A World of Their Own: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values.

A World of Their Own: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values. By John R. Gillis (New York: Basic Books, 1996. xix plus 310pp.).

To readers worried that the family isn't what is used to be, John Gillis offers the cold comfort of learning that it never was what it used to be. Or, to be more precise, actual family life was never quite what it was supposed to be or what we now imagine it to have been. Gillis' purpose differs slightly from that of Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Were. Whereas Coontz examined how remote from historical reality current notions of ideal family types and family values are, Gillis attempts a cultural history of imagined family life, of its inner and symbolic meanings. "Convinced that the demographers' numbers and social historians' structures tell only part of the story of change over the centuries," he writes, "I have set out here to reconstruct the history of the Western family imaginary from its beginnings in the late Middle Ages to the present." (p. xviii)

The book may be best appreciated as a stimulating overview for general readers. It offers a sweeping narrative, broad-ranging observations, and a raft of anecdotes and human detail. It succeeds, too, in alerting readers to the ways in which family life has always been historically and socially constructed, and in spurring them to greater self-awareness of how they construct their own familial relationships and how they imbue them with meaning. This is clearly important to Gillis, and he ends his book by emphasizing a humane and generous vision of family life: "We must recognize that families are worlds of our own making and accept responsibility for our own creations." (p. 240)

Academic readers, however, will find several aspects of the book frustrating, and even general readers should be alert to these issues. Of these, perhaps the most jarring is the book's consistent, pervasive use of universalizing and homogenizing statements. Some of these points emerge at such a level of generality that they remain banal and benign, if not wholly persuasive; Gillis asserts, for instance, that "the 'traditional' family enjoyed by WASPs is strikingly like that conjured up by Jews, Germans, and Mexican-Americans. All these visions of family past emphasize stability and unity, rootedness and continuity." (p. 6) But more often the author's strategy of collapsing himself, his readers, and his historical subjects into a large, undifferentiated "we," a "we" abstracted from cultural and historical specifics, is disturbing and misleading. To give one example: drawing on a 1947 Pilot Questionnaire on Marriage developed in England, Gillis states flatly that "In this century, it is accurate to say 'every girl likes to get married in white'.... When a woman remembers the most important day of her life, the white wedding is usually regarded as 'the time of her life.' It is what women dream of and plan for years. Men find it difficult to remember their weddings, but for a woman it is the moment that anchors her life, her sense of self." (p. 146) Surely it is fair to expect a book concerned with family myths to avoid such unqualified, uncritical statements of this kind; yet Gillis builds his book on broad statements of precisely this kind, rather than analyzing, critiquing, and contextualizing their bases. Generalization at some level is necessary and welcome in books on such ambitious topics but this degree of uncritical generalization leads to distortion; and since it inevitably breeds a certain contrariness of spirit in the reader, inviting an unbroken reflection on counter examples and quibbles, it distracts from the book's main themes.

The universalizing tendency of the book is linked to and compounded by another difficulty, that is, the surprisingly frequent use of evidence in uncritical and decontextualized ways. It makes perfect sense to quote William Gladstone on the middle-class Victorian ideal of family life (even if Roy Jenkins' recent biography makes it clearer than Gillis does just how unintentionally hilarious many of these pronouncements are), but does it make equal sense to cite Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' views on conjugal love after death as somehow representative of mainstream opinions? Gillis writes: "Modem conjugality endures much longer in the mind than it does in reality, even beyond death itself. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross recently told Jonathan Rosen that she intends to join her ex-husband in heaven despite the fact that he remarried before his death. 'To my mind, when you're married, you're married for life,' she said. 'That's my philosophy. Even after he married that young Loulou, he was still my husband. That was his problem, not mine.'" To paraphrase one Victorian commenting on another, you would have to have a heart of stone to read this passage without laughing out loud. It does not take much imagination to guess what Kubler-Ross' former husband, not to mention young Loulou, might make of this idea; nor does it require much skepticism to wonder whether Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' views on death and marriage and the two combined might not be widely held. Yet Gillis solemnly concludes from this: "It seems that conjugality has been granted an immortality that singlehood has not, for when Europeans and Americans imagine life after death, they imagine only couples." (p. 134)

These criticisms apply with the least force to the book's middle section, which examines the Victorian origins of the modern family. Here, the book's evidence - which is largely drawn from nineteenth-century middle-class English families - is harnessed to historically specific discussion rather than sacrificed to gross generalizations. Here, too, Gillis addresses concrete historical changes and material circumstances that allow him to consider differences and qualifications as well as commonalities in family expectations. As a result, this is by far the strongest section of the book, and Gillis proves both shrewd and persuasive on the impact of industrialization on family life, increased divergence in family expectations by class and region, and, especially, the role of women. Ironically, this section seems strongest precisely because it, more than any other, links the "family imaginary" to social, economic, and demographic changes. Gillis' stated intention to concentrate on cultural as opposed to social or economic history runs afoul of the interpenetration of these changes and of the refusal of the evidence to stay corralled in one category or another. This section shows how much more interesting the story of family life is when considered within an historically specific context rather than in terms of cultural universals or transhistorical constants.

Helena M. Wall Pomona College