Societal Roles and Concept of Age in Contemporary Short Fiction - Research Paper Example

? Full Writing 102 12 November  Societal roles and concept of age in contemporary short fiction Discussing through the story of “Aren't you happy for me?" by Richard Bausch Over centuries our societal roles and concept of age has conditioned us to think in a linear fashion about these issues. A role or a social role is a set of interrelated behaviours, privileges and obligations as understood by people in a social state of affairs. It is an accepted or free or constantly changing conduct and might have a provided a person social standing or social rank. The concept of age and age related roles is also an old concept in our society. We as society assign roles to an individual based on their age. These social issues have been well illustrated in a short story “Aren't you happy for me?" by Richard Bausch. The story is in third person and chiefly dialog based in which telephones call between the father and daughter is occurring. The reader finds out the daughter's dilemma (expecting a child, planning to get wedded to a sixty three year old man who was her professor) with the father. This dilemma of the daughter is in sharp contrast to the father’s own marriage which is in mess. The story forces us to wonder if Jack Ballinger, Melanie’s father is opposed to the idea of an older man marrying his daughter, or the fact that he himself does not have a happy marriage and hence he is so upset with his daughter. This story gives us a glimpse of the way our society is moulded and reacts. In the story when Melanie informs Jack her news he overreacts about the situation. This story forces us to think about various social issues such as, love between two individuals, age gap between the couples, attitude of the society towards such couples, and relationships in general. Love is an abstract concept and highly subjective. Not only is it difficult to explain, it is also intangible. These characteristic of love makes it most discussed but least understood of all phenomenon. When two people are in love, they are in a state of delirium and tend to see only the positive side of the other person or rather they focus only on the positive side and ignore the shortcomings. In psychology love is portrayed as a cognitive and social phenomenon. Psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed a tri-partite theory of love and believes that love is formed of three distinct components. These components are intimacy, commitment, and passion. Intimacy is a status in which two individuals share feelings and a variety of information of their private lives, and is generally shown in camaraderie and dreamy love affairs. On the other hand, commitment is the belief that the relationship is lasting. The last and most widespread form of love is sexual appeal and passion. Passionate love is present in obsession as well as idealistic love. All types of love are seen as different combinations of these three variables. Then there are various stages of love and the first being the enchantment stage, which last for usually 6-8 months. In maximum romantic relationships the romantic stage or the enchantment stage is the first stage and it is a great stage. The brain produces a hormone called endorphin in this period that makes the two people in love feel cheerful, whole, energetic, and very optimistic. When an individual is "in love" the person is actually on drugs. In this stage the couples want to spend quite a lot of time in each other’s company (that's when the endorphin gets secreted and the couple want that amazing feeling). The other person appears to be the best in the world and individuals in love are not really ready to listen to anything against their partners. The story depicts this quite clearly as Melanie tells her father that she has been in this relationship for five months as compared to her parent’s relationship of six months before their marriage. The age gap of forty years is considered a huge difference by Jack, which is how our society also views. There are both points of view prevalent in the society with respect to such a huge age difference between couples. Some people opine that a large gap between the couples will bring a lot of complications in the relationship, such as widowhood, supporting an elderly husband and young child at the same time for the wife, and possibly divorce due to other extraneous factors. These people also feel since the age gap is so huge, once the initial euphoria of love is over difference in age will be difficult to manage. There will be very few activities such a couple would be able to do together. The demands and expectations of both the people in the relationship will be very different and their world view would also vastly differ. The other school of thought believes that age is just a number and when two people are attracted it does really matter what the age gap is. What really matters is the compatibility, having common interests, common goals, common family values, etc. Additionally these days there is a new concept of psychological age rather than biological age and two people who are closer to each other in psychological age are more compatible than people who are nearer to each other in biological age. We have real life examples of both the school of thoughts in our society and hence it is really difficult to say which the correct one is. Not only the couple may have problem because of the age gap, it is also quite possible that the social circle in which they have been moving might not be able to handle such couples. Till the time they were separate they had their own social circles comprising of people of their age. Once they become a couple, they will either hang out with the younger group or the elderly group. One of the partners is bound to feel uncomfortable as the others around him or she will not know how to react or behave. Even the relatives will not know how to be with this odd couple. As in the story when Jack is speaking to William Coombes he says “"Oh, you needn't 'sir' me. After all, I mean I am the goddam kid here." (91).This clearly illustrates the haplessness of a future father-in-law in reacting to his future son-in-law who is nineteen years older than him. Additionally since this is an odd couple, there will hardly be any other similar couples with whom they can hang out or share their experiences with. These kinds of situations and experiences will make them feel socially awkward. The kids of such couples also face various weird situations. The older parent may not appear to be a parent but more likely a grandparent and this may embarrass the kid sometimes. Different relationships demand different expectations. In case of parent- child relationship it is very frequent for parents, even after their kids have started their individual lives, to strive and persist to tell their children how to live their lives. The parents may always advise their offspring that they need to learn from their own faults, but when it comes down to it, they want to keep their kids from perhaps making the same mistakes they did.  When Melanie tells her father Jack her news he makes a big deal about the state of affairs. In the dialogue Melanie had with Jack on the phone she tells him not only that she is expecting but that she is planning to marry a man much elder than her.   Her prospective husband is sixty-three years old and forty years older than her.   Melanie’s father does not like this information at all.  He says, “Melanie, you’re- you’re not pregnant, are you?” (86). Jack does not want to acknowledge the circumstances and he wants to shield his daughter even though, she is mature enough to make her own choices. Afterwards, we find out Jack overplayed about Melanie’s information because he wants to evade discussing his impending divorce with Melanie’s mother. He is trying to evade the dialogue with his daughter about the separation with his wife thus; he makes a huge deal on the information that the guy Melanie is planning to marry is sixty three years old.   Jack says, “Well, good God, this guy’s nineteen years older than your own father.”(89)   This line shows how he is exaggerating everything because otherwise there is no reason why misbehaves with Coombes when Melanie has decided on marrying William. The reality was that he had information of his own to share. Roughly a week back he and Mary had decided on a divorce. “Some time for both of them to sort things out." (86) "Outside the window, his wife, with no notion of what she was about to be hit with, looked through the patterns of shade in the blinds and, seeing him, waved. It was friendly, and even so, all their difficulty was in it." (87) "Everything they had been through during the course of deciding about each other seemed concentrated now." (94) "Of course there are things to work on. Every marriage—"His voice had caught. He took a breath. "In every marriage there are things to work on." (94) "Who knows," Ballinger's wife said. "Maybe they'll be happy for a time." He'd heard the note of sorrow in her voice, and thought he knew what she was thinking; then he was certain that he knew. He sat there remembering, like Mary, their early happiness, that ease and simplicity, and briefly he was in another house, other rooms, and he saw the toddler than Melanie had been, trailing through slanting light in a brown hallway, draped in gowns she had fashioned from her mother's clothes." (95) The above five lines actually tell the entire story and are really the story. Melanie's approaching marriage is in fact a background against which Bausch develops an image of a discontented marriage that has not always been sad. Here probably two thoughts were running into Jack’s head, first that his own marriage was breaking even though when he married Mary, both of them were quite certain that it is forever. So is Melanie making the right choice was his first concern. Secondly he was wondering if his marriage is breaking it could be because he and Mary were really young and inexperienced when they had decided to marry and they had known each other only for six months when they had decided to marry each other. Since he was already affected by his own future divorce he was not able to articulate his thoughts and it seemed he was overreacting to the news. The relationship of each parent with their children is also quite different. Mary, Melanie’s mother had a different reaction to the same news. Though she was also going through the same emotion of impending divorce, she felt maybe Melanie may have a better shot at her marriage than they did. Melanie is also shown closer to her father rather than her mother and she expects him to be more understanding as he may have always been with her. Thus relationships are complex in nature generally and the expectations are based on past experiences, but when the same relationship is subjected to new situations, they sometimes do not hold up to expectations. Through this story Richard Bausch has tried to bring out multiple social issues such as a twenty three year old girl getting pregnant out of wedlock, she planning to marry the guy who is forty years older than her, who is also her professor at college and the parents of the girl planning to divorce each other after twenty three years of married life. He has tried to focus on the relationship dynamics between individuals and the expectations associated with the relationships. He has also indirectly pointed out to the fact that marrying someone after knowing her or him for few months is probably not a great idea. He has quite well described the frustration of the father and his inability to differentiate his life with his daughter’s. Works Cited Bausch, R. The Stories of Richard Bausch. NY: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print. Sternberg, R. J. “A Triangular Theory of Love.” Psychological review 93.2 (1986): 119-135. Print.  Read More