I decided to do my interpretation on ‘Happy Endings’ by Margaret Wood. This story has 6 different parts/endings to it. Each part leads into different aspects of a relationship and the dynamics of a relationship. I decided to do my focus on a particular part/ending of a happy ending, that gave me the most trouble and maybe the most interpretation I was able to find.
1. I will focus my attention on Part A and Part C of the story.
Part A: John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.
Part B: John, who is and older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for him because he’s worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him eve though she’s not in love with him. She met him at work. She’s in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down. John on the contrary settled down long ago; this is what is bothering him. John has a steady, respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but Mary isn’t impressed by him, she’s impressed by James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. Freedom isn’t the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.
John is married to a women called Madge and they have two children, a charming house which they bought just before the real estate values went up, and hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging, when they have the time. John tells Mary how important she is to him, but of course he can’t leave his wife because a commitment is a commitment. He goes on about this more is necessary and Mary finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer so on the whole she has a fairly good time.
One day James breezes in on his motorcycle with some top-grade California hybrid and James and Mary get higher then you’d believe possible and they climb into bed. Everything becomes very underwater, but along comes John, who has a key to Mary’s apartment. He finds them stoned and entwined. He’s hardly in any position to be jealous, considering Madge, but nevertheless he’s overcome with despair. Finally he’s middle-aged, in two years he’ll be bald as an egg and he can’t stand it. He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice—this it the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later—and shoots the two of them and himself.
Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, married an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.
2. This text needs to be interpreted because it has such complexity and different layers that are portrayed within the character development of the story. The density of a relationship are observed in Part C and the story further dives into a bit of what one may hope and what is the reality, but is it reality? It makes you questions love, commitment, freedom, and what is true love and true commitment and true freedom? Where are the boundaries? Are there any boundaries? Is love really just about being the outer things as mentioned in Part A? Like the job you have, the amount of children, and your ‘worthwhile friends’, your house, is this what measures a marriage and/or love? A lot of questions began popping into my head as I read and re-read the two parts in the story. I t really made me think of what a contradiction we humans make a relationship. We say we want one thing, and yet our actins do not always follow up with what we want. We say we want ‘stimulating and challenging’ marriages, but are we willing to put in the work? What is ‘stimulating and challenging in a marriage/relationship? How are those values going to set a foundation for a marriage to truly work? Now, work isn’t that what a marriage often is? Isn’t that what the word ‘challenging’ is referring to? The questions just keep on approaching my mind as a go through the text and try to find what the author is really trying to allow her readers to understand. It boggles my mind and makes me searcher deeper within the text for the answers.
3. A central theme of this story is centered on love, marriage, commitment, and reality vs. desire. I will begin by exploring Part A and then Part C, then contrast/compare both sections.
Part A of the story illustrates, to me, a ‘happy ending’ that many of us imagine when we are growing up. First you find the love of your life, and then you go off and get married. Then further on, you two buy the perfect house, have the perfect jobs, simulate and challenge one another, have kids, save, and retire while all being happy. I mean why not? Margaret Atwood portrayed this part of the story very well, of the fantasy and hope many of us have when it comes to marriage. I began to look for patterns within this part of the story and realized the following words kept reappearing ‘worthwhile, stimulating, and challenging.’ With worthwhile appearing twice, and stimulating and challenging showing up 3 times within the one little section. I feel as if the author did this on purpose, by showing that her ‘perfect’ type of marriage was something that was worth pursing. That marriage should make you feel challenged and stimulated so that you do not get ‘bored’ and not maybe want to go off and sleep with someone else. That seems to be the reason many men and women sometimes go off and cheat on their wives, is because they do not feel like theses key components, that I believe are vital in marriage to feel like you are worth it, to be stimulated and challenged.
Part C paints a picture of what, sadly happens in some marriages, that often the spouse is not getting that ‘worthwhile, stimulating, and challenging’ marriage they wanted. So they often try to go and find it in someone else that is younger and can make them feel even more powerful. Even the twenty-two year old Mary, did not feel worthwhile for her boyfriend James, so she slept with a balding middle aged man, John, to get ‘stimulated’ sexually, it seems in this case. However, Mary was not ‘impressed’ with him or in ‘love’ with him. It’s ironic that the mistress is the one who feels such emotions; usually the cheating spouse feels these emotions. Further more, the author brings up the word ‘freedom’ and that this ‘freedom’ is not the same for girls, as for guys. This shows that society is not fair, and the expectations they often put on girls as well. I think, that the author is also portraying that girls’ freedom is different from guys’ freedom. Girls often want to be ‘impressed’ by their men, and to feel loved and stimulated by them, for them this is freedom. However, men work on a different level, they can have all the toys they want, like a motorcycle, and that is their freedom. It’s quite funny though that James ends up using his freedom, the motorcycle, as symbolized in the story, to ‘impress’ Mary and then Mary’s freedom of being intimate are meet together. Maybe that is what the author is trying to get across, that marriage needs to take both partners working together for the same goal. That his and her ‘freedom’ should meet and ‘challenge/ stimulate one another. I wonder. Diving more deeper we look at John, and it seems that the reason he sleeps with Mary and cheats on Madge is because he finds her challenging and stimulating. He continues to keep talking to her about commitment, which shows that he is struggling with his own commitment to his marriage. John does not seem stable, he is taking what his wife is not giving him and putting it on a twenty-two year old who herself is not stable to keep that relationship going. So when John finds that Mary is with someone else and kills all three of them illustrates that there is so much depth to the human need for love, commitment, and freedom. This happens way to much society. A relationship cannot only survive on love, it does need to be stimulated and challenged. Maybe not on the material things in our lives, but the deepest core of a relationship
4. The evidence I support in this text is from the constant repetition of words that I observed and connections I made with the words to make connections. In Part A : “The both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs that they find stimulating and challenging.” Then, “John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends.” Further on, “They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging.” Then in Part C “… and hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging, when they have the time.” Also when I discussed the freedom part, “But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn’t the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John.” Going along when talking about John having commitment issues and yet struggling with it is portrayed in the following quotes, “John on the contrary settles down long ago; this is what is bothering him.” “…he can’t leave his wife because a commitment is a commitment.”
5. This interpretation matters because it picks at the text and tries to find the meaning of what the author says. Maybe someone else’s interpretation may provide different meaning and/or light. Yet it illustrates the core of what I believe the author is trying to show her audience. With the constant repetition of words and phrases, that marriage is not what everyone thinks it to be. That it takes work, time, and true commitment. That a marriage is not just stimulated challenged to be worthwhile by what we have but by the work we put into one another.
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