ipl-logo

Homelessness In John Cheever's The Country Husband

958 Words4 Pages

families because they had to work long hours to make ends meet. Working-class and low-income fathers typically earned hourly wages and were not paid if they were not working. This meant they could not easily afford to take time off with their families. It’s poverty, which makes some fathers sometimes unable to go back home and run away to avoid responsibility or out of shame ,especially during the Great Depression .Cultural beliefs about fathers as breadwinners: One consistent cultural expectation throughout the century was that fathers were to be the main wage earners in their families; their primary familial duty was to provide. Consequently, men holding these cultural beliefs sometimes found it hard to be involved as fathers when they were …show more content…

Family lives in poverty, sometimes having to forgo food for clothes and other necessities. Thus drowned , as the novel’s title suggests , in a “symbolic orphanhood ” .In Cheever’s short stories “The Country Husband ” the protagonist of the story Francis Weed ( who feels sexually attracted to the babysitter) fails to connect with his wife, and his children, who are looked after by a baby-sitter. Moreover the babysitter’s father is a notorious alcoholic. The House on Mango Street (1991) another novel by Sandra Cisneros deals with family problem as result of lack of connection between husband and his wife, they have two children, but he “left and keeps leaving,” causing familial dissolution and making Minerva “sad like a house on fire”. Burnside ,the writer, in his fiction tries to represent the pathetic and tragic failure of the father, Ellis also is well known American novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer, he talks about the absent or violent father and his influence on family life and its structure in his novel Lunar

Open Document