Materialism, Is that what we want for us?

During the XIX century, appeared a literary movement, called Realism. This movement was born against Romanticism. Realism was mainly focused on real life problems such as bad living conditions, money resources or familiar problems. In that sense, social issues were the focal point of realistic works. According to that, and also to what I have learnt in my Literature classes, I can say that real life problems must be depicted by books, paintings, etc., in order to understand what really happens in this society as well as finding possible solutions to that.

First of all, I want to say that after giving a little explanation about Realism, it is necessary to tell you about D.H.Lawrence`s life. Lawrence father was a miner and his mother was a teacher. She was superior to his father, because she had got the chance to study. It is important to mention that Lawrence childhood was round of poverty and economical problems. He won a scholarship to study at Nottingham High School. As you could see, Lawrence infancy was not so happy. This is going to be reflected on his pieces of writing.

In “Odour of Chrysanthemums”, Lawrence tried to depict his early childhood. The characters of this short story were a mother who was a teacher and a father who was a miner. If you remember, at the beginning of my paper I wrote that Lawrence´s parents where a teacher and a miner respectively. For that reason I strongly believe that Lawrence attempted to write his own life because it had a huge impact for him. I remember that in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” Elizabeth was very unhappy because she was not so sure if she was in love with his husband. They could not have any chance to improve their living conditions, because the man, who was a miner did not have enough money resources to do it and also because he did not want to be better. He just liked enjoying his life with his friends, drinking alcohol, but he was also trying to support his family. In this case, the only thing that was important for them was money, what can be summarized in materialism. If we think about the title of this tale, it is completely related to the moment in which Elizabeth got married to her husband, at one moment she says: "It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole." With this quote she is showing to the readers her dislike and disappointment with her marriage, but especially with everything that could be related to her husband. Besides, here is easy to see that Elizabeth was just interested in money, and if her fiancé could not give it to her, even though he was very hard worker.

Second, in “The Rocking Horse Winner”, it is also easy to notice how materialism can affect human beings life. In this tale, Hester does not love her child, and she just used him to have more money. She liked taking advantage of him, without thinking that she was damaging him. Materialism was present again. In both stories, women roles are the ones who are materialistic because they are just interested in money. Furthermore, this might be related to what used to happen during the 19th century in which women were not happy because they had just to take care of their children without having the opportunity to have more funds.

Making the relationship between those stories and realism, I can say that they are realistic. They are showing to the readers, how things were in the past. Women wanted to be better in order to have the chance to work and to not take care of their children and cleaning their homes. Moreover, every detail that is given by the writer let us make the relationship with our society, our reality, and with what happened in the past and even today.

If I start thinking about how could those stories be incorporated into the EFL classroom, I would say that materialism does not help you to be happy. You are not going to be a better person because you are rich. The best person is the one who has beautiful and sincere feelings, who accepts others as they are, and who thinks that life is good because you are there and you are happy thanks to what you have. The idea is that students can notice that money is not enough. For that reason it is necessary to give some examples that can be meaningful for them. For example: if you are a rich person and you have a lot of money, but someone in your family has a terminal disease. In this case, money will not help him/her to improve his/her health. So, does money help you to be happy? I strongly believe that a lot of money can help you to be happy just if you can help someone with what you have.

During a class, I would like to ask students to write a list of things that they think are necessary for them. Then, the teacher is going to ask them if all of them are necessary or some are just because they want to have them. The idea here is that students can notice that in life not everything is need.

To conclude this paper, I can say that materialism is present in most of the people, but the idea is that we can able to show to the rest that there are things that are more important than money. Having our own purposes and goals about what we want for our future will help us to organize ourselves, and to notice that we can work in order to reach all what we want, but without thinking that money will help us to be happy.

Sources
D.H.Lawrence “Odour of Chrysantemums”
D.H.Lawrence “The Rocking Horse Winner”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts)
http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c19th/realism.htm