Family as a Precarious Community in Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold

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2024-04-01

Author

Doğan, Buket

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In the post-millennial period globalization reopens the question of connectivity and the possibility of togetherness in a transnational context between the West and the rest of the world. In company with globalization, cosmopolitanism introduces politics of the possibility of communities being together and sharing simply more than coexisting. While this togetherness is questioned in both urban and suburban communities in macro level, the proximity between family members as a nuclear part of community is examined in micro level. Rachel Cusk from a new generation of contemporary British writers puts the cynicism about being together as a family and the intimacy level in our everyday existence at the heart of her novel In the Fold (2005). It is taken for granted that in city space it is common to see mechanized, solipsistic and fallen apart individuals, yet in Cusk’s novel suburbia along with city space stops being an emotional outlet by no more offering an alternative space with deep social ties and function. The novel depicts the contemporary experience of the inability to relate suburbanites to their family which makes them despaired more especially at the moments of trouble. In the novel the male narrator Michael, aged 18 then, is invited to a birthday party by his friend Adam’s sister Caris in a suburban farm called Egyptian Hill. When Michael becomes a lawyer and is involved in a disastrous marriage remembers how he was once under the spell of the warmth and supportive family atmosphere in Egypt. One day when balcony of Michael’s Georgian house in Bath falls and nearly crushes him he agrees to come to Egypt to help his friend Adam during lambing season. Michael seizes this invitation as an opportunity to see what has been lacking in his marriage to Rebecca and in his life. Upon arrival to Adam’s farmhouse Michael notices that the suburban family that once attracted him is indeed an inoperative community who can only form a traumatized world for each other. What Michael sees upon his second visit to Egypt is irritation, bitterness and family feuding between the Hanburies; what is more the toxic air pervades the place. Michael’s new changed perception rings true for the contemporary idea that life is a personal illusion and that we interpret things from our own perspective. Another challenge Michael becomes aware on his second visit is that Egypt is at risk of renouncing its land to a prefabricated projects for individualist uniformity of masses which will mean to compromise on specificity and indigeneity of Egypt’s local features. Paul, Adam’s father is the only person on the farm who will not let it happen but he is in the hospital for cancer treatment. None of his children is understood to have felt emotional attachment to the place and almost ready to give in; the only issue that they cannot reach a consensus on is the way they share the money. It is later found out that in order to run the farm Paul has had to get married to Vivian who spends all her money and sources to feed her step/children, grand-children who keep coming and going. Adam’s mother Audrey, Paul’s first wife is another frequent guest on the farm. Adam’s wife, his sister, and everyone in the farm act strangely. At the end of the visit, Cusk makes the reader notice that family is an epitome of trauma of loneliness in the embrace of beloved ones rather than a reciprocal nurturant community. Another corrupt fact about the family is introduced by inserting women characters who are victims of exactly increasing inability to relate. At the heart of all the houses in the novel, female psyche is about to fall apart. With the representation of individuality and communal dynamics, Cusk challenges family as an institution that cannot create a reliant, resourceful or emotionally embracing members at the end of the day. In this elusive web of relations, each and every member of the family feels insecure, threatened with being left alone and not achieving intersubjectivity.Keywords: Suburbia, family, insecurity, space, female psyche.

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https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-0364-0313-3/
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111806

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Book / Book chapter