| The cultural discourse of the “decline of the family” recalls nothing so much as what Raymond Williams remarks, in The Country and the City, of another cultural discourse, that of the rural way of life of “Old England,” whose disappearance before the ravages of modernity had been bemoaned afresh in each generation back to Piers Plowman and beyond. On the level of ideology the two decline narratives are not unrelated, and a genealogy of the latter invariably uncovers the former: family saga narratives are modern versions of the pastoral. Familial ideology posits a state of nature which precedes history and culture, and it idealizes precapitalist forms of social existence; the ideological structure of the family is always a structure of nostalgia.; Through a detailed investigation of the family saga novels of John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga), D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), and Virginia Woolf (The Years), this dissertation argues that the main project of the family saga is to narrate the decline of the Victorian patriarchal-nuclear family, structured around paternal authority and “productivist” social values, and the rise of a modern, “post-Oedipal” family oriented towards consumption, pleasure, and the relaxation of traditional gender roles. A unique synthesis of the historical novel, the domestic novel, and the Bildungsroman, the family saga is a culturally “liminal” genre, one which tests the gendered boundaries of “high” versus “mass” culture. Family sagas displace their ambivalence about these determinations onto the texts' formal levels, as tensions between narrative and discourse, and realism and modernism. Even the most formally-radical family saga, however, cannot escape complicity in familial ideology's “pastoral” naturalization of its constitutive contradictions—history itself is the skeleton in the family closet. A concluding chapter surveys other trends in the family saga genre, with sections on Irish generational novels of the 1930s (Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak and Sean O'Faolain's A Nest of Simple Folk), British television series Upstairs, Downstairs and I, Claudius, the postmodern family saga novels of Graham Swift's (Waterland) and Angela Carter (Wise Children), and two “postcolonial” examples, Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and A. Sivanandan's When Memory Dies. |
