Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Essay | Critical Essay #3

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Critical Essay #3

Faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house's virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues.... Come what may, the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The Annex which Anne first describes resonates with this archetypal, universal image of the house as shelter and fortress that both protects against and resists the world outside. Otto Frank had spent months transforming the rooms, attic, and loft into a comfortable hiding place. With furniture, decor, and supplies from the family's former life, he sought to preserve the illusion of order, normalcy, and continuity. Anne dedicates many pages of her diary to the description of the Annex as both physical and metaphoric place. When the diary was first published in Holland, it was...
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