Theme of Despair in Literature

Social injustice is not the only context in which the bleakness of nagging despair may be experienced. One can despair or feel something very like it in the privacy of one's home, and one can feel excluded or alienated within one's own family. In William Faulkner's The_Sound and_the_Fury and Willa Cather's The_Professor's_House, the disintegration of family life and the despair that it suggests may be seen as a frame for movement of the narrative. In each book, a family is shown in conflict, with fundamental structures of kinship either in a precarious position, realigned, or out of balance. Alienated as individuals from one another or from the world at large, the families created by Faulkner and by Cather act on one hand with reference to the patterns of kinship in which they find themselves and in a perpetual tension against such patterns on the other. Both Cather and Faulkner also frame their novels in a situation of more generalized tension, alienation, and anxiety as regards the world outside the family, as the characters confront the increasing pace, complexity, and bleakness of their lives.

Keeping the structure of kinship in balance is significant to anyone who assumes that human beings are fundamentally social animals and that it is within the family that an individual makes a connection with his or her position in the universe. As one's experience of the complex modern world enlarges, one may value family higher or lower, but the individual's family as principal

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ural and intellectual gulf that separates them) to the seamstress Augusta. It is Augusta, indeed, who saves him from being asphyxiated and her way of being that calls him back into life, however altered. This growing attachment to Augusta can be read as the emotional/psychological aspect of his attachment to his ancient office, which has doubled as Augusta's sewing room for many years. The sewing roomoffice harbors a number of physical inconveniences but provides familiar psychic pleasures: Fairly considered, the sewingroom was the most inconvenient study a man could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway.6 So it is with the Professor and Augusta. Augusta is as far removed from St. Peter intellectually as sewing rooms are from professorial retreats. Yet Augusta makes no psychic demands on St. Peter as his family does (e.g., Lillian with her social ambitions, Kitty with her jealousies of Rosamond). Just as the office has been a retreat from the family, so

Category: Literature - T