Essay 4: Home, Sweet Home

Jordan Ackerman
06-04-09
Literature 223
Essay 4

Home, Sweet Home

It’s been said, so I’ve heard, that home is where the heart is. I’ve also heard it said that no matter where you are, you never forget your home or where you’re from. Cliché, though they are, these over-used statements hold a lot of truth for many people, even in this day and age. It causes some questions to arise as we grow older, though: What is home? How is it defined? More importantly, what does Home mean to me? First of all, we must specifically define what home is. According to dictionary.com, home is a word with over twenty definitions and fills four grammatical functions. Some of these definitions commonly refer to a kind of building or institution where one resides often or a place someone is from. Personally, I see home not necessarily as an intangible thing or ungraspable, but as something further, deeper than a structure with four walls and a roof. This means that home may not always or ever be the place in which I take up residence or even the place of my loyalty or citizenship, but my place of ministry, my place of business, or perhaps even, as in a game, a goal or a particular item or person precious to one’s self. To visualize this point more thoroughly, I will try to render some historical context, combined with a bit of gaming know-how, with which to help put it in perspective. Now, bear with me as I travel back and see how this definition is represented and evolves over the generations from the fifties onward to today.
During the 1950s, now that World War II was five years dead, things had seemingly simmered down among European nations and with America. It was also around this time that American women were beginning to be viewed more popularly in a more traditional sense, being depicted more often than not in pop culture as home makers and house wives that had children and did not work outside of the home while the man went out and brought home the bacon. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle brings that ideal home, pardon the pun, in the form of personification with the character of Constance. The main difference in Constance, however, is that she almost never leaves the house and never walks any farther from it than the surrounding gate outside. This grants her virtually no social life outside of her sister, Mary Katherine or “Merricat” as she’s more commonly known, and her Uncle Julian and occasional visits from friends. She seems very content with her position as the head of the home as it were, another major difference between her and the stereotypical house wife of the fifties, obvious differences aside. She does, however, take responsibility for most of the house work and the garden, leaving Merricat to help a little around the house and go to town for groceries and books twice a week. Mary seems to look up to and cherish Constance the most above all everyone else in the story, even commenting in a narrative fashion that “She was the most precious person in my world, always.” So, in a way, Constance is Mary Katherine’s home and in the end she gets home all to herself, she wins.
Moving onward to the sixties, we move into a more tumultuous time, on both the war front and the home front, but especially on the home front. As shown in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, young people began living more independently, and, sadly, without purpose. Oedipa, the main character, seems to wander about aimlessly throughout most of the story attempting to either prove or disprove a massive government postal service conspiracy. While she’s out of town trying to figure that out, her husband Mucho, a failed former car salesman, apparently gets hooked on a prescription of LSD given to him by Oedipa’s psychotherapist, Dr. Hilarious. Mucho denies being hooked saying “It’s not like you’re some hophead. You take it because it’s good.”, though it’s also implied that he takes the pills to take away the dream he keeps having about the lot he used to work as a car salesman. Whatever the case, Mucho’s home, or rather his escape at this point, has become the LSD, a common theme that can be seen throughout the sixties and, later on, the seventies as well.
The seventies were also a time of political unrest in America, continuing to cause more and more rebellious young people, sleeping around with their peers and taking only God knows any number of illegal drugs while they were at it. This common every-day scene seems to be a stark contrast to the picture painted of the town of Stepford in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. A quiet, peaceful little neighborhood, Stepford seems to be the picture-perfect town at first glance to main character Joanna. However, what had seemed to be the greener grass to Joanna at first steadily turns more into a nightmare of sorts as she finds herself swept into a kind of mysterious conspiracy cover-up created and supported solely by the town’s Men’s Association. As she becomes more suspicious of them, she progressively gets backed further into a corner. Eventually, before she can find out more, she’s cornered by the members of the Association, one of them being her husband, Walter, and becomes one of the Stepford wives in the end as the story implies; “She stopped. The Music is in case I scream, she thought. She’s not going to cut her finger; she’s going to-“. In this way, it’s game over for Joanna and she loses her sense of home when she’s replaced with a newly air brushed, shapelier version of herself in the end.
Nowadays, home has become a very ambiguous word to define accurately. Here, in capitalistic America, home can actually be fittingly described with the game analogy, pertaining mainly to that of video games. Life for us as Americans has become something like an RPG, role-playing game, of sorts in that we make our own decisions and reap the benefits, or consequences as the case may be, of our decisions with no rewind/erase button we can use to do it over. We have to live with our mistakes and shortcomings and once it’s over, it’s over, do not pass go, do not collect $200. In real life, there are no do-overs. I’ve found this out the hard way many times, myself, as I’m sure many of you have as well. That’s the thing about hindsite, it’s twenty/twenty. All I can do is learn from all my mistakes and move on with life. If I can do that and be honest with myself, I’d like to think that’ll help me find my way home in the end. Of course, I don’t rely solely on my own judgment to find that path, I can only choose to seek out the wisdom to help me find it. Otherwise, I will just wander around like so many others in the same pursuit who try to fill the void with material things that don’t last.
So, to recap what I’ve discussed in this short essay, home as it is described in the dictionary is not necessarily the way we, individually, may define home. The fifties portrayed home in a rather political and nuclear sense with a household made up of a mom, dad and two kids in a capitalistic society. Merricat and Constance go almost completely against this stereotype and obtain their goals anyway. Perhaps it’s this theme that became so popular sixties and seventies among young people rebelling against a corrupt government and doing their own thing. Oepida doesn’t really follow this idea that closely in her search for answers, though it leaves us with a vague sense of confusion and a feeling of being unfulfilled as it abruptly ends. Joanna takes a similar approach, though her outcome is far different and quite a bit more specific in detail. As for Americans today, home seems to be getting redefined all the time, having its lines blurred all the time like so many things today. In short, home can be defined as a goal or ideal which we strive to obtain. We must choose our own goals and paths on which we will travel to reach them. To borrow another somewhat cliché term, home is in the eye of the beholder.