Ryan Reeder
History 485:6
Susan Rugh
January 13, 2000
John R. Gillis. A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1996. Pp. xix, 310. $16.95
Who's shouting? This was my reaction as I concluded Gillis' book. His statements and conclusions appeared so inflammatory to me, that I could not tell if the voices in my head yelling came from the words Gillis had written or my reaction to them.
The position that Gillis takes in A World of Their Own Making is that the cherished myths, rituals, and images that Westerners have of the ideal family, the family that is lived by, are of relatively recent origin. In the first of four parts, he reaches backward in time, looking for a point when family values and ideals were different from how they are conceived today. He doesn't have to look very far. Much of what we believe about families has come about since the mid-nineteenth century, the so-called Victorian Era. But he reaches still further back, as far as medieval times, when the idea of family was vastly different from what it is today. Then, using that as a point of origin, he propels us forward in time, finding where modern family myths arose. He finds these in the next two parts of his book: culture (family, time, home) in the Victorian Age, and figures (couples, mothers, fathers, ancestors) in the Modern Era of Suburbia. His conclusion, the fourth part of the book, describes the attitudes he feels society should have toward the family in the twenty-first century and beyond.
This book is a synthesis of a number of secondary works, shown in an impressive fifty-eight pages of notes. Despite this volume, however, the notes are not arranged very clearly. Neither does there exist a separate bibliography. Often, after checking a particularly controversial remark, I discovered that the note referred to one of his previous books or articles, with no further elucidation on the veracity of his statement. It often seems that Gillis manipulated his sources to prove his ideas. This becomes especially clear since it is not known what the quoted authors' original arguments were, or whether their quotes and paraphrases were taken out of context. Such validation is necessary because of Gillis' core-shaking arguments.
However, Gillis does provide much information on the light of the family and the development of family traditions. In the introduction, he leads us into a personal story of his own son's tragic death to illustrate how his own family traditions evolved to meet the new needs of his family. He explains at the beginning that if these events had not occurred, this book would not have been written (ix). However, because they did happen, the impression created by the tone of the book is one of a bitter man, angry at the world and the society (family) which it has come to foster, which society eludes him. He also seems to desire to justify his absence in the life of his deceased son by explaining that his behavior was constructed by society's ideal of the family. In a sense, the Quest for Family Values is his own.
The objecting opinion to society's norms of belief concerning the family and the description of the history of the development of the modern family create a book worth reading. Opposing viewpoints, in this case, serve to help one clarify one's own views. Understanding the history of the family is a relevant issue in any setting.