When a newborn is laid in the arms of his mother, the sense of power and purpose she feels outstrips any other achievement. No academic honor, no professional accolade, no work of art—even those attaining the heights of greatness—can approach this new and unrepeatable child. A child unable to lift his own head can, in an instant, become an entirely new center of gravity for his mother, possessing in his helplessness the power to move her as nothing else can.
“Virtue” comes from the Latin virtus, meaning strength or power, particularly the power of causation. American coastal population centers are, putatively, the nation’s power centers. Popular culture is manufactured by the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, the New York financial industry drives business, and legislative and military policies are made and executed in Washington, DC. These are the places where the powerful congregate to flex the muscle of causation. But this kind of power is only one kind, and it is subordinate to a different kind.
David Brooks famously delineated résumé virtues from eulogy virtues. “[R]ésumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace…[E]ulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral.” I will go further and say that eulogy virtues are the source of meaning for résumé virtues; without them, résumé virtues are powerless.
Eulogy virtues spring from the domestic and move the things that matter. The generosity of a father who spends Saturday mornings teaching his son to throw a ball, the gentleness of a mother’s kiss on a toddler’s scraped knee, the doting big sister carrying the baby around, the adoring little brother attempting to comfort a distressed older sibling by climbing in his lap; these are eulogy virtues in the flesh. They cause the human person to recognize his most fundamental identity: a beloved child of God.
Résumé virtues move the external, they make laws and stock portfolios, they deploy armies. Because their action is in the external world, résumé virtues appear larger and more significant; they are the powers praised in public life and popular culture, the things that command news segments and editorial commentary. Yet, what is meaningful about their action is its impact on people and the domestic. Laws and bank accounts and territorial disputes matter because of their downstream effects on actual people.
Consider virtue, the power of causation, in light of the narrative categories of plot
and stakes. Plot is what happens in a story; stakes are why it matters. If there are no stakes, the reader has no reason to keep turning the pages.
If I lose a shoe, the other shoe is rendered useless in the absence of its mate. Frustrating, but not particularly compelling as a narrative plot point. Unless…I lost the shoe—a glass slipper to be precise—running back to my carriage, fearing the carriage’s imminent reversion to a pumpkin. Said lost shoe was retrieved by a prince, whose search for me is facilitated by the possession of a shoe which fits no one else. If he is successful in using the shoe to identify me in the home where I live, a servant unappreciated and abused by my stepmother and stepsisters, he will rescue me from a lifetime of misery and install me on the royal throne. But if he cannot find the foot that matches the shoe—my foot—the cost is quite a bit higher than a missing shoe. Those are the stakes, the source of meaning and context for the lost shoe.
Everything matters to the extent and because it concerns the domestic.
Résumé virtues are all plot. They tell us what happened and who made it happen, but on their own, they are meaningless. The eulogy virtues—the domestic—are the stakes. Every one of the great stories of the canon is a domestic story, even those whose plot revolves around war, crime, or politics.
In that multitude of ships launched when Paris offended Menelaus’ hospitality by abducting the lovely Helen and fleeing with her, Odysseus departs to fight the war in far flung Troy. The Odyssey’s plot moves through danger, tragedy, and divine retribution. Yet, every obstacle of Odysseus’ journey, no matter how terrifying or how richly imagined by the poet, derives its power from its ability to prevent Odysseus from returning from Troy to his home in Ithaca where Penelope waits. The great threat of the land of the Lotus-eaters is not violence, but the power of the lotus plant to erase the men’s memory of home and sap their desire to return. They may, if they choose, drift in a haze of empty contentment, having forgotten the only thing that really matters.
When Odysseus and his men escape the Cyclops and land on the hospitable island of the wind-god Aeolus, Odysseus insists they move on, because it is the only way to reach Ithaca, their home and destination. Aeolus contains the winds that would blow Odysseus in the wrong direction within a knapsack, leaving only the West Wind free to carry him home. Buoyed along by the West Wind, the men come so near the shores of Ithaca, they can see the home fires burning. Contentedly awaiting his imminent arrival on the shores of Ithaca, perhaps dreaming of warming himself at one of those fires, Odysseus dozes off. It is the loss of those fires and everything they represent that gives tooth to his men’s foolish decision to open Aeolus’ sack and allow the other winds to escape, blowing them away from the homecoming that had been, just a moment prior, within reach, and sending them back out to sea.
In the land of the dead, Odysseus encounters his mother who died of grief awaiting his return. The urgency of that return is underscored by the new knowledge that his father, still alive, is wasting away with the same grief that destroyed his mother. Three times Odysseus reaches for his mother, and three times she slips from his grasp, no longer having a body.
Odysseus survives the sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis, he escapes the island of the sun god, resists the temptation of Helios’ cattle. He is held captive by Calypso, desperate to marry Odysseus, for seven years. But Odysseus loves Penelope and Telemachus. He yearns for his family and homeland and is consumed with regrets about angering the gods. He wonders what is happening to his family now, if Penelope has been faithful and what kind of man young Telemachus has become. It is always home that captures Odysseus’ imagination and moves him onward. Each of the brilliant plot elements derives its power from the stakes—the threat of the loss of home. The great epic is archetypal of all our stories in its centering of domestic power and its ability to move the external world—the power to take us out to war and the power to bring us home, no matter the obstacles.
It is because of Georgian England’s entailment laws that Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are desperate to marry off a daughter to the tedious Mr. Collins. The modern instinct is to protest the law, search for a way to change it or circumvent it, because this is the modern concept of power: making laws and policies, or modifying existing ones. The modern wants to resist, to be loud, to demand, to refuse. But the real story of Pride and Prejudice isn’t about unjust inheritance laws. It’s about, well, pride and prejudice. The story of men and women whose flaws and sins threaten their own happiness is endlessly more interesting than legislative maneuvers. Lydia’s impulsive and foolish decision to run away with Wickham, Charlotte Lucas’ calculations on the value of a marriage to Collins, Elizabeth’s (many) near misses with Darcy; these are the events that give the novel its power and meaning, because of the stakes that ride upon them. Social ruin, the practical difficulties of life as an unmarried woman, and the loss of a true love match move the reader to hold his breath waiting to discover what will happen next, and what it will mean for Austen’s women.
Prince Hamlet’s uncle and newly-minted stepfather, Claudius, dispatches him to England to remove the troublesome young prince who suspects Claudius’ own role in the death of the king. Claudius murdered the king to win Queen Gertrude and usurp the throne rightfully belonging to Hamlet’s father and then to Hamlet. It is noteworthy that Claudius’ decision to seize the throne is undertaken by striking the heart of the household—murdering the king and marrying his widowed queen—and not by military maneuvers. This breach of the household is what sets the entire tragedy into motion. The king’s murder is a blow against the family itself; Claudius has betrayed the loyalty of brothers, shared the bed of his brother’s wife, and stolen what rightfully belongs to his nephew. This assault on the domestic heart of the play, and Hamlet’s resolve to right what is wrong in his home by avenging his father, combined with his flaws of indecision and incoherence, are what conclude in a stage of dead bodies.
When Erlend Nikulausson of Husaby enters into a treasonous political plot, he is caught because his paramour, with whom he has betrayed his wife, then betrays him in turn. The true weight of the matter is felt in the peril to which Erlend exposes his young son by involving him in the destruction of damning letters, the humiliation suffered by his wife, Kristin Lavransdatter, when the entire community learns how he was exposed, the family rift he causes with his brother-in-law, and the financial and social penalties his large brood of sons will have to pay for the rest of their own lives. The subplot around the political jockeying of minor Norwegian and Swedish royalty is only a vehicle for showcasing Erlend’s rash decision-making, propensity for womanizing, and lack of sacrificial care and planning for his family; the domestic failures reveal the kind of man he is.
Why does it matter when a thousand ships set sail—when armies deploy, when unjust laws prevail, when traitors are caught and imprisoned? None of these things derive their power from their own reality. Rather, they matter because soldiers will die and the people who love them will grieve, because people will have to make defining calculations to balance legal realities with personal decisions, and because our sins cause the people we love to suffer. In other words, everything matters to the extent and because it concerns the domestic.
Twenty years after departing to fight the Trojan War, Odysseus arrives on the shores of Ithaca and returns home in disguise. Argos, the faithful hound, lifts his muzzle and pricks his ears at the sound of his long-departed master’s voice, before dying in peace. During Odysseus’ bath, his childhood nurse recognizes the scar below his knee, acquired in an old hunting accident. Odysseus’ knowledge of the marriage bed he carved from his own olive tree reveals his identity to Penelope. His musings on the family fruit trees identify him to his father, Laertes. It is his place in the family home that gives Odysseus his full identity.
Man exists first in a family. John Paul II said that, “The first and fundamental structure for human ecology is the family, in which man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness and learns what it means to love and be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person” (Centesimus Annus, 39).
In Odysseus’ absence, Penelope wove a shroud for her elderly father-in-law by day, telling her suitors that when the shroud was complete, she would choose a husband. In her fidelity, she unraveled her work each night, pushing off remarriage for another day, waiting for the king. Modernity despises Penelope, the faithful wife, because our misconception of power relegates what is domestic to powerlessness. In fact, the family, the domestic, is both the source and object of power—the ability to cause something else. It was a domestic dispute which began the war taking Odysseus from his home for twenty years, and it was the domestic that drew him home, across oceans and past monsters and (super)natural storms. The comfortable drift of life with the Lotus-eaters and immortality in the bed of a goddess could not silence the call of something more compelling than even the Sirens—home.
The familiar scar on the beloved knee, the garden out back of the family estate, the heirloom piece—these are the things we are willing to go to war for, to make and change laws for, to work and spend for. These are the things that have the power to move us in ways visible to the external world, but meaningful because they concern what is internal, the domestic. When the child who, once laid in his mother’s arms, reoriented her entire life comes to the end of his own, he will call out for her, as the dying do. Because the foundational relationships of family and home are the things that really matter, the ones we come to first and last, and that command the movements of the life in between.
