Connie Reid, protagonist of Lady Chatterley's Lover, had been in love with Oliver Mellors a gamekeeper of his husband's estate, provides a sense of family estrangement by D.H. Lawrence; since Clifford, her husband, returns paralyzed from war. Clifford's emotional negligence and physical challenge forces his wife to keep her at distance. Besides, Connie's physiological urge ignores so-called bondage in family between husband and wife.
It breaks the traditional obsession of relationship and the way how people can think to maintain it. Because of its "obscenity" UK bands the novel until 1960 and it was also banded in most of the riches countries in the world including India. But, soon after winning the case Penguin Books, his publisher, sold at least 30 lac copies in short which indicates that people in common didn't banned it psychologically. For all that, there had been a mixed reaction among people about Lawrence's novel but it leaves some rooms to let into the fact.
Charulata an excellent cinematographic form of extra marital affair between Charu and Amal had been depicted by Rabindranath Tagore in his Nastonirh with the same gravity. It is a well description of 19-th century Bengal middle class family life and an outright rejection of traditional conservative Hindu family structure.
Tagore takes a challenge of making an overview of modern life, how Amal incites passionate feelings in Charu in guise of a relationship in different form. To remember, Hindu typical family didn't allow any sort of relationship beyond the traditional bondage between spouses. Tagore sees how a relationship comes after between two friends with their long and deep contiguity. This is not really unprecedented in human society nor is it unreal since human mind doesn't follow the course that is prepared by the convention and traditional norms.
Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals was the Nobel winging piece faces huge criticism from Britons and others for his position on relationship, sex and traditional morality particularly maintained by Christianity. He loses professorship form College of the City of New York for his heresies. One of his female student's mothers sued against Russell as saying that her daughter is not safe under his tutorship.
The man, she accuses, who held such morality on sex could never be safe. Finally, Russell was badly dismissed from the college. The taboo on sex and values are really discomfiting between relationships. In history, famous people did care little about the convention and the traditional way of morality. For every case, there had been conflict between old and new senses of morality that essentially influences on human relationship.
To define relationship sociologists take different views with exceedingly opposed opinions but the common thing is to grasp that relationship builds in any atmosphere regardless status or social disparity. Relationship can also be made in spite of highest discretion from both parts and also defying impediment on the way. Love ignores dissonance and builds rapport between two minds; it also ignores time and space. It sometimes cares little about the traditional norms of society and the age-old convention that shapes the social values.
For any relationship, especially man and woman, some basic points are seriously mooted in which economic independency and finally liberty takes a great part. Kurt H. Wolff a gifted sociologist defines relationship, "To the extent that the ideal of friendship was received from antiquity and (peculiarly enough) was developed in a romantic spirit, it aims at an absolute psychological intimacy, and is accompanied by the notion that even material property should be common to friends." Very commonly, it is defined that all relations depend upon the social structure and its economic basis. Mode of production determines social relationship. Society of hundred years back is obviously different to that of society we have at present.
The relationship between husband and wife should never be thought as a definite shape because with the increase of social complication it changes with great many practical issues. Importantly, woman feels sense of relieve and real taste of freedom while they are thinking to get out of subjugation. Accordingly, individualism grows up with that, and conventional idea of relationship has been remarkably taking a different shape. Now, polyandry or group marriage is almost defunct in modern society.
In Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) provides some information that the separation between spouses are quietly increasing since the last decade. Gender experts, psychologists and social workers confirm that domestic violence, woman empowerment, impotency, and class consciousness lead to the separation or divorce.
On the other hand, however, there are some fundamental postulations behind relationship. How friendship grows between two is not difficult to mark dawn but what is difficult is to single out how relationship intrudes an uneasy way and develops through uneven track. It is absolutely uncertain how a single mind relocates in another.
And, it is also surprising, how people fall in love. Love is perhaps the highest level of human affection that grows after knowing each other; after finding the maximum satisfaction through interaction. In some cases, love never takes a form in spite of having long and deep association; instead, it may engulf human mind even a second. In many cases, people sub-consciously seeks intellectual partner and of course someone whom is to be trusted finally.
Thus, trust and belief became the centre of love. Love between two opposed sexes basically comes through the line of two different purposes: one is physiological and another is moral or social. Needless to mention, very few people love their partner without thinking about sensuous affection. The spirit of love thus revolves round the sexual attraction and in some little cases love proceeds without maintaining sensuous provocation. Platonic love is substantially rare although these feelings are not uncommon.
But, for human being, relationship appears to be most complicated and oozy. Modern time makes it more provocative and sliding. To fill the vacant up and also to have an intellectual partner people seek friends and an enduring relationship. Complicated social stratification and modern day's hectic life forcibly brings man to split up the boundary. So, normally individual mind seeks a confidential abode where he/she finds best option.
To remember, human mind is essentially curious; curious to unravel the mystery of life. It wants to know more and more and also longs for friendship. It wants to feel ecstasy of joy. Love provides profundity of life; no matter whoever the person is!
Life finally follows neither logical syntax of life nor the rule of governance that shapes the society. To quote Tagore, " Love adorns itself;/ it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty./ Love does not claim possession, / but gives freedom./ Love is an endless mystery,/ for it has nothing else to explain it./ Love's gift cannot be given,/ it waits to be accepted."
The writer is Professor and Chairperson, Department of Philosophy, Jagannath University, Dhaka
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