The Family Way
“No longer can we use the ‘typical’ family of a husband, wife, and children as the normative family structure with which to evaluate and judge our family forms,” (pg. 227 Cosbey). In recent years necessity and alternative unions between peoples have transformed this definition. More and more we see households with both parents working and grandparents or aunts and uncles giving primary care to children. Adoption has become a popular alternative to having children or when the option isn’t available. Single independent women have begun to have children on their own without male aid. With the growing acceptance of same sex lifestyles children are growing up with two fathers or mothers. It only makes sense that this evolution in family values and dynamics would be reflected in literature of the day.
In Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory we have Sophie, the child of rape, living with her Aunt in Haiti and moving to stay with her mother in New York. The story progresses to reveal the horrors that can run through generations in a family, “There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms,” (pg. 234 Danticat). Martine begins to obsess over her daughter’s purity just as her own mother had obsessed over her own and scars Sophie as she herself had been scared. Sophie begins to heal only after she returns to Haiti and is reunited with her mother. Her husband begins to aid her healing and she joins a support group. Distancing herself from her place of origin and making her own way with her daughter and husband, help Sophie forge ahead in life. From feeling displaced as a child of rape she finds her place with her daughter and husband, though the healing is slow and necessary. The story ends with Sophie’s freedom from her mother and father in the cane fields, “where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her,” (pg. 234 Danticat). Throught he shedding of her past family she is free and can move on with the family she has began to create for herself.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd expands on the idea of family, not necessarily being confined to blood or direct relation and even takes it further as to suggest it transcends race as well. Lily is this young white girl who flees her biological father with her maid, Rosaleen, in a journey to find her birth mother. What she finds is a family in a group of complete strangers and a place where she can belong and grow into her own. “I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street,” (pg. 302 Kidd). Both Danticat and Kidd suggest family is something more then blood and relation, transcending physical and genetic bonds. Family is portrayed as something that can be found and formulated from experience and with caring; it need not be arbitrarily supplied at birth and can actually be escaped or refreshed. These self-attained families are seen as stronger and truer then those both girls had originally.
They say when you kiss someone you’re kissing everyone that person has ever kissed. White Noise by Don DeLillo certainly brings a new twist to this statement and brings emphasis to the mutability of the contemporary family. With divorce being so popular in modern times families are reshaping and forming all the time. “My first and fourth marriages were to Dana Breedlove, who is Steffie’s mother,” (pg. 213 DeLillo). It’s as if the family has become mercurial. Changing every other moment as one or both persons decide to pack up the kids and their things and leave. But the past moves with them, exes follow each other and remain in contact, remarry, share children. The family now includes, not only mothers, fathers and children’s, but stepmothers one, two, three, stepbrothers, stepsisters. A hodgepodge of people all brought together by their pasts.
“The sociology of literature has long recognized that literature reflects society,” (pg. 227 Cosbey). Literature is a documentation of social structure and beliefs. As such contemporary fiction has no option but to try to represent the variability that can be found in modern families. So many advancements have been made in society socially and mentally, between women’s rights, civil rights and the beginning of gay rights the modern family is more diverse and personalized. From these three contemporary novels alone the definition of family can be seen to vary vastly though certain elements remain. Caring and understanding remain large factors in the cohesion of families. In each of the novels the family either formed or feel apart due to the appreciation and attainment of trust, love and understanding.
Works Cited
Cosbey, Janet. "Using Contemporary Fiction To Teach Family Issues". American Sociological Association 1997: 227-233.
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Division of Random House, Inc, 1994.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. United States of America: Penguin Books, 1998.
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
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