A Wedding Ceremony: A Wedding Ceremony Foreshadowing Your Life

2590 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Foreshadowing essay

“I, take you, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.” From a young age, girls think about the perfect wedding- everything from the perfect dress to the color scheme, venue design and the cake. Every girl aspires to have the perfect wedding including a perfect balance between her modern ideas and her family’s culture and traditions. When the wedding day finally comes…What if the guests ignore the traditions? What if the problems at the wedding become the problems in your own life? In The Jungle, Ona and Jurgis have a disastrous wedding ceremony in which guests ignore traditional Lithuanian customs. Upton Sinclair uses this scene to imply that events that go wrong at a wedding ceremony can foreshadow later events that will occur in a marriage. By doing this, Sinclair conveys the idea that a wedding ceremony is often the defining moment in a marriage as a couple begins their lives together.

The overuse of alcohol by the guests at Ona and Jurgis’s wedding foreshadows Jurgis’s addiction to alcohol and the abuse he will encounter by those who sell it. In a traditional wedding ceremony, it is customary for a couple to drink wine and eat salt and bread to symbolize joy, tears and work (Lithuanian wedding traditions 2). It is also customary for the couple to serve abundant food and drinks in return for the guests leaving a substantial amount of money to help pay for most of the wedding ceremony. (Kilmas 1). At Ona and Jurgis’s wedding reception this does not happen, rather the guests and saloon owners take advantage of them. When Marija is observing the wed...

... middle of paper ...

...ly to be defeated but to acknowledge defeat” (Sinclair 10). Jurgis and Ona must admit defeat not only in their wedding ceremony but also in their marriage. For Jurgis and Ona the wedding vows till death do us part remain only slightly true. They stay married physically but mentally Jurgis wants nothing to do with Ona and does not love her the same way he did when they got married. They remain a couple because they have to not because they want to. Even when Ona dies Jurgis feels relief because it is one less person he will have to provide for. If Jurgis and Ona’s wedding ceremony reveals the tragedies a couple will face in their marriage is this possible today? Does this actually happen in real life? And if so, every girl will need to make their wedding ceremony even more perfect and in doing so pick the perfect guest list that will abide by all of the traditions?

Show More
Related

  • House Of Beauty By Mark Doty Analysis

    629 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Theory of Marriage” is one of the poems in which Mark Doty read while visiting the students here at Ramapo College. After reading the title of the poem one expects that the content of this written work will focus on, well the theory of marriage; however, after reading the poem it is to some confusion to find out that the face value of the poem is actually about Doty and his friend at a massage parlor. It was only through Doty’s emphasis on certain words such as “oh” that I later realized his poem is not about the pain that the masseuse was giving to him but rather the pain that marriage caused. The way he read the lines, from the pauses to his facial expression really opened up my eyes to see that nothing is as it seems, especially when it comes to

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Otsuka's 'The Buddha In The Attic'

    1215 Words  | 3 Pages

    Living on the border of California towns, brides are not welcome in the white communities. “We settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us” (22-3). It puts a pressure on their geographic location and adds difficulty to be recognized and transform into their culture. From the beginning of time, women have been treated inferior to their male counterparts and this is a key picture as the brides in search for acceptance. The phrase “… when they would let us…” proved that gender and race prejudices have power to move them around. The brides learned to revolve their lives to find acceptance by the general society by playing the correct gender role of submissiveness. “Most of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives. We knew how to cook and sew. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours… A girl must blend into a room; she must be present without appearing to exist” (6-7). The geographical factor is not the only thing that created a culture distance. Japanese identities were rejected from white culture. Without identity, their husband and their community will never accept them;

    Read More

  • The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman Analysis

    1386 Words  | 3 Pages

    For Foua, a Hmong mother, the United States was a complete opposite to the life she was use to living and right now preparing this wedding shows the skills that she possess even if they are not very relevant in her new home, “‘I [Foua] am very stupid.’ When I [Anne] asked her why, she said, “Because I don’t know anything here. I don’t know your language. American is so hard, you can watch TV all day ad you still don’t know it” (Fadiman 103). This wedding bought Foua and Anne close in a different way, it created a new level of understanding and appreciation. Anne is starting to discover what it is like to be from another country where the language is different, the clothes are different, the entire way the people live is different. Basically, the world has been flipped upside down and the people need to find their new source of living. It is never easy to pick up a perfectly settled life and suddenly decide that moving and changing it all around is exactly what we need to do. But that was not the case of Foua, her family was forced to move to the United States. This would have made it even harder to adjust. Everything is suddenly thrown at Foua and there is no looking back only forward and the forward might be a lot more difficult. This is why this wedding is like a dream to Foua, it combines her old life with her new life. Although, the skill of creating a Hmong wedding might not be useful in the United States they still create a lot of joy and this joy can lead people to understand one another in a new found way. A new joy that was found in the new life of the bride and groom, but also there was the connection between two cultures. There was a greater understanding and

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Joe Sparks And Vergile Tea Cakes

    1033 Words  | 3 Pages

    All over the world, marriage is one of the main things that define a woman’s life. In fact, for women, marriage goes a long way to determine much in their lives including happiness, overall quality of life whether or not they are able to set and achieve their life goals. Some women go into marriages that allow them to follow the paths they have chosen and achieve their goals while for other women, marriage could mean the end of their life goals. For Janie, the lead character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who was married twice first to Joe sparks, and to Vergile Tea Cake, her two marriages to these men greatly affected her happiness, quality of life and pursuit of her life goals in various ways, based on the personality of each of the men. Although both men were very different from each other, they were also similar in some ways.

    Read More

  • Marriage

    823 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage” is a beautiful, comic poem. The author is the main character and he is thinking about his future and the possibility of him getting married. He is trying to deeply think about all the possible scenarios he might face, he tries to think about the right decision to take in regard of him getting married or not getting married. So he takes a scientific approach to the dilemma, he first lays out all the possible options he has, and then he simulates every decision in his mind and tries to realize its consequences.

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1345 Words  | 3 Pages

    “If any one of these onlookers came sufficiently close, or looked sufficiently hungry, a chair was offered him, and he was invited to the feast.” (Sinclair, 2) This was one of the interesting laws about the wedding feast in the forests of Lithuania where Ona Lukoszaite, Jurgis Rudkus, and their family lived before immigrating to Chicago. In Lithuania, Ona's family troubled by debt, since her father died. Heard about America was a free country, they decided to leave their homeland. Jurgis loved Ona and wanted to marry her. Therefore, he decided to go with her family. After six months immigrated to Chicago, this young couple celebrated their veselija in Packingtown that was Chicago's Meatpacking District in the early 1900s. Their wedding was

    Read More

  • Edna Pontellier and Elizabeth Bennet: Challenge of 19th Century Conventional Methods

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Bible which is seen as one of the most sacred text to man has contained in it not only the Ten Commandments, but wedding vows. In those vows couples promise to love, cherish, and honor each other until death does them apart. The irony of women accepting these vows in the nineteenth century is that women are viewed as property and often marry to secure a strong economic future for themselves and their family; love is never taken into consideration or questioned when a viable suitor presents himself to a women. Often times these women do not cherish their husband, and in the case of Edna Pontiellier while seeking freedom from inherited societal expectations and patriarchal control; even honor them. Women are expected to be caretakers of the home, which often time is where they remain confined. They are the quintessential mother and wife and are expected not to challenge that which...

    Read More

  • Understanding Marriage: More Than Just Unification

    1085 Words  | 3 Pages

    Spring and summertime come around, wedding invitations begin to weed their way through the mail, and dates are set aside for weddings to attend. Months are spent planning out a perfect day. Each person develops high hopes that the wedding and ceremony will be as close to perfect as it can possibly get; this is often not the case. A wedding is not a wedding without a last minute issue or family drama. But after the wedding, after the first dance, after the party, after the honeymoon, after everything marriage is made up to be, reality strikes.

    Read More

  • How Dead Men's Path and Snapshots of a Wedding Portray Different Cultures

    690 Words  | 2 Pages

    How Dead Men's Path and Snapshots of a Wedding Portray Different Cultures For this essay I am going to discuss Dead Men’s Path, by Chinua Achebe, and Snapshots Of A Wedding, by Bessie Head. These are both short stories from the Opening Worlds book by Heinemann. Written by the Nigerian son of devout Protestants, Dead Men’s Path is a profound short story, which explores the modernisation of Africa through beliefs and also the effects of Western customs and ideas on traditional African society. It tells the story of one man trying to modernise Ndume Central School in Africa where he has recently been made Headmaster. Although only 26, Michael Obi has a very high opinion of himself, and a somewhat over-inflated ego.

    Read More

  • The Marriage Ordeal: Rights and Ramifications

    1792 Words  | 4 Pages

    Tradition is a strong component in the institution of marriage. The ideal American dream usually involves the perfect fairy-tale wedding with the gorgeous white wedding dress for the bride, the matching bridesmaids, the well-arranged bouquet and the numerous rituals that compose this well thought-out event. Usually it requires a great amount of planning, devotion and dollars to make the important day memorable. Family and friends come together to rejoice in the vows that will bond the two lovers into a lifetime journey of love, commitment and fidelity. Each person in the couple is expected to have a role in this institution. According to Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, “in the idealized form of the older model of traditional marriage, the man’s primary job for self-definition is to provide for the economic well-being, protection, and stability of his family ...The woman’s job and self-definition”, on the other hand, continue Wallerstein and Blakeslee, “is to care for her husband and children and to create a comfortable home that nourishes everyone, particularly her husband, who comes home each evening drained by the demands of his job (211).” With a constantly changing society, the concept of marriage has also varied. The “quickie” Vegas drive-through wedding or the underwater vow exchange is not as unusual or shocking as it once was. Even the roles of the persons involved have changed to fit the shape of society’s needs. For example the modern “companionate marriage” which is “founded on the couple’s shared beliefs that men and women are equal partners in all spheres of life and that their roles, including those of marriage, are completely interchangeable (Wallerstein, Blakeslee 155).

    Read More

  • Orland by Janet Woolf

    1661 Words  | 4 Pages

    Chesser, Barbara Jo. “Analysis of Wedding Rituals: An attempt to make weddings more sfdsdfffdmeaningful”. Family Relations. Vol. 29, No. 2. (Apr., 1980) pp. 204-209. [JSTOR]

    Read More

  • Women's Role in Society in Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

    2714 Words  | 6 Pages

    In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen shows examples of how most marriages were not always for love but more as a formal agreement arranged by the two families. Marriage was seen a holy matrimony for two people but living happil...

    Read More

  • Wedding Customs Essay

    1902 Words  | 4 Pages

    The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast between various wedding customs that are prevalent in different continents of the world. The essay sheds light on culturally diverse traditions that originate in different parts of the world. It is the wide variety or cultural conventions that give each nation or tribe a unique identity. Every culture has ...

    Read More

  • My Wedding Essay: My Big Day

    1280 Words  | 3 Pages

    It’s about 7:45 P.M. April 15, 2015. Jasmine is calling my name asking if I’m ready to go. As I’m trying to put all the loose ends together, I think I’m ready. My hair is done in a curly up do with a thin white braided hair band, makeup rushed but it will do, and I’m wearing a knee length white dress. Just a simple white dress, form fitting, made from a linen type of material. My stomach is turning and twisting. As my mind is racing we make way to the park. Jasmine seems to be more eager than I am. As we arrive to the park my legs are a trembling mess. I feel like my mind is in a state of chaos. As I feel my chest pumping harder and harder, it feels tighter and tighter. This day will mark a very important day for the rest of my life. Today is the day I marry my husband. On this day my family becomes one.

    Read More

  • A Narrable Wedding Essay: A Memorable Wedding

    1278 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many little girls dream of their big fairytale wedding with a prince charming of their own. We all have watched and grown up with the classic Disney movies that not only entertain children, but are influenced by what we see. I am guilty of wanting the fairytale wedding, big puffy gown, sparkles, handsome husband and our happily ever after. But what you don’t see is how much time and energy is put into creating your own fairytale wedding. After many months of planning and preparation for this day I was excited, nervous and anxious to carry on with the day that symbolized a new beginning with the love of my life. I was about to make a lifelong commitment to my one true love. Nothing I’ve done has taken so much preparation

    Read More

More about A Wedding Ceremony: A Wedding Ceremony Foreshadowing Your Life

Open Document