Famille

In class, we are reading Kay Boyle's Plagued By The Nightingale, a love story of a Frenchman called Nicolas and an American woman, Bridget, which examines the positive and negative aspects of having a close-knit family. In class, we compared and contrasted the cultural differences between family life in Europe, specifically France, and the role of the family in the United States. In the United States, families are more independent. Some families still hold on to the tradition of sitting at the table together for dinner, but it is safe to say that this practice is not as common as it has been in the past. Members of the family do activities, such as travelling, going out to eat, and going to the movies on their own, rather than participating in family activities. In American society, there is often little interaction with the extended family, aside from the occasional trip to Grandma’s. We raise our children with their independence in mind, every lesson being one to teach them to do things on their own and to be self-sufficient. I have never been to France, but I have been to Italy, and I can say that this American view of family life is very different than the view of family in Europe. In a trip spanning ten days, I was invited to five family dinners...from strangers. I declined all but one of these offers, and agreed to have dinner with an Italian woman and her family that I met in Florence. There were ten people sitting at the table, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, and uncles, and everyone sat around the table and spoke the entire time, including me in the conversation as if we shared blood. It was beautiful, and so strange. There was no television on. No one checked their phone at any point. No one even checked the time. This is a stark contrast from the family dinners that I have at home in the states, where each member of the family grabs their food and parts ways, off to watch netflix in another room, away from each other. I say all this not to say that either idea of the family dynamic is better than the other, but to illustrate how important it is to note these cultural differences when analyzing literature. Understanding the culture of the character’s homes as well as the nationality of the author is vital for getting the full effect of the novel.