as coherent units, united in solidarity against the
outside world. These family ties can be a soothing,
strengthening force, helping us to battle life’s trials.
However, these ties, always complicated, can also
work to destroy us, rob us of the emotional tools
we need to survive, and provide us with no defenses
when trouble sets in.
The families into which we are born and the
families we create as we get older hold such impor-
tance for us because they are our primary sources
of identification. The answer to the question “Who
am I?” lies, in large part, in who our families are. The
sociologist Jerome Kagan notes that children iden-
tify most readily with their parents, and that before
adolescence they believe they share the same basic
qualities and values with their “parental models”
(Kagan et al. 40). In Chaim Potok’s The chosen,
David struggles with his father’s identity as a rabbi
and Reuven struggles with his father’s identity as
an academic. Neither boy feels the chosen path
is necessarily the right one for him, but because
they identify so strongly with their fathers, they
are confused about who they are and who they are
supposed to be. Ultimately, although they will, in a
sense, trade paths, with Reuven entering the rabbin-
ate and David going to graduate school, the bonds
they formed with their families in childhood will
serve them well.
Not all family identifications are positive, of
course. In Eugene O’Neill’s LonG day’s Jour-
ney into niGht, the Tyrones all feel that they are
doomed to never achieve their dreams and goals pre-
cisely because they are Tyrones. Brothers Edmund
and Jamie, one a tubercular alcoholic and sometime
merchant mariner and the other a failed alcoholic
actor, are both trapped in a family system that will
not allow them happiness, only dreams of happiness.
Their father is a cheap, belittling alcoholic whose
own dreams of vaudeville success died, and their
mother is a morphine addict constantly in mourn-
ing for the son she lost as an infant and the “normal”
life she gave up to marry Tyrone. For each of the
Tyrones, “who they are” seems sadly predetermined.
In addition to helping to identify us, family
also provides us with a haven in times of adversity.
Especially in the modern Western world, according
to Edmund Shorter, there is a “special sense of soli-
darity that separates the domestic union from the
surrounding community” (205). Families have a ten-
dency to protect their own and to shut out the out-
side world if need be. Even families who participate
heavily in the community, such as the March family
in Louisa May Alcott’s LittLe woMen, put fam-
ily before others. For instance, when they receive a
telegram that Mr. March is ill, Marmee goes off to
Washington, D.C., to be with him, while Jo sells her
hair to finance the trip. The entire family worries
over Beth when she is ill and mourns her deeply
when she dies, with Jo and Amy putting aside their
differences for the sake of their beloved sister. In
Tennessee Williams’s The GLass MenaGerie, the
“safe” haven of family actually becomes a handicap
to both Laura and Tom Wingfield. Because Laura
has the security of knowing she can cocoon herself
away from the outside world that terrifies her so
much, she never overcomes her painful shyness and
cannot function outside her family’s apartment. For
Tom, because his mother expects him to take care of
the two of them, the “haven” becomes a prison, and
he can think of nothing but escape, first the meta-
phorical escape of alcohol and movies and finally
the literal escape of a job that will take him far away.
The Wingfield family are able to keep their
troubles locked up in an apartment because that
is how families work. If they so choose, they may
stay behind closed doors. This domestic sphere, as
it is sometimes called, is not subject to what society
might want, but only what the family itself desires.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke of this
separation between the “public sphere” and the
“private sphere,” saying that public people must be
responsible and rational at all times because they
participate wholly in both private life and the life
of the community around them. Therefore, they
must have the highest moral standards and the
most exacting sense of justice (Elshtain 53). Private
people, on the other hand, need not live up to high
ideals; they need only possess a “limited goodness”
as it applies to the sphere in which they dwell (54).
The family, then, as the nexus of the “private sphere”
is important, but only because it provides a sanctuary
from public life. Those most closely associated with
the family, women and children, need only aspire
to this “limited goodness.” This view, unfortunately,family 31