Mercy Among the Children

Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex theory echoes faintly in Lyle’s dreams of his father’s death, within this literary context. Freud’s theory uses the myth of Oedipus, who would blindly kill his father and marry his mother, to discuss a formative stage in the sexual development of an individual. Lyle’s banishment of his father reverses Oedipus’s own banishment by his father. Lyle’s new position and subsequent anxiety when he is literally made a pseudo father figure to Percy is also in keeping with Freud’s theory that the desired death of the father is only an imaginary position, which if actually attained, can be detrimental to the development of the child.

The wishes for death of the father is also a pivotal concept in literary theory. American literary critic Howard Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence spawned a new theoretical school that enshrined the “revisionary,” or “antithetical.” Bloom’s idea is that great writers must figuratively “kill” their literary forefathers if they are to establish their own place within the canon of literature. Bloom argues that this “anxiety” is discernible in the greatest writers, whose works engage in an “agon,” or contest with influential literary precedents. From this perspective, Lyle’s story is a broader parable about the challenges of writing in a postmodern literary landscape.

Chapters 8 and 9 of “Fury” discuss the children’s differing stances to education. While Lyle rejects education as Professor David Scone rejected his father, Autumn’s imagination is energized by her own independent studies. Lyle can only perceive himself at odds with the institutions that have failed to support his family and becomes hopeless and self-destructive: “Our lives were not the lives of Rhodes scholars, even if Autumn was brighter than one. We were instead people with a true destiny, recognizable only in our universal lunacy under the winter skies” (200).

The shredding of Lyle’s essay into paper airplanes and their final resting place in the mud of the schoolyard is bitterly ironic. His dreams of upward mobility will have a similar trajectory due to the societal prejudices against him. Lyle’s realization that he is “twice as strong” echoes his father’s assertion that the perpetrator of harm is always harmed by it.

Richard draws biblical parallels: “It was like Adam talking to Eve—I had left my mother and father, left the valley of the Saints, and had been thrust forward into the thorns” (206). The Hendersons are aware of the literary parallels in their own lives. As with many poor communities, religion offers an escape from painful realities. Paradoxically for the narrator of the novel, Lyle is unwilling to write his own story. Such is his belief in his family’s “brutal rural destiny” (14) and the absurdity of his existence that he remains alienated from it. Sydney Henderson’s passivity in response to the torments endured by his family is moral but not ethical. Richards does not exculpate his readers from this quandary but leaves them to discern the nature of Sydney’s character for themselves.

Sydney and Elly’s third child, Percy, is born in a crib. The family’s poverty and the meagerness of the child’s surroundings contain a latent echo of the birth of Christ, rejected from all the inns in Bethlehem and born in a manger. Transposed into modernity, the reality of this biblical story is less seductive. Lyle’s resistance to social welfare systems and social support in general is unambiguous in this chapter:

She had the type of face that as she got older its traits of social cruelty became more pronounced; traits always hidden in our culture just under the surface like the effects of sin on a picture of Dorian Gray […] Part of me was by now a social slave. I would squeeze the slave out of myself, as Chekhov said, but not for a while (216).

The mention of playwright Anton Chekhov is poignant, as most of the ancestors of Russia’s foremost dramatist were serfs, and Chekhov’s plays are marked by some antagonism toward societal hypocrisy. For Chekhov, the tragedy of modern life is that society is a kind of cage. Lyle sees this tragedy through to its conclusion.