tulls

From my lecture at the University of Melbourne, G. Smith 28/3/90

The Tulls' Reactions to outsiders

Closed families produce people less socially and personally satisfied. For instance the son or daughter in a family business may tell the parent what he can do with the business but their relationship problem is never really resolved. It is deferred until the next opportunity to argue, when there is a clash of interest. This is the immature or impulsive way of dealing with a situation one cannot cope with or dislikes.

Among the strengths of the small family business structure are flexibility and firm direction. But if the family becomes locked into a particular pattern of inter-family strife and too many unspoken and ill-defined areas of responsibility, commitment and dependence exist, then family relationships and the business itself may crumble. This is the fate of the closed family.

The Tulls were such a family as this. In one instance Pearl says to Ezra about the offer of a partnership in the restaurant (p 94):

. .partnerships don't cost a dollar; you'll be beholden all your life. Ezra, we Tulls depend on ourselves, only on each other. We don't look to the rest of the world for any help whatsoever. How could you lend yourself to this?"

"Mother, I like making meals for people, " Ezra said.

"He's a marvel," said Mrs Scarlatti.

"But the obligation!"

Cody said, "Let him be, Mother. . . It's his life."

"What do you care about his life? You only want to see us break up, dissolve in the outside world."

Unfortunately, Pearl saw the world outside the family as alien, foreign, destructive. Even Mrs Scarlatti's generous offer was a threat to the whole family. Hence no guest ever came to the Tulls' house, neighbours and strangers were treated alike - kept at arm's length - and the children were implicitly taught to put on a brave face to the world. "I guess your family's enough for you. . .Aren't we lucky to have each other?" Pearl would say to Cody (48). This hypocrisy or double standard may partly explain why Jenny, Cody and Ezra were successful in their careers even though privately they failed and seemed to bear the scars of neglect and failure in their relationships with one another in the family. Their upbringing in a closed family was destructive for adult life.

In another of Anne Tyler's novels The Accidental Tourist, Muriel unfreezes Macon from a destructive grief and a numbness of feelings; she puts him in touch with the world again, with real life. In this scene Macon is on top of a building in New York afraid and disoriented: he thinks:

"they would send for an ambulance and he would be, yes, carried - just what he needed. Or he wouldn't have to be carried but only touched, a mere human touch upon his arm, a hand on his shoulder, something to put him back in connection with the rest of the world. He hadn't felt another person's touch in so long. (p 163)

Finally, failing to get help from his brothers, his sister, and his estranged wife, he rings someone outside the family, Muriel, and starts the ball rolling. This is the story of a man learning to trust, to step out of his carefully ordered and contrived life and dip into the muddy waters of life as it is actually lived. I highly recommend it to you; there you meet a closed and self sufficient family, the Learys, who actually make a habit of not answering the phone. Yet Macon Leary attains happiness by finally breaking out of their restrictive bonds.

Expectations of themselves and one another

Finally a third Heading in the theme Paragraph to touch on briefly is " . . the expectations family members have of themselves and others within the family." I refer you again to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, on pages 184-5 where we read:

"Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy and her daughter can't seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself . . .Still sometimes she sometimes has the feeling that its simply fate, and not a matter for blame at all. She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role. Certainly she had never intended to foster one of these good son/bad son arrangements."

Here Pearl's her own expectations of her children were clear to her even if they were not to them. But what could she to expect of herself? Perhaps blaming fate is the best answer when you are feeling overwhelmed.

Despite her expectations of herself, the same sense of inevitability occurs to Jenny on pages 208-9 in Chapter 7-Jenny's chapter, "Dr Tull is not a toy" - where we read:

"By her eighth month [of the pregnancy] her marriage was finished, and Jenny was walking round in a daze. She saw that she had always been doomed to fail, had been unlovable, had lacked some singular quality that would keep a husband. She had never known this consciously, before, but the pain she felt was eerily familiar - like a suspicion long held, at last confirmed."

She continues on page 109: "Was this what it came to - that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? . . .She continued to feel fragile though. She went on guarding a trembly, fluid center. . . She would remind herself to draw back, to loosen hold. It seemed to her that the people she admired had this in common: they gazed at the world from a distance. There was something sheeted about them - some obliqueness that made them difficult to grasp.(212)

But Jenny learnt nothing from this self questioning; it only led to a breakdown in the end. She must have wondered: what do expectations come to in the long run anyway; the results are often so wide of the mark.

Cody too had to accept some inevitability when he remarked "I'm just naturally mean I guess. To which Pearl snaps: "You've been mean since the day you were born." (page 64) Such an candid remark seems to redeem Cody somewhat but the sense of inevitable failure he expresses here describes the disappointment the whole Tull family inherit.

To sum up this section then, we could well listen again to Pearl Tull who "sensed a kind of trademark flaw in each of their lives: Cody was prone to unreasonable rages, Jenny was so flippant; and Ezra hadn't really lived up to his potential" (22). So when discussing expectations family members have of themselves, we should keep in mind that results often fall far short of expectations and to blame fate or the family genes is just too easy an answer. Characters have flaws and such imperfections break out all over the place in everyone: "Everything tangled, mingled, not perfect any more" as Beck says (301) Expectations are all very well but they too can be destructive if not tempered by a realistic compassion. I rather like Jenny's answer when she said: "We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks." (196)

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