The Issue Of Authority And Res

The issue of authority and respect has been and will be an ongoing issue between youngsters and their elderly. In the story Red Dress by Alice Munro and the movie Rebel without a Cause by Nicholas Ray the issue of authority and respect comes up many times through the character actions. Authority and respect is directly linked to one another. It is very hard to obey supremacy if you have no respect for authority. In both the works we have studied, all the characters have trouble dealing with the issues of authority and respect for themselves and for others, they do not show respect to their parents and therefore does not look upon them as authority figures.

In Alice Munro's the Red Dress, the narrator and her best friend Lonnie have two totally different relationships with their respective guardians. The narrator, without the mention of her father, is in care of her mother, whom she thinks butts in too much into her business. She sort of resents her mother for being so too close and nosy about her private life. Her mother's stories, which at one point seemed interesting to her, is now 'become melodramatic, irrelevant, and tiresome'. She knows that her mother only means well but sometimes she wishes she could be like Lonnie. Lonnie is in care of her father; her mother had passed away some time before. Her father never notices her and does not show his affection for her, she is pretty much on her own. The narrator considers her as a 'Blue-Baby' and privileged. The narrator also sees her mother as 'shameless and obscene'; she tries to direct her friend's attention away from her mother as much as possible. In the story, we are told by the narrator that she was 'never comfortable for a minute' in high school and 'was close to despair at all times'. She hated being called upon to do anything in front of an audience, whether it is the class or just the teacher. She reveals that she hasn't accepted herself as who she is, always wishing to be like someone else, she hasn't learned to respect herself as a growing teenager which makes it hard for her to understand the relationship between her mother and herself. Since she lacks the proper understanding and respect for her mother and herself, the narrator has trouble seeing her mother as an authoritative figure, which makes her less tolerant to the other authoritative figures in her surroundings.