Sarah's life as she knows it is completely spun around. This "finger-talk" changes the entire aspect of communication between the deaf in the household and causes Sarah to face challenges of isolation unlike any other. The setting of the story helps create the loneliness and repressed resentment that Sarah feels in her home and on the farm and in effect helps create the challenges she meets throughout the piece.

The first parts of setting described on the farm are the buildings on it which Sarah dislikes. She is embarrassed about what her son's wife will see as they drive in to meet them at the main house. These buildings are described as "dilapidated outbuildings instead of the orchards and fields that were now full and green," (323). As Sarah thinks, they "would look like a poor place to the new bride. Her first impression of their farm would be of age and bleached-out, dried-out buildings on which the doors hung open like a row of gaping mouths that said nothing," (323). This forlorn description of the buildings is an obvious parallel to the loneliness and silence Sarah experiences everyday and helps to present the overall sad tone of the novel.

Greenberg then goes on to speak of the landscape surrounding the farm. She talks of the "blue and silent" sky, adding more vividly to the isolated point of view we get from Sarah. Then Greenberg writes about the poplar trees beyond the creek that calm Sarah when she is stressed. She says in describing them beyond Sarah's garden, "along the creek, there was a row of poplars. It always calmed her to look at them. She looked today. She and Matthew had planted those trees. They stood thirty feet high now, stately as figures in a procession. Once-only once and many years ago-she had tried to describe in words the sounds that the wind made as it combed those trees on its way west," (323) In this quote the setting represents the time Sarah has spent married to her husband Matthew. The description of her attempt to describe the sound of the wind through those trees also shows the lack of actual communication shared between them.

Even though Sarah feels removed at the farm, the overall physical isolation also serves as a sanctuary for Sarah's family. It is said in the story that the deaf could not exactly function normally in society or school because of their deafness, "But the boys had work and pride in the farm. The seasons varied their silence with colors-crows flocked in the snowy fields in winter, and tones of golden wheat darkened across acres of summer wind. If the boys