A Literary Divorcée on Family
August 19, 2014
Jean Stafford
ALAN writes:
The hard-drinking, twice-divorced American novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford, writing in the midst of the turmoil of the late 1960s-early 1970s, said the following:
“….I believe our society is an utterly decadent one. And I believe so because I believe any society is decadent in which the family is not the basic unit—the basic moral, social, economic unit. …. Of course families cause us great pain, but unless we are decadent we must be willing to suffer for principles. …. The structure of the family, of whom the woman is the architect, has been weakened to the point of debility …. Nothing obliges us to love our parents or our cousins…but, plainly, the individual must be nurtured within an edifice, within a form.”
[The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford, Ann Hulbert; Knopf, 1992, pp. 350-51 ]
