‘…the winter coat, the scabbed knees, my stubborn nine-year old face… not because I was too young or badly dressed, it was something else, something about me so offputting, so unimaginable….’
Meena describes herself as very unattractive. When compared to Anita, we can see that it is the truth. Anita’s description gives her maturity and superiority while Meena’s make her seem as if she is a little ‘nine-year old’ girl who does not possess the same maturity and superiority as Anita. It is very much the same as Lord of the Flies with Piggy and Ralph’s friendship. At the beginning, our first impression gained of Ralph is of an athletic and attractive young boy:
‘He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood…you could see now that he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of shoulders went, buy there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil’
Here Ralph is described in an attractive way and he, like Anita, can be described in two different ways: firstly as a ‘boxer’ which portrays Ralph as a strong, powerful man while the ‘mildness about his mouth and eyes’ shows that he is still an innocent pleasant young boy. In the same way Anita is friends with Meena in Anita and Me, Ralph is friends with Piggy. Piggy is very similar to Meena. Both Piggy and Meena are not as attractive as Ralph and Anita. In this way, they are seen as insuperior to them:
‘The naked crooks of his knees were plump, caught and scratched by thorns’
Here Piggy’s description does not portray him as either very attractive or very interesting. The fact that his knees are scratched by thorns makes Piggy seem quite young as you normally imagine young children to have scratched knees. Ralph is described as almost a man. This is another way in which Piggy is depicted as inferior to Ralph.
Another way in which Ralph and Anita are described as greater than Piggy and Meena are when they meet. When Anita talks to Meena for the first time, she assumes that she is more superior to Meena.
‘…then snatched the bag off me and began walking away as she ate’
When Anita meets Meena, she snatches a bag of sweets from her and starts to walk away. She expects Meena to follow and what I find surprising is that Meena seems to think that this is fine and she feels happy to follow her a few paces behind. Meena feels privileged to be in Anita’s company. Anita realises this and uses it to her advantage. Anita has got used to realising that she is normally the leader of a group and that she has the ability to exert a lot of power. Ralph also assumes that he is superior when he meets Piggy. When Piggy asks what Ralph’s name is, Ralph does not return the gesture:
‘The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn buy this proffer of acquaintance was not made’
Here Ralph is portrayed as quite arrogant. We can see that Ralph obviously feels in some way superior to this fat boy and therefore he feels that he is not the same level as him. Throughout the book, Ralph has a certain amount of superiority over Piggy and uses it often. When Jack, Simon and Ralph explore the island for the first time and Piggy asks to come, Ralph embaraces him by refusing to let him come. The same is done in Anita and Me, as Anita is throughout the book more superior to Meena. Both Meena and Piggy do not belong to the groups that are formed in the books. Piggy is far too intellectual and mature for the games played and he is the odd one out of the group, as is Simon. Meena too does not fit in to Anita’s group. She describes herself as ‘too young for Anita’s consideration and too old for the children’. Even when she does join Anita’s group, she sometimes feels out of place.
Towards the end of both books, both Anita and Ralph find that they need support when their close friends leave them. In Anita and Me, Anita experiences this when her mother leaves:
‘…she always seemed older than her peers. But when I spied her sitting alone on the park swings, from a distance, her crumpled face and hunched shoulders turned her momentarily into a little old lady.
When Anita’s mother and the poet leave her, Anita feels depressed and lonely. Meena, although she is angry with her, feels sorry for Anita and tries to comfort and support her. This shows how Meena, even though she is portrayed as insuperior to Anita, is the more stable of the two girls. Meena has two loving parent who look after her well and a baby brother while Anita lives with her unreliable mother who is hardly there for her and a father who sees her very rarely. Ralph also finds himself in this situation when the boys divide into two groups and Ralph is left only with Simon and Piggy:
‘Piggy’
‘Uh?’
‘What are we going to do?’
Piggy looked at the conch.
‘You could-‘
‘Call an assembly?’
Ralph laughed sharply as he said the word and Piggy frowned.
Here we can see the difference in Ralph’s way of talking to Piggy. We can see that Ralph has no idea of what to do now that Jack has made his own tribe. Ralph now finds that he is relying on Piggy to help and support him through his time of need. Ralph also uses the word ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. This shows how Ralph feels that both him and Piggy are now in their own tribe. It also shows how Ralph is letting Piggy be on the same level as him by using ‘we’.
Another way in, which the friendship of Anita and Meena and the friendship between Ralph and Piggy are similar, is the ending of the friendship. At the end of the book, Meena realises that Anita is not the person she should be a best friend with:
‘I don’t give a toss what your sister [Anita] does, Tracey. Yow can tell her that from me.’
At this point, Meena has realised that Anita has not treated her as well as she should have been treated. Meena learns this from making friends with two other people who treat her well and are true friends. When Meena returns from hospital, she doesn’t socialise much and is happy doing things alone. Anita, jealous of her happiness and the love she receives from her parents, sends threatening notes to her in the hope of scaring Meena. At this point we can really see that Meena is superior to Anita as Anita tries to make a desperate attempt at trying to feel more superior and secure by threatening her. The same happens in Lord of the Flies. After Piggy has died, Ralph realises what a great friend Piggy really was to him and how much he needs him when Jack’s tribe turn against him:
‘And in the middle of them, with filthy body, unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
Here we can see that Ralph’s image of a strong, powerful young man is lost and we see him as a young naïve boy in contrast to Piggy who is described as ‘wise’. Before, Piggy was portrayed as a fat, asthmatic boy who was inferior to Ralph but now we see that Piggy is superior to Ralph. Ralph realises this and feels bad in the way he treated Piggy.
Towards the end of both books, the characters who were portrayed as superior: Anita and Ralph find it hard to cope when Meena and Piggy leave them. In Anita and Me, when Meena breaks the friendship between herself and Anita, Anita begins to find that she is jealous of Meena and sends her threatening notes. Similarly in Lord of the Flies, when Piggy dies, Ralph finds it hard to cope. He is left all alone and is abandoned by his so-called friends who he preferred to Piggy in the beginning. In both cases we find how much Ralph and Anita depended on Piggy and Meena to make them feel superior. While in actual fact, Meena and Piggy were the superior ones.
