I've been thinking still about my last post on The Hours and happiness in general and it brought to mind one of my all time favorite books, The Home-maker by Dorothy Canfield-Fisher. Written in 1924 it details the life of an ordinary happy family: father has a good job, mother is a dedicated homemaker, the three kids are all well behaved. But behind the facade of middle class success lies some all too common truths. Here's part of the description from Persephone Books:

The Home-Maker describes Evangeline, an obsessively house-proud mother and home-maker (a word that is in everyday use in America but not in Britain) who renders each of her children miserable in different ways, through her perfectionism and her need to control; without realizing it, she is frustrated and bored - yet she thinks she is a good and devoted mother.

Lester, her husband, is also unhappy, at home and at work. It is only when he falls off a roof that his family's life changes; he is wheelchair-bound at home and his wife goes to work in a department store (the setting is smalltown New England). The children gradually blossom; all sorts of practical ruses are devised (like covering the kitchen floor with newspaper when Evangeline leaves each morning); and a Montessori Father is born.

The problem is that Lester will get better and when that happens he, as the man, is supposed to go back to work and Evangeline, as the woman, must then return home. And they are supposed to want this to happen - they are all supposed to want this. But the truth is that they don't and the tension of what they want versus what they have to do is excruciating.

I love this novel.

A lot of books have been written about the search for personal happiness, especially how that might collide with what other people think should bring happiness. (In YA literature we have an entire category of books on this subject artfully referred to as "coming-of-age"). In the description for The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, Persephone books writes about the main character "...waiting for life to begin..." which in the 1920s meant finding a husband. In the 1950s it meant having a family and now, in the 21st century it means...

Maybe that's the problem. Nobody knows what being happy means anymore.

In the 1980s happiness was about going to college, getting a career and finding enormous professional happiness. You did not have to get married but you did have to get rich. Now you don't need to get married or have children or get rich. But we're not too sure what has taken the place of all those tried and true paths to happiness. (Mind you this is just official happiness; it's not like anyone was actually happy doing any of these things in the past.) (I'm sure those rich people were just miserable, honest.)

In The Hours, Clarissa finds her life empty and vapid and is torn by the significance that Richard seems to have found in his commitment to his art. This is something that Holtby's main character Muriel, figures out on her own: "The book’s conclusion is that ‘the thing that matters is to take your life into your own hands and live it, accepting responsibility for failure or success. The really fatal thing to do is to let other people make your choices for you, and then to blame them if your schemes should fail and they despise you for the failure.’"

Of course that is largely what Virginia Woolf did but I'm not sure that we would all agree with the outcome from her taking her life into her own hands.

It is intriguing how many books are written about people mystified by happiness. I would say they are all overrated if I didn't know so many people whose lives are mirrored in literature. I even know people who write fake Christmas letters pretending to have perfect happy lives. What I wonder though is that if these folks get it when they read books like The Homemaker or The Crowded Street. Or if they just think those books are written for someone else, someone who is really sad and depressed.

Oh lord. I think I need to read a murder mystery or something now. I'm starting to freak myself out and not in a good way.