Beth Jarrett in Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People is a woman who uses illusions to protect herself from the outside world and from the reality that would destroy her completely. She is a family woman, and her family becomes the center of her illusion. Judith Guest develops this character through a series of interactions with other members of the family. Beth is not the central character in the book, and much of what we see of her is through the eyes of others. However, their view of her is important because her deteriorating mental state affects them and shapes the way they react to their own place in terms of their membership in the family.
Beth Jarrett is ultimately a woman brought to a point of despair by the death of her son, a death she will not truly acknowledge and cannot truly mourn. We meet her in the middle of her new life of illusion, an illusion created to hide her deep depression and unhappiness. Beth is almost a caricature of the doting housewife who cares more for the house than her family. Her greatest concern seems to be the mess made by Conrad in his suicide attempt, and she has rearranged the world so that every action within her family is taken as a personal affront to her. The seeming normalcy that Beth maintains is all surface, and always beneath that surface is the reality of her son's death and her own refusal to adapt to it in a healing way. Indeed, she cannot because she would then also have to face the fact that she may not have been the best mother, and being the ideal, projecting the aura of the ideal, is vitally important to her. Even as her marriage is falling apart, others see her as the perfect housewife, as Sara says to her husband:
That wife of yours! . . . I don't know how she does it! Everything organized, down to the last detail. It's marvelous, really! (Guest 253).
Beth is a woman who creates her own reality and refuses to budge from it. When she leaves her husband, she...