Family in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa Family plays an extremely important role in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Biological families drive the action and the plot of Clarissa. Clarissa’s family tries to force her into marriage with Solmes and therefore drives her into the waiting arms of Lovelace. Throughout Clarissa, biological families fail. James Harlowe Senior, weak from the gout, passes his paternal authority on to his son, creating a fictional version of kinship. Lovelace’s family does not control him. The biological family fails because of a lack of paternal authority and failure of patriarchal succession. The characters in Clarissa must create their own fictional versions of kinship because of the biological family’s failure. Both Clarissa and Lovelace, towards the end of their lives, surround themselves with false families which they place above their biological families. Clarissa’s days at Mr. Smith’s glove shop, her will, and Lovelace’s letters after her death show that two characters let down by their families must create their own fictional versions of families. As Clarissa stays at Mr. Smith’s glove shop, she desperately creates the family she needs around her. She supplies “herself the father and mother her dutiful heart pants after” (1082). Her family has abandoned and cursed her. Consequently, she must create the family she needs in her dying days. Clarissa praises Mr. Goddard, the apothecary, for his “paternal looks” (1075). She is obliged to both Mr. Goddard and her doctor for their “paternal care and concern for her” (1248). As Clarissa nears her death, references to fictional version of kinship become more common. She thanks Reverend Dr. Lewen for a letter “containing so many paternal lines…” (1255). T... ... middle of paper ... ...ained and controlled him. However, Lovelace is never restrained or controlled. Lovelace is a victim of the absence of paternal authority and the failure of patriarchal succession. His family lets him down. Therefore he must, like Clarissa, surrounds himself with a fictional family. Fictionalization of kinship operates throughout Clarissa. It is present in Clarissa’s grandfather’s will and persists through Belford’s postscript. The characters in Clarissa must create their own versions of family because their biological relations repeatedly fail them. Clarissa and Lovelace are victims of the absence of paternal authority and the failure of patriarchal succession. They therefore create families that are superior to the natural family. Clarissa and Lovelace, although extremely different characters, must both share the ability to create their own versions of kinship.
Nettles and Catrin present parent-child relationships in different ways, possibly as a result of the authors’ personal experiences. The father in Nettles tries to protect his son from any pain and danger the world throws at him. In Catrin, there is too a parent-child relationship between the mother and daughter, but at times it seems strained and fraught with conflict.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
The thought of her brothers still being in her former home environment in Maine hurt her. She tried to think of a way to get at least one of her brothers, the sickly one, to come and be with her. She knew that her extended family was financially able to take in another child, and if she showed responsibility, there would be no problem (Wilson, 40). She found a vacant store, furnished it, and turned it into a school for children (Thinkquest, 5). At the age of seventeen, her grandmother sent her a correspondence, and requested her to come back to Boston with her brother (Thinkquest, 6).
The book begins with Sara at the young age of ten years old. Sara portrays her father as a strict and religious man, who runs the family almost as a dictator would. At one point in the novel, Sara even goes as far as to say her father is ‘more terrible than the Tsar of Russia.’ We see Reb’s overbearing control over each family member through his infallible disapproval of the men each sister brings home. Whether it is for religious or monetary reasons, Reb manages to find some reason to dislike each one of the men with whom the sisters fall in love. In a series of sad events, we witness Reb disapprove of each man of the house in a very controlling way. Reb takes matters into his own hands and plays the role of a matchmaker, selecting men of his choice for his daughters. Although Reb believes his judgeme...
Alfred and Louisa Dorsets’ relationship is not literally incestuous; that is, they are not lovers. Rather, their seemingly incestuous relationship is symbolic of a much larger societal characteristic – a type of incest defined in much more expansive terms. Mr. and Miss Dorset engage in a different brand of incest known as “social incest.” Simply put, social incest is the inclination to only marry within one’s own class. In an interview with Barbara
However, their way of life slowly and surely became less alarming and less foreign to Augusten. The characters that reside in the Fitch home allow him to grow and expand his view and perspective. Other patients of the doctor reside in the home as well, in place of the similar experience to staying in a psychiatric ward. Both the patients and the members of the Fitch family offer colorful stories in contrast to the prim and proper life Augusten had been living previously. Hope and Natalie Fitch, two of the doctor’s bickering sisters, soon became Augusten’s dearest friends. Hope, who was nearly twice his age, taught him to live more freely through her child like spirit. She opened his mind through her spontaneous actions and casual but close relationship with God. He and Natalie, who was just a year older and initially struck him as the most outlandish and peculiar person he had ever encountered, bonded over their newly discovered similarities in forbidden love. At age thirteen, Augusten began deeply intimate romantic relationship with the doctor’s adopted son, who was twenty years his senior. Their love reeked of problems, with Augusten’s boyfriend, Neil’s abusive behavior leading the
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway undergoes an internal struggle between her love for society and life and a combined affinity for and fear of death. Her practical marriage to Richard serves its purpose of providing her with an involved social life of gatherings and parties that others may find frivolous but Clarissa sees as “an offering” to the life she loves so well. Throughout the novel she grapples with the prospect of growing old and approaching death, which after the joys of her life seems “unbelievable… that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…” At the same time, she is drawn to the very idea of dying, a theme which is most obviously exposed through her reaction to the news of Septimus Smith’s suicide. However, this crucial scene r...
The body of Kingston's essay refers to a story her mother told her about her aunt. Her mother used stories reflecting events of the family's past to try to teach her important lessons of life. In the story, Kingston's aunt becomes pregnant outside of her marriage. Since the pregnancy occurred during a time period when f...
Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...
The plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun, deal with the love, honor, and respect of family. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, the caring but overbearing and over protective mother, wants to be taken care of, but in A Raisin in the Sun, Mama, as she is known, is the overseer of the family. The prospective of the plays identify that we have family members, like Amanda, as overprotective, or like Mama, as overseers. I am going to give a contrast of the mothers in the plays.
The characterization of Cato and Emerson’s stepmother and father is what lead to the parental neglect on the two brothers. In the short story, “The Farmer’s Children,” the stepmother is characterized as
Afterwards, an important plot development occurs, previously Aunty Bundle refuses to accept Amrith’s relatives but gives in upon being convinced by Uncle Lucky showing that the relationship of individuals from opposing families can unite the two as a whole.
Aubery Tanqueray, a self-made man, is a Widower at the age of Forty two with a beautiful teenage daughter, Ellean whom he seems very protective over. His deceased wife, the first Mrs. Tanqueray was "an iceberg," stiff, and assertive, alive as well as dead (13). She had ironically died of a fever "the only warmth, I believe, that ever came to that woman's body" (14). Now alone because his daughter is away at a nunnery he's found someone that can add a little life to his elite, high class existence; a little someone, we learn, that has a past that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of his friends.
Lingenfelter, S.. (1985). [Review of A Critique of the Study of Kinship]. American Ethnologist, 12(2), 372–374. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/644228
Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.