them: Analysis of Major Characters
The analysis of major characters in the narrative highlights the complex dynamics within the Wendall family, particularly focusing on the lives and struggles of Loretta, Howard, Jules, and Maureen. Loretta Wendall, the mother, embodies a romantic yet disillusioned spirit, grappling with her unsatisfactory life through escapism and a series of relationships. Her character evolves into a more shrewish persona as she ages, revealing her vulnerability and survival instincts amidst a harsh environment. Howard, her husband, is portrayed as a passive figure, overshadowed by his mother’s influence and ultimately rendered emotionally unavailable to his family.
Jules, their son, inherits his mother’s romantic inclinations, often at great personal cost, as he seeks adventure in a tumultuous Detroit. His journey is marked by a series of reckless choices and tragedies, yet he maintains a deep familial love. Maureen, the daughter, initially shares this romantic outlook but ultimately chooses a different path, seeking security through an unorthodox marriage to her professor, thus distancing herself from her family's tumultuous past. Each character's journey reflects the themes of aspiration, disappointment, and the search for identity within a challenging socio-economic landscape, providing a rich ground for analysis and understanding of their intertwined lives.
them: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
First published: 1969
Genre: Novel
Locale: The Midwest
Plot: Naturalism
Time: 1937–1967
Loretta Wendall, née Botsford, the mother of Jules and Maureen. A generally passive and not particularly intelligent woman, she has an extravagantly romantic nature that is never satisfied. Her one truly independent gesture, an escape to Detroit from the stifling home of her in-laws, ends in humiliation but does achieve her goal of leaving the country for the city. As she grows older, she becomes more limited in her aspirations and more shrewish in her complaints. She is crudely racist and moralistic but is also a survivor in a brutal and violent environment. She drinks to avoid facing the blankness of much of her life and generally neglects her family. She changes character, dreams, lifestyle, and men, depending on her situation. Her children are baffled and frustrated by her inconsistencies in behavior and in her often irrational and unpredictable actions toward them. The Detroit riots destroy her home, but rather then discouraging or defeating her, this experience actually rekindles some of her old desire for adventure and excitement.
Howard Wendall, Loretta's husband and the father of Jules and Maureen. Stolid and unintelligent, Howard is dominated by his mother. A policeman at the start of the book, he is later forced to work at jobs that he hates. Unable to meet the emotional needs of his wife or of his children, he has become a mere shell by the time of his death.
Jules Wendall, the son of Loretta and Howard. He continues the romantic tendencies of his mother, often to his own destruction. Searching for wealth and adventure, he roams Detroit's streets, stealing and living independently even as a child. When he is older, he runs off with an unstable rich girl, who first abandons and later shoots him. He also becomes involved with a wealthy and bombastic but ineffectual criminal who is murdered. Through each disaster, Jules continues a deep love for his family, none of whom, however, can meet his needs. After a period of severe depression, during which he exists as a pimp, the violence of the Detroit riots serves as a catalyst and reawakens his romantic need for adventure and self-importance.
Maureen Wendall, the daughter of Loretta and Howard. She shares her mother and her brother's romantic nature, but eventually she responds to the brutality of the life around her by abandoning her dreams of being a teacher, repudiating her family, and deliberately entrapping and marrying one of her college professors. She then settles into the highly respectable middle-class life of which her mother had dreamed but never achieved, setting up a barrier between herself and her past. This past includes a brutal and almost fatal beating by one of her mother's husbands, who discovered that she had been prostituting herself to earn money to escape her life at home.