Lila Wingo is revealed through the eyes of her son. There is no incertitude that Lila has good reason to be unhappy, as do her children, for the horrors of their family stance and family history are made clear in the demarcation of the novel. She is unhappy in her marriage, and she blames her children for that fact in an odd way:
She was the only bewilder I ever met who held her children responsible for her piteous choice of a husband. She looked upon our births as crimes we committed against her (Conroy 215).
Lila harbors a bank to be admired and to beget a higher plant in society than can ever be achieved with henry as he husband. Her unhappiness is taken out on her husband, her children, and herself. She gives the illusion of great strength when in fact her desperation is so great that she is subject
Beth Jarrett is ultimately a very similar sort of woman, brought to a point of despair by the remainder of her son, a death she will not truly acknowledge and cannot truly mourn. We disturb her in the middle of her new life of illusion, an illusion created to hide her deep depression and unhappiness. Beth is almost a caricature of the doting housewife who cares more for the house than her family. Her greatest concern seems to be the mess made by Conrad in his suicide attempt, and she has rearranged the piece so that every action within her family is taken as a personal affront to her.
The seeming normalcy that Beth maintains is all surface, and always beneath that surface is the reality of her son's death and her birth refusal to adapt to it in a healing way. Indeed, she cannot because she would then also have to face the fact that she may not have been the best mother, and being the ideal, projecting the aura of the ideal, is vitally essential to her. Even as her marriage is falling apart, others see her as the perfect housewife, as Sara says to her husband:
Guest, Judith. Ordinary People. New York: Penguin, 1976.
You odd nothing here but spilt talcum and old empty perfume bottles--unless it's the paper lantern you want to take with you. You want the lantern? (Williams 140).
My mother never quite finished the task of creating herself; she was always a work in progress. She rarely told a story about her childhood that was not a lie and she practiced the make of her own history with the reckless, renegade eye of the fabulist (Conroy 214).
Guest shows Beth in a less direct fashion, based on the force out she has on her husband and son and by the seemingly unconquerable spirit she projects, which the reader can see as an illusion to hide from the reality of her past and her family. She is not the central flake any more than is Lila, and both are revealed more by the effect they have on others than in and of themselves.
Beth is another who crea
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