My Big Fat Greek Wedding Essay

Marriage is recognized in society as one man and woman in union for a legal contract. Marriage has numerous definitions, for example, legal and moral provision for generations among humans. This word can represent more than its definition. Marriage for various writers signifies hate, passion, oppression, and euphoria which have been serving as the focal point of many literary works. One example is “Linoleum Roses”, one of the vignettes that make up The House on Mango Street, a coming-of-age novel by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. Cisneros in this specific vignette reveals the inherent oppressiveness of particular marriages, which by their nature rob people of their independence.

Marriage is described as two people as partners in a personal relationship. There are two typical ideas of marriage that we know today. The first one that comes to mind is the one we all know, based on love, but there is another one that some may not even know of and its arranged marriages. Arranged marriage is not typically in our culture we know but in different cultures arranged marriages are their normal marriage. Throughout this essay, I will discuss the importance of realizing cultural diversity and how we apply the perspectives we gain from cross-cultural comparison to our own experience using central concepts about marriage to compare and contrast marriage in several cultures.

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding” stars Nia Vardalos as Toula Portokalos, a 30-year-old daughter in a Greek family living in a city. The movie opens with Toula’s father, Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine), picking her up in a rain storm and telling her she needs to get married because she is getting old. Toula then recounts her childhood, telling of the difficulties involved with growing up in a Greek family. Toula’s life has been less than stellar to this point, but that all changes when Ian Miller (John Corbett), a teacher at a local school, walks into her parent’s restaurant. It is love at first sight for Toula, but she is too awkward and nervous to converse with the handsome stranger. He leaves.

As a typical intercultural movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is about Toula, a lower middle class Greek American woman who fell in love with a non-Greek upper middle class “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” Ian Miller. They overcame a series of difficulties and eventually held a big fat Greek wedding. This movie shows us how Greek Americans live, reflecting the conflicts between Greek culture and American culture in a humorous way. Guided by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, this paper mainly explores how Greeks and American handle the cultural conflicts, and how they integrate into each other’s culture. Therefore, we will arrange the paper in three

As a beginning of this film, a myth is told by the Nyinba people of Nepal: a story of fearsome spirits thought to kill children and the weak. Their crime was adulterous passionate love and it was this that had condemned them to live eternally between life and death. In this film, we learn about and explore marriages in tribal societies. We can clearly identify the differences that challenge both side’s ideas and sensibilities about marriage bonds.

The film Mosquita y Mari directed and created by Aurora Guerrero is a coming of age story set about Huntington Park in the southeastern part of Los Angeles. It uses tense scenery that seeks to explore what it means to be in a romantic relationship versus a close friendship. Furthermore, upon legitimizing Yolanda and Mari`s relationship the film provokes the audience to ask the question, “If they are queer, what is keeping them in the closet?” This question is most effectively answered by examining how Yolanda and Mari`s ethnicity, locational, and immigrant descendant identities intersect to keep them in the closet.

The book mentions about the mental confusions, insecurities and the effort to understand their spouses. The writer has expressed simple and usual emotions of a womanhood, fidelity and family. A tint of Indian culture is reflected in each chapter indicating how a bridegroom and groom select each other, the nature of an Indian woman and how she takes up challenges in her life, reconciling the roles of a daughter, an ex-wife, a wife and a mother, the strength of the human spirit and their passion to survive and fight for a good life. It also features the distinctive qualities of Indian relatives highlighting their interest in an individual’s marital life and how offensive it is to the society to find a married woman talking to an unknown man. The book also focuses on the pain of a mother to see her unhealthy

Hank’s physician assistant Divya Katdare, is of Indian decent, who’s parents to do not approve of her working in the medical field. Instead, her family sticks to the traditional Indian cultural roles of arranged marriage, which eventually falls apart and becomes shunned by her parents for a time for not obeying their wishes. In this instance, we can see the cultural values of the United States beginning to shine through. Freedom to choose and marry whomever a person wants is a cultural norm and something that is prided upon by Americans. As a culture, we tend to look down on cultural traditions where individuals are forced into arranged marriages. This also goes along with stereotypical views of Indian culture. If their children do not obey the parents, they suffer from being shunned by their

Established with Adam and Eve, still surviving, marriage is the oldest institution known. Often the climax of most romantic movies and stories, whether it may be ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Dil Wale Dulhaniya Ley Jaein Gey’, marriage has a universal appeal. It continues to be the most intimate social network, providing the strongest and most frequent opportunity for social and emotional support. Though, over the years, marriage appears to be tarnished with high divorce rates, discontentment and infidelity, it is still a principal source of happiness in the lives of respective partners. Although marriage is perceived as a deeply flawed institution serving more the needs of the society than those of the individuals, nevertheless, marriage is

In Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

Jane Austen shows the readers within the first sentence what the plot and main theme of Pride and Prejudice is and what social ideas she plans on presenting through this novel. The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice stands as one of the most famous introductory lines in literature. It states, “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Austen 5). This statement puts the novel in motion by showing that the novel will deal with the pursuit of single wealthy men by various female characters. By stating this, Austen reveals that the reverse is also true in the nineteenth century English society, which is that single women of

Movies not only have a uniquely powerful ubiquity within human culture, but it is also a reflection of the culture itself. The film The Father of the Bride is a genuine glimpse of American people, their identity and attitude by the way it illustrates a traditional Western wedding. Furthermore, audiences can also notice a social awareness of women’s identity and their roles in the family – the character Annie Banks shows a great feminine power of an independent woman; as well as her mother, Nina Banks, who usually calms George’s and be his emotional anchor; and together, Nina and Annie handle everything to prepare for a romantic and beautiful yet fancy white wedding. The success of the film depends on how it portrays preparation rituals of

marriages that occur in India and the United States have several dramatic differences. Marriages in India are based solely on parental decisions, whereas in the United States a marriage is based on individualism. Who, why and how the spouse is chosen, is very different in both countries. Most Americans date to discover who their future spouse is going to be, and they know the person very well before marriage. In India, dating is not something that occurs. Most individuals in India do not have any interaction with the bride or groom prior to their wedding day, therefore, they do not personally know who they are marrying (Nanda 624). Though these differences exist, pros and cons reflect on each of them.

Thanks to the characters described by Adichie, there are important questions to be raised concerning love and marriage: If today’s man or woman wants to get married, for what reason will he or she walk down that aisle? Is it just a means to an end? Is it the mere fulfilment of societal demands?

This function of marriage endured throughout much of human history, even transcending different cultures, so often, in plays from past centuries, marriage plots function not like a familiar Katherine Heigl romantic comedy but rather like a business deal. This disparity leaves modern audiences who grew up on these movies unable to understand the at times strange, clinical nature of marriage in plays such as Goldoni’s A Servant To Two Masters. Furthermore, without this knowledge of the historical practice of marriage, audiences cannot clearly understand the dynamic between fathers and daughters like Pantaloon and