Unit13

1. Unit13

2. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement Watch the movie clip and answer the following questions. Pre-reading Activities - Audiovisual supplement 1 • What do you feel from Lester’s words? He is depressed and sedated. 2. What do you think of their marriage? Very cold and passionless.

3. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement American Beauty Pre-reading Activities - Audiovisual supplement 2

4. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement Lester: That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on those pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident. Jim: Hush, Bitsy! Hush, what’s wrong with you? Lester: That’s our next-door neighbor, Jim. And that’s his lover, Jim. Jim: You spoiled her. Bitsy, no bark. Come inside now. Me? Come on. Yes. Inside. Carolyn: Good morning! Jim! Jim: Good morning, Carolyn. Carolyne: I love your tie, that color! Jim: I just love your roses. How do you get them to flourish like this? Video Script1

5. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement Carolyn: Well, I’ll tell you. Eggshells and miracle-Gro. Jim: I’ve never heard about that. Lester: Man, I get exhausted just watching her. She wasn’t always like this. She used to be happy. We used to be happy. Video Script1

6. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement 1. Divorce in America Cultural background1 The divorce rate in America is reported to be more than 50%, which means one in two couples will break up. Why is it so high? What is the real reason for them to divorce? Freedom is one of the most important beliefs for Americans and nothing can replace it. So if they think the love and family can’t offer them happiness and safety, they would choose to divorce. They wouldn’t think more about the family or the children because they take themselves as the center. What’s worse, as the divorce rate in America rises, bad effects are brought on children who are used to growing up with both parents.

7. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement 2. Stuttered speech Cultural background2 1) Money Money is a sensitive area and your household finances need to be properly structured. You and your spouse should define your core values. Try to come to an understanding about what you both care the most about spending money on.

8. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement 2) The in-laws It is not uncommon for some mothers- or fathers-in law to overstep their boundaries and interfere with their child’s marriage. If your in-laws are causing difficulties in your marriage, you and your spouse will then need to set boundaries with your parents. Cultural background3

9. Cultural background Audiovisual supplement 3) The way they spend their time together Of course, you and your spouse have individual needs and interests. However, you and your spouse should focus on the time you spend together, instead of the activity itself. Cultural background4

10. General analysis Structural analysis Rhetorical features Marriage is a social union or legal contract between individuals that creates kinship. People get married for such reasons as legal, social, emotional and economical; for public declaration of love; or for the lawful foundation of a family. Marriage practices are diversified in different cultures. They are dependent on many things, such as conventions, habits, legal system, etc. How much do contemporary people value their marriage? What are the possible causes of their difficulties in regard to marriage? How can marriage be more rationally understood? This text attempts to convince the readers that marriage is thought to be full of difficulties by all people, conventional and unconventional, past and present, and it suggests that taking a proper attitude towards these difficulties may make some difference. Structural analysis

11. General analysis Structural analysis Rhetorical features The text falls into three parts: Structural analysis Part I (Paragraph 1): The author, after quoting Russell on the subject, puts forward his own argument that difficulties in regard to marriage have been an old issue for centuries. Part II (Paragraphs 2 － 7): The author analyzes the roots of such difficulties by listing quotations from famous literary works and famous people.

12. General analysis Structural analysis Rhetorical features Part III (Paragraphs 8 － 9): The author assigns the causes of unhappy marriages to the excessive consciousness of difficulties in human beings, and encourages people to face the difficulties in marriage bravely. Structural analysis

13. General analysis Structural analysis Rhetorical features In this text the author often makes comments on the people he quotes or what is said by those people so as to express his own opinions. Listed below are the comments made by the author in Paragraphs 5 － 7: … the reputed saying of the henpecked Socrates, ... . (Paragraph 5) Burton is far from encouraging! (Paragraph 5) Pepys scribbled in his diary ... (Paragraph 5) The pious Jeremy Taylor was as keenly aware that marriage is not all bliss. (Paragraph 6) The sentimental and optimistic Steele … (Paragraph 6) Dr. Johnson, … devoted husband though he was … (Paragraph 7) Rhetorical Features 1

14. Detailed reading MARRIAGE Robert Lynd “Conventional people,” says Mr. Bertrand Russell, “like to pretend that difficulties in regard to marriage are a new thing.” I could not help wondering, as I read this sentence, where one can meet these conventional people who think, or pretend to think, as conventional people do. I have known hundreds of conventional people, and I cannot remember one of them who thought the things conventional people seem to think. They were all, for example, convinced that marriage was a state beset with difficulties, and that these difficulties were as old, Detailed reading1.1 1

15. Detailed reading Detailed reading1.2 if not as the hills, at least as the day on which Adam lost a rib and gained a wife. A younger generation of conventional people has grown up in recent years, and it may be that they have a rosier conception of marriage than their ancestors; but the conventional people of the Victorian era were under no illusions on the subject. Their cynical attitude to marriage may be gathered from the enthusiastic reception they gave to Punch’s advice to those about to marry － “Don’t.”

16. Detailed reading I doubt, indeed, whether the horrors of marriage were ever depicted more cruelly than during the conventional nineteenth century. The comic papers and music-halls made the miseries a standing dish. “You can always tell whether a man’s married or single from the way he’s dressed,” said the comedian. “Look at the single man: no buttons on his shirt. Look at the married man: no shirt.” The humour was crude; but it went home to the honest Victorian heart. If marriage were to be judged by the songs conventional people used to sing about it in the music-halls, it would seem a hell mainly populated by twins and leech-like mothers-in-law. 2 Detailed reading2.1

17. Detailed reading The rare experiences of Darby and Joan were, it is true, occasionally hymned, reducing strong men smelling strongly of alcohol to reverent silence; but, on the whole, the audience felt more normal when a comedian came out with an anti-marital refrain such as: Owhy did I leave my little back room In Bloomsbury, Where I could live on a pound a week In luxury (I forget the next line). But since I have married Maria, I’ve jumped out of the frying-pan Into the blooming fire. Detailed reading2.2

18. Detailed reading No difficulties? Why, the very nigger-minstrels of my boyhood used to open their performance with a chorus which began: Married! Married! O pity those who’re married. Those who go and take a wife must be very green. It is possible that the comedians exaggerated, and that Victorian wives were not all viragos with pokers, who beat their tipsy husbands for staying out too late. But at least they and their audiences refrained from painting marriage as an inevitable Paradise. Even the clergy would go no farther than to say that marriages were made in Heaven. That they did not believe that marriage necessarily ended there is shown by the fact that one of them wrote a “best-seller” bearing the title How to Be Happy Though Married. 3 Detailed reading3-4 4

19. Detailed reading I doubt, indeed, whether common opinion in any age has ever looked on marriage as an untroubled Paradise. I consulted a dictionary of quotations on the subject and discovered that few of the opinions quoted were rose-coloured. These opinions, it may be objected, are the opinions of unconventional people, but it is also true that they are opinions treasured and kept alive by conventional people. We have the reputed saying of the henpecked Socrates, for example, when asked whether it was better to marry or not: “Whichever you do, you will repent.” We have Montaigne writing: “It happens as one sees in cages. The birds outside despair of ever getting in; 5 Detailed reading5.1

20. Detailed reading those inside are equally desirous of getting out.” Bacon is no more prenuptial with his caustic quotation: “He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry: ‘A young man not yet; an elder man not at all.’” Burton is far from encouraging! “One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.” Pepys scribbled in his diary: “Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor folk decoyed into our condition.” Detailed reading5.2

21. Detailed reading Detailed reading6.1 The pious Jeremy Taylor was as keenly aware that marriage is not all bliss. “Marriage,” he declared, “hath in it less of beauty and more of safety than the single life － it hath more care but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys.” The sentimental and optimistic Steele can do no better than: “The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.” 6

22. Detailed reading Rousseau denied that a perfect marriage had ever been known. “I have often thought,” he wrote, “that if only one could prolongthe joy of love in marriage we should have paradise on earth. That is a thing which has never been hitherto.” Dr. Johnson is not quoted in the dictionary; but everyone will remember how, devoted husband though he was, he denied that the state of marriage was natural to man. “Sir,” he declared, “it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connexion and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation are hardly sufficient to keep them together.” 7 Detailed reading7

23. Detailed reading When one reads the things that have been said about marriage from one generation to another, one cannot but be amazed at the courage with which the young go on marrying. Almost everybody, conventional and unconventional, seems to have painted the troubles of marriage in the darkest colours. So pessimistic were the conventional novelists of the nineteenth century about marriage that they seldom dared to prolong their stories beyond the wedding bells. Married people in plays and novels are seldom enviable, and, as time goes on, they seem to get more and more miserable. Even conventional people nowadays enjoy the story of a thoroughly unhappy marriage. It is only fair to say, 8 Detailed reading8

24. Detailed reading however, that in modern times we like to imagine that nearly everybody, single as well as married, is unhappy. As social reformers we are all for happiness, but as thinkers and aesthetes we are on the side of misery. The truth is that we are a difficulty-conscious generation. Whether or not we make life even more difficult than it would otherwise be by constantly talking about our difficulties I do not know. I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginaryand that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear. Is it quite certain that the ostrich by burying his head in the sand never escapes his pursuers? I look forward to the day when a great naturalist will discover that it is to this practice that the ostrich owes his survival. Detailed reading9 9

25. Detailed reading 1. Why is it said that the younger generation of conventional people has a rosier conception of marriage than their ancestors? (Paragraph 1) Detailed reading2—Question 1 Because people of the younger generation are mostly not yet married and they thus have great expectations of marriage.

26. Detailed reading 2. What attitude did people in the Victorian era have towards marriage? (Paragraph 1) Detailed reading5—Question 1 Even people in the Victorian era, which was a period renowned for its emphasis on social duties rather than rights, did not have expectations for a difficulty-free marriage.

27. Detailed reading 1. Who are those people the author quoted? Are they considered conventional or unconventional? Why? (Paragraphs 2－7) Detailed reading2—Question 2-7 The people quoted are all philosophers, writers, and scientists, whom the author considers as unconventional people, since they were all people with knowledge, talents and wisdom beyond the ordinary. What they thought of marriage could be derived from the essence of human experience.

28. Detailed reading 2. How did the novelists and playwrights describe marriage in their works? (Paragraphs 2－7) Detailed reading5—Question 2-7 The conventional novelists of the nineteenth century seldom described marriage after the wedding. Even when married people did appear in plays and novels later on, they usually seemed more and more miserable.

29. Detailed reading 1. What attitudes do social reformers and thinkers and aesthetes hold towards marriage? Why? (Paragraphs 8－9) Detailed reading2—Question 8-9 Social reformers tend to take an optimistic view towards marriage, while thinkers and aesthetes are on the pessimistic side, thinking of marriage as full of miseries. Social reformers usually encourage people to get married by convincing them of the happiness of marriage, since marriage and family are the cornerstones of a stable society; while thinkers tend to analyze both the positive and negative sides of marriage, and aesthetes strive for the perfection of marriage, so they focus more on its miserable side.

30. Detailed reading 2. Did the author draw a conclusion concerning the truth of marriage? Why or why not? (Paragraphs 8－9) Detailed reading5—Question 8-9 No, he didn’t. He explains that whether marriage is difficult or not depends on people’s attitude: if we think it’s difficult, then it is; but if we can ignore the difficulties, then they may well cease to exist.

31. Detailed reading Group discussions Do you think that half our difficulties are imaginary? Give some specific examples in your study and life experiences to illustrate your opinion. Detailed reading8– Activity

32. Detailed reading beset: v. (of a problem or difficulty) trouble (sb. or sth.) persistently Detailed reading1– beset e.g. problems besetting the country The maintenance of an effective incomes policy is beset with problems. Collocation: be beset with/by Synonym: afflict e.g. A nightmare afflicts me from time to time. Unemployment afflicts 1.2 million workers in that country.

33. Detailed reading rosy: a. likely to be satisfactory and very successful or enjoyable Detailed reading1– rosy rosy prospects a rosy view e.g. Synonym: hopeful, promising Idiom: Everything in the garden is rosy. 样样称心如意。/ 一切都满意。/ 事事如意。

34. Detailed reading illusion: n. a false idea or belief, esp. about sb. or about a situation Detailed reading1– illusion e.g. He could no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. It is time for them to cast aside their illusions. Collocation: be under no illusions about sth. have/cherish/entertain/hold illusions about sth. Derivation: illusionary a. e.g. illusionary stage effects Synonym: vision, delusion, fantasy, misconception

35. Detailed reading cynical: a. skeptical Detailed reading1– cynical a cynical view/smile He was getting harder and more cynical about life. e.g. Translation: 由于困难很大，他对这个主意是否可行持怀疑态度。 The enormous difficulty makes him cynical about the feasibility of the idea. ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ 他不相信她有胜利的希望。 He was cynical about her prospects for victory. ______________________________________________________________ Derivation: cynicism n.

36. Detailed reading crude: a. rude and offensive Detailed reading1-- crude a crude remark/joke crude interference in another country’s internal affairs the crude behaviour of schoolchildren e.g. Synonym: vulgar Derivation: crudely ad. crudity n. e.g. The crudity of her language shocked him.

37. Detailed reading reverent: a. showing great respect and admiration Detailed reading1-- reverent e.g. a reverent silence file past the tomb in a reverent manner give reverent attention to the sermon Synonym: respectful, adoring Derivation: reverently ad. reverence n. e.g. The crowd knelt in reverence and worshipped. The younger generation lack reverence.

38. Detailed reading refrain: n. (in Paragraph 2) a regularly recurring phrase or verse, esp. at the end of each stanza or division of a poem or song; chorus vigorous and glowing v. (in Paragraph 4) stop oneself from doing sth., esp. sth. that one wants to do Detailed reading1– refrain Collocation: refrain from (doing) sth. e.g. refrain from laughing/tears He has refrained from criticizing the government in public.

39. Detailed reading green: a. young and lacking experience Detailed reading2– green a green hand The new trainees are still very green. e.g. Antonym: experienced, mature, versed

40. Detailed reading tipsy:a. slightly drunk Detailed reading2– tipsy e.g. The wine had made Barton a trifle tipsy. Synonym: tiddly Antonym: sober

41. Detailed reading rose-coloured:a. used in reference to a naively optimistic or idealistic viewpoint Detailed reading2– rose-coloured e.g. a rose-coloured talk/plan a rose-coloured vision of the world Synonym: rose-tinted Translation: 他总是过于乐观地看待世界。 He tends to view the world through rose-coloured spectacles. ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________

42. Detailed reading reputed:a. generally thought to be sth. or to have done sth., although this is not certain Detailed reading3– reputed e.g. a man reputed to have worked miracles He is the reputed writer of the two epic poems. Synonym: supposed Derivation: reputedly ad. e.g. events that reputedly took place thousands of years ago Reputedly, he is very dangerous.

43. Detailed reading henpecked:a. dominated by one’s wife Detailed reading3– henpecked e.g. A henpecked husband always gives in to his wife. Translation: 他是个典型的“妻管严”。 He is a typical henpecked husband. ______________________________________________________________ 我看他将来是要怕老婆的。 I can see he’s going to be henpecked. ______________________________________________________________

44. Detailed reading repent: v. feel regret or sorrow about one’s wrongdoing or sin Detailed reading3– repent e.g. repent one’s crimes before a priest Bitterly did we repent our decision. Collocation: repent of sth.; repent bitterly; come to repent Derivation: repentance n. e.g. He shows no sign of repentance. repentant a. e.g. She was not in the least repentant.

45. Detailed reading caustic:a. critical in a bitter or sarcastic way Detailed reading3– caustic e.g. caustic comments/wit a caustic tongue Some caustic things have been written about media stars. Collocation: be caustic about Synonym: biting, acid

46. Detailed reading scribble: v. write sth. quickly and untidily Detailed reading4– scribble e.g. I scribbled his phone number in my address book. He scribbled down our names. Word formation: “scrib-” means “to write” e.g. describe, inscribe, prescribe, subscribe, transcribe, postscript, scripture

47. Detailed reading decoy:v. lure (a person or animal) away from their intended course, typically into a trap Detailed reading4– decoy e.g. They decoyed him into a dark street. decoy sb. away from the house Synonym: lure, entice e.g. The child was lured into a car but managed to escape. The bargain prices are expected to entice customers away from other stores. Collocation: decoy into

48. Detailed reading pious: a. having or showing a deep respect for God and religion Detailed reading6– pious e.g. pious acts/utterances Mrs. Smith was a very pious woman who attended church services regularly. Antonym: impious, profane, undutiful

49. Detailed reading prolong: v. make sth. last longer Detailed reading7– prolong e.g. prolong a visit prolong one’s stay in London All the time people are seeking to prolong life. The operation could prolong his life by two or three years. Synonym: lengthen, extend Derivation: prolongation n. prolonged a.

50. Detailed reading motive: n. a reason for doing sth. Detailed reading6-7– motive 1 be proper in motive He says that he is doing this to help me, but I suspect an ulterior motive. e.g. Collocation: motive for sth. ulterior motive