A Wedding Ceremony: A Wedding Ceremony Foreshadowing Your Life

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“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...

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...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?

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