The family dynamic in The Man Child confuses me a little bit.
When I first started reading it, I got really concerned that I was about to read a short story about an abusive father who did not care about his children or wife at all. I thought the family dynamic would be a lot worse than it ended up actually being.
In the very first paragraph in the book, Baldwin is setting up the scene. They’re describing the main character (Eric) and his family. In the second line, Baldwin writes,
“Eric lived with his father, who was a farmer and the son of a farmer, and his mother, who had been captured by his father on some far-off, unblessed, unbelievable night, who had never since burst her chains. She did not know that she was chained anymore than she knew that she lived in the terror of the night.”
When I first read this, I had to reread it, making sure that I wasn’t mistaken. His mother was captured by his father? What does that mean? These questions are never really answered in the novel, so those lines still confuse me. But not only that, they leave me with a sense of worry. It makes me feel like the father is not a good guy. It makes me believe that the father will turn out to be a bad man in this story and that scares me a little.
Later in the same paragraph, still setting up the story, Baldwin writes,
“Then, not long ago, there had begun to be a pounding in his mother’s belly, Eric has sometimes been able to hear it when he lay against her breast. His father had been pleased. I did that, said his father, big, laughing, dreadful, and red, and Eric knew how it was done, he had seen the horses and the blind and dreadful bulls.”
This again, puts my mind in a weird place. It is obvious that Baldwin is maybe trying to set us up to be wary of the father figure in this story, but I’m not so sure.
The story goes on, nothing really stands out about the father that is “bad”. He seems pretty caring towards his family, which it doesn’t seem like would be the case based on the first paragraph. So maybe, the word “captured” was in reference to a phrase like “captured her heart”? Who knows. The only thing that I noticed that the father did that was bad was poking fun at Jamie at the dinner table and arguing with him. This also kind of contradicts the beginning, because in the third paragraph it said they were good friends, they were practically brothers. So I was surprised by that as well.
Overall, I liked this story a lot. I liked the twist at the end, although it was horrible and awful and terrifying. I guess I just like morbid short stories. But, I am still confused by the beginning. I still don’t know what Baldwin meant by all of it. I don’t know if he wanted us to believe that the father would be bad, if he was just setting us up to be surprised. Whatever his actual intention was, I was definitely surprised by the story as a whole.
I too thought badly of the father's character in the beginning of this story, which I think is what Baldwin wanted us to think. Setting the father's character up as a little possessive, but mostly fun and always ready for a laugh allowed me to contrast his later character after his wife loses their second child. He becomes gloom and very quiet, heading off to hang out with Jamie more than his own family. It shows just how drastic and impactful losing that child really was for the whole family.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you that this beginning was confusing and gave me a very different expectation for the father's character. While the father didn't end up being a particularly scary person, the relationship between him and the mother is never really explored so the possibility that their relationship is somehow unhealthy is still there. The mother's interactions with people all feel kind of reserved in the story which makes me think she isn't super happy in her current situation (even before the loss of the child).
ReplyDeleteA *lot* about this story "puts my mind in a weird place," and it was very helpful for me to talk it through with you all in class. I like your focus on the unsettling family dynamics *within* this family that is supposed to be this classic "salt of the earth," "someday, son, this will all be yours" thing--you draw out just how unsettling Eric's dad's portrayal is. This doesn't go so far as to *justify* Jamie's incomprehensible action at the end, but it helps flesh out a context within which to think about it.
ReplyDeleteI agree; some of the descriptions at the beginning of this story are really interesting. This is a prime example of how you have to read Baldwin's intricate descriptions very closely to understand the nuances of the story. For example, the line about the mother being "captured" sets up the theme about the unequal power dynamic in the mother and father's relationship.
ReplyDeleteI didn't see this story as centering around the mother. But yet, in the beginning, the narrator makes her life seem a little ominous, as you said. Maybe Baldwin is trying to show that even though the father doesn't seem abusive to us, he still is very much capable of abuse. It seems that he did emotionally abuse Jamie; maybe something similar happened with his wife.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Maddie that Baldwin seems to be intentional in his choosing to depict the father in a certain light at the beginning of the story. We talked about this with Salinger and how our initial assumptions about characters ended up biasing our reading of the story or causing us to feel that we had been tricked while we read.
ReplyDeleteIf we consider the fact that the father and Jamie are lifelong friends and essentially brothers, the bickering that goes on between them would be to be expected. The difference is, in "The Man Child", it feels like the father is very aggressive towards Jamie at times, and looks for opportunities to put him down, which is why he argues with and constantly poke fun at Jamie, to a point where it actually starts to affect him. It's possible that these actions on the part of the father are what pushed Jamie over the edge, and caused him to murder the boy.
ReplyDeleteI also thought the father was a strange character. I read the "I did that" as a possible feeling of pride (maybe, in a twisted sort of way). Maybe that made dad feel powerful or something. On the flip side, the mother seems helpless in this story. Baldwin says that she was "captured" and she seems very cautious about everything she does in front of the father.
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