AP ENGLISH III FINAL EXAM, Sem 2, 2014
Richard Murphy, Instructor
Read the following passage by Ellen Goodman. Then write a well-organized essay that
supports, challenges or qualifies Goodman’s assertions about differing male and female friendships.
Use your own experience, reading, and observation as part of your essay; in addition, use
examples (i.e., text support and citations) from the works we studied in class to substantiate your
point of view: The Chosen, The Secret Life of Bees, A Separate Peace, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby,
My Antonia, Antigone, Genesis, and Left To Tell. (you do not have to use examples from all of
these; just pick and choose). You may use additional examples from your own reading. Do not be
vague.
You may bring with you to class on the day of the exam up to two 3x5 cards that contains
your examples and text support. You will be evaluated holistically. I will put this essay in your
portfolio folder than moves onto ACCP English IV or English IV.
“The Tapestry of Friendships”
...It was, in many ways, a slight movie.
Nothing actually happened. There was no bigbudget chase scene nor a bloody shootout. The
story ended without any cosmic conclusions.
Yet she found Claudia Weill’s film
Girlfriends gentle and affecting. Slowly, it
panned across the tapestry of friendship,
showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the
connecting tissue between the lives of two young
women.
When it was over, she thought about the
movies she’d seen this year: Julia, The Turning
Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the
peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had
drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male
Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female
Friendship flicks.
This wasn’t just another binge of
friendliness, but a kind of cinéma vérité. For
once, the movies were reflecting a shift, not just
from men to women but from one definition of
friendship to another.
Across millions of miles of celluloid, the
idea of friendship had always been
male, a world of sidekicks and “pardners,” of
Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids. There had
been something almost atavistic about these
visions
of attachments, as if producers culled their plots
from some pop anthropology book on male
bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only
men, those direct descendants of hunters and
Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for
friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women
picking on each other the way they picked
berries.
Well, that duality must have been
mortally wounded in some shootout at the
You’re OK, I’m OK Corral. Now, on the screen,
they were at least aware of the subtle distinction
between men and women as buddies and
friends.
About 150 years ago, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge had written: “A woman’s friendship
borders more closely on love than man’s. Men
affect each other in the reflection of noble or
friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and
more signs and expressions of attachment.”
Well, she thought, on the whole, men
had buddies while women had friends. Buddies
bonded, but friends loved. Buddies faced
adversity together, but friends faced each other.
There was something palpably different in the
way they spent their time. Buddies seemed to
“do” things together, friends simply “were”
together.
claustrophobic life of George Babbitt had been
with Paul Riesling. But not once in the tragedy of
their lives had one been able to say to the other
“you make a difference.”
Buddies came linked, like accessories, to
one activity or another. People have golf
buddies and business buddies, college buddies
and club buddies. Men often keep their buddies
in these categories, while women keep a special
category for friends.
Even now, men shocked her at times
with their description of friendship. Does this
one have a best friend? “Why, of course, we see
each other every February.” Does that one call
his most intimate pal long distance? “Why,
certainly, whenever there’s a real reason.” Do
these two old chums ever have dinner together?
“You mean alone? Without our wives?”
A man once told her that men weren’t
real buddies until they’d been “through the
wars” together, corporate or athletic or military.
They had to soldier together, he said. Women,
on the other hand, didn’t count themselves as
friends until they’d shared three loathsome
confidences.
Buddies hang tough together, friends
hang onto each other.
It probably had something to do with
pride. You don’t show off to a friend; you show
need. Buddies try to keep the worst from each
other; friends confess it.
A friend of hers once telephoned her
lover, just to find out if he were home. She hung
up without a hello when he picked up the phone.
Later, wretched with embarrassment, the friend
moaned, “Can you believe me? A thirty-fiveyear-old lawyer, making a chicken call?”
Together, they laughed and made it better.
Buddies seek approval. But friends seek
acceptance.
She knew so many men who had been
trained in restraint, afraid of each other’s
judgment or awkward with each other’s
affection. She wasn’t sure which. Like buddies
in the movies, they would die for each other, but
never hug each other.
She’d reread Babbitt recently, that
extraordinary catalogue of male grievances. The
only relationship that gave meaning to the
Yet, things were changing. The ideal of
intimacy wasn’t this parallel playmate, this
teammate, this trench mate. Not even in
Hollywood. In the double standard of friendship,
for once the female version was becoming
accepted as the general ideal.
After all, a buddy is a fine lifecompanion. But one’s friends, as Santayana
once wrote, “are that part of the race with which
one can be human.”