As an adult, Glory comes to realize that their home was a stage dedicated to their father's vision. Perhaps in part, this is why Gilead often now feel like a place of exile to the grown-up Boughton children. In a moment of frustration, Glory complains, "Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him"(282).
Springing from his faith, Boughton's ideals and hopes are threatened by the world: "experience had taught [Boughton and his wife] that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness"(17). He loyally clings to his belief inspired vision of the world, while realizining it doesn't always answer the reality he encounters.
At times, this stance gives a forced quality to his attempts to live out that belief. There are times when it seems that experience has hollowed out the conviction of his belief and yet, out of a prideful desire to appear consistent, he persists in a show of that belief. When he first hears of Jack's desire to return, his response is to "set aside grievances and doubts...[and seek] footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace"(24). Sensing this, with the apparent exception of Jack, his children tread cautiously when it comes to questioning his belief. Glory reminds Jack: "'we're beyond the point where we can raise questions about his theology...If I pointed out a contradiction in his thinking, I would probably upset him. He's gotten touchy about that kind of thing"(154).
Resting on a shaky foundation, Boughton's belief needs a high degree of seconding by the world; for God to be there and be good, the world must conform to a level of order and goodness. His children feel an obligation to act in accord with these general expectations. Exposing these expectations, Jack half-jokingly warns his father, "I really don't think the Lord's good name should depend on my behavior"(274).
For Boughton, the Lord's good name is dependent on his children presenting a happy front. Anger and sadness are frowned upon in the Boughton home. These emotions threaten their father's conception of himself and his family, his creation. Even as an adult returned home, Glory "was wary of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness....she did no permit herself to brood....It would make him miserable"(16). In addition to sadness, she has been trained to suppress anger and disappointment. When Jack attempts suicide, Robinson almost comically notes how Glory "was almost disappointed that she couldn't be angry at him"(249). The qualifying adverb here suggests the extent to which Glory's been taught to suppress negative feelings and thoughts. This reflects Boughton. A belief in a good God will not brook too much disappointment in his creation.
Since what he encounters often does contradict his sunny belief, Boughton is always attempting to square events with his beliefs. Faced with suffering and injustice in a world made by a good God, Boughton has concluded with Paul that all are sinners and all deserve to suffer. The fact that some suffer and seem punished while others seem to escape punishment troubles Jack but not his father. As he sees it, the suffering of some simply points to the working of Justice. Those who escape this suffering do so thanks to a mercifully granted grace. So he squares reality.
Yet, Jack's situation brings all these issues close to home and causes Boughton pain and confusion; he understands Jack's suffering but not his inability to gain any mercy. This is part and parcel of his failure to make sense of Jack in a more general sense. How could he be who he is; how could his blessed and loved family produce such an estranged person? Given his upbringing in a minister's home, how to explain Jack's lack of belief which persists despite Jack's own seeming desire and effort to believe? Where's God in this outcome?
Faced with these questions, Boughton tends to stick with his belief at the expense of his experience. Rather than see and know Jack, to the extent he can, he ignores and believes Jack can be gathered, he can and will eventually be a Teddy.
Jack presents a mirror image of his father's habit in this regard. Because his life has never made much sense to him or squared with Christian belief, he has decided to keep his experience and jettisons belief. His life and the world lead him to see life as a puzzle at best, a cruel and irrational thing. A key moment comes when he lucidly tells Glory how the world feels to him and she cries. As if her father were in the room, she apologizes, "I get tears. I can't help it. They don't mean anything." She's lying. Jack corrects her, "They're nice , actually, To be honest, I think I tell you my sad stories to see if they really are sad. And, sure enough, the tears start, and I can relax about it. I mean, there's nothing sad about getting what you deserve. So I've been told. I feel a little vindication when you cry"(276). Jack often claims that he suffers justly. Yet, deep down, his profession of sadness points to his feeling his life is an example of injustice. Glory is able to comfort Jack, not by making sense of his misery or excusing his misdeeds, but by sharing in his conviction that both are senseless.
The Reverend is given to blinders. As Ames suggests in a more pronounced fashion in Gilead, living in Gilead could easily become a form of escape for a Christian; this is a small, quiet and homogenous town. Yet,
Boughton hardly seems at peace, nor does it appear that he is aging gracefully. He is tetchy and irritable, host to all sorts of grievances which he covers over with a forgiving and gentle manner. Inevitably, these grievances come to the surface, "the decorous turmoil of his soul...erupt[s]"(50). Glory notes that "her father woke up gruff sometimes, or confused. Sometimes he needed an hour or so to come into his own"(84). The phrase "to come into his own" points to his self as a personae assumed.
To block/ignore realities, Reverend Boughton and kin place a premium on appearance and form. Upon Jack's unexpected arrival, the reverend apologizes to his son,"you've caught me in my nightshirt"(32). While not having any idea when Jack might show, apparently Reverend Boughton has "been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping"(32). He fears being caught out of uniform, so to speak. Rebel Jack also is concerned with appearing in a proper guise before his father. While they embrace and greet each other when he first arrives, before they sit down and talk both go off smarten up, each goes off to smarten up, to put on some form. Jack comes back "with his jaw polished and his hair combed" and his father announces his return with the noise of his "cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine...[with] a roguish look in his eyes, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form"(34). He accepts Glory's help up stairs till Jack arrives (60).
For his family, for himself, Reverend Boughton has crafted a benevolent, Christian exterior that has too a certain extent become him. He projects faith, certainty, ease, humility. When his parish begins to marginalize him and dismiss his input as that of an old, out-of-touch man, he grows "furious on slight pretexts." This shocks his family, who concludes "he was not himself" and worries what is to happen. He eventually regains his long crafted personae, "he came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord"(51). In truth, he has simply regained what will prove an increasingly untenable and unhealthy posture.
Jack too hides behind the form of manners. He is unfailingly polite, standing whenever Glory or their father enters a room. She realizes "It looked like deference, but it also seemed to mean, You will never see me at ease, you will never see me unguarded"(46).
Glory also trusts in rituals and forms. She almost invests them with magical powers. Uneasy and uncertain over Jack's return to Gilead, she sets and leaves the dining room table "for days....[until] she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron"(39). The first few hours of Jack's return do not go well, or according to any conceivably appropriate form of homecoming. Home is a meditation on the story of the prodigal son, but this return is anything like the one in the Bible. Still, in the hopes of "starting all over again, [Glory] made a dinner to welcome him home"(39). Pathetically, immediately after Jack's suicide attempt is discovered, she begins to not only try to cover for him by again resorting to the formality and ritual of a making a meal. She thinks, "How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did"(252).
It is tempting to see attachment to form and ritual as hypocritical. While in part it is so, it is motivated by a sincere conviction that appearance and form tends toward and shapes reality. A role eventually becomes one to a certain extent. Yet, these roles are also a bit like the inherited clothes of a large family like the Boughtons: "jackets and shoes that child after child stepped into, out of, ...too large and then too small, but never ever comfortable"(39).
Form has a positive side. Dependent on forms, religious practice confers strength, purpose and consolation to Reverend Boughton, Ames, and Glory to some extent. Glory persists in religious practices as an adult, even though she often expresses doubt as to the precise nature of what she is seeking by doing so. With an aside,Jack points out how form can authenticate and activate spiritual practices. Curious as to Glory's feelings about religion, he asks her "'Do you still, um,pray'-he gestured at the floor-'down on your knees?'"(103). Attempting to console Jack after his failed attempt to go to church, Boughton points out "Many people find it hard to go to church if they've been away for a while. I've seen it very often. And I'd say to them, It's because it means something to you'"(170). The ritual or form of going to a building, to a church service, expresses and tests the reality of our faith.
All learning and knowledge is dependent to some degree on form and inheritance, of learning/memorizing the wisdom of the past. A couple of questions related to the benefits and efficacy of form run through both Gilead and Home: how to pass on these pleasing and beneficial forms? Does achieving the form necessarily bring on the benefit of it?
Robinson addresses the issue metaphorically in the anecdote surrounding Glory and Grace's taking piano lessons. Their teacher employs a formal pedagogy presumably intended to elicit and draw out musical ability: she is "deft at smacking hands...Whack! when a note offended." Grace "actually liked piano. She practiced more than she needed to and learned more than was exacted of her." She has a musical bent despite her teacher's pedagogy. Eventually, Grache complains to their mother about the hand smacking teacher and the teacher relents with Grace. However, the hand-smacking teacher then "vented her pedagogical method on Glory," (54-55)suggesting that her method is more for her own benefit than in a self-less pursuit of a certain form. One almost wonders if all correction is more a venting of frustration on the part of the corrector than a method of achieving correction.
In search of changing his own heart and those around him, Jack pursues all sorts of forms and rituals. He invests himself in work in hopes of capturing a new self and putting away a bad, older self. Soon after arriving, he helps Glory with the garden. Glory is surprised to find "he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and pride of that life"(61).
In addition, Jack tries to dress in ways which might answer his fathers and Glory's vision of him. It's not that his father doesn't acknowledge he's fallen, but his father sees this as the aberration. Glory too finds herself resorting to prodigal Jack as the aberration. Even late in the novel,the day after his suicide attempt is discovered, Jack spruces himself up and comes down from a nap and Glory thinks "He did look more like himself." But, at this point wiser, she acknowledges the falsity of the form Jack's assumed, a form he's assumed out of a desire for their love and acceptance. She thinks, "more like himself. An odd phrase, since he was always himself, perhaps never more so than he had been in the last two days." Jack still hasn't given up his faith in trust in forms though. He tells Glory, "'This is better, I think,'....and looked at her for confirmation"(290).
Manners and daily habits and rituals can provide comfort and stability. With the Boughtons, they too often take the place of people honestly expressing their love and hurt. At dinner, the trio routinely engage in conversations that neglect essentials. They pretend that nothing is unusual in their situation; "It was hard work talking to Jack. So little in his childhood or youth could be discussed without embarrassment"(63) and neither wishes to make him uncomfortable by addressing his twenty year absence or why he's returned. Glory observes that "the starchy proprieties observed in her family overlapped more or less precisely with Jack's strategies for avoiding humiliation"(87).
Careful not to expose any of his underlying weaknesses or needs, yet eager to love and care for him, the family reverts to a type of formal, over-zealous play-acting in order to show Jack they care. When Jack develops a splinter early on, both Glory and the Reverend go to great lengths to appear solicitous. Despite the fact that he probably might have pulled it out himself, Glory does it for him while her father runs about securing materials and offering advice, as if in an emergency situation. The reverend is trying to show his love. He is eager to reestablish his role as and be a caregiver and father. Thus, the Reverend advises Jack to "wash it and dry it again,'" and "then he daubed it here and there, finally where it should have been." Jack senses this and tries to play along, to be the son in need of a father's care: "Jack said, 'Ow,' for old times sake"(62). In part to answer their father's false suspicion that they don't care for each other, days later, Glory changes his bandage and brings "the gauze and the tape, and there where they knew [their father] could watch them, she tended to Jack's wound"(76).
This show is performed for their father's benefit and with little regard for the benefit of other parties. They are enacted in lieu of addressing Jack's more serious and difficult to treat wounds and hurts. Yet, the show is dangerous to the extent it postpones or ignores these wounds; it is akin to offering a cancer sufferer an aspirin when chemotherapy is needed.
The Boughton's shows and forms are also dangerous in that they are like games: governed by rules and strategy that dictate only a certain range of moves thus locking folks in roles and behaviors. This is to the good when the roles and behaviors are good, but not so good when the roles and behaviors are less than ideal. So Robinson suggests when Jack and his father sit down for checkers. Rather shortly into the game, Boughton concedes to his son, claiming to be "outflanked"(78). When Jack questions whether his father is sure, he shoots back "'Sure'? If I do this, you do that. And if I do this, you do that....It seems odd...that I should be the one to point it out!'" Jack points out, "'If you hadn't, I might not have thought of it'"(79).
As we discover later in Home and in Gilead, Jack has returned home seeking an environment in which he might begin to workout personal issues and pursue a more virtuous path in his life. Yet, Jack's response above during the checkers game suggests his long-standing delinquency and bad-apple behavior is a role that performs a function for their family in some fashion. It is part of a form that answers their father's needs. Everyone in the Boughton family (in any family?) gains their role in relation to the other roles enacted in the family; they coudln't fully perform all aspects of their role if the others altered their role. Early on, cheerfully griping, there's an edge in Glory's voice when she recalls her mother's telling her she took "'things too much to hear.'" Glory goes on to recite "That was always what was said about her. Hope was serene, Luke was generous, Teddy was brilliant, Jack was Jack, Grace was musical, and Glory took everything to heart"(14).
Beyond offering role definition for the others, Jack's role or self provides other satisfactions to those around him. Glory thinks:
My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn't such a villain after all"(101).
As elaborated on by the whole of Gilead, Home is a rather moody meditation on predestination, an attempt to see how it might work and for what purposes. At points, Robinson suggests that the sheer beauty of forgiveness, the joy it provides the forgiver, makes necessary the sinner and his/her sin. Insofar as it is a role imposed and fulfilled, insofar as it rarely provides him an opportunity or position from which to forgive, Jack's sinner role has a sacrificial aspect to it. Similarly, his incorrigible behavior tests the depths of the Christian love they profess. Jack provides plenty of practice for a follower of Christ. After she uncovers his suicide attempt, Glory reflects how she made "a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer" and realizes she suffers under the "illusion that she could help her father with the grief Jack caused, the grief Jack was, when it was far beyond her power to soothe or mitigate as the betrayal of Judas Iscariot"(248). Here, Glory seems to be echoing Jack's own contention that he may be destined to evil in order to serve the other members of his family, either as a test or a punishment.
Even Jack feels this. In an ambiguous aside one wishes Robinson would have developed, Glory thinks how "resigned to Jack's inacccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him" his suicide attempt. She muses, "They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him"(249). In effect, Jack is afraid that he is ultimately the victim of their forgiveness, their desire to be good Christians, their wish not to see one of themselves as evil.
Finally, forms and rituals don't bring back the past. Simply following the patterns and rituals from times past conjures up but tepid versions of the feel of past times or places. For the "dinner with Lazarus"(185), as Jack names it, "whatever part of her father's hopes for the evening could be satisfied by fragrance and candlelight and by the food consecrated to the rituals of Boughton celebration, that part at least had been seen to"(184). The material world of a past time and place can never be fully reconstituted. Even if it could, doing so would most likely never render the invisible aspects of that time and place. Such intangibles are never fully in our grasp; they are not so easily gotten.
Robinson goes on to expand on the deleterious effects of decorum and roles by looking at history. Throughout the novel, the characters in Home observe and comment on the ongoing civil rights confrontations occurring during the time the novel takes place. The Reverend Boughton is opposed, seeing the black demonstrators as outlaws and this is the issue. He tells Jack, "it is necessary to enforce the law....You cant have people running around the streets like that"(98). Of course, the civil rights demonstrations of the time were all about shifting perceptions. Fundamentally, black demonstrators were looking to break out of set roles and free everybody from confining, low and negative expectations. Beyond the fact that his wife is black, Jack has a natural affinity with the demonstrators' aims. He is a truly a black sheep, and ultimately, I think he aims to be appreciated as a sheep without doing anything drastic or unnatural to the color of his wool.
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