In “On Going Home,” Joan Didion handles the subject of family and the mystery of marriage by recounting the tale of when, without her better half, she took her little girl “home” to celebrate her first birthday. Didion rushes to clarify the contrast between a home and a house; to her, a house is just a dwelling,, but home is where the heart is and what’s more, for Didion, her heart is where her family is. She says, “By “home” I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family is, in the Central Valley of California. It is a vital although troublesome distinction.” (Didion 137) In a way, Didion is telling us that it’s not about the residence itself but rather more so the persons in a residence. Both the persons from our past and our present shape us into our character. Didion re-imagined “home” not just as in it isn’t simply someplace one lives for a long time, yet it is something that envelops the reasons why somebody is the way they are and characterizes their personality.
In any case, her family is in no way, shape or form perfect. She says, “My husband likes my family, but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways.” (Didion 137) Her significant other’s discomfort is evident through his nonappearance and through her memory of his encounters there. His negative, snarky, deigning demeanor toward Didion’s family’s garbled ways, the dust that sickened him, “We live in dusty houses (“D-U-S-T,” he once wrote with his finger on surfaces all over the house, but no one noticed it)” (Didion 137), and the tokens that confounded him, “…filled with mementos quite without value to him (what could the Canton dessert plates mean to him? How could he have known about the assay scales, why should he care if he did know?)” (Didion 137), uncovers the condescending and pretentious sides of her husband. By disclosing to us that the house was so dusty that her husband could literally write the word “dust” on the surfaces. This demonstrates how unkempt the house is. They also seemed to gossip a lot about something that her husband did not approve of:…and we appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges.” (Didion 138)
Moreover, Didion is open about the disheartenment that she gets from the manner in which her marriage estranges her from her home. It doesn’t help that her better half looks down on her family, their lifestyle, and how she behaves around them . She says, “My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal,” (Didion 139) . It turns out to be certain that her brother has no regard for him or perhaps considering that Didion’s daughter has just turned one, her marriage is still fresh and he is yet to come to terms that his sister belongs somewhere else. He is yet to accept that she has made a new life for herself back in Los Angeles and he does not get to see her as often as he would like. Didion warmly shares that she yearns for an age that does not think visiting kinsfolks or birthplaces is a duty or a chore but instead a revitalizing experience. She says, “Sometimes, I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home,” to find in family life the source of all tension and drama,” (Didion 139). She reveals that even in her grown age she often cries after calling home and this is because she misses home but has to hold down her fort in Los Angeles.
The house and everything in it is tied to incalculable cherished recollections, inciting an emotional reaction when Didion meanders the house and scavenges through drawers. Truth be told, when her spouse calls, she “dreads her husband’s evening call” for it is a preview back to the real world; a world she does not want to have a place with. The wistfulness she feels is something numerous individuals can identify with.
At last Didion winds up thinking about every one of the things she cannot give her girl in her present “home”. She exhibits a profound feeling of compunction for her single undertaking. She could not want anything more than the sight of her daughter growing up in a place that supports one’s natural, unique self and the acknowledgment to think back upon this sense of self and one’s foundations. She says, “She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life.” (Didion 143)Even though she cannot guarantee to give any of these things to her daughter she simply promises to tell her “a funny story.
This essay discloses Didion’s own concerns as she thoroughly analyzes her present existence with her better half and their daughter versus her life and encounters growing up. Moreover, this essay tends to the inner clash countless feel as grown-ups the minute we leave home, as it were, and venture out to discover different “homes” whilst consistently recalling our pasts. Didion yearns to unite her two families, and she conveys the longing for each to cherish the other, as they cherish her. She appears to need everybody to cohabitate cheerfully and, yet, she has yielded to the possibility that it might never happen.
Works Cited
Didion, Joan. “On Going Home.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. 137-144. Print.
