tion of her day is a small party she is giving (rather
than, say, an epic battle or journey). By conveying
her thinking directly through stream-of-conscious-
ness narration, Woolf exposes the complicated,
nearly countless threads of Clarissa’s thought as she
goes about her day. In this way, the novel challenges
not only 19th-century novelistic conventions but a
predominant sexist society that values the accom-
plishments of “great men” as well. The character who
seems to most resemble Clarissa, the shell-shocked
soldier Septimus Smith, commits suicide at the
end of the novel. This grim conclusion brings up
two debates: first, whether suicide is ever ethically
permissible, and second, what responsibility society
has to returning soldiers. Haunting the entire novel
is World War I and questions about whether war
is ever justified and what its relation is to sexism at
home and imperialism abroad. One of the strengths
of Woolf ’s writing is the way in which it subtly
critiques misogynistic society, demonstrating, for
example, how much of the thinking and writing
deemed important (including the ethical philoso-
phies discussed above) are written by men or assume
a male agent and fail to account for the impact of
emotions and the subconscious on reason.
Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
extends the formal experimentation of Woolf and
O’Brien’s fellow Irishman James Joyce, offering a
much more humorous, though no less ethical stance
on writing. One of the novel’s many plots centers
on Dermot Trellis, a popular fiction writer who uses
character types to create marketable fiction. When
he sleeps, his characters come to life and, unhappy
with the roles they have been given, work to keep
the writer asleep while they put him on trial. In this
sense, this highly self-conscious work dramatizes the
argument forwarded by Levinas. Additionally, Trel-
lis’s decision to write a moral tale that nonetheless
includes enough smut and bad language to keep it
interesting offers a satiric commentary on the genre
of the novel, whose practitioners have time and
again defended the inclusion of “unsavory” parts as
necessary to the book’s overall moral purpose. While
the decision in this instance can be ridiculed as
self-serving, it does seem that works that are overly
didactic lack the complexity and therefore the stay-
ing power of other stories. It is clear that ethics will
continue to play an important part in literature for
some time to come.
See also Chestnutt, Charles W.: “Goo-
phered Grapevine, The;” Davis, Rebecca Har-
ding: LiFe in the iron MiLLs; Defoe, Daniel:
MoLL FLanders; Ibsen, Henrik: doLL’s house,
a; hedda GabLer; Ishiguro, Kazuo: reMains oF
the day, the; Kingsolver, Barbara: poisonwood
bibLe, the; Machiavelli, Niccolò: prince, the;
Malamud, Bernard: naturaL, the; McMurtry,
Larry: LonesoMe dove; Molière; Misanthrope,
the; Paine, Thomas: “Age of Reason, The”;
Thoreau, Henry David: “Resistance to Civil
Government”; Vonnegut, Kurt: sLauGhter-
house-Five; Wollstonecraft, Mary: vindica-
tion oF the riGhts oF woMan, a.
FURTHER READING
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2d ed.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans-
lated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett,
2002.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond
Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1998.
Daniel Ryan Morsefamily
Much has been written on the institution of family
in the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropol-
ogy, but one of the most famous comments on the
family comes from literature. Leo Tolstoy wrote, in
Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This
comment underscores the importance of family hap-
piness in our lives as human beings. From our family,
we get our beliefs and values—religious, political,
social. From our family, we learn to function in the
real world as adults. We spend an average of 18 years
in this environment, and its atmosphere, positive
and negative, cannot help but deeply affect us for
life. Furthermore, it is not just the families in which
we are raised that shape our worldview, but also the
families in which we function as adults. As parents
and spouses, we tend to prioritize our families over
all other aspects of life, and also to see our families30 family