Lentils_and_Lilies

Lentils and Lilies A Summery We find us selves in a suburban neighborhood of Miniver Road. Jade Beaumont is walking lightly down the sunny streets, soon feeling free as a bird because her graduation is in a few weeks. Actually she should be studying English poets from the Romantic period, but she is going to aninterview for a summer job. Passing the peaceful houses, she thinks about how much a suburban purdah it really is. While planning her life, she turns a corner, and runs into a man and a woman bending over a screaming child lying on the pavement. As she walks towards them, the man says that the matter probably would be better of with her, and storms of. Now she finds herself standing on the road with a very worried and utterly frustrated woman and a chubby, screaming child with a lentil up her nose. Jade gets her inside, and before she can say ‘no’, she has a tweezer in her hand and being asked to get the lentil out of the child’s nose. She gives it a shot, but fails because the child is so uncooperative. The woman is pretty helpless; so Jade says that she call the doctor and ask him to come over. The woman then begins to complain about her hard life, now Jade has had enough and sprints off into the sunshine. B Essay The wish for something more. The picture of the ideal life, I think, has struck us all at one or another time. Especially when you are a teenager, you have your whole life in front of you. Always wishing for something more than you have, is for a lot of people a normal thing, aiming higher. Meaning something beyond what you were born with, in another word, something higher than your parents has given you. In this novel we are introduced to a girl named Jade Beaumont. She must be around the age of 18, because she studies A-levels. The first thing I noticed was that Jade shied away from the abstractions in the works of Thomas Coleridge. She referred to his works as full of minefields and it was just streaming off into nothingness. Perhaps Jade is to shallow – or is it that Coleridge is too deep' She lives in the perfect little surburban purdah, which is surrounded by battery hens, everything is so neat and tidy and narrow-minded[1]. The last part where she says narrow-minded is what she really thinks of the neighborhood. Everything in this neighborhood, is in her point of view, closed in that fifties mentality. Nothing is spontaneous and wild. Everybody lives there own little lives, with theire family. The solitary women are somewhere downstairs, chopping fruit or on the telephone organizing some toddle tea[2], this family first represents everything she hates. Solitary in this sentence is of course not that they are single or divorced, but that they are ‘stay at home moms’ – she would never want to be that! Those are women who give up everything, so they can stew their own juice, waiting for their husbands to come home. If she ever were to get married, the housework would be even 50/50 % - it should be fair. Walking down the road heading for her summer job interview, she sees an au pair girl pushing a bugle with crying babies. She reminds herself of the string of au pairs she has had. Jade says that she was dragged around with so many au pairs, and her mother hated when she talked bad about them. Her mother wasn’t home enough, and when she was home, she could not relax. Jade is really sarcastic and judgmental of her mother, saying that the only thing she cares about is: “… making rotas and lists and endless arrangements, lost forever in a forest of twitching detail with her tense talk of juggling and her self-importance about her precious job and her joyless “running the family” “[3] The word precious is surely very sarcastic and very condescending. She really doesn’t get that the hard work that her parents does, isn’t for fun. It is to get food on the table and clothes on their bodies – it benefits her. Instead of being grateful, she sees it as the parents as distinctly distant from her utopian world. Jade Beaumont knows exactly what she wants with her life. After a ‘gab-year’, where she will have some freedom, she will pursue a successful career in Business Studies and Marketing. Her future is planned – very simple and not more complicated than she can think it through in a few minutes. She would never live the life her parents have. What hits you are, as said, her total lack of gratitude for her parents work, but even worse: her absolute inability to see of seeing her life in realistic perspective. It is as though she has answers to all the existential matters in life. Jade can not se any problems or bumps ‘on her way to perfection’. And she does not think twice about hard work, or that perhaps she won’t be admitted to her preferred education – then what' Then her little idyllic world will fall apart..' She doesn’t have any if, maybe or buts in her plan – and I think she is heading for a rude awakening! She doesn’t acknowledge that her parents does work hard, and she will have to do too. Because nothing in life comes cheap. Actually Jade is described as very sweet and innocent, wearing white summer clothes and being “light on her feet” – but you really have to ask yourself, “is she also angel white and virtuous on the inside'” Turning a corner she runs into a woman whose screaming daughter is lying on the street. Her first thought was : trouble. The lonely mother with the uncooperative, screaming child lying on the pavement and getting dirty – it could not be any more ‘suburban low life’ in her eyes. This was a little bump in the road for her plans for the day. She is so to say ‘caught of guard’ and is so stunned by this whole thing that she does not have any solution to ‘the problem’. If she would have known that the girl would be lying there, she would most likely have taken another route – because it was not in her nature to help. But now she is standing with the distressed mother and can’t see any way out, other than to get the girl into the house. Everything on her mind from the point when she sees the lady until she leaves the house is so condescending, sarcastic – and very rude! She criticizes their clothes, weight, the furniture, everything she can put her finger on. It is all the superficial aspects she focuses on. She actually also says it directly on page 2: “she herself found outward forms utterly absorbing, the color of clothes, the texture of skin, the smell of food and flowers.” A lot of her problems lie here, she can not see beyond the dirt on the child and the unfashionable mother and thus she fails to show true sympathy towards the family. Because by not showing sympathy towards them she can raise above them and give herself that satisfaction of being all clear about her life – or at least she thinks. The ending, where Jade says: “my mother got four, AND a job. Goodbye” should not be confused with some kind of sudden insight in her mothers world. It is simply so she can _____ more. In the last line Jade is compared to the Greek god Atalanta. Atalanta would only marry a man if he proves himself better than the thing she where best at – running. Jade sees herself as perfect. That would indicate that the man Jade was to marry would be, in her eyes more perfect than herself. Jade desperately need to see the world as it really is, because sooner or later reality will catch up with her and then she will not be able to just run away from problems as she does in the incident with the lentil. The title “Lentils and Lilies” is important to notice and to analyze. A lily is a very unique and beautiful flower. In this story Jade sees such a flower in the woman’s house. Even though it is getting to be too old, it is described as hideous. The flower, in my eyes, is a symbol of the woman. The lily was “standing on it’s last legs” that means that maybe the woman was like Jade once, but was forced to se reality and grow up, be responsible and take care for her children, and that is precisely what Jade never wants to experience. But I also think the lily is in somewhat an symbol of Jade and her wish for the perfect life. But by the lily fading in the suburban house, it could mean that Jade never gets to experience her dream. Jade’s dream is too vague to be taken seriously. Jade is still a ‘little’ girl. The lentil represents a practical task that Jade is too childish to handle. Translation You cannot see it by looking at them. But as soon as they write or eat, it becomes visible to anyone – they are left-handed. Throughout history they have been forced to become right-handed, and even though things have somewhat changed, there are still much that could indicate a certain amount of discrimination. Actually, about one tenth of all people are left-handed, but still there are only few tools especially manufactured for them. That is how it was until recently anyway, when a shop opened north of Copenhagen, which purpose of selling useful tools for left-handed. ----------------------- [1] L. 74 [2] L. 71 [3] L. 38