My Home, My Battleground: The Deconstruction of the American Family

Abstract

The concept of the family has been exploited in the arts as a microcosm of personal and social dilemmas, and this is nowhere more evident than in American art. As Maurice Lee and Carmen Flys Junquera have asserted, “Family values are considered as sacred to the American cultural ethos and form part of the sociological, cultural and political rhetoric” (2). Family actually takes part in the greatest American mythological creation: the American Dream. “The values of success, good health, various freedoms, hard work, and education are closely aligned with the concept of family. Americans seek them because they are the basic values of their families, or they desire to incorporate these values in families they hope to create, or both” (Lee and Flys Junquera 17). Certainly, the portrayal of family structures has varied enormously in the last decades in the media, from the typical nuclear home to single or homosexual parents. The message, however, is still the same: family is vital to fully succeed. But while the notion of family is granted this mythological role, and television shows such as Family Matters and Desperate Wives or comic movies such as Little Miss Sunshine have endeavored to highlight the magnificence of home, American dramatists have decided to deconstruct the lie of home in order to show that home can also be the place of “disappointment, resentment, and betrayal” (Chaudhuri, Staging Place, 109), a place where the fungi for violent outbursts subtly grow.