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The Family in Contemporary Literature
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18172 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
7,517 Words |
| Author
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Anne Carson Daly
Anne Carson Daly, former professor of English at the
University of Notre Dame, is currently writing a book entitled
Alice and the Existential Questions. |
Franz Kafka once said that the bravest thing a man can do is to marry and have children, and, judging from the picture modern literature paints of family life, he was right. Contemporary books sing the same refrain: Marriage is a foray into territory more dangerous than the Brazilian rain forest, and raising children is a daunting enterprise in which the thrill of victory is often eclipsed by the agony of defeat.
Indeed, if a literate Martian were to stumble upon the New York Review of Books or even the Washington Post's Book World section, he would probably be amazed at the peculiar literary fare that earthlings read for entertainment. Jockeying for position as best sellers, he would find tales of shrewish wives, brutish husbands, psychologically crippled children, and malevolent in-laws. He might also notice that such "popular" literature almost always includes at least passing references to child abuse, unwanted pregnancies, illegitimate children, abortion, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, and pre- and postmarital promiscuity (and this is our "fun" reading!). Ironically, much modern literature depicting the family seems to describe forces that are destroying it.
Unlike most Victorian stories, modern novels no longer present the home as a haven from the world, a resting-place for the heart, and a school for the soul. Instead, it all too often appears as a breeding ground for neuroses, a kind of split-level petri dish of pathology. In fact, contemporary literature so strongly identifies with illness and aberration that the famous southern novelist Walker Percy has said that "a nose for pathology" is the primary prerequisite for the modern novelist, who acts as a diagnostician, by putting "his finger on the peculiar lesion of the age."
Where does all this animosity come from? There seem to be several answers. Today, when the average American marriage lasts 6.8 years, 23 percent of all children are born out of wedlock, and three out of ten youngsters born in the seventies will live mainly in single-parent households, the Ozzie and Harriet marriage of the past is a demographic relic. One shudders to think what Donna Reed would say of an America of thirty-eight million single adults, or what Ward and June Cleaver would make of a nation, like ours, in which 25 percent of the population is, at one time or another, what the Census Bureau calls POSSLQs - Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.
The bitterness of much contemporary fiction on the family also seems to arise from the pain of unfulfilled
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