The Family as the Origin of Life’s Narrative Meaning

Generations of readers and theater-goers have thrilled to the magical conclusion of Shakespeare’s enchanting pastoral comedy As You Like It, in which a quadruple wedding creates four new married couples out of eight of the play’s previously single individuals. The millions who cherish this wonderful play recognize in this wedding the culminating event that defines the narrative goal for all that has gone before. It is thus the saying of wedding vows that converts the previously confused and tangled lives of the play’s principals—Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Phebe and Silvius, Audrey and Touchstone—into a coherent and meaningful pattern. Nor, in Shakespeare’s imaginatively powerful universe, does marriage confer life-affirming meaning only retrospectively. As Hymen (the Greek god of marriage) joins the four couples, he anticipates the marvelous power of the vows he is now ratifying to enrich the future:

Then is there mirth in heaven
When earthly things made even
Atone together.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wedding is great Juno’s crown,
O blessed bond of board and bed!

‘Tis Hymen peoples every town;
High wedlock then be honored
Honor, high honor, and renown
To Hymen, god of every town!’ (5.4.106-108, 139-144)[1]

Not all 21st-century Americans would immediately recognize a connection between their own lives and Shakespeare’s marriage-centered narrative. But even a little reflection will help establish that connection. For we live by stories. Acute insight shines through the words of a gradeschooler asked what would happen to the world if there were no stories: “There wouldn’t be a world, because stories make the world.”[2] Ethicists Gebhard Allert and Gerlinde Sponholte recognize that “the question , Who are you? Can better be answered by telling stories of significant personal experiences than by giving abstract definitions.” In the same vein, Allert and Sponholte stress that “to ask for meaning is to ask for narratives.”[3]

As sociologist Teri L. Orbuch explains, “Stories are everyone’s rock-bottom capacity….Stories and narratives…represent ways in which people organize their view of themselves, of others, and of their social world.”[4] With good reason, philosopher Charles Taylor insists that moral vision depends upon a deep sense of “life as an unfolding story.”[5] Ethical theorist Alasdair MacIntyre goes even further: “Man,” he writes, “is a story-telling animal,” adding that “the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.”[6] But man is not merely a story-telling animal; man is a story-living animal. Our lives cohere into meaning as we recognize their form in narrative, in story. And whatever he may have gotten wrong in his cultural theorizing, Roland Barthes got it right when he recognized the ubiquity of human dependence upon stories: “There nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives….[Narrative] is simply there, like life itself.”[7]

Not only does narrative speak to a universal human need, but the narrative most compelling and meaningful for most men and women — including 21st-century Americans — is the narrative of family. For although Allert and Sponholtz are right to identify “personal narrative [as] a source of integrity and identity,” they well understand that “the personal story correlates with different metastories, that is, with the narrative of the person’s family, nation, religious group, and so on.”[8] Shakespeare’s As You Like It makes luminously clear that family relationships — most particularly the relationships formed through wedlock — profoundly define the overarching narrative within which a personal narrative is realized.

From beginning to end, it is family that scripts most American lives. As they ponder the profound significance of personal narrative, Allert and Sponholtz focus particularly on “family, where a kind of common narrative always exists.”[9] Indeed, ordinary Americans do not need Shakespeare’s rare imaginative gifts to understand that their own personal narratives derive their meaning in large measure from a family life that naturally takes the form of a story: a marriage, a birth, a childhood, a young adulthood, another marriage, another birth, a grandparent’s death—and so it goes.

Whether looking at the first days an infant spends in the nursery or the final minutes a octogenarian spends on his deathbed, scholars see the family giving life’s narrative its context and significance. Ethicists Owen Flanigan and Kathryn Jackson underscore the importance of “the natural virtue of parental love” and of “family nurturance” in explaining how “the helpless infant…survive[s] its first night.”[10] In the same vein, social commentators Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Blankenhorn highlight how the gender complementarity of intact parental marriages provides the safe setting for the first days of early childhood: “Fathers protect the vulnerable infant from physical harm by defending the perimeters of the domestic realm. Mothers provide emotional nurture to the child and sustain the domestic realm as the center of nurturance.”[11] Looking at the other end of life, British sociologist Clive Seale finds that it is marital and family ties that typically define the circle of those “gathering around the deathbed,” so providing the “emotional accompaniment” that allays “fears of abandonment and isolation” in a person’s last mortal hours.”[12]

Though Sigmund Freud tried to teach modern intellectuals and cultural critics how to interpret the narrative of family in terms of dark and ugly psychological pathologies,[13] millions of ordinary men and women persist in seeing in their family life a narrative so richly comedic (in the oldest and richest sense of that word) and life-affirming that it transcends even the bounds of mortality. For such men and women, it seems only right that Dante depicts a meeting with his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in the luminous final section of his Comedia: The Paradiso. As his illustrious forbear explains to him “the surname you now bear,” Dante affirms the eternal meaningfulness of his intergenerational family narrative (XV, 138).[14] Much nearer our own time, the Cornish poet Charles Causley has likewise expressed his belief that the narrative of family life will extend beyond the grave. In his poignant poem “Eden Rock,” Causley envisions his now-immortal parents: “They are waiting for me…/My father, twenty-five, in the same suit/Of genuine Irish Tweed…My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress….” (ll. 1-2,5).[15]

Beyond the Grave

Nor do poets hold a monopoly on confidence in the death-defying character of family narrative. Brought to light by a PBS documentary on the Civil War, a letter sent by a Union officer to his wife expresses a hope that resonated in the minds of many viewers. Sent not long before the battle in which its author died, this letter expresses strong faith that the narrative defined by marriage cannot be destroyed by an enemy’s bullets: “Sarah,” the Union officer presciently writes to his wife, “do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.”[16] Belief that the story defined by marriage and family ties survives the grave still lives in the hearts of millions of 21st-century Americans.

Family thus richly deserves its mention as the first source of supra-personal narrative cited by Allert and Sponholts — ahead of nation and even of religious group. When survey sociologists ask American adults or young adolescents to identify the meaning of their lives, they are more likely to refer to family relationships than to national citizenship or religious affiliation.[17] The importance of family narrative as the wellspring of meaning emerges even among young upwardly-mobile graduate students pursuing graduate degrees in business and law. Such students, modern sociologists might suppose, would invest above all in modern narratives of self and career. But no. In reporting the results of a 2003 survey of MBA and law students, sociologist Robert M. Orrange highlights as his “most significant discovery” — one he had “not anticipated at the outset” — “the importance that a dominant majority of respondents assign to ‘family’ as a primary source of long-term meaning in life.”[18]

One of the students Orrange interviewed as part of his survey emphatically underscores the centrality of family narrative to life meaning: “Family is first, always first! It defines you, and it should be what you work at even harder than your job — keeping a happy family and a good marriage…. That’s the whole major thing, and if that breaks, so does everything else.” One of the students Orrange talked with even asserts the unique power of family narrative to transcend human mortality: “Family. That’s the thing that’s here after you’re gone. That’s it. I mean, when I’m dead in the ground, I don’t think anyone is going to be like, ‘That [names herself], she was a fine worker.’ You know, it’s going to be your family that’s there [to say], ‘This is what she meant to me as a friend, a mom, a companion.’”[19]

A deep wisdom inheres in this student’s belief that family uniquely safeguards the memory of the dead in its intergenerational narrative. The abiding significance of this belief receives attention from social theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain, who meditates on how through “honoring the dead” in rituals such as “scattering flowers . . . over the grave of a loved one,” we locate ourselves within a family narrative that stretches far beyond the limits of our mortal lives:

Respecting the dead enlarges life and compels us to acknowledge our indebtedness. The living, knowing that at their deaths they will be honored, too, gain an awareness of a life connected not only horizontally but vertically—to generations now gone and generations to come. Such recognitions are so fundamental, so basic, that they constitute one’s own self identity. . . . [I]n respecting the dead, we do more, much more, than enact unthinkingly tribal custom....We link ourselves up with . . . human meanings and imperatives that go back as far as recognizably human creatures go and will continue so long as human beings are born, live, and die.[20]

Allert and Sponholtz do list nation after family as another basis for “metastories” within which a personal narrative takes shape. The events of national history indeed impress themselves upon the personal life stories that define who we are. Just ask a veteran. In places such as Arlington Cemetery, the nation even reverences its dead within a narrative that transcends the self. But national leaders ultimately depend on healthy family narratives to advance the story of the nation much more than families depend upon the national narrative to advance their own family stories. Princeton legal scholar Robert P. George sees the issue clearly when he writes, “Governments rely on families to produce something that governments need — but, on their own, they could not possibly produce: upright, decent people who make honest, law-abiding, public-spirited citizens.”[21]

The sacred narrative of religion, to be sure, may trump family history for the devout, especially for priests, monks, and nuns. However, it is in the family — and within the story the family experiences — that most children first learn to view their own lives as part of the sacred narrative of religious faith.[22] It is typically parents — not a priest, pastor, or rabbi — who first teach children to interpret life as part of a cosmic narrative ordained of God. Even when children do receive formal religious instruction in an institutional setting, it is usually because their parents wish them to receive such training and have arranged for it.

A saint who cared deeply about the divinely-guided story of the Christian community, St. Augustine still understood the primacy of the narratives lived out by families. As Elshtain aptly remarks, before the much-revered saint shifts his focus in his writings to the Church, “Augustine begins with families and the good of families and what they are charged with preserving and sustaining.”[23] In our own time, Senate staffer John Florez thus speaks for millions when he reflects on how he learned his faith in a family that would regularly get together to “kneel, pray the rosary, [and] give each other big hugs.” It was experiencing this family story that taught Florez when it was “time to get on your knees, pray and thank God for the life he gave us.” As he ponders the family prayer through which he acquired his heritage of faith, Florez is deeply grateful: “It was a religious and cultural tradition for which I thank my parents…for teaching us — it was about family.”[24]

On the other hand, it is hardly surprising that when the family narrative disintegrates, young people often lose their faith in their religious narrative. Playwright Jonathan Garfinkel has reflected revealingly on the way family breakup undermined his own religious faith:

After my father left my mother, the Jewishness in my family, as I knew it, came to an end. We tried to continue in splintered-off versions. A Passover Seder, the odd Friday-night dinner. But nothing was the same. Judaism is about ethics, Torah and prayer. But more than anything, it’s family. And ever since mine has broken apart, I’ve been wondering what remains of the religion I’ve inherited.[25]

Evidence abounds indicating that Garfinkel is not at all peculiar in viewing the narrative of religious faith as dependent upon the narrative of an intact family. Consider, for instance, national survey data showing that “frequency of attendance at religious services is higher, and [religious] nonaffiliation is lower among [secondary-school] students who live with both of their parents as compared to those who live in other family configurations.”[26]

The divine love informing religious narrative is not the only kind of love most Americans experience intimately as they participate in the story of their own family. American poet Mary Jo Salter insightfully clarifies the narrative meaning of love within a family when she highlights the way family relationships mature. Salter remarks,

Family, inevitably is the doorway inside each of us and that…always relates to the passage of time. We know members of our family for decades; and, as parents, we have the privilege of knowing our children from before they’re even born. Then we watch them change and grow. So our attachment to our loved ones is a lot like our attachment to life itself. So family…is a door into thinking about not only love but about time as well — both of which are endlessly mysterious.[27]

As Shakespeare well understood, it is in marriage and family life that we find the most illuminating narrative perspectives on the bottomless human mysteries of love and time. Of course, Americans do draw life meaning from narratives found in various literary narratives—plays, novels, and short stories—not rooted in their own family experience. But to understand the primacy of one’s own family narrative over all merely literary narratives, we need only listen to the impassioned Mrs. Antrobus when she forcefully asserts the overriding value of family in Thornton Wilder’s play By the Skin of Our Teeth. “I’d burn ten Shakespeares,” she asserts, “to prevent one child of mine from having one cold in the head” (Act I).[28]

As Wilder surely realized, American life rarely tests Mrs. Antrobus’s hyperbolic assertion: Americans almost never have to burn valuable works of literature to safeguard their families’ well-being. Quite the contrary. The available evidence generally indicates that the kind of life narrative children experience within a strong and healthy families actually fosters an appreciation for the kind of vicarious literary narratives Shakespeare and other great writers have bequeathed us. In a 1995 survey of 85 studies of educational attainment, researchers determined that “the family is critical” to students’ success, with “parental involvement” predicting “profound and comprehensive benefits” in their children’s intellectual development.[29] But since other researchers have established that “levels of parental involvement, supervision, monitoring, and closeness are higher, on average, in two-biological-married-parent families than in single-parent families,”[30] it would appear that acquiring the skills to read Shakespeare depends critically on a family narrative based upon the joyous event—wedlock—that concludes As You Like It.

When the family disintegrates or never coalesces in the first place, personal life often loses the coherent form of narrative, degenerating—in the vernacular—into “just one damn thing after another.” It is hardly surprising that children whose lives no longer feel like a coherent narrative often fail to connect with the vicarious experience of literary narrative. The erosion of family connections thus figures prominently in critic George Panichas’s thinking when he ponders the question “Where Have the Readers Gone?” Panichas finds it hard to believe that “a teen who absents himself from a family dinner . . . [will] visit a local library and pick up a book to read.” A teen lacking family ties can be expected to opt for “viewing Internet pornography [rather than] reading a Shakespearean play or a Dickens novel,” in Panichas’s judgment.[31]

Lost “Equipment for Living”

Sadly, teens drawn to both the family dinner table and the library have grown rarer in an age of marital disintegration and maternal employment.[32] Family breakdown weakens young people’s links to literary narratives in other ways as well. If young adults have watched parents divorce and have chosen to cohabit rather than to marry, they may view as incomprehensible aliens those literary figures who care deeply about marriage and family life—from the couples who gather for Hymen’s blessing at the conclusion of As You Like It to the heroine who insists on the absolute sanctity of wedlock in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to the brooding searcher (Pierre) who finally finds fulfillment in marriage and family life at the conclusion of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Critic Kenneth Burke’s assessment of literature as “equipment for living” makes sense only so long as some consonance in social outlooks connects readers and authors.[33] Such consonance can hardly survive when readers’ attitudes toward the significance of narratives focused on marriage and family life diverge sharply from those of the authors who write the narratives. Because of this divergence, many modern readers regard much of traditional literature not as “equipment for living” but rather as detritus for discarding.

In the literary attitudes of his character Helmholtz Watson, novelist Aldous Huxley memorably depicts why much of traditional literature may appear worthless to a modern sensibility shaped by a family-destroying culture. In his remarkably prescient 1932 novel Brave New World, Huxley shows Helmholtz reacting with incredulous laughter to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For a man like Helmholtz, who has grown up in a world in which men can have sex with almost anyone at almost anytime, Romeo’s passionate desire to be married to one particular woman seems “rather ridiculous.”[34] A recognizably similar perspective has emerged among an increasing number of young Americans, who are as cut off from a marriage-centered morality and to the literature that celebrates it as is Huxley’s character. That the American retreat from wedlock has imperiled our national literary culture only underscores the point poet Wendell Berry makes when he calls marriage “the fundamental connection without which nothing holds.”[35]

The national retreat from marriage and family life adversely affects more than just the literary sensibilities that foster appreciation for traditional narratives. This retreat has jeopardized even the basic literacy skills necessary to enjoy the rich narratives of literature. As literacy specialist Vic Menard points out, the loss of “our American family culture” has opened ruptures in patterns in which “parents or older siblings took time to teach pre-school children their ABC’s…[so that at] early age, children were taught the value of books and reading.” As Americans see “more single and two-parent working families with an apparently higher reliance on media for pre-school literacy conditioning,” they see more and more young people enslaved by the often-crude sensationalism of electronic entertainments and fewer and fewer awakened to the power of literary narratives.[36]

At a higher level of cultural analysis, the literary critic and longtime Yale English professor Alvin Kernan has suggested how the health of family narrative and the well-being of literary narrative culturally intertwine. In The Death of Literature, Kernan remarks that the cultural dynamics killing literature are the same ones tearing the family apart. In Kernan’s view, indeed, “the death throes of the nuclear family” make the parlous state of literature “seem but a trifle.” Yet he insists that “the death of literature may be … interesting … for the precise schematic way in which it represents changes taking place elsewhere, as in the family, in more complicated and less obvious ways.”[37]

The disintegration of contemporary family life may thus help explain why critic Joseph Bottom looks at 21st-century fiction and sees authors delivering “an inventory of detail,” indeed indulging in the “cosseting of meaningless detail after meaningless detail,” but who have grown “more and more diffident, more and more self-conscious, about the entire idea of telling a story or using the narrative finality of stories to convey unified judgments about society, history, or even themselves.” Bottom himself suggests that this loss of confidence in literary narrative in general is linked to the loss of appreciation for joyful family narratives (such as Life With Father and Cheaper by the Dozen) in particular.[38]

Those who share Kernan’s belief in a deep connection between the death of literature and the crisis in family life will suspect that doubts about literary narrative do derive—at least in part—from the traumatic aftereffects of family and marital failure. If Kernan is right in identifying “the family [as] probably the most desperate battlefield” in today’s ongoing cultural wars,[39] then we may discern in young people’s turning away from literary narrative the effects of a kind of shell shock. When a harrowing parental divorce turns the home into a “desperate battlefield,” the traumatized young survivors may well resemble Virginia Woolf’s character Septimus Warren Smith, who loses in the trenches of World War I all of his former passion for Shakespeare. How, Woolf forces readers to ask, can “the intoxication of language” last for someone who now believes that “the world itself is without meaning”?[40]

Woolf’s literary question deserves fresh consideration in a world in which more and more broken homes look like social trench warfare. After all, today’s writers look out upon a society in which the strands of meaningful family narrative disappear among couples who repudiate their wedding vows (or don’t even bother with them in the first place), in which a middle-class “birth dearth” indicates that children often count as more of a burden than a blessing, and in which home life often consists of no more than shared electronic entertainments. In such a world, family narratives often look very fragile and inconsequential. For those who share Kernan’s belief in a deep cultural connection between literature and family life, it is no surprise that the strands of literary narrative now look very weak also.

Some post-modern commentators see little to worry about in the loss of a sense of narrative in family life or in literature. Since many of these post-modern commentators argue “there are no metaphysical underpinnings to narrative” and that therefore narrative meaning must be an “illusion,”[41] they suppose that its disappearance should matter to no more than a few reactionary critics. In truth, however, the disappearance of lived and literary narratives signals a profound social and cultural malaise. Ethicist Zygmunt Bauman recognizes the peril, warning that as meaningful narrative fades away in our increasingly “pointilist” social universe, life increasingly degenerates into nothing but the vapid adventures of the “avid consumer.” This vacuous consumerism confers upon life no narrative pattern, “neither cyclical nor linear,” as it breaks life’s narrative into “a multitude of separate morsels.” But the morsels of a consumerist life refuse to cohere into a coherent or satisfying pattern: “The discarding of successive consumer offers expected (promised) to satisfy desires is paralleled by the rising mountains of dashed expectations,” leaving in the end nothing but “a cemetery of wasted chances.”[42]

Likewise alarmed by the cultural dangers of ubiquitous consumerism, classicist Stephen Bertman laments the surrender of “fundamental values “ in our “nowist culture,” a culture utterly lacking in the kind of narrative grounding that fosters patience in time’s unfolding.[43] Bertman believes we risk becoming “a nation of amnesiacs” as we lose the “chain of continuity from the past to the present that helps us keep our bearings as we journey through life.” The preservation of that chain is now imperiled, as Bertman recognizes, because “the structure of the family has broken down, leaving us without humanity’s prime transmitter of tradition. If mothers and fathers are no longer able to read their children stories, if they no longer have time to tell them remembered tales, who will the storytellers be, and what tales will be told?”[44]

The breakdown of the narratives that only healthy family life can sustain exposes more and more Americans to what Panichas calls “the perils of presentism.” Among those exposed to these perils, Panichas perceives the “tendency to drift in centerless, undisciplined, anarchic ways.”[45] Such drifting fosters “an ugly procession of discontinuances and disloyalties at all levels of society and culture,” finally producing “the shapeless, twisted, tormented, and arrested psyche of modern man . . . trapped within a parenthesis, having no connection.”[46] The pains of the tormented modern psyche explain why when psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ponders Americans’ increasing dependence upon psychotropic drugs, he finds himself wondering why so many adults have given up on “playing with one’s child, reading poetry, or attending a family reunion.”[47] The loss of the lived family narratives that motivate one to play with one’s child or attend a family reunion does appear to be linked at a deep level to the loss of literary narratives enjoyed when reading poetry.

But Americans need not lose family narratives; they need not lose literary narratives. As one who cherishes literary narratives that reinforce family narratives, Elshtain calls our attention to a “favorite passage” from The Captive Mind by the poet Czeslaw Milosz, a passage in which Milosz recalls having seen in a disorderly World War II train station “a peasant family—husband and wife and two children—[who] had settled down by the wall,” with the wife engaged in “feeding the younger child; the husband . . . [in] pouring tea out of a kettle into a cup for the older boy.” Elshain thus joins Milosz in affirming that this peasant family was “a human group, an island in a crowd,” an island preserving “something proper to humble, ordinary human life.” Unfortunately, that “something proper to humble, ordinary human life” now too often vanishes in a cultural riptide that pulls husband from wife, parent from child. Elshtain thus has good reason to fear that as modern men and women lose “the relational ecologies” developed through the traditional narratives of family, community, and church, we make “the altar at which we daily worship . . . the sovereign self, whose key terms are control, doing your own thing, and choice as a kind of willfulness.”[48]

A “sovereign self” absorbed in “doing his own thing” can offer little of lasting worth to his culture or society. Long-term social and cultural health depends upon the self-transcending principles that sustain a robust family narrative. Emphasizing young people’s deep need for such a family narrative, columnist William Raspberry urges “parents [to] instill values via family tales,” tales that deliver a “positive effect on children [by conveying] the belief that they are part of a special family whose members include heroes, large and small.”[49]

Bereft of Heroes

Unfortunately, we may anticipate a profoundly negative effect when children and adolescents see themselves as part of a broken, fractured family entirely bereft of heroes, large or small. Lacking the sustaining narrative continuity that an intact family can provide, children from broken homes prove all too vulnerable — as sobering sociological research has shown — to the allure of the intense now experienced through illegal drugs.[50] Lacking the long view of family narrative, too many young men become criminals by yielding to the destructive impulses of the moment.[51] Yearning for the sacred punctuation that rituals give healthy family life, too many young men seek out the toxic surrogate rituals offered by street gangs.[52] Never summoned to add their own memorable extension to their family narrative, young people from broken homes are particularly likely to fail in their school work and careers.[53] Deprived of the hope inspired by a sustained family narrative, many children of divorce and illegitimacy live under dark clouds of depression, too often lethal clouds of suicidal depression.[54] Unschooled in the principles embodied within a robust family narrative, young people from broken homes frequently manifest signs of incomplete moral development.[55]

Though Americans may discern certain kinds of stories in the lives of those scarred by parental disintegration, these are not the sort of stories that sustain hope or moral wisdom. Not many Americans take comfort in the frequency with which young men recapitulate the story recounted by Frank Abagnale, Jr. (the youngest man ever to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list) in his memoirs: it is a story of how a young man “turns to a life of crime…when he’s shattered by his parents’ divorce.”[56] Nor would many Americans want to see young people enduring real-life experiences with a departing divorced or never-married father that prompt them to echo the fictional Dick Diver’s poignant lament: “Good-bye, my father —good-bye all my fathers.”[57]

And though they may recognize the deep benefit of contemplating tragedy portrayed in literature and drama, most Americans prefer to script the real life that young people actually experience along the life-affirming comedic lines found in the literary narratives of Dante and Causley, Austen and Dickens. Since Aristotle insists that in true tragedy, the sort that effects a purging catharsis of “pity and fear,” we see the tragic hero experiencing a moment of transcendent “recognition” [anagnorisis],[58] we may wonder if many of the children who experience the pathos of family breakup actually do experience real recognition, real tragedy. Many of these poor innocents never understand what has hit them.[59]

Unfortunately, many prominent and influential Americans who do recognize that the nation’s young people are in deep trouble refuse to understand the life-enhancing centrality of the family narratives underwritten by intact marriages and strong homes. Some of these Americans even suppose that political activists and government leaders can substitute an ideological narrative for a natural family story. One particularly candid activist has openly expressed her willingness to bid “good riddance to the family” and its narrative, as she advances the narrative of progressive politics.[60] To be sure, a narrative of political involvement and government service can complement the narrative of family. But when politics and government supplant the narrative of marriage and family, Americans have reason to fear they have started down a road mapped out by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.[61] With good reason theologian Stanley Hauerwas has warned of the totalitarian consequences of political processes through which “people are uprooted from their particular loyalties and stories,” so making it possible for “the storyless masses” to be indoctrinated in “the ‘story’ of the state.” We must not, as journalist G.K. Chesterton remarks, “forget the fact of the family in the theory of the State.”[62]

But as the history of totalitarianism makes clear, government commissars serve as poor substitutes for spouses or parents or siblings. They are similarly poor surrogates for creative writers. To be sure, many contemporary writers in free countries are doing little to foster cultural health. The fact that much of contemporary fiction now reflects—as critic John R. McArthur notes—”the widespread breakdown in morals and Western family life” in “our degraded and profoundly immoral society” says much about the current crisis in both the lived narrative of family life and the vicarious narrative of literature.[63] To Panichas’s acute dismay, literary critics now generally respond to this contemporary fiction by choosing to “ignore and even disdain the moral dimension,” their insouciance another symptom of the gravity of the cultural crisis.[64] But then these are typically the same critics who reject the very possibility of narrative as anything but a temporary illusion.

But family life can make narrative a deep and precious reality, not an ephemeral illusion. This is the life-affirming and comedic reality experienced by Cathy Thrasher Usher, an ordinary American, an ordinary Virginian, as she looks back and discerns the narrative pattern of her life: “I love to laugh. I cherish my family…. [And] I am grateful for my life. I have experienced fear, felt grief and pain, and am grateful for my life.... I wake up to the birds singing, feeling the earth in my hands as I work in my garden, to enjoy a hug from a child and words of kindness from my husband.”[65] The priceless laughter of the Cathy Thrasher Ushers of the world is not the laughter of people deluded by a metaphysically unwarranted sense of narrative. It is a laughter that resonates with that of readers delighting in our greatest, our most life-affirming comedic literature. And though survey sociology may be too course an instrument (absolutely dreary compared to great poetry and fiction!) to capture such comedic laughter, that sociology does hint at such laughter in studies showing that men and women in intact marriages enjoy much greater happiness and life satisfaction than do single or divorced peers.[66] Without ever taking a class in sociology, the author of As You Like It would have understood that!

As they confront a post-modern world in which narrative is struggling to survive in life and in literature, Americans can only hope for the day when 21st-century Shakespeares and Dantes, Austens and Dickenses, and Causleys and Miloszes will again celebrate the “blessed bond of board and bed” that enables families to live out joyful and morally substantive narratives. Then young and old, men and women, parents and child, will join in a precious laughter that echoes the “mirth in heaven”!

Endnotes:

1 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. George Rice Carpenter (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 99-100.

2 Qtd. in Arnold J. Sameroff and Barara H. Fiese, “Narrative Connections in the Family Context: Summary and Conclusions,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 64.2(1999): 122.

3 Gebhard Allert and Gerlinde Sponholte, “Chronic Disease and the Meaning of Old Age,” Hastings Center Report 24.5(1994): 11-13.

4 Terri L. Orbuch, “People’s Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts,” American Review of Sociology 23(1997): 455-456.

5 Taylor qtd. in Martha Nussbaum, “Our Pasts, Ourselves,” Rev. of Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, by Charles Taylor, The New Republic 9 Apr. 1990: 29.

6 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd. Ed (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 216.

7 Barthes qtd. in Roberto Franzos, “Narrative Analysis—Or Why (and How) Sociologists Should be Interested in Narrative,” Annual Review of Sociology 24(1998): 517-518.

8 Allert and Sponholte, op. cit.

9 Ibid., emphasis added.

10 Owen Flanigan and Kathryn Jackson, “Justice, Care, and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited,” Ethics 97 (1987): 630.

11 Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Blankenhorn, “Man, Woman, and Public Policy: Difference and Dependency in the American Conversation,” Institute for American Values Working Paper, Pub. #WP3, Feb. 1991.

12 Clive Seale, “Dying Alone,” Sociology of Health and Illness 17 (1995): 376-392.

13 Cf. Robin Lydenberg, “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives, PMLA112 (1997): 1072-1086.

14 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 485.

15 Charles Causley, “Eden Rock,” Secret Destinations (Boston: David R. Godine, 1989), 114.

16 Letter from Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah Ballou, 14 July 1861, “Historical Document: Sullivan Ballou Letter,” The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns. 2002. PBS. 24 Jun. 2008 http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/war/ballou_letter.html.

17 Cf. Karen I. De Vogler and Peter Ebersole, “Adults’ Meaning in Life,” Psychological Reports 49 (1981): 87-90; Karen I. De Vogler and Peter Ebersole, “Young Adolescents’ Meaning in Life,” Psychological Reports 52 (1983): 427-431.

18 Robert M. Orrange, “Individualism, Family Values, and the Professional Middle Class: In-Depth Interviews with Advanced Law and MBA Students,” The Sociological Quarterly 44 (2003): 451-480.

19 Ibid.

20 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 309-310.

21 Robert P. George, “Law and Moral Purpose,” First Things Jan. 2008: 25.

22 Cf., e.g., John M. Wallace, Jr. et al., “Religion and U.S. Secondary School Students: Current Patterns, Recent Trends, and Sociodemographic Correlates,” Youth & Society 35 (2003): 98-125.

23 Elshtain, op. cit., 330.

24 John Florez, “”New Year Is Good Time to Reflect on Traditions,” Deseret News 1 Jan 2007: A9.

25 Jonathan Garfinkel, Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 11.

26 Wallace et al., op. cit.

27 Qtd. in William Baer, “An Interview with Mary Jo Salter,” Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry 3.1(2008): 19.

28 Thornton Wilder, By the Skin of Our Teeth (1942), in American Literature: The Makers and the Making, ed/ Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 2: 2373.

29 Cf. Bonnie Erbe, “Maybe schools should grade parents,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 11 Mar. 2001: 2J.

30 Stephen Demuth and Susan L. Brown, “Family Structure, Family Processes, and Adolescent Delinquency: The Significance of Parental Absence Versus Parental Gender,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 41(2004): 58-81.

31 George A. Panichas, Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), 97.

32 Cf. Marla E. Eisenberg et al., “Correlations Between Family Meals and Psychosocial Well-being Among Adolescents,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 158 (2004): 792-796; Elizabeth L. Brach, Kathleen A. Camara, and Robert F. Houser, Jr., “Patterns of Dinnertime Interaction in Divorced and Non-Divorced Families,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 32(2000): 125-139.

33 Cf. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living” (1941), Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 943-947

34 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1946), 187.

35 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1994), p. 138.

36 Vic Menard, “We Face a Growing Crisis in Literacy,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times 5 Dec. 2007: A15.

37 Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 8. 31

38 Joseph Bottum, “The Judgment of Memory,” First Things March 2008: 34.

39 Kernan, op.cit.

40 Cf. Panichas, Restoring, op. cit., 134-135.

41 Cf. Eyal Amiran, “Against Narrative Poetics: Postmodern Narrative Returns,” SubStance 25 (1996): 90-91.

42 Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 171-173.

43 Bertman cited in Bauman, op. cit. Cf. also Towers, “Hyperculture,” With Bated Breath: I Have Waited 11 Oct. 2007. 26 Jun. 2008 http://with-bated-breath. blogspot.com/2007/10/hyperculture.html.

44 Stephen Bertman, Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory (Westport: Praeger, 2000), 6, 74, 123.

45 George A. Panichas, The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt (Wilmington: ISI Books, 1999), 133.

46 Panichas, Restoring, op. cit., 5-6.

47 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “If We Are So Rich, Why Aren’t We Happy?” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 821-827.

48 Elshtain, op. cit., 329-332.

49 William Raspberry, “Parents Can Instill Values Via Family Tales,” Chicago Tribune 4 Aug. 1990: 13; cf. Bryce Christensen, “Stories Out of School: A Path Out of Moral Chaos,” The Family in America Aug. 1990: 5-8.

50 Cf. Shanta R. Dube et al., “Childhood Abuse, Neglect, and Household Dysfunction and the Risk of Illicit Drug Use: The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study,” Pediatrics 111(2003): 564-572.

51 David Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 240-280.

52 Cf. Paul Pearsall, The Power of the Family: Strength, Comfort, and Healing (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 43-35.

53 Cf. Ralph B. McNeal, Jr., “Extracurricular Activities and High School Dropouts,” Sociology of Education 68 (1998): 62-81; Mary Ann Powell and Toby L. Parcel, “Effects of Family Structure on the Earnings Attainment Process: Differences by Gender,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 (1997): 419-433.

54 Brian M. D’Onofrio et al., “A Genetically Informed Study of Marital Instability and Its Association with Offspring Psychopathology,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 114 (2005): 570-586; Steven F. Messner et al., “Nonmarital Fertility and the Effects of Divorce Rates on Youth Suicide Rates,” Journal of Marriage and Family 68 (2006): 1105-1111.

55 Thomas Parish “The Relationship Between Factors Associated With Father Loss and Individuals’ Level of Moral Judgment,” Adolescence 15 (1980): 535-539.

56 Cf. Stephen Schaefer, “Double or Nothing,” Boston Herald 23 Dec. 2002: 29.

57 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 222.

58 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, VI and XI, The Internet Classics, 25 Jun. 2008 http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html.

59 Cf. Allan Carlson, “Broken Homes, and Hearts,” Rev. of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of the Children of Divorce, by Elizabeth Marquardt, National Review 7 Nov. 2005: 55.

60 Judith Stacey, “Good Riddance to the Family: A Response to David Popenoe,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 55(1993): 545-546.

61 Cf. Bryce Christensen, “The Family in Utopia,” Renascence 44 (1991): 31-44.

62 G. K. Chesterton, “The Modern Surrender of Women,” As I Was Saying . . . A Chesterton Reader, ed. Robert Knille (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s, 1985), 143.

63 John R. MacArthur, “Commentary: Where Fiction Most Precisely Measures the Depths of Our Contemporary Malaise,” The Providence Journal 1 Jun. 2004: B5.

64 George A. Panichas, Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virtue (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999), 109.

65 Cathy Thrasher Usher, Letters to the Editor, Virginian Pilot 25 Dec. 1998: 4.

66 Steven Stack and Ross Eshleman, “Marital Status and Happiness: A 17-Nation Study,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(1998): 527-536.