| Ind Aff Essay, Research Paper
THEME ANALYSIS
Extreme relationships often tend to be abusive in some way from one of the partners towards the other. Very marked age differences some times show a sense of immaturity or a parenting feeling, it is hard to assimilate to someone who in deed is very different to the other. Now when there is a certain dependence that is more than of love, like economic, intellectual, physical, social, progressive it can become very abusive on the depending person. It s a case were almost anything has to be tolerated, because in deed, if one wants to keep enjoying from those benefits, he or she must lower their head and keep eating what ever is thrown at them.
What starts out on a rainy day, seems to open way to the blindness of what s to come. I never got to see much of it cause of the rain (151), focusing on the fact that she to couldn t see much of her relationship blinded by the pressure that rained down on her also. There is a constant mentioning of Princip s story (148), by both lovers; since her theses is based on that historic moment that would be: the shot that lit the spark , that fired the timber, that triggered the (148). She seems to identify herself in a way with young princip, it s how she pictures her self, and how she must look for that opportunity to just take control of the situation and just go for it.
Our narrator has a direct conflict with Peter s wife, more of a personal competition to were she considered to have the strong end So far as I could see, it was no contest at all between his wife and myself . In a sort of way she seems to feel guilty for the way she was slowly being left behind. The Archdukes wife can be represented as Mrs. Piper and how she mustn t forget the wife, who being innocent, seems to get in the way.
There is a part were they order wild boar meet, the younger of the two waiters emerged from the kitchen with two piled plates of roasted wild boar I could tell from the glisten oil that the food was no longer hot (151) although it might be an exquisite plate, he seems to think it is nothing but a fraud painted up, to what she understands it s just cold, and that its time for her to move on. In this way she understand each other s point of view.
The intensity in our story develops when our narrator discovers she really doesn t love Peter. It s when he asks her if she fancy s the waiter (151), when she understands, at that moment she does not love him. Here is when she falls out of love in Sarajevo. It is because our narrator has a certain abusive struggle from Peter, that she seems to change her mind about him in such an instance. But through out the story she doesn t seem to mind the way he mentally abuses her, how he s always putting her down, and she doesn t seem to understand that he still thinks of his wife but is practically with her for the fact she s a good LAY . Her constant thought of Mrs. Piper, Peter s wife, although she never physically appears in the story, she seems to always be present in her and his mind, making it hard for her to be fully with her lover (Peter) and in this way further extend her fantasious love relationship. She seems to be in denial about what truly is going on, and how she wants to make this work, when in deed she s only in it for the grade, but she doesn t want to see this.
At the end our narrator wakes up to the knowledge of her blindness, when she discovers that indeed it was a silly sad thing to do in the first place, to confuse mere academic ambitions with love (151). The fact that she was truly not interested in Peter, and thought she could do it on her own and didn t need from his petty. Something that proved later on that he was the real immature party in the relationship he was spiteful, and did his best to have my thesis refused (151), where she once again came on top, and proved to be more than she even thought of herself.
She understood that what went on was wrong and that she was probably giving to much, since not a lot but aggressive quotations, came out of Peter towards her. And she just seemed to need the urge to leave him and do it on her own, with more life.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in England 1933 grew up in New Zealand, parents divorced. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a writer of commercial fiction under the pen name “Pearl Bellairs.” Her parents divorced when she was five, after which her family moved to New Zealand. She lived with her mother, sister and grandmother until she started college and, as a result, grew up believing “the world was peopled by females.”
She returned to England with her mother and studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her actual christened name was “Franklin Birkinshaw”, which she feels contributed to her being accepted at St Andrews and permitted to study economics: the school assumed she was a male student applicant.
In her early twenties she was briefly married to a man more than twenty years older than her. It is not clear whether she had her first son during this marriage or earlier.
Raising her son as a single mother, she looks back on her twenties as times fraught with “odd jobs and hard times.”
She then embarked on an extremely successful career as an advertising copywriter, advertising was the only thing she could do in order to earn a decent enough living. . . I did it for about eight years.”
She married Roy Weldon in 1962 and had three more sons. She then went through a mid-life crisis: “I was thirty, inadequate and depressed and ignorant, and knew it.” She went through psychoanalysis, which gave her the self-knowledge and courage to give up advertising and start writing (internet I).
In the story Fay reflects the constant imagery of woman overcoming bad relationships, woman s independent struggle to overcome failure, and go towards independence. As we can se her life seems to reflect into woman s independence. The fact that she seems to depress herself in what seems to be mans struggle to keep her down, and the situation of her being raised by women, and that she entered a school mistaken for a male, shows how much she opposes commitment and the male based society.
One can also look back at her life and realize that her relationships haven t been all that great, especially her first marriage, which clearly seems to directly reflect on the story with there being an extreme age difference, and the clear fact that it did not last that long. And Fay clearly wants to show us the fact that after so many falls, slips and abuses, she is still overcoming her obstacles and is still standing at the end of each episode.
CRITIZISM
But if Ms. Weldon fires her cannon from the female vantage point, this feminist student of sexual politics has a tolerant heart for most of the men in her books, even for the womanizers, even for the bounders–
Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens
A 25-year-old graduate student on vacation with her professor-lover abruptly ends the affair in Ind Aff: Or Out of Love in Sarajevo. (Ind Aff is their private abbreviation forinordinate affection, which, despite her earlier avowals of passion, is precisely what the narrator discovers she does not feel for her lover.) Although their plots can be absurd and thin, these stories are enlivened by Ms. Weldon’s caustic wit. Occasionally harsh in her judgments, she is typically perspicacious, consistently clever and always entertaining.(internet II)
Michael Malone; New York Times, April 26, 1992, p. 11.
I must agree with Mr. Malone since as much as you в expect her to destroy peter in her story she gives him a sense of indifference, but one would come to expect that from him since through out the story she seems to plot out his character. Now the way that the story seems to not unravel till the end is interesting, it kind of takes you along a calm river ride with a smooth NIAGRA FALL ending.
WORK SITED
Weldon, Fay. IND AFF or Falling out of love in Sarajevo Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 5th edition. Boston. Bedford / St. Martin s. 2000. Pages 146-151.
INTERNET I
RED MOOD http://redmood.com/weldon/biography.html
INTERNET II
Malone, Michael. The Life Force Has a Headache. The New York Times p.11 April 26, 1992 Criticism about: Fay Weldon. Texshare. E.P.C.C Libraries El Paso 28 February, 2001. Gale Literary Database
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