A literary guide to family values

Playwrights see their job as delving into the most fraught and tragic aspects of life.

Ever since Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, they have mostly achieved this by focusing on the epicenter of human experience.

The family.

In modern times, we have Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neil and Arthur Miller, to name a few. 

Their dominant subjects could have been war, politics, farming, urban development, ballet, the internal combustion engine, snack foods – but what did they focus on?  The family. That oft paraphrased quote from Willy Sutton applies here.  If you want drama, go to where it’s most plentiful. 

One of my favorite cartoon captions reads, “I’ve decided to run for office so I can spend less time with my family.” 

I think everything that’s ever been written about families is true.  The bonds, the love, the mutual support, the enrichment, home cooking and tag football.  It’s also the crucible of selfishness, brutality, oppression, rape, sadism and deprivation.  The best and the worst. 

Politicians who campaign on the first, neglect to point out the second, for good reasons. 

But this contributes to a norm within the general culture that declares the family as the highest achievable constituent of the social order, when in fact, it’s often the most degraded.  The finest playwrights in history have pointed this out, though you won’t ever find a passage from Eugene O’Neil in the State of the Union Address.

Despite its shortcomings, few would argue that a healthy, love-filled traditional family is a priceless thing.

The harm is in denigrating other forms of intimate arrangements, or classifying them as sup-par.  Military units in combat zones, successful athletic teams, long-surviving rock bands and AA meetings know this not to be true.  As do countless same-sex families and collections of vagabonds who fall in together and never leave.  Often these groupings are bulwarks against what was missing in the traditional family, and those involved are generally grateful for it.

Photo: My Knopf family, circa 1890s. Great grandfather lower right,
great-great grandfather next to him. Clearly a fun-loving bunch of folks.

Blood is indeed thicker than water, but often diluted into thin gruel. 

Even so, conventional family is nearly irresistible in great part because of biological imperatives.  Winston Churchill was utterly neglected by his parents, but never once expressed a single word of criticism.  This is why abused children often want to be returned to their family perpetrators, and cops chasing escaped prisoners first check the addresses of their moms and dads.   So it takes some mighty forces to cleave these attachments, thus the power of countless novels and plays. 

And yet, who but our biographers and creative writers will date the launch of a successful life to the moment their heroes left home?  Huck Finn’s real father was nothing if not an evil scoundrel, from whom Huck escapes into a relationship with a surrogate father not even of the same race, and certainly not social standing, even for a hardscrabble white kid like Huck.  Huck also flees from other, wealthier family structures that threaten his freedom and personal sense of self.  Which family values was Mark Twain celebrating here?

A completely unscientific examination of the family lives of mystery novel protagonists would reveal a litany of sadness and disfunction that would make Freud hang up his cigar and examination couch. 

Most are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics, few are not divorced with estranged children, usually daughters.  Parents are rarely mentioned, unless they’re abusive, in nursing homes or dead at a young age.  Siblings are usually no good, or too good, cousins get the hero in trouble with the mob, or worse, a fair percentage have been the victims of a serial killer or an unsolved disappearance. Can an uncle be anything other than a flaming screwball or picaresque bon vivant?  

Mystery writers are no different from playwrights. 

They go to where the best material is just sitting there waiting for exploitation.

Literature postulates that our blood relatives get the first claim on our hearts, but that title is revocable, even if persistently haunting our moods and dreams.  Like inherited wealth, it can assure generations of comfort and security, or be squandered by the reckless, cruel, vindictive and ungrateful.