Meeting Other People, Love And Friendship

Foremost, I will talk about my file in general. I have chosen three texts to illustrate the notion of "Meeting other people, love and friendship". The writers involved in my theme are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen and Jack Kerouac. With those documents I'll approach the subject of the humans relationships' complexity. Thanks to that, we can ask us how are developed romantic and friendly relations in these texts. The two first texts deal with the romantic relation and the last text is about a friendly relation.

First of all, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of the first text, was an American novelist and short-story writer born in Salem. Most of his works are set in New England and are moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration and are considered part of the Dark romantic movement. In this story, everyone is looking at Hester Prynne, a young women which is going out of a jail. She was condemned for an adultery, but it was a mistake. She was in love with a man. But one day, she learned that he was dead, and she felt in love with another man, with whom she had a child. However, her first lover was in fact not dead, and that's why she was condamned for adultery. But nobody knew the truth about this story and everyone judged her for having committed this fault. The author shows that we can't judge someone about a story which we don't know anything and this story of adultery was amplified with the context of the Protestant religion, that the author condemned, which was against any relationship outside the marriage and adultery.

Afterward, Jane Austen, the author of the second text, was a very famous writer of the 19th century. She wrote about the world, and most especially the society that she knew and where she was living in. She gave to her heroines like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice an indepedent voice which was never given to them before. Thanks to those heroines, she defended traditional values against stupidity, hypocrisy, absurdities and pretentions with irony in her novels. Her novel Pride and Prejudice, written in 1813 is inscribed in romantism, but it's over all a criticism of the society. Love is the center of the story : Elizabeth Bennet, the main character, coming from the hupper-class, was in love with Darcy. But she didn't tell him her feelings because they were not in the same social class, he was more fortunate. That was also why his family didn't want any relation between them, they wanted him to marry a woman with the same social class. But the marriage was almost an obligation in this time, and the both family want to marry them children.

Finally, the last text was written by Jack Kerouac in 1957. This text is inscribed in the Beat Movement, which is a counter culture, with a rejection of norms and authority, a call for freedom. In those texts, we can see that the characters enjoy the present time, multiply experiences and celebrate non-conformity and obscenity. In the 1960's, the Beats influenced the hippie counterculture. In On the Road, Kerouac shows, with the teenagers, the importance of the movement to escape from immobility. There's also a random choice of the direction : they don't know where they're going, but they're going. In fact, they're indifferent to the destination and the prefer focusing themselves on the journey itself, leaving the past aside because they feel a desire to live life to the fullest.

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