Mela's Reviews > The Home-Maker

To me, it is a sacrosanct and personal book. It touched those parts of my soul I had thought that were too personal to find them somewhere else (e.g. in a novel).

In the copy, I have borrowed on LibriVox was also an article by Dorothy Canfield, published in the same year as the novel, entitled "Marital Relations". These two publications created an important message for all of us.

What we ought to realize about marriage is, first of all, that, like every other human relationship, it is a problem that is never completely solved and settled, once and for all, until both parties are dead and buried. And secondly, that it is an intensely personal affair and that nobody on earth can know as much about it as the two people involved. Consequently, advice and pressure from the outside are always given on the basis of insufficient information, and have at least a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong.

In the novel, one can see:

--> the heavy, crushing impact of tradition (social rules that one is expected to respect) on a human being
--> how different people can be from what is expected from them
--> what is (should be) a motherhood (fatherhood)
--> how big impact on children have parents
--> women in the marriages.

and also:

--> passion of young (rather small) entrepreneurs
--> the beginning of modern consumerism.

It was one of these books that are perfect to discuss. But I am not going to touch (in my review) all things that are worth it, otherwise, it would be a very long review.

The plot was rather predictable but it wasn't important. The important thing was how the family as a whole and its members changed after perhaps small and common change (in our modern eyes). From the beginning, I understood what was the source of Helen's helplessness and passivity (the feeling that she is not able to please her mother), Henry's weakness (the fear of his mother), Stephen's anger (the attempt to attract the attention of a mother), Lester's depression and Eva's unhappiness (the roles forced by society). Of course, they were more complicated, I have mentioned just some of their issues.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an advocate of the Montessori method. It was obvious in the novel. I am not going to tell if this method is the best (I simply don't know) but definitely, it is better than traditional upbringing.

What made the biggest impact on me was Eva as a mother and the reasons why she wasn't a good mother (in the meaning of upbringing children). She loved them, without a doubt, she loved them passionately. But her personality wasn't a personality of a mother because she lived from task to task, from goal to goal, from plan to plan. Upbringing a child is endless, there are no plans for it, there are no goals you can achieve and finish the task, there is no end. For people like Eva (and me) motherhood (upbringing children) is like a poison that kills a mother and children. Eva was lucky, she had Lester as a husband, not all such women have such luck (I don't, I love my partner and in this aspect, he has a personality like me, so we will stay childless).

As I wrote, this book was very moving and important to me. I will stay in some kind of awareness for some time yet. I have problems with articulating my feelings about this book so I quote below a few more examples, what I have extracted:

A profound depression came upon her. These were the moments in a mother's life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity. They never told you that there were moments of arid clear sight when you saw helplessly that your children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible. How solitary it made you feel!

Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them.

Lester said to himself, shivering, "What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It's cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!"

Anybody who knows anything knows how delicate and exacting a matter it is to try to tune in harmony two human beings, almost constitutionally out of tune even with themselves, full of strange complicated weaknesses and unexpected beauties and strength. Add to that the element of children, each of whom brings a full equipment of strange unexplored possiblities, and any fool can see that no outside complications are needed to make the problem a difficult one.

It wasn't because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying. But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture.