Membership and Its Privileges: The Vision of Family and Community in the Fiction of Wendell Berry

Most readers familiar with Wendell Berry's novels and short stories will appreciate that his creation of the fictional Port William community has given him a unique perspective from which to examine the concept of family. Serving as the setting in each of his eight novels, the small farming community of Port William enables Berry to return to flesh out the same individual characters in ever greater detail and thus to give more and more history and perspective on the families of which these individuals are a part. The gradual accretion of detail through a multiplicity of perspectives finally creates multifaceted portraits of these families as they face different challenges during the tumultuous changes taking place in rural American communities since the Civil War. Throughout his novels (and his almost thirty short stories), Berry returns again and again to characters representing several generations of some of the older Port William families, including the Feltners, the Beechums, the Coulters, and the Catletts, but many other peripheral families reappear in these narratives as well. All of these families are viewed obliquely, through stories concentrated on individuals such as Mat Feltner, who serves as the centerpiece of Berry's early third-person narrative titled A Place on Earth. But of course Mat and many of his relatives reappear in later novels. For instance, Andy Catlett and Hannah Coulter, who appear as minor characters related to Mat Feltner in A Place on Earth, are given full-length novels written from their own first-person perspectives later on in Berry's literary career. One consequence of returning to characters and a distinctive setting in this way is that minor characters in one story are humanized more fully in subsequent narratives to create the sense that everyone matters, that everyone has a story, a history, a set of hopes, a unique and unrepeatable personality. In other words, an outcome of reading broadly in Berry's novels is a sense that there are no minor characters, which is to say that there are no minor persons. Another consequence of presenting such a thorough picture of the human community of Port William is that the community itself effectively becomes a character featured in each of the novels, a character that is understood as a particular web of marriages, familial relations, and friendships. As a character, this community lives and grows and changes and even decays over time; it is an organic reflection of the persons of which it consists.

As a setting, Berry's Port William functions much like William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or J. R. R. Tolkien's even more elaborate Middle Earth; in each of these imaginative realms, the setting acts as a sort of common denominator linking story to story, providing continuity and acting as a semantic framework in which particular actions and symbols have particular meanings. In the case of Port William, it may be said that two communities exist: one may be defined by cold census data, physical topography and buildings, a zip code, or certain GPS coordinates, all of which are summed up by a dot on a map. The other, and more vital, community in Berry's novels may more rightly be understood as a communion of persons bound together by kinship and friendship, by shared memories and history, by working together on the land, and, most crucially, by self-sacrificing love. Thus, the novels make plain that mere kinship, a shared environment, and common work are not enough to move people beyond being a congregation of individuals in the pursuit of self-interested economic gain; indeed, the novels continually underscore that caritas, or self-giving love, is required to bind persons into a community that may enrich them emotionally and spiritually. This is the living community to which some of Berry's characters refer as "The Membership." In the 2004 novel Hannah Coulter, Hannah relates her brother-in-law Burley Coulter's understanding of this unique kind of community, viewed in this instance on the occasion of relatives and friends joined in...