Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Living in Families Essay
How does the average person view the common family? In the picture of â€Å"a happy family†on commercials, conflict and hatred are replaced with sweetness and adoration – qualities that are apparent on the family members’ smiling faces. Pure happy days are simply not realistic. In real life, families have good reason to frown occasionally, which leads to a statement by the author Willa Cather about a family relationship. She comments that the seed of the family conflict is from the clash of each members’ individual personality, or identity. As one builds own identity, there is no choice but to struggle for appealing his or her ego to other family members; even though they are a family who is supposed to understand and concede to one another, ideally speaking. Cather also says that family members pursue the sense of security from mutual existence, and they want to eschew from the restraint and infringe on individual privacy at the same time.    Three works of literature which support Willa Cather’s idea about family relationships are: â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing†by Tillie Olsen, â€Å"Two Kinds†by Amy Tan, and â€Å"Sonny’s Blues†by James Baldwin. Through the eyes of these characters, we can see how the development of identity causes conflicts between family members. Ironically, they continue to pull away from each other even though they need each other. We should explore how the characters get over the â€Å"tragic necessity†(Cather 107-120).            Though the main conflict in â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing†doesn’t seem to appear on the surface the author shows that the conflict occurs inside narrator’s mind. When the narrator has Emily, her daughter, she â€Å"is nineteen and it is the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression†(341). Living in the new era as a nineteen-year-old single mother, she has to confront her new identity. In other words, there is a struggle between two identities inside her, as an individual who tries to survive in tough circumstance and as a mother who tries to love her daughter. As she confesses that she â€Å"was a distracted mother†(345), her unstable identity does not allow her to take superior care of Emily. This is the situation which Cather referred to as a â€Å"double life†(107-120). The narrator has suffered from â€Å"the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends†(Cather 107-120).            In laborious circumstances, her only family, Emily, is the reason why she is still alive, but also the burden from which she wants to escape. This is shown in â€Å"what was in my face when I looked at her,†the scene in which she realizes her frown face at her daughter saying â€Å"there were all the acts of love†(341). Because of her desperate fate, the narrator unconsciously tries â€Å"pulling away from†her daughter even though she â€Å"seeks†to feel (Cather 107-120) maternal affection for Emily. This irony is represented by Cather’s idea of â€Å"the tragic necessity of human life†(107-120).            At the end of the story, the narrator shows her will to finish the conflict she has endured. According to Emily who never believed herself to be special, finds her identity and path, which concludes with her mother lightening the pressure about being a role of breeder by â€Å"letting her be†(345).            Contrary to â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing,†the main conflict between family members in â€Å"Two Kinds†is revealed clearly; it is about the relationship between a mother and daughter. The peculiarity of this story is that the basis of the conflict is a clash of two different cultures, which can be interpreted as a clash of two identities; the Chinese mother who wants â€Å"obedient daughter†and the Americanized daughter, named Mei, who wants to â€Å"follow her own heart†(353). Her mother’s wishful thinking is clear on this quote; â€Å"you can be anything you want to be†(346), which means actually â€Å"you can be anything I want you to be.†This attitude is very different from the mother’s attitude in â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing.†On contrary to â€Å"letting her be†(345), Mei’s mother keeps pushing her daughter to do what she wants, not what her daughter wants – this is Mei’s mother’s personality. Mei’s response is:  â€Å"I won’t be what I’m not†(348). As a result, the conflict in this story is caused by the clash of individual identities, as Cather describes.            Moreover, the trouble reaches a peak at their quarrel following the piano recital. In this scene, Mei pretends to â€Å"pull away†(Cather 107-120) from her mother by saying â€Å"the magic words†(353). What Mei says was not from the bottom of her heart: it could be seen when Mei gets the piano as â€Å"a sign of forgiveness†(353), she â€Å"feels proud, as if it were a shiny trophy†(354). In other words, she cannot deny that she misses her family even though she wants to get away from them. After all, the daughter seeks to get out of the â€Å"tragic necessity†(Cather 107-120) by realizing that the two piano pieces â€Å"pleading child†and â€Å"perfectly contented†(354) is one song, which means that the pleading child has become perfectly contented.            Compared to the other two works above, the conflict in â€Å"Sonny’s Blues†occurs between a sibling relationship, not between parent and child relationship as in the preceding examples. The origin of the conflict is the same; the clash of identities. At the beginning of the story, the fact that the narrator, Sonny’s brother, gets Sonny’s news from the newspaper shows that the relationship between two brothers is not secure; their relationship as a family has already been â€Å"pulled away†(Cather 107-120). The reason why they have been separated from each other for a long time was the lack of comprehension of the other’s individual personality. To overcome â€Å"the darkness outside†(384), which describes the discrimination in that era, both brother have to develop their identities which helps them as they endure hardships. Unfortunately, the identities they developed are very different; the narrator is practical and conservative, and Sonny is emotional and unconventional.            The clash of the identities has divided the brothers and causes Sonny to pursue â€Å"escaping, running away, and trying to break the net†(Cather 107-120) which leads to his addiction to heroin. In fact, Sonny â€Å"had always been a good boy†(377) as a member of the family. In his subconscious, he had â€Å"another secret, passionate and intense†(Cather 107-120). Though the narrator tries to care for Sonny in order to fulfill the promise made to his mother, He cannot understand Sonny’s â€Å"another†(Cather 107-120) aspect. This conflict is the reason why they keep pulling away each other.            Nevertheless, at the end of story, they get back together with perfect comprehension. Listening to Sonny’s play, the narrator â€Å"understands, at last†(398), his brother’s identity and why they were pulling away from each other; he realizes that the root of the conflict the brothers had was not because of Sonny’s rebellion but of his own misunderstanding of the suffering Sonny has endured. The brothers prepare to overcome the â€Å"tragic necessity,†which initially separated them, with â€Å"a Scotch and milk†(399) in the end.            In conclusion, through the analysis of the three works of literature, Willa Cather’s idea of â€Å"the double life†and â€Å"tragic necessity of human relationship†(107-120) can be seen as a universal theme in various stories. The development of identity causes the conflicts between family members, and the irony is that they continue to pull away from each other even though they need each. In Cather’s view, family members have a chance to overcome the conflicts they have had, as demonstrated by the narrator of â€Å"I Stand Here Ironing,†Mei from â€Å"Two Kinds,†and Sonny’s brother from â€Å"Sonny’s Blues†. Each character gets the better of his or her own conflicts to a certain extent. As they should; families are supposed to stick together. References Cather, Willa. â€Å"Katherine Mansfield.† Willa Cather on Writing. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. 107-120. Schilb, John, and Clifford, John. Making Literature Matter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006 Â
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