The Nontraditional Family Depicted in Literary Works

At Issue

Through the presentation of families other than the nuclear family, which has been assumed to be the norm, literature shows how nontraditional families fulfill, or fail to fulfill, the functions of nurturing, teaching, protecting, and providing, which are the family’s main purposes for existing. Nontraditional families include single-parent households, stepfamilies, adoptive families, grandparents or other nonparent relatives raising children, and same-sex couples with or without children. Large extended families living together might also be considered to be nontraditional (although this kind of family is traditional) because they have been rarer in North America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The "traditional" nuclear family is actually a relatively new family unit. In many cultures and throughout much of human history, families included many more people: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and various in-laws. Families have also historically included fewer members than the nuclear family does. Death from childbirth, wars, diseases, and desertion have long removed members of families. Literature shows that stepparents, stepsiblings, half siblings, and in-laws are not modern inventions. The ways in which these variant families are accepted or not accepted by their communities can inform the reader about the culture and time period being discussed and about the culture and time period that produced the story.

Governments and religions have refused to acknowledge certain groups as families. Mothers and their out-of-wedlock children have often been refused the status granted other families. Stepchildren and stepparents have often had trouble coming to an understanding with one another. Gay and lesbian couples have long been denied the right to live together and the right to raise children, although that started to change with the legalization of same-sex marriage across the US in 2015.

History

Historically, the family has provided a rich ground for the telling of stories. Stories about perfectly happy, perfectly normal families teach few lessons, however, and would provide little information, and would, in fact, be boring. Two sources, the Bible and Greek mythology, are at the root of much of Western literature and cultural thought about families. Actually reading about families in these two sources is often hair-raising. In the Bible one finds examples of polygamous marriage, half siblings, patriarchal families (wherein grown sons and their families live under the authority of their father), and other nontraditional families (such as Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, or Mordechai and his foster daughter, Esther). Greek mythology abounds with tales of nontraditional families wherein parents, siblings, and cousins are related in intricate marriages, and stepparents and stepchildren do not get along. The male gods engender many children out of wedlock, a situation that often makes the mortal women outcast—along with their children—despite the women’s helplessness to prevent their rapes.

Fairy tales, another mainstay of literature, often involve step-relatives, who are usually cruel. Snow White is threatened repeatedly by her stepmother, Hansel’s and Gretel’s stepmother convinces their father to abandon them in the woods, and Cinderella is a slave to her stepmother and stepsisters, having only a godmother to care about her. The loving sister in “The Seven Swans” must sacrifice herself to save her brothers from their stepmother’s curse. In short, the nontraditional family, including many family problems, is as old as Western literature.

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Because family is so important to younger children and identity to older ones, the literature directed at these audiences deals extensively with these issues. Younger children need stories that show that their parents love them and will protect them and stories that show that it is natural for families to have occasional strife. Teenagers need stories that show them other teenagers facing the same problems that they or their peers face, including family problems.

Traditional families are often shown in this literature, but, increasingly, so are other types of families. Controversy has surrounded many of these texts, in particular those that address the most nontraditional family, the same-sex couple. Leslea Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and Michael Willhoite’s Daddy’s Roommate (1990) are two of the better-known works that address this issue. Written for younger readers, these books are meant to show that these families, families which children may experience, are normal. Some claim, however, that there is something wrong or abhorrent about gay or lesbian families, and that children should be so told.

Examples of how adolescents struggle to find their identities can be found in Cynthia Voigt’s novels about the Tillerman family and their friends. The father of the four Tillerman children—Dicey, James, Maybeth, and Sammy—never married their mother and deserted her before the birth of Sammy. When their mother suffers a nervous breakdown, thirteen-year-old Dicey, assuming the role of guardian and parent, manages in Homecoming (1981) to bring her siblings first to an aunt’s house and then to a home with their grandmother. In Dicey’s Song (1982), all of the children must learn to live by a new set of rules, with a new set of assumptions, and so must the old woman. To form a family, Dicey and her grandmother must re-evaluate what it is that they expect from family. In Sons from Afar (1987), James, the older brother, is seeking to understand why he is the person he is. He convinces Sammy, the more confident younger brother, to accompany him on a journey that teaches them more about each other than about their father. A Solitary Blue (1983) is the story of Jeff, Dicey’s friend, who is the son of a professor who is at first almost completely oblivious to his latchkey son. The boy’s mother abandons them to go back to her spoiled life with her wealthy grandmother. The story demonstrates that sometimes one must let go of family and that sometimes children of divorced parents must choose between their mothers and fathers.

Other examples of adolescent literature that focuses on nontraditional families, and the place of children within those families, can be found in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), a novel filled with nontraditional families. S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) is a tale of three brothers living on their own following the death of their parents. Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) is the story of a girl entering puberty and struggling with her parents’ interfaith marriage. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) is Maya Angelou’s examination of a lost childhood and survival. Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985) is a story of a widower, his children and the woman who joins them as wife and new mother.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, nontraditional families of all types gained further representation in children's and young-adult (YA) literature, particularly in picture books and YA novels, as they became more visible in media overall. Despite that, an analysis by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that only 4 percent of new books for children and youth in 2017 contained "significant LGBTQ+ content" and 0.6 percent dealt with LGBTQ families. Children's books on or including same-sex families, such as The Family Book (2011) and And Tango Makes Three (2015), remain among the most censored because of some parents' anxieties over when, how, and in what context to explain the concept to children. Similarly, another 2017 analysis found that young-adult books featuring adoption continue to perpetuate subtle negative views of adoption as shameful, problematic, and questionable and exclude fathers, suggesting ongoing cultural anxieties about that type of family structure.

Contemporary Adult Literature

Literature for adults also addresses nontraditional families, but it is rarer that the search for identity within the family is a major element of the work. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) examines one woman’s escape from the bondage of a traditional marriage. Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist (1985), details a broken marriage and a close relationship between adult siblings. Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven (1993) explores the issues of adoptionadoption and the desire of Native Americans to keep their children within their heritage. Dorothy Alison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1993) is a disturbing look at how an illegitimate child’s extended family tries to protect her when her mother chooses to stay with a boyfriend even after watching him rape the girl. White Oleander (2000) follows Astrid as she endures the abuses of various foster homes after her mother is imprisoned for murder. In adult fiction, the traditional family is often portrayed in a critical light.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) contains a particularly disturbing depiction of women who have had their identities stripped away. Their society calls them, and treats them as, Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Econowives, Handmaids, Jezebels, or Unwomen. No room for individuality is left to them in the patriarchal, almost polygamous, society of the novel. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) details how society and family might look if every person had the ability to be either a father or a mother. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) shows the trials of an older Hispanic woman in late-twentieth-century America, where she has been declared insane and lost custody of her child. John Varley’s Steel Beach (1992) examines questions of identity, with a particular emphasis on gender.

Canonical novels that address the issue of nontraditional families include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), which explores the relationship between a single mother and her child and the mother’s relationship with the father of that child and with her husband. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly (1852) addresses the breakup of slave families in the service of economics; similarly, the single mothers in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) illustrate the emotional and physical ravages of slavery and racial violence and their effects on black families. The novels of William Faulkner, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), examine the pain that families can cause when different family members have different expectations regarding the importance of pride and honor.

Adult nonfiction about nontraditional families has grown as a category of literature as well. Self-help books and memoirs about adoptive, blended, and single-parent families abounded by the late 2010s; one notable example was All You Can Ever Know (2018), a complex transracial adoption memoir written by adoptee Nicole Chung.

Bibliography

Beer, William R., ed. Relative Strangers: Studies of Stepfamily Process. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988. An examination of the dynamics of stepfamilies, discussing stepparent-stepchild relationships, blended families, and half-siblings.

Bettleheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Random House, 1975. Examines what fairy tales teach and how fairy tales may affect children. Family interactions receive a great deal of attention.

Coontz, Stephanie. “The American Family and the Nostalgia Trap (Attributing Americans’ Social Problems to the Breakdown of the Traditional Family).” Phi Delta Kappan. 76, no. 7 (March, 1995): 1-20. This article discusses the myths that surround the debate over traditional and nontraditional families in American society.

Parsons, Sue Christian, et al. "Representations of Adoption in Contemporary Realistic Fiction for Young Adults." Journal of Language and Literacy Education, vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 70–92. ERIC, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1141502.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

Tyner, Madeline. "The CCBC’S Diversity Statistics: Spotlight on LGBTQ+ Stories." The Horn Book, 15 Nov. 2018, www.hbook.com/?detailStory=ccbcs-diversity-statistics-spotlight-lgbtq-stories. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1991. This is a collection of stories and poems about families, traditional and nontraditional. Of particular note are the stories and poems about slaves and the problems they had keeping their families together.