Compare the presentation of family ties and dysfunction by Jeanette Winterson and Tracy Letts in

‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal’ and ‘August: Osage County’ respectively

The primary concern of August: Osage County and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is the
catalyst for action in both, family issues. While one examines a large American household out on the
planes the other deals with a small adoptive situation in Manchester. While setting and structure
make differences, the iconography of each respective location highlights the contrast and similarities
in each. The quaint mountainous village of Manchester is in direct contrast to the quintessential
American planes but the characters within these locations are demonstrably similar.

Letts’s August tells the story of a dysfunctional family who come together to comfort their mother at
their home in Oklahoma California on the planes after the vanishing and subsequent suicide of their
father. Her sister, three daughters and their new families are drawn back into the ‘state of mind’
that is the planes and the “madhouse” that is their childhood home. Dysfunction bubbles to the
surface and Violet Weston unleashes her unbridled fury on the family at will, only safe due to the
family’s nascent denial of their own problems. Winterson’s Why Be Happy tells the autobiographical
story of Jeanette, a girl adopted by the tyrannous Mrs Winterson who hurls abuse, punishments, and
psychological destruction on her, justified always by her unwavering religious faith and insistence on
Jeanette’s Satanic mistake at being bestowed upon her. It’s a coming-of-age narrative of a young
woman in an environment that refuses to look after her.

Both August and Why Be Happy deal primarily with matriarchal figures; they are at the heart of the
plot and they stand at the core of the family dysfunction. Letts has claimed that the play itself was
‘based on family history’ and Why Be Happy is unabashedly autobiographical. Letts has based the
character of Vi on his own grandmother who, after his grandfather committed suicide, descended
into years of downer addiction, which took a terrible toll on his family. Winterson has said that her
book is as true to life as they come, a straight account of her life from an author’s pen, no additional
frills or furbelows. For Violet Weston, Letts presents a darkly comical toxic mother, a pill-popping vile
personality with a cancerous mouth and literal mouth cancer, ‘(she) takes drugs as well as potshots
at (her) daughters’ Barbara, Ivy and Karen. But her attacks don’t stop there, no one in the family is
safe from her and ‘nobody slips anything by (her)’.

In Why Be Happy we have Mrs Winterson as Jeanette’s adoptive mother, a gaslighting, abusive,
intensely Christian woman with a pious righteousness of air. She represents the hypocrisy and the
strict and unwavering life of a woman of the church in that time, something that comes into direct
conflict with our writer and narrator. She bludgeons and punishes her daughter, locking her outside
and forcing her to sleep on the front step of the house and trapping her under the stairs. Mrs
Winterson’s abuse goes much farther than that of Vi’s verbal onslaught. In fact, the physical abuse,
psychological torment and punishing torture Jeanette suffers through is in fact similar to that which
Vi had endured in the stories she tells. The idea of inherited abusiveness in parental lineage is also
shown in Jeanette, demonstrated in how abusive she becomes in relationships as an adult ‘I used to
hit my girlfriends until I realised it was not acceptable... Even now, when I am furious, what I would
like to do is punch the infuriating person flat on the ground’. This is similar to the way Vi has been
corrupted become at the hands of her own mother and her gentlemen callers.
But Winterson presents two matriarchs, Mrs Winterson’s the “evil stepmother” and the motherly
counterpart in Jeanette’s biological mother. Connie is caring, sweet and understanding, presented as
the idyllic mother Winterson thought she’d never have. But it’s not as expected, Jeanette finds
herself faced with a difficult revelation; the expectation she had for finding her real mother is
completely wrong. She compares it to TV shows where adoptive children discover their birth parents
and the overwhelming saccharine joy they perpetuate and the relative hollowness she feels upon
finally meeting her. The perfection she sought all these years has been tainted by the normalisation
of the years of abuse and pain but moreover the truth can’t live up to the fantasy. Much in the way
August’s characters cannot live up to their own expectations, Connie cannot meet Jeanette’s. The
fairytale, storybook ideal of her true mother is challenged by the harsh realism that Jeanette hasn’t
considered.

This leads to the ultimate crux of Why Be Happy, growing accustomed to the pain; Jeanette’s
disillusionment and fatigue at her abuse and how commonplace and matter-of-fact it is as a part of
her life; the emptiness and the mundaneness of it as a part of her life is something Jeanette claims
herself she has come to identify with as normal and commonplace “I didn’t respect them for it but I
didn’t fear it either”. The disillusioning effect this has had has taken its clear toll, dysfunction has
bred dysfunction, abuse has brought forward deep-set issues and what’s most harrowing is that
Jeanette carries this through to relationships as well, she abuses people until she sees it’s wrong but
the learning she must make is offset by the difficulty which is that she can never really comprehend
something she is raised with. Her birth mother coming into the picture is what reveals this, in a
literary sense it’s her role; she exposes the conflict Jeanette has had and all the repressed trauma
comes to the surface.

Another fascinating element in each story is the façade of a normal functioning family and the way
they each reside in their predisposed role. Letts presents the Westons with a need to align with the
typical familial structure and, moreover, to maintain a constant act of the idyllic perfect family. This
notion for the perfect household is all a result of the delegation by American society, it’s embedded
in the iconography of Americana and the desire to live in a fantastical Norman Rockwell version of
the ideal family. But that’s just it; it’s a fantasy and it’s a fantasy that the Westons cannot live up to.
The family’s constant pushing of this is uncomfortably forced, and this is made abundantly clear in
this one moment when Ivy reveals she had cancer and she never told Karen and Barbara, shattering
their delusions in the process:

BARBARA: We're your sisters. We might've given you some comfort.

IVY: I just don't feel that connection very keenly.

KAREN: I feel very connected, to both of you.

IVY (Amused): We never see you, you're never around, you haven't been around for-

KAREN: But I still feel that connection!

IVY: You think if you tether yourself to this place in mind only, you don't need to actually appear.

KAREN: You know me that well.

IVY: No, and that's my point. I can't perpetuate these myths of family or sisterhood anymore. We're
all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing
more.
Karen and Barbara keep up the lie of the sisterhood and claim to feel the connection even though Ivy
has pointed out she’s barely been around, in fact it’s been revealed that she hasn’t been around for
years. The nascent bond of sisterhood that would otherwise be accepted in any other story is
framed in August as absurd, the rebukes and degradation Karen receives for her attempts to keep
the bond alive are hostile. This could be that while everyone else in the family keeps the act
understated, Karen’s attempts are unsubtle and overwrought. Before and during dinner she’s trying
to make herself heard talking of the childhood fort and the memories and nostalgia she has, but her
reminiscing falls on jaded ears. Her attempt at familial sharing is met with a clapback remark, Ivy
says it’s been gone for years, which then leads to their interaction. The family silently keeps the
structure sound whereas Karen doesn’t have a deft enough hand to do so, this makes her the target
of Vi’s attacks because as she runs her mouth the lie is exposed. Karen just tries to keep the ruse
going but she unintentionally does it a detriment which makes her easy for the family to pick apart.

In many toxic family units, the dynamics between everyone will eventually land on one particular
person; the “whipping boy” that every member lashes. Every family member turns on Karen
vigorously, she’s this family’s bullseye. This could also be because every member of the family has a
certain pessimism that helps to ground the ruse, Vi’s opinion of aging women, Bill’s view of the
“madhouse” they’re in, Barbara’s irreverence about the family’s troubles unless it pertains to
herself, everyone in the family each has their own cynicism that makes the lie more plausible but
Karen rejects cynical thoughts and feelings as far as we can see, it’s her defence mechanism and her
way of coping with the abuse she receives. Her positivity and optimism is what she carries through
the play and it’s also what makes her open season for the other members of the family, putting her
heart out there to her family lets it be trampled on by everyone else. It’s also telling that when Ivy is
the only one with Vi she is the scapegoat for Vi’s insults and bile, “you always look like such a schlub”
“you look like a lesbian”, but there’s a tenderness that she levels it with, almost as if Ivy’s not the
one she wants to hurl the abuse at.

This also displays the dysfunction in the unlikely locations of the family bonds. The same goes for
Barbara and Mattie Fae, they get jabs and probing remarks, but they never receive the full brunt. But
the minute Karen’s on the scene she is Vi’s unabashed lightning rod, all through dinner she’s
relentlessly attacking Karen for everything she does. And the one moment that captures all of
Karen’s abuse and attitudes together; “Where’s the beef?”. This one scene encapsulates it all,
Karen’s few interjections until now have been requesting wine or praising the food until Mattie Fae
and Vi share a joke about the famed commercial of “Where’s the beef?”, a nostalgic advertisement
on television. Karen’s enthusiastic and friendly correction of “meat” to “beef” is met with a repeated
‘screech’ of “Where’s the meat?”. This whole moment sums up perfectly Karen’s outlook, Vi’s
treatment of her and Karen’s position as her punching bag. While Karen is by no means the only one
who feels Violet’s wrath, her treatment shows the extreme of the dysfunctional interpersonal bonds.

Similarly, in Why Be Happy, Winterson presents a façade of religious and communitive farce; Mrs
Winterson is a devout Christian who purports a charitable, loving front; fuelled by the need to be
seen by her neighbours and fellow churchgoers as a good Christian she has the adopted Jeanette as
an example of her Christian plight and the gestures she gives. “She wore it like an armour and then
the armour became her skin”. The lie doesn’t stop there though, Jeanette reveals other ploys in Mrs
Winterson’s lies, the aerosol fragrance she claims to be insect repellent, the hidden box of cigarettes
that she pretends not to have, the secret heated corset she pretends not to wear (something that is
inevitably revealed when it beeps upon becoming overheated), the weight she claims she has lost
but truly hasn’t. All this just shows Mrs Winterson’s lies have transformed into a state of denial. She
lies to others but more importantly, so the lie can be palpable, she lies to herself as well. Her weight,
her smoking, her abusive nature, her validity in her own faith. It’s reached a point that she cannot
tell the difference between the lies she tells others and the truth she believes in, to the point that
she doesn’t even know what the truth is. The armour became her skin and the lie became her truth.

This dichotomy in the lies and truth is so that becomes confused, more lies are needed to stifle the
truth, lie upon lie smothers this sense of understanding between fact and conjured fiction. This is
also very similar to August, every character also claims lies to themselves; Mattie Fae’s “cocktail”
being straight whiskey, Ivy believing herself and Little Charles can work, Karen’s saccharine belief of
her dream husband and the denial that her fiancée Steve is not as debauched and deprived as he is,
Violet’s initial denial of her drug problem. The list goes on, every character claims false truths that
even they are not entirely aware of which is true; ‘each character chooses to hold on to their own
lies rather than face reality and all its consequences’. The truth and the lie is never exposed without
destruction, Beverly’s true intent of suicide results in Violet’s downward spiral, the reveal of Barbara
and Bill’s separation is met with hostility, Steve’s molesting of Jean is rejected until it explodes,
resulting in the ruination of the family dynamic and Jean’s maternal relationship, Ivy’s learning of her
and Little Charles being siblings shatters her hopes and the chance she had of escape. These truths,
when excised, further enhance the dysfunction, and the same for Why Be Happy. Jeanette’s
confession that she’s a lesbian ruptures Mrs Winterson’s varicose vein, the tell-all book is met with
Mrs Winterson’s wrath over the phone. These truths, when told, further drive the family apart. In
fact, the lesson each work puts forth is that these lies help to keep the family together despite the
deceit of the entire situation.

Both these works examine the latent dysfunction in a family unit and the structure and roles each
family aligns with. Comparatively speaking, the two works have a lot in common as they pull apart
the latent issues each family struggles with but what really sticks with me is that they both address
the idea of the truth, the whole truth but never tell the truth. Because it never needs to be said. The
perfect culmination of each story is Ivy wishing she’d never been told of her and Little Charles being
siblings; the truth of the family she talks of and she’s pushed on everyone else is all forgotten once
she realises she can’t take the truth either. This is evident in the final exchange:

BARBARA: Goddamn it, listen to me: I tried to protect you-

IVY: We'll go anyway. We'll still go away, and you will never see me again.

BARBARA: Don't leave me like this.

IVY: You will never see me again.

BARBARA: This is not my fault. I didn't tell you, Mom told you. It wasn't me, it was Mom.

IVY: There's no difference.

That final line tells so much, Ivy doesn’t care who told her the truth but the fact that the truth was
revealed it has now ruined everything for her. The tragic irony of this is that the truth she’s pushed
upon her family has now ruined her escape from it. And what’s truly upsetting is that if she had lived
in ignorance she would have been happy, her and Little Charles. But once the truth is revealed, she
can never get back the innocence she had, she and Little Charles are not only over but they are
shattered. And for Why Be Happy the moment Jeanette has found her real mother; her reaction says
it all. The truth hasn’t set her free, it’s only complicated things. And she doesn’t know what to do
with it and why it hasn’t solved her lifelong trauma. There’s no “eureka” moment of knowing who
she is, where she came from and how it came to be. And in fact, the truth confuses her more and
adds more difficulty to her identity.
Both these works show dysfunction and the family ties but also, more than anything, the truth of
both. And that truth that makes and breaks a family member and their familial relationships. It also
shows the truly inescapable darkness in a family unit and the irreversible damage that has. But most
prevalent is this idea of reality and fantasy, the fantasies we dream and the harsh reality that it
meets and in a way the

Biblography

August: Osage County – Tracy Letts

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson

The Singularity of August: Osage County – Annette Insdorf

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/annette-insdorf/the-singularity-of-august_b_4530633.html

“August: Osage County”– Family Secrets and Lies

http://www.unhealedwound.com/2014/01/august-osage-county-family-secrets-and-lies/