The Breakdown of the Family: Fictional Case Studies in Contemporary Novels for Young People

The trouble the American family has been having recently is not news to any of us anymore. We take note, as we watch ourselves, our friends, and the culture at large, of the factors within the family and outside of it that stress its structure. And we note the consequences. Sometimes a family breaks apart. Sometimes its integrity is badly damaged. Sometimes, rarely, there is a new and dynamic adaptation. But whatever its state, the family must come to terms with the strange shifts that seem to keep cropping up anew in our culture, confusing everybody and demanding either to be assimilated or denied.

In the interest of assimilation, we are seeing more stories for children designed to instruct them in how to grapple with these threats to family life. Adults have always told stories for the purpose of initiating children into the psychological norms of the culture. But what we seem to have now are stories told to initiate children into the psychological confusion as well. In the books discussed below, children live in families that are failing, their integrity undermined. The adults, being weak and fallible, are unable to help children face this confusion. The children, therefore, must be resourceful, not out of some feisty adventurousness, but because the families fail them psychologically and because the survival of their personalities intact requires it.

The four books that will be discussed here are: The Man Without a Face by Isabelle Holland (1972), The Drowning Boy by Susan Terris (1972), Nobody's Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh (1974), and Where the Lilies Bloom by Vera and Bill Cleaver (1969). They offer a representative sample of recently published novels portraying variations in family life. One problem which seems to recur in these books is the failure of adult leadership. The children either live with leaderless families or with families in which the leader is a despot who rigidly adheres to a misguided code. The father's role particularly tends to be distorted. Mothers, relegated to either some passive or intrusive role, are at any rate of diminished importance. In these stories, the father as a strong guiding light, that kind and knowing figure, seems to have passed from the culture. In his revered place is either some pathological patriarch or, just as bad, someone whose absence forces the child to find substitute leadership in him/herself, perhaps prematurely, or to seek it elsewhere. Authority in these stories is deaf to the psychological needs of children and to the changing culture. Where leadership in families exists, it obstructs. It is an authority that stands as clearly for psychological immobility as the child's resourcefulness stands for growth.

This leads us to the morals of these stories, for I do think these stories all have to do with instruction, and particularly psychological/moral instruction. The authors attempt to demonstrate the problems confronting children in troubled families by presenting autocratic characters who offer values which readers must infer to be false. The questions posed to each child protagonist are: first how to circumvent these powerful but false values; then how to find values appropriate to the child's emerging sense of self; and lastly, once found, how to integrate these new values into the family. Simply because they are moral, these tales are profoundly optimistic, no matter how delightfully fantastic or how sadly realistic; they imply that if the particular moral is learned, change will follow. The moral well-learned is presented as a powerful ally, perhaps even a magical one. This presentation is seductive then. Each of these books explores a particularly tricky family situation in which what the children most need is some kind of moral guidance. And this is not to be found in the family or at school. But consciously or unconsciously the authors of these books suggest that there are answers and that they, the authors, will be the beacons.

The first book, Isabelle Holland's The Man Without a Face, addresses the issue of adolescent homosexuality. Holland seems to have a twofold purpose here. One...