Expectations and Difficulties in Romantic Relationships

At the beginning of our course, we were asked to identify concerns of literature. As we discussed, I came to a conclusion that literature throughout history reflects our humanity, expressing our lives and our concerns. In contemporary literature, authors have a comparable way of addressing these concerns creating a similar thread in their stories.  While there are many of these threads that span across the four stories we have read thus far, I was particularly interested in the way these authors wrote about love as a reflection of culture and family. In each of the stories, the characters’ intimate relationships in every romantic stage of life reflect the difficulties of their cultural and familial expectations, connecting each story to each other and our own experiences.  

In Please Look After Mom, the oldest daughter and fiancé’s relationship reflects several of these difficulties from familial and cultural expectations. The oldest daughter has always been independent, single, and determined to stay that way much to the chagrin of her mother. However when her mother disappears in the Seoul subway system, she begins to reevaluate her interactions with her mother, and her mother’s wishes. The culture and tradition that her mother was raised in dictates that women need to be taken care of and start a family, like her sister had done.  As the appeal of appeasing her mother becomes greater, she becomes engaged to her boyfriend and promises that once they find mom then they would get married even though she  since her mother went missing hasn’t “been able to embrace (him) warmly since Mom went missing” (242).  In the final chapter of the story, the daughter is engaged and on a romantic holiday while not able to embrace her man, as a result of these expectations.  

In Omeros, Helen like the Helen of Troy is the woman that men go to war for. But, I think that she is often misunderstood. She is a proud, beautiful woman from an impoverished minority group and needs a source of income. So while it is wrong for her to string along Achille and Hector, her actions are also in her best interests, illustrated as Hector quits the sea and buys a bus to financially support her. This culture of poverty, minority, and survival on the island influences her intimate relationships as she uses her body to entice, but also provide for her needs. Perhaps as the story unfolds itself, a different side of Helen will be revealed. But as of yet, we have met her most often through evaluating others interactions. Helen stands aloof, proud, and unknown in all of her relationships, necessitated perhaps by her culture and the difficulties she faces.

Arabian Nights and Days is an episodic story full of a variety of relationships. There is only one happy romantic tale in the book involving the relationship between Dunyazad and Nur Al-Din. After being manipulated by the genies, their unfulfilled love is restored. This happy-ever-after is not often found in Islamic culture, particularly when the woman as well as the man is in love. However, the cultural and familial expectations leading up to marriage were vastly different for the two of them. Dunyazad always knew that she would be married to further either her father’s position or the sultan’s. The sultan actually promises her in exchange for money. And so when she awakes and realizes that she is no longer a virgin, becoming an object of shame in her culture, she goes to commit suicide.  However, while Nur Al-Din wants to find this woman and make love to her again, there is no danger for him. In fact, he may and many do have multiple wives. This male-dominating culture is furthered when this tale of infinite love and rejoicing of the newlyweds is soon broken two chapters later. When Nur Al-Din along with the sultan and other prestigious men are seduced by the genie, locked in a cupboard naked, and freed to face no punishment but his own shame. While if a woman like Dunyazad was caught in the same act outside of marriage, her death would be justified by both their culture and her family.

My Michael goes further than many of the other stories we read to describe both the courtship and the first eight difficult years of marriage.  Michael’s family doesn’t want him to get married yet, because they are afraid that he will not be able to live up to their expectations of him if he submits to marriage. However, the cultural premise during this time is that singledom for women is not acceptable or a solution. Hannah is expected to marry and settle down, and so she does. After getting married and pregnant, she gives up her studies while he continues. Their relationship is plagued by their pasts as she never had a good female role model and he never saw how a husband interacts with his wife. Their marriage is one of unbalanced confusion as they struggle through Hannah’s depression and desire for control, along with Michael’s complacency.

In Arabian Nights and Days, from the very beginning the sultan and Shahryzad’s relationship was built on difficulties. In One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the pretext for Arabian Nights and Days is Shahryzad telling the sultan stories for 3 years to save both the other virgins and her own life. In the opening chapter of Arabian nights and days, the marriage is finally going to occur, but this does not mean that Shahrzyad is safe. Rather she is now married to a killer who still has the power to kill her at any time and who she abhors, for the rest of her life and. By most people’s definitions, these feelings of resentment and fear create a difficult environment to develop a relationship. The sultan later deciding that he wanted to leave, releases her from their marriage, which is counter-cultural.  However, she still never had the choice to leave or even be married.      

Another relationship in Omeros is Maud and Major Plunkett. There are three major strains or difficulties on their relationship. First is that he suffers with shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder, making it difficult for him to live from day to day with the memories and her with the his struggle. They are also childless, as Dennis ponders “(o)nly a son was missing” (29) . Later on as he investigates the island’s history this gap is again mentioned when he comes across the mention of a young Plunkett. Though this young Plunkett had lived long before, Dennis believes that “(t)his was his search’s end. He (Dennis) had come far enough to find a namesake and a son” (94).  The third difficulty is their conflicting views on paradise and where they should live as Maud’s desires to return to Ireland and he desires to stay on St. Lucia.

   Please Look After Mom, the relationship between the mother and the father reflects the culture and many difficulties. Theirs was an arranged marriage during wartime so that the mother would not be carried off into the hills and the father would settle down and as the oldest male child take on the familial responsibilities. Despite annual abandonments, other women, and her sustaining the family alone, they remained married. She chose to stay with him, having to fight at times for her place as the woman of the house, because this is what was expected in their culture. However their relationship is one-sided, that is until the mother is lost in the Seoul subway system. Only then does the father realize his error and his mistreatment of his wife, but then it is too late.

In contemporary world literature, the cultural contexts and familial expectations play a larger role than I ever would have expected. In some literature, both in the past and present day, romantic relationships are often idealized and glossed over to create the illusion of a happily-ever-after or the reader never hears from the female character again. However, in all of the books that we have read for Contemporary World Lit this has not been the case. The difficulties in building and maintaining a relationship are in fact emphasized by these authors rather than hid, along with highlighting the roles of culture and family in each relationship. While I have never been in any such romantic relationships, the difficulties that Walcott, Malfouz, Kyung-Sook, and Oz reflect are relative as shown through the characters in every stage of relationships. None of these tales ends in an illusion; the relationships are developed in a meaningful and similar thread through difficulties and expectations, connecting one to another.