Family In Fiction

We often speak of a family circle, but there are none too many of them. ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

There’s no question about it: sometimes it’s a lot easier to write about orphans. I’ve observed this tendency in books and discussed it with other writers before. There’s a certain freedom in writing about a character with no family ties—they’re free to move about where they will; the decisions they have to make affect no one but themselves. In a simpler type of story, a shortcut to eliminating the complications of relationships and background is just to leave your character alone in the world! It’s occurred to me, too, that this concept may be responsible for the epidemic of motherless heroines (particularly rampant in Westerns!). A girl who has a close relationship with her mother, or at least a mother closely involved in her life, will naturally have a mother’s input and advice on difficult decisions or problems that she faces. An orphan or a motherless girl is thrown on her own resources—do authors feel that this situation is more interesting to the reader? (A rare variant on this theme appears in Louis L’Amour’s High Lonesome, where an aging ex-outlaw worries over how to best counsel his motherless daughter on the verge of womanhood.)

But anyway, the orphan or loner protagonist can eventually become cliché (quick: name a Shirley Temple movie where she has two biological parents who are both still alive at the end), or, to go a little deeper, using them too often can cause us authors to miss out on an extra level of depth that we can add to our stories simply by making our characters part of a family.

The “loner” protagonist has long been a standard feature of the Western. That freedom of the unattached protagonist works better in an action-focused story, no doubt. As I remarked once before, yes, there were certainly plenty of unattached men in the Old West, especially in the professions of cowboy, soldier, explorer, et cetera…but don’t overlook the fact that much of the settling and taming of America was accomplished by families. And they certainly had their fair share of adventure, so their experience was no less interesting! In past centuries, the family was regarded as the most important unit in society, not only in the emotional sense but in the practical. Family members relied on each other in both senses as they forged their way in new or isolated territory. Parents, children and frequently extended family members all contributed their share to making a livelihood and home life. Multi-generational families living together were much more common—foreign as that may seem to our modern society, in which, if authors of magazine articles are to be believed, it’s necessary to practically draw chalk lines down the middle of rooms for two generations to exist in the same house together. (That’s not saying that many modern families don’t need the chalk lines, but that’s beside the point…)

I think one of the reasons that I like B.M. Bower’s Westerns so much is that she did not limit herself to that “loner” type of character and plot; nearly all of her books feature family of some shape and size, and the resulting relationships add additional color and enhance the plot. She wrote several mother characters who were not only very much alive and present, but strong, positive personalities (Points West, Rim o’ the World), as well as her share of fretful or negligible ones (Her Prairie Knight). She wrote fathers who make their families miserable (Hay-Wire, The Singing Hill) and intelligent, likable fathers who have affectionate relationships with their offspring (Skyrider, Fool’s Goal). There are close sibling relationships and strained ones; a pair of novels deal with the bitter consequences of a parent favoring one child over another (The Dry Ridge Gang, Open Land). I’m not as big a fan of Zane Grey, but I do notice that the books of his I found most interesting often have some kind of family dynamic as part of the plot and conflict (Forlorn River, Raiders of Spanish Peaks, Code of the West, Sunset Pass).

Do you see the variety? And yet all of these books are very much traditional Westerns, with their fair share of outlaws, cattle, action and romance. It would apply to any type of historical fiction, though. Putting a character in a family instantly adds extra layers to their personality, in the relationships and the responsibilities that are a natural part of family life. Depending on the people involved, these can be the most wonderful, supporting relationships and improving responsibilities in their lives, or the most difficult relationships and heaviest responsibilities. Another variant would be to take that orphaned or loner protagonist and put them into a family situation—learning or re-learning how it is to live as part of a family could be another whole layer of conflict for them. The possibilities are endless—as endless as the varieties of human beings and human relationships that exist.

(And incidentally, the Shirley Temple movie I described above does actually exist. See if you can name one of the two I’m thinking of!)