Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Intro Contrast Essay

My wife inevitably rounds me out no matter how hard I try to stay the rigid and uncompromising male. I try to keep the hard edge but she softens it with graceful ease. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is her devious plot to get me into her favorite T.V. show "The Gilmore Girls." She puts it on while I play video games or do my homework. So often has she watched it that I know the entire plot of a seven season show and never once put it on myself. I must admit begrudgingly that the writing is superlative. Among the rich and deep character development there are two characters which stand out to me. I find them especially fascinating for their troubled relationship which mirrors a similar relationship in my family. Lorelai Gilmore and her Mother Emily Gilmore are an amazingly enthralling pair whose battles with eachother have become legendary in the small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. I find an amazingly accurate characterization of the relationship with my mother in the two. Lorelai is the fiercely indepent daughter who was on her own at the age of sixteen. She raises her daughter Rory (short for Lorelai) and runs a Bed and Breakfast called the 'Dragonfly Inn." Her mother Emily is a wealthy Daughter of The Revolution whose whole life is fulfilling her responsibilities to her husband, Richard and her social obligations to the 'Blueblood' world. They seem like polar opposites but are in reality more similar than either would like to admit.

The characters of Lorelai Gilmore and Emily Gilmore present a literary spectacle of Dicken's quality. In the television show "The Gilmore Girls," the character of Lorelai is really the focal point. She has a remarkable relationship with her equally remarkable daughter, though each episode further illustrates one or another of the quirky denizens who live in a small town called Stars Hollow in Connecticut. The most often chronicled besides Lorelai or her daughter is Lorelai's mother, Emily Gilmore. The basic meat of the plot is flavored by Lorilei's emancipation from her mother at the age of sixteen due to pregancy. Her mother and father were society people greatly mortified by their daughters indiscretion. Their inability to communicate in any meaningful way led to the split and Lorelai had no contact with them for a very long time. The show begins with Rory getting accepted to a school called Chilton which Lorelai could not hope to afford. There is a very awkward episode where she must reconcile with her mother and father to ask them for the money to send her daughter to Chilton. The differences between Lorelai and her mother seem profound and insuperable yet over time you begin to see that the apple didn't fall to far from the tree.

1 comment:

johngoldfine said...

Tough row to hoe in my opinion--the writer has to gin up interest in two characters he has no way of knowing if the reader has ever seen (in my case, I have not...)

It seems complicated and 'complicated' is only going to work when the material can be dramatized--here, instead of drama, we're going to get exposition.

The point of entrance--you, your wife, your family--holds hope, the development less so.