The Novels: Plainsong, Bridget Jones's Diary, and Cold Mountain - Research Paper Example

? [Teacher and number] 24 March Alternative Families in Fiction The novels Plainsong by Kent Haruf, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier all depict different kinds of families. As readers, we expect a functional family to be made up of people who take care of one another and love one another. The characters in these three novels fill these expectations by caring for each other and providing support that their chosen family members can depend upon when they need help. Each of the three books depicts a different kind of alternative family. The families in the books all have one thing in common, however. They all choose to be together and love each other regardless of anything that happens. In this way, these alternative families are able to function better than many traditional families. The theme throughout all of the books is that people find love and support in unexpected places. This doesn’t just refer to romantic love, but all kinds of love; especially the love that exists between good friends. The friends in turn use the love they’ve found to form families. The three different books all begin with traditional families that have been fractured in some way. In Plainsong, Tom Guthrie’s family is falling apart because of his wife’s growing depression, and she eventually leaves him. Victoria loses her family because first her father and then her mother have abandoned her. In Cold Mountain, almost all of the main characters’ close family members have died, and they all find themselves stuck far away from the places they think of as home. In Bridget Jonses’s Diary, Bridget appears to feel that her family is slowly falling apart because she has grown up and her parents’ marriage seems to be ending. In each book, the main characters must find ways to make their own new families, each in different ways. The characters in Plainsong make up many different kinds of families. High school teacher Tom Guthrie’s family is the most traditional. He has a wife and two children. However, when his wife leaves him, he must learn how to carry on and take care of his sons without her. His main task throughout the book is not to find a new family, but to make the one that he already has work. Tom loves his children, and the loss of their mother naturally hurts them very much. The fact that they are able to accept the loss of their mother and move on shows that they love and trust their father. Even though things are hard for him, he continues doing his job as their father. When Maggie joins their family at the end, she is not completing a broken family. She is just adding an extra piece to it. Maggie chooses the McPheron brothers to take care of Victoria and her baby because she knows that they need someone to take care of just as badly as Victoria needs someone to care for her. Because the two brothers live together, they don’t realize that they need someone else until they learn to love Victoria and her child. They don’t notice how alone they are until they aren’t alone anymore. Maggie is right in thinking that the brothers are the perfect people to take care of Victoria. Their kindness is apparent right away. In comparison to her cruel mother, the McPherons are so different that Victoria is confused by them, but they end up becoming the best possible family that Victoria and her baby could have found. Her abusive boyfriend wants to take her away and have a traditional family with her—a married couple and their child. Victoria has to choose between the traditional family that society expects her to have and the quirky alternative family she has found with the McPheron brothers. Victoria chooses to stay with the brothers because they are the ones who protect her and treat her kindly. Maggie Jones is the most important character in the book. She is the one who creates families. She doesn’t just bring Victoria and the McPheron brothers together, but also brings the family created by the McPherons, Victoria and her baby together with the Guthries to create an even larger family. Like the McPherons, Maggie is characterized by her kindness. She is strong and she always seems to know exactly the right thing to do. She ends up becoming like a mother to Victoria, and to Bobby and Ike, too. In addition to this, in some ways she is like a mother to the whole group, including the men who are her own age or older than her. This is never really stated in the book. Instead, Kent Haruf uses his quiet and understated style to get the message across. He uses sparse descriptions of little details and short lines of dialogue that have few words, but say a lot. Near the end of the book, when everyone comes out on Memorial Day, the text suggests that Maggie and Victoria look alike. “They might have been mother and daughter” (Haruf 367). However, this line is about so much more than just the way they look. By this time Maggie really has filled in the space left behind by Victoria’s absent mother. In Cold Mountain, the characters must create new families in a similar way to the characters in Plainsong. Ada and Ruby are both women who have no mothers, have lost their fathers and are not able to survive on their separate farms alone. “Like Ada, Ruby was a motherless child from the day she was born. They had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other” (Frazier 52). Ada’s father has died, leaving her to take care of Cold Mountain Farm by herself. Ada is ill-equipped for this, but she decides to try her best to do it anyway. Ruby is more able to take care of herself, but her father has deserted her and taken the horse, leaving her unable to do the work on her farm that she needs to do in order to be able to live. The two women are forced to team up and work together to survive. At the beginning of their arrangement, Ruby insists that she will not be a servant, and wants Ada to consider the two of them to be equals. Ruby will not do demeaning work for Ada. As she puts it, “everybody empties their own night jar” (Frazier 52). They become like sisters, and in the harsh environment of the frontier during the Civil War, they must protect each other. At first Ada believes that she needs a man to help her take care of her farm, but after Ruby shows up, Ada quickly learns that two women can take care of themselves. Like Ada and Ruby, Inman is alone in the world. However, he doesn’t have a friend who can help him, and he will have to find his way back to Cold Mountain alone. For Inman, it’s the desire for a family—for a life with Ada—that keeps him going. In the end, he leaves Ada with a daughter, which expands her family even though she loses Inman. Even after Ruby gets her father back, marries, and has children, thus gaining a traditional family of her own, she never stops being a part of Ada’s family, and they all choose to stay together at Cold Mountain. Of all the alternative families presented in these books, Bridget Jones’s is the most dysfunctional. Most of this is because Bidget herself is dysfunctional, and must work through her dysfunctions throughout the book. Even though she has both of her parents, Bridget Jones feels alone, almost as though she has no family. Bridget is very single, and spends all her time longing to fall in love with someone so that she can have a traditional family. She has pulled away from her parents because that’s what adults in modern society are supposed to do. When she learns that her parents might be getting a divorce, she fears she will be “the tragic victim of a broken home” (Feilding 38). As the book progresses however, through talking with them about their marital problems, Bridget also becomes closer to her parents. At first she sides with her father and has sympathy for him, and is mostly jst annoyed with her mother, but as she starts to talk with her mother, she begins to see things from her perspective, as well. Bridget slowly learns that her friends are her family, too. Her best friend Tom sticks by her no matter what, and her other friends usually do everything they can to help, support, and defend Bridget, even when they have their own problems. At the beginning of the book, Bridget is insecure about how much people like her, and she thinks about her friends in disdainful terms. As they prove to be loyal and as Bridget matures, she begins to understand that she can trust them and rely on them. When she finally falls in love with Mark, the good man she has been hoping for, and it appears she will probably marry him, the reader knows that Bridget has already found the family she was looking for on the way to finding a husband. In fact, she had this family all along, she just didn’t know it. The families in each of these three books do not necessarily resemble the traditional nuclear family. However, they do love each other and provide a place for one another to feel safe. These three stories show the audience that the word “family” can mean a lot of different things. Any group of people who share one another’s lives and support each other can be a family. The characters don’t always make it to the happy ending exactly the way that they expected, but they do have each other. Works Cited Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1996. Print. Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1997. Print. Haruf, Kent. Plainsong. New York, NY: Knopf, 1999. Print. Read More