Happy Families
Four cards suffice for a family in the old game but is that enough? From Ancient Greece to Netflix family feuds are the stuff of drama ranging over many generations.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The opening words of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1878) are often quoted as expressing a universal truth. As proof, Tolstoy presents his heroine in two marriages blighted by Anna’s unhappiness. Meanwhile, Kitty, dumped by Anna’s lover Vronsky, marries Levin and they, we are given to believe, live happily ever after. There’s no denying, however, that sorrow makes better copy than joy.
Next Friday, International Women’s Day, we in Ireland will be asked to vote on two constitutional amendments. The first is designed to expand the definition of family beyond the unit based in marriage, the second to remove an offensive reference to enabling women’s perform their ‘duties in the home’. This last will be replaced by a general protection for a carer within a family. While the principle may be sound the wording of the amendments has sown confusion and set many people to discussing the meaning of marriage, family and the mooted new formulation ‘enduring relationship’.
Instinctively I look to fiction to solve this riddle. According to our Constitution the family is the corner stone of society, an assertion rooted in the Christian ideal of the Holy Family. Yet the converse does not hold true, not all families are ‘holy’ nor should they be sacrosanct. Family dynamics are complex, fraught with a mix of love, rivalry, betrayal and fierce loyalty, making them a potent source of stories, on stage, page and screen.
*************
The heroes of the new blockbuster movie, Dune: Part Two, based on Frank Herbert’s cult novels, derive from the mythological Greek house of the Atreides. Its grotesque multi-generational cycle of feuding, incest, internecine murder and war has fuelled many a play and opera over the past two millennia, starting with Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 BCE).
Last year, playwright, Marina Carr, presented her searing work, Girl on an Altar, based on Aeschylus’ character, Clytemnestra. By coincidence, a novel named for her also came out in 2023 (Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati). On Friday I saw Carr’s latest play, Audrey or Sorrow, which likewise portrays a troubled family, half of whom appear as ghosts. There is little love lost between the members of any of these families. Instead, they tear one another apart, unleashing a rage and vitriol that only people in intimate relationships feel driven, or permitted, to vent.
 Competition between siblings is a paramount theme which in turn spurs a lust for revenge. Many of the Revenge Tragedies so popular in Elizabethan England hinged on family feuds, look no further than Hamlet, where the drama begins with a fratricide. Set in Denmark, the play harks back to the era of the Old Norse sagas, when ties of kinship obliged family members to avenge the murder of their relatives. Rough justice protected the family’s power base and property. These families, like the Atreides, have high status in their societies to the extent of vaunting their quasi-divine authority, which they take as licence to do pretty much as they like, an attitude not confined to the ancients.
What the stories in fact represent is the breakdown of social order, the family as microcosm of the author’s world. A recent, and pointed, debut production of The President (1975) by Austrian Thomas Bernhard, at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, offered another take on power and family. Born in 1931 and raised in Austria, Bernhard had witnessed the Second World War and its aftermath from close up.
His play comprises two long self-serving paranoid monologues, delivered by the First Lady and the President, who has been injured in an assassination attempt, possibly at the hand of their ‘anarchist’ son. Only the dog has died. The tyrannical old order was toppling when the play was first given and its revival now, in a co-production with Sydney Theatre Company, is a bellwether for the direction contemporary society is taking.
 This grim situation chimes with the story of the 2023 Booker winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Here, however, the family is modest and all-too relatable. Eilish Stack and her children are pitched into a totalitarian nightmare when their husband and father disappear. We share Eilish’s desperation as her life shrinks to the point of suffocation and she must flee. In an ironic reversal of the current trend her flight puts her in the position of the many who undertake perilous journeys from Africa or Asia to seek refuge here. Lynch’s vision shakes our complacency and the very ordinariness of the Stack family makes the events he describes all the more credible.
Happily, not all unhappy fictional families deal in death and destruction. In the nineteenth century the growth of a literate middle class inspired writers of that period to focus on families with means, and their efforts to retain and enhance their wealth. In this they are a modern reflex of the ancient royal families (think the Roy family in the HBO series Succession) where typically the father holds absolute power and much time is spent seeking the right (wealthy) wife or husband for his children.
Pity the Cinderellas in Jane Austen’s novels whose whole life is a struggle to find a loving and affluent husband. Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall in Persuasion (1817) ‘never took up any book but the Baronetage’ where he liked to read the history of his own family, taking pride in its royal connections. Another patriarch who loves to burnish his noble lineage features in Thomas Mann’s brilliant novel, Buddenbrooks (1901) which traces the decline of this mercantile family or, as a friend of mine puts it, ‘the decline of beauty’.Â
In John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, (1922), possession of beauty is the ‘hallmark’ of social status. The despicable Soames collects paintings and spends more time with them than with his beautiful wife, Irene, whom he rapes when she locks him out of her bedroom. The family winds in on itself when, divorced from Soames, Irene marries his artist cousin, Jolyon, and their son falls in love with the daughter of Soames’ second marriage. The young lovers separate because of their parents’ previous unhappy relationship, and Irene and her son emigrate to Canada. The series of novels exposes the self-destructive aristocratic pretensions of the professional middle class in late-Victorian England. It has been serialised for the screen several times, first in 1967 and again in 2002, reflecting its continuing interest for us.
 Published in 2002, Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Family Matters (a beautifully ambiguous title), portrays the tensions within a family caused by chronic illness, when the father, Nariman, is afflicted by Parkinson’s disease. Zooming out from this situation we can see that the old man’s degenerative condition and its impact on his family reflect the situation of Parsis in modern India. Nariman regrets having yielded to his parents’ insistence that he marry a Parsi and, in so doing, leaving the woman he loved. The quarrel between his step-children and birth daughter dramatize the tussle between tribal loyalty and emotional truth. His son-in-law resorts to crime in order to provide for him, an error imposed by the expectation that people will care for their families, even when they lack the means.
 ************
Once the term family had a much wider compass than the nuclear unit of modern Western society. Perhaps the concept of family as a cornerstone of society needs to be reversed and society perceived as a large family, complete with the affections, allegiances and antagonisms that entails.
  Thank you for joining me here. Next time out I’ll let you know the outcome of our ‘family’ referendum. Meanwhile if you have any thoughts on families real or fictional do share them here.
Thank you! Happy reading !
Good! Thank you!