The Nuclear Family Theme Analysis

It is telling that the drama embodied by Pirandello’s Characters, which on the surface might seem only tangentially relevant to the point of the play as a whole, is fundamentally about marriage, family, and gender. More specifically, it concerns the Characters’ continual attempts—and consistent failures—to establish a functional household, to fulfill the ideal of the nuclear family that promises to resolve their conflicts and restore them to a stable, happy harmony. In a sense, they do succeed: of the Mother’s three illegitimate children, two die tragically and one flees the stage, leaving the original nuclear family (Mother, Father, Son) together onstage. In short, while the Characters believe they can resolve their conflicts and create a happy nuclear family, it turns out that the very attempt to preserve the integrity of their family is the root of their problems, and their tragedy is inseparable from the restoration of their nuclear family. By elaborating this conflict, which echoes his own real-life family tragedy, Pirandello challenges the assumption that establishing a family is the key to success and happiness, instead suggesting that differences of personality—and the very pursuit of a perfect family—can tragically undermine the stability that a family is supposed to provide.

The Characters’ family history already suggests that individual personality and autonomy are more important contributors to happiness than familial relations. At first, the Characters appear to be a complete, legitimate family comprised of two parents and four children. The Manager assumes this, and is quite confused when the Step-Daughter and Father begin to explain how the Mother came to have a second family with the Clerk. But as they start recounting their story, it becomes clear that the Characters are far from a harmonious family. Indeed, their problems stem precisely from their reunification: namely, the Step-Daughter’s reunification with the Father at Madame Pace’s brothel, and then the Son’s disdain for the others who move in with him and the Father: the Mother who abandoned him more than a decade before and the new children he is supposed to treat as siblings. Their very separation stemmed from earlier problems between the Father, who sees himself as a creative soul full of “intellectual complications,” and the simpleminded but deeply loving Mother. Both felt unfulfilled because of their differences, and when the Mother began growing close to the Clerk who worked for the Father, the Father saw a chance to win his own independence and give her a more suitable partner in one fell swoop. Accordingly, he sent the Mother to live with the Clerk, and together they had three children (the Step-Daughter, Boy, and Child). The Father and Mother’s strained relationship is to some extent a fictionalized version of Pirandello’s poor match and lifelong conflict with his own long-suffering wife, who descended into a permanent mental illness after their families’ mining fortunes suddenly disappeared in a natural disaster.

The Characters’ tragic drama is fundamentally about the breakdown of family: the Father and Step-Daughter commit a kind of incest, violating the quintessential social rule that distinguishes relatives from everyone else. The Mother, Father, and Step-Daughter are all horrified at the Father and Step-Daughter’s liaison—although they argue over whether or not it actually occurred, the very possibility of it is still horrifying enough, and the Mother cries and screams even when they re-enact it. The fright of the Father and Step-Daughter’s meeting in Madame Pace’s brothel is not just about the taboo, incestuous relationship between a middle-aged man and the teenage girl he used to visit at school—it is also about the exploitative power differential between them (as evidenced by the Mother’s continual disdain for Madame Pace, who deceived her into letting the Step-Daughter become a prostitute). By breaking the principal rule of the family, the Father and Step-Daughter unmake their family symbolically and precipitate its inevitable self-destruction once everyone moves in under one roof.

The Father tries to save his family, but fails miserably and tears it apart even more horrifically than before. With the elemental rules of family broken, the Father attempts to undo his error by bringing the rest into his household—but the family’s tensions only worsen, until they show up at the theater and demand to play them out on stage. They invert another basic rule of family: rather than preserving a nuclear family’s privacy and trust, the Characters air their dirty laundry for the public to judge. As the Son puts it, his parents show the world their failure to truly fulfill the roles of “father and mother.” But unlike the rest, to the Son ideals of family are irrelevant: he just wants to go on living his life, preferably while avoiding the family’s drama. The deaths of the Father’s other step-children (the Boy and the Child) at the end of the play are clearly tied to the reunited family’s shame, which also drives the Step-Daughter to flee the stage (in most but not all versions of the play).

Ultimately, the play inverts the rules of family four times. First, the Father and Mother’s apparently happy family is secretly a nightmare for both of them. Secondly, the Father rejects his wife to make space for his own personality, and thirdly the family is united by the Father and Step-Daughter’s unspeakable affront to family. Finally, through the death of two children and the disappearance of another, the original family—Father, Mother, Son—is reunited and brandishes its shame onstage at the end of the play. In other words, the desired nuclear family emerges only as farce, as evidence that the Father’s attempt to save his family for family’s sake was pointless and possibly doomed to fail.

The tragic nature of the Characters’ fate is not that they are duped by believing in the value of family, but that they wrongly think that the principle of family can and must be more important than all their differences and conflicts. Accordingly, they get the family they wanted—but only at a horrific cost.