The Country Husband

Content Warning: This section references domestic violence and alcohol addiction.

“The Country Husband” is a prototypical example of American realism. Through intricate psychological portraits, subtle symbolism, and a detailed exploration of the enclave of Shady Hill, Cheever crafts a layered narrative that invites readers to question whether authenticity is possible within the confines of American suburbia and whether people are capable of Redemption and Change.

Francis Weed experiences three significant events that spur his emotional awakening and develop these overarching themes. The first is the plane crash that opens the story. Although physically unharmed, Francis undergoes a profound emotional shift in the aftermath of the crash. He desperately wants to relay the experience in a meaningful way and experience a resulting emotional connection. However, the people he encounters back in Shady Hill remain indifferent to the event, and the very environment seems to prevent Francis from speaking about it. When he meets his neighbor, Trace Bearden, on the train back from the crash, for example, he struggles to convey the experience: “Francis had no powers that would let him re-create a brush with death—particularly in the atmosphere of a commuting train, journeying through a sunny countryside where already, in the slum gardens, there were signs of harvest” (38). The sun-drenched beauty of Shady Hill drowns out the harsh ugliness of the plane crash, and Francis can’t bridge the gap between his recent experience and the groomed reality of his hometown. This initial disconnection sets the stage for the exploration of Suburban Conformity and Disillusionment in Marriage—in particular, the psychological chasm that exists within his family unit and the larger community of Shady Hill.

The second event is Francis’s run-in with the maid, who sparks a memory of the war that he had successfully repressed. There are subtle hints throughout the story that World War II continues to impact him subconsciously, most especially in the way the close third narration describes things in terms of war and violence: His home is a “battlefield,” his children are “combatants,” and Julia’s call to dinner sounds like “the war cries of the Scottish chieftains” (38). The episode with the maid highlights Francis’s alienation from his true self much more overtly. While at the party, Francis thinks that his memory has become “something like his appendix—a vestigial repository” (40). It has ceased to have a function in his everyday life. To fit in at Shady Hill functions, he cannot acknowledge the ugly truths that he’s witnessed. He must constantly repress a significant part of his identity, represented by the maid. Francis leaves the party in an altered psychological state: “[T]he encounter left Francis feeling languid; it had opened his memory and his senses, and left them dilated” (41). Already primed for existential angst by the plane crash the previous day, the flood of war memories further contributes to the mental anguish and unraveling that plague him throughout the rest of the story.

The third significant encounter is with his children’s young babysitter, Anne, who embodies the passion, promise, and emotional openness that he believes his life lacks. When he first meets her, she is crying about the abuse she has suffered at the hands of her father, who drinks heavily. Francis finds this level of vulnerability intoxicating; all of his other encounters contain a level of superficiality or avoidance and no longer fulfill his “dilated” state. As he comforts her, he thinks that the “layers of their clothing fe[el] thin, and when her shuddering beg[ins] to diminish, it [is] so much like a paroxysm of love that Francis los[es] his head and pull[s] her roughly against him. She dr[aws] away” (41). The brief emotional connection he experiences gives him the jolt of authentic feeling that he’s been missing, such that he immediately calls it love and projects the feeling onto her. Though Anne likely doesn’t return his feelings (she “draws away” from his embrace), Francis begins to fantasize about building a completely new life with her.

His intense feelings cause him to view his life with a renewed sense of vitality and vigor: “Even the smell of ink from his morning paper honed his appetite for life, and the world that was spread out around him was plainly a paradise” (42). At the same time, the encounter with Anne causes him to retreat from “real life” into a fantasy in which he and Anne are living together in Paris and sailing together on the Mauretania. This fantasy very quickly dissipates, however, when the facts of the situation become apparent. After he learns Anne is engaged to Clayton Thomas, a college-aged neighbor, he begins to mentally unravel and even hallucinates seeing Anne on the train. As he realizes that his feelings have begun to consume him and negatively impact his mental health, he decides to see a psychiatrist, who tells him to consider woodworking as a distraction. At the end of the story, he has apparently been able to abandon his feelings for Anne, resettle into his old life, and find happiness in the “holy smell of new wood” (48).

Through Francis’s journey—from initial complacency, to rebellion, and finally to a form of acceptance—Cheever explores the human capacity for change and redemption. While the reader is explicitly told that Francis is “happy” with his newfound hobby of woodworking, it is unclear whether this emotional transformation is permanent or significant enough to quell his profound existential crisis. Cheever underscores this ambiguity in the ending scene, which describes Shady Hill as a place hanging “morally and economically, by a thread” and shows all of the characters behaving in the same, familiar ways they did at the beginning (48)—Mr. Goslin plays the Moonlight Sonata, Gertrude the stray is being told to go home, and Mr. Nixon is shouting at the squirrels. There is a sense of both stasis and precarity in the air: Given that all things necessarily must revert back to the status quo for Shady Hill to function properly, Francis may rediscover his disillusionment. 

The ending images of the story don’t offer an easy answer to Francis’s problem, but rather suggest that the push and pull between Fantasy Versus Reality, passion versus complacency, and turmoil versus harmony are ever-present conflicts within the human psyche. Sometimes, Cheever suggests, people are like the unhappy cat, “sunk in spiritual and physical discomfort” and feeling angrily constricted by the roles they are forced to play by society (48); sometimes they are like Jupiter, brashly acting on their desires and prancing happily through the tomato vines of life. Like Toby, who jumps off his bed hoping to fly, humans like to believe themselves capable of fantastic acts but are often brought back to reality with similar, harsh thumps. However, the image Cheever leaves readers with is one of “kings in golden suits” far away (48), providing hope that something larger, grander, and more magical exists, if only people are brave enough to reach for it.