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  3. Female RelationshipsA)Several new books and films explo

Female RelationshipsA)Several new books and films explo

游客2024-04-23  16
问题                         Female Relationships
A)Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B)Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline’s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she’s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C)Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven’ t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach’ s Frances Ha(2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she’ s deserted by her best friend.
D)Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends, and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha—same to these women’s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We’re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E)What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture(2010)and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it’ s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach’s works, there’s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F)As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One’s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G)The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould’s first novel, Friendship, the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H)Friendship is Gould’ s first novel but she’ s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times, re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship, pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould’s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls".
I)These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman, has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs?" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house? Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights? Great, then you’re a feminist."
J)So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film? Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism? Carol Dyhouse, in her study "Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women", says this feminism, and Moran’s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship, "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women’ s lives, the only legitimate goals women’ s lives can have"?
K)In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her?
L)The fact that Girlfriends, despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren’ t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha / Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe’s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything, was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M)Look between the cracks, and there’ s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls(1960); through Mary McCarthy’s The Group(1963); Shirley Conran’s Lace(1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth’ s novel Animals(2014).
N)Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there’ s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women’ s lives today as they always have, it’ s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O)And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman’s life is that". [br] The common characteristic of Frances Ha, Tiny Furniture and Girls is the depiction of a young woman struggling to keep balance between career, love and friendship.
选项
答案 E
解析 此句意为：《弗兰西斯哈》、《渺小的家具》和《女孩子们》的共同特点就是对年轻女性如何协调事业、爱情和友情的刻画。根据题干中的balance betweencareer，love and friendship可以定位到E段中的What Frances Ha and LenaDunham’s film Tiny Furniture(2010)and her hit TV series Girls have in common aretheir truthful portrayals of what it’s like to be a young woman struggling to balancecareer，love life and friendships．题干把portrayal换成了depiction，二者意思相近，其他地方变动不大。
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