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Family Secrets
 The
Schiavo family tragedy, which has begotten
such bitter national controversy, reminds us how complicated and vexed
family matters can
be.  It’s
easy to speak
sentimentally of “family values,” as if cozy affection and
settled morality could be taken for granted, but it doesn’t always
work out that way in our real experience.
Often, thank heaven, it does.
Let’s not forget or belittle that. There are many happy families and,
no matter what Tolstoy says, they aren’t all alike. They may not be
quite as dramatic as unhappy families, and they may not make headlines
quite as often, but under scrutiny they can be every bit as interesting.
In recent years psychologists have
begun to study happiness for a change. Psychology has generally been the
study of pathologies and abnormalities — failure, in a word — but
now it’s turning its attention to happy and successful people. That
study should include families that don’t wind up in court, jail, or angry
memoirs.
Still, close kinship is no guarantee
of bliss, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. C.S. Lewis once wrote
that the Victorian sentimentalization of the family produced the reaction of
a “savage” anti-family literature in Ibsen, Shaw, Samuel Butler,
and just about every early modernist novel you can name; one thinks of P.G.
Wodehouse’s unsparing realism about aunts.
This reaction wasn’t
confined to literature. It’s still with us, in the form of “sexual
revolution” for instance. Today, in an inversion of Victorian
sentimentalism, one gets the impression that the only happy marriages are
those of same-sex couples. Among the rest of us, the fatherless household
has become virtually normal. As Ellis Cose has observed, the problems
observed in the black family a generation ago now afflict white families with
similar frequency. Should that surprise us?
From the Greeks to Shakespeare
to the Russian novel to Tennessee Williams, literature and drama have dealt
with the most embarrassing (white) family secrets. And the remarkable
thing is how close to the bone they can get. When you watch King Lear make
a horrible fool of himself and tear his family apart with his crazy demands,
you don’t feel you’re watching some incomprehensible
stranger. If he doesn’t remind you of your own dad, you may have an
uncle just like him.
![[Breaker quote: The survival of the family]](2005breakers/050322.gif) I
recently caught up with a family I used to be close to but hadn’t seen in
decades. These people, all lovable, aren’t speaking to each other
anymore. It’s sad, even heart-piercing, but not that unusual. You
don’t really know a family, sometimes, until you know things about
them you wish you didn’t.
The Schiavo case also reminds us
what has become of marriage. We used to think you had to stick it through in
sickness and in health, but soon we may have to amend wedding vows to take
into the account the option of pulling the plug. Isn’t relieving oneself
of an unwanted spouse a fundamental human right? Michael Schiavo, Robert
Blake, Scott Peterson — sure, we may disapprove of their methods,
but don’t we all know where they’re coming from?
Such men show that conjugal love
isn’t unconditional; at least not always, or not for long. Men may
abandon their children, but they seldom want them dead. Even the man who
kills his wife may still adore the kids she gave him. It’s Terri
Schiavo’s parents who want her to live.
Comedy rings down the curtain
just when everyone is about to get married and live happily ever after.
Tragedy shows what may actually happen afterward, when Othello and
Desdemona get around to setting up housekeeping and discover each
other’s little quirks. Soon the neighbors are talking, and finally Verdi
is writing an opera. From romance to family squabbles to La Scala —
you never know where it will lead.
But Otello is a
worst-case scenario. In spite of everything, there are still happy families,
and even husbands who stand by their hopelessly ailing wives to the bitter
end. In fact, these are the norm we should be paying more close attention to.
The beleaguered and battered
family still exists, and it still manages to produce healthy children. It has
even survived all of our enlightened modern society’s determined
attempts to reform it. That’s because modern society knows when
something is working wrong, but hasn’t a clue when, or why,
it’s working right.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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