[These materials have been excerpted by the author from Jerome Bump, "The Family Dynamics of the Reception of Art," Style 31.2 (1997): 328-350]
book of literary criticism has finally been devoted to using
family dynamics in the services of literary criticism:
Paula
Marantz Cohen's The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the
Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (1991). Cohen places
Richardson's
Clarissa, Austen's Mansfield Park, Emily
Brontë's
Wuthering Heights, Eliot's The Mill on the
Floss
and James's The Awkward Age in the context of the family
system
theory that emerged from schizophrenia research, represented by Kerr
and Bowen.
Believing that the "cross-sexual, cross-generational relationships of
father
and daughter functioned as the core of the nuclear family" (22), Cohen
focuses
on the sick daughter's role in the family as the bearer of the
family's
symptoms. She traces the ways in which psychosomatic illness performs
a
regulating function, maintaining the closed family system, and on the
relationship between "the novel's thematic drive to establish a closed
family
system" and "its formal drive to closure" (29).
While family systems theory is but one of three contemporary psychologies John V. Knapp relates to literature in Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism (1996), he adds many dimensions to the approach pioneered by Cohen. He presents thorough, convincing defenses of interdisciplinary literary scholarship, especially integration of contemporary psychology and literary criticism, and of mimetic or "realistic" literary characterization in the age of postmodernism. He shows us how to reconstruct "a fictional family's system and its emotional life" (61) in terms of the "mimesis" discussed by Tallis (In , 69), Phelan (50), Graff, Hochman and Wachs. He convinces us that we are "inhabitants of a world not entirely or primarily constituted out of parts of speech" (Tallis, Not 63), a world in which language is not self-sufficient but embedded in society and history, especially the history of individual families (6).
Moreover, he brings to literary study the family systems theory that informs the practices of the thousands of family and marriage therapists (who greatly outnumber practicing psychoanalysts). He demonstrates the relevance of this widely effective contemporary psychology to Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Roth's Call It Sleep. Like Cohen he discusses triangulation and scapegoating, but explores the marital, parental, and sibling subsystems as well. In his subtle exploration of the families of origin of the parents in Call It Sleep, he demonstrates that we do not truly comprehend an individual character unless we understand his entire family system, including the legacies of previous generations. He shows not only the source of dysfunction in the secrets, blame and denial in that family system, but also how that family began to break the bonds of the repetition compulsion by cultivating openness, intimacy, and emotional expressiveness. Knapp concludes with a call for more research "relating family systems ... to literary works from every time and culture" (245).
Family Dynamics and the Limitations of Psychoanalytic and Postmodern Conceptions of Self
- Introduction: Family Dynamics and the Limitations of Psychoanalytic and Postmodern Conceptions of Self
- Object Relations Theorists
- Family Dynamics, Family Systems Theory, and Literary Criticism
- Family-Systems Theory, Addiction, and the Novels of the Brontës
- Family-Systems Theory, Addiction, and Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights
- Family-Systems Theory, Addiction, and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge
- Family-Systems Theory and Great Expectations
- Works Cited
Last modified 1999