Family Values: From Merry Olde England to Fire Island

An artist friend of mine spent a couple of days last week vacationing with one of her friends on Fire Island, a narrow island of summer homes off the southern coast of Long Island. She describes it as a very family sort of place—the part of the island, that is, that’s not a gay enclave. And therein lies the beef, such as it is.

For my artist friend is not a family person. She was once married, but that’s over. Didn’t have any kids, and glad of it. She has no desire to get married again and, in particular, NO KIDS. She’s skeptical about families. She finds them, one gathers, rather creepy.

And so she told a bunch of us, time and again, over a long Friday afternoon lunch. Frolicking in the sun and surf, communing with nature, all that was fine and refreshing. What a vacation’s for. But doing that in the presence of FAMILIES, mommies and daddies and their kids, why are these people oppressing me? And people DO oppress her over the fact that she’s a woman who HAS NO KIDS. Ewe! How unnatural, they beam at her. No! how sane, she protects herself, people, too many people, will be the death of the earth, and it’s families that cause people to multiply multiply multiply.

Why families? she wonders. Biology, comes the reply, from another friend, we’ve got these urges, and these urges produce families.

Well, yes, we do. And those urges do crank out families. But is THAT what families are about? Is that ALL they’re about? Perhaps there’s more to families than mere biology.

Could a commitment to one’s family be a way of committing oneself to something beyond oneself? If that is so, well, then things become very complicated. It’s not simply that self-transcending commitment can take many forms. But that there’s a world of difference between inflating oneself to fill the world under one guise or another, and committing to THAT, and committing oneself to something outside, other than, one self. The problem is that YOU who are at the center of this commitment may not be able to tell the difference.

Shakespeare on the Family, Sorta

So, let’s back up, and take it step by step. But let’s take those steps through Shakespeare, because he was very much interested in the family, and depicted a number of them that didn’t work very well. Like Hamlet’s family, or Macbeth’s. But we need to be careful, however, because “family” didn’t have the same resonance for the Elizabethans that it has for us and those Fire Islanders. While living arrangements tended to be nuclear, relations with extended family were more active than they are today. Further, marriages were not supposed to be contracted on the basis of love, which was regarded as much too fickle for such a basic political arrangement. Families, especially among the aristocracy, were a matter of practical politics; they were about forming alliances.

But things were changing, and that’s what we want to look at, hints of change in Shakespeare’s plays.

Let’s look at King Lear. As king, Lear’s already more than himself; he’s the kingdom. And it’s the kingdom that’s at stake when he asks his daughters: How much to you love me? The one who loves him the most gets the largest chunk of the kingdom. What a deal.

Big mistake. Lear ends up entirely dispossessed and Cordelia, the daughter he most loved, gets murdered.

Just what mistake did he make? Well, he certainly misjudged the answers his daughters gave him. But Lear’s mistake went deeper. His mistake was two-fold: 1) in asking the question at all, and 2) in making the fate of the kingdom depend on the answer. The problem with the question itself is that that answers can be easily faked, which both Goneril and Reagan did, while Cordelia, the honest, refused to answer.

The second problem is different. By making the division of his kingdom depend on the answer to such a question, Lear confused two arenas which should have been kept separate: affairs of the state and matters of the heart. Such confusion was perhaps natural given that statecraft often took the form of political marriages and that succession did pass through kinship bonds. But affection should have been kept out of it. Business is business.

Fat chance!

With that in mind, let’s look at another play, Antony and Cleopatra. Both Antony and Cleopatra were rulers; she ruled Egypt and he was one of the three triumviri who ruled the Roman Empire. They met, and they fell hopelessly in love with one another. And, so we’re led to believe, that may have cost them their kingdoms. They lost a war, Antony committed suicide when he’d thought Cleo had done so (but hadn’t—it’s complicated) and Octavius Caesar, the victorious triumvir, planned to parade Cleopatra before the Romans as his great prize. She’d have none of it and so really and truly did kill herself.

Caesar lost. Well, yeah, he won the war and went on to become the first Roman Emperor. But he saw that, in some way, those love-besotted suicides had won something. He speaks the final lines of the play:

She shall be buried by her Antony;
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral,
And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
High order in this great solemnity.

They’re famous and for that they merit a state funeral. In that odd back-handed way Shakespeare was able to affirm love between a man and a woman as something comparable in metaphysical weight to affairs of state. It was a realm in which one could become more than oneself, and wonderfully so. Matters of the heart thus won out over statecraft.

Finally, let’s look at The Tempest. Prospero had been deprived of his dukedom by his usurping brother, Antonio, who had been aided by King Alonso, and made his way to an island where he lived with his daughter, Miranda, and two strange helpers, Ariel and Caliban. It so happened that one day Antonio, Alonso, and Alonso’s son Ferdinand were in the neighborhood, so Prospero arranged for a storm to wreck them on his island, presumably so he could arrange for a little revenge, which he achieves, but nothing that inflicts permanent damage.

But also so he could arrange a husband for his daughter. And it worked, Miranda saw handsome young Ferdinand and fell in love, according to plan. What sort of plan is it in which one has one’s beloved daughter fall in love with the son of one’s enemy? Yes, she needs a husband, but this? That’s not supposed to be how it works with families.

Compare this story with that in Romeo and Juliet. There we have children from two warring families. They fall in love and their family’s wars drive them to suicide. Family matters, that is, the political alliances of the extended family, take precedence over individual desires. Against that standard Prospero’s behavior is most peculiar.

As I point out in At the Edge of the Modern:

Most importantly, Prospero has served as mother to Miranda, as well as father. When they were floating at sea Miranda "wast that did preserve me! Thou didst smile,/ Infused with a fortitude from heaven" (1.2.153 - 154). He tells her that "I have done nothing but in care of thee" (1.2.16). Prospero certainly isn't the only Shakespearean father with a strong emotional investment in his daughter (cf. Boose 1982), but the quality of that investment is different, it isn't so entangled with the masculine requirements of honor and power as is the very strong investment of, for example, Capulet, Brabantio, or Lear. The way in which Prospero actively works to bring about Miranda's marriage distinguishes him from other Shakespearean fathers. He puts his daughter's need for a husband above his need for her. In this he displays a generosity of spirit which is fundamentally feminine.

But Shakespeare worked awfully hard to create this Prospero, this man whose generosity is so different from that of other Shakespearean males. Arguably it took Shakespeare his entire career to do it. And that it took the play a couple of centuries to find an audience suggests that its emotional resonance may have been a tough sell.

But Shakespeare’s works, I’m suggesting, is one of the imaginative sources of the idea that a family is a vehicle for self-transcendence. He did it by counter-pointing the political motives of aristocratic characters against their merely personal ones and, in the process, he repurposed the political to reconstruct the family as a new sphere of self-transcendence for the parents. For the overarching conclusion to The Tempest is political, Prospero is returned to his dukedom; but that end is incidental to finding a husband for his daughter.

Back to Fire Island

It took decades of novels to work out the of Shakespeare’s achievement and to package them for a rising middle class. But, as we know, reading novels, even good ones, is no guarantee of anything but, well, reading novels.

And then came the movies and TV. During the 1950s sitcom after sitcom mythologized the family as a haven of happiness in a heartless world. And what happened?

Crash! All gone. Women became liberated, got jobs, and up went the divorce rate. Now that they were no longer dependent on their husbands for an income, women refused to put up with bad marriages.

But the myth lives on. Perhaps because we have little else to hang on to, unless, of course, you believe in one of the two GREAT RAPTURES just over the horizon, the Christian apocalyptic one, or the techno-utopian one. And so the Fire Islanders celebrate their happy families—but how many of those moms and dads are, in fact, step-moms and step-dads?—and my artist friend wonders about it all, waiting for her muse to get her @ss in gear and do some more self-transcending.