One of the things I enjoyed talking about in our gender conflict discussion was the idea of how, as readers, we are not really supposed to hate Florentina. Even though she is involved with her sister's husband's murders, the story does not make the reader feel too bad about the situation. I notice this all the time in movies, books, and television shows and I don't really understand it. It seems to reveal that when we are more invested in a person or character, we are more lenient about their actions. For example, if our best friend does something mean to another person, we might not take it too seriously because of our close relationship with the friend. Does this demonstrate that people can sometimes care about what affects themselves or what they are familiar with and that people are in general self-centered?
In class we also talked about how some people say that a triangle of relationships or conflicts makes for the best stories. This made me think about why is it that we are most entertained by conflict when in our own lives we try to avoid it? I guess we like feeling the emotions that go along with it and enjoy feeling anxiety for the characters. However, we don't aspire to have such complications in our own lives so I wonder what really drives this desire in entertainment.
Perhaps it brings us back to the earliest of all dramas: the triangulation of the Oedipus Complex? If I may be so psychoanalytical, a child is always a Third, if you think about it: there is always a Mother figure and a Father figure, even if one or both are physically absent, they are always "imagined." In the end there is very little difference between the actual and the imagined. As we have been seeing, "the actual" can only ever be felt, perceived or experienced THROUGH the imaginary (and the symbolic and so on...), never in its (nonexistent?) raw state.
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