| dc.description.abstract | Isolation, alienation, separation, psychic loneliness, fundamental aloneness, failure to communicate ... the words sound a twentieth century litany. This study primarily examines the methods that writers from different cultural backgrounds use to portray alienation between family members and what their fiction implies about alienation and connection. Of secondary interest is the degree to which influences in the writers' own family experiences can be seen in their work. Three twentieth-century novels and their authors are particularly suited to such a study. The Years by British novelist Virginia Woolf was published in 1937; Eudora Welty of the American South published Delta Wedding in 1945; One Hundred Years of Solitude, the tale of a Colombian family and, its village, was published by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1967. The novels depict many of the different ways family members try to communicate with each other on a fundamental level. At the same time, each novel uncovers secrets these characters keep from one another, and why their secrets are so precious to them.
The books differ markedly in style, reflecting the three cultural backgrounds of Woolf, Welty and Garcia Marquez. Despite the differences, each is- a 'modernist novel in the sense that the writers "distort" objective reality to create a psychologically true effect. The reader is compelled to join the writer from the vantage of a god as motives, thoughts, secrets and half-truths are revealed. But the reader is also sucked into the three families-as literary techniques elicit a visceral response. All three writers blend reality with illusion, the commonplace with the fantastical, and the conscious with the unconscious. Reality transcends the corporeal in acknowledgment of the fact that the secrets we keep and the half-truths we throw into the world are often translated falsely; yet false assumptions engender a reality as real as any other. The books disclose the reality of illusory roles and the fact that our secrets may constitute our salvation as well as our destruction. Each of these novels uniquely portrays that part of us that vacillates between the need to protect and hide an essential self and the need to connect with others.
The novels are similar in that they relate the lives and relationships of at least three generations of one particular family. In addition, the three families can be termed "model" families. Each commands a degree of respect and power in its particular society. The family members profess to love each other and seek out one another's company. The different ways the writers employ natural phenomena as a literary device is revealing and of interest. All three use weather, landscape, insects and birds in particular ways to depict family solidarity, and individual isolation.
I have chosen three other aspects that are common to all three novels and seem to me essential to understanding the novelists' treatment of alienation. Woolf, Welty and García Marquez construct a paradoxical center or metaphor that applies to the family as a whole. This metaphor holds the family together and identifies it; yet it is the very cause of separation. It represents the "secret of all secrets," the manifestation of a fundamental fear each family faces. Families in the novels unconsciously look with terror at the fact we are indeed each separate from the other, that we- can never know or be known. On the most fundamental level, family members grapple with fear. Collectively, each family has devised a metaphor to stand in for this fear. | en |
