Anne Tyler/Women & Social Isolation
Number of pages:
9
ABSTRACT:
A 9 page essay that discusses Anne Tyler's novels Celestial Navigation and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Anne Tyler's novels have been described as "songs written in the key of hardship" (Patrick 24). In many of Tyler's narratives, her female protagonists are isolated, divorced from the company of other women, which denies them the sort of social support that women draw on from each other. In Tyler's novels, also, mothers are seldom resources for daughters. They are frequently out of touch with who their daughters are and are too caught up in their own emotional needs to tend to those of their children. Daughters who are raised by such mothers find that they, likewise, have no emotional resources on which to draw to nourish their own children and the cycle perpetuates itself. Furthermore, the women's emotional isolation prevents them from developing any sort of true intimacy with the men in their lives. These isolated, emotionally-starved women find themselves primarily in their situations due to breakdowns in communication, as well as misplaced assumptions about what is important in life. This pattern of development is particularly clear in Tyler's novels Celestial Navigation and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Bibliography lists 8 sources.
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