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.
