Unity of Place and the Family Household

The pursuit of unity of place brings us back ultimately to the home.

Aristotle says in the Poetics that the best tragedies have to do with only a few great houses: those of Atreus, Oedipus, and the like. And Chesterton contends that the best storytelling spirals closer and closer inward to the family and the home. Why? Because the family household is where the human person is most of all a king. Perhaps not a literal king like Agamemnon or Oedipus, but a king, at least, within the confines of the small patch of this earth’s land over which he rules in freedom.

The family household, writes Chesterton, “is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter. It is not so much the place where a man kills his wife as the place where he can take the equally sensational step of not killing his wife.”

Other institutions, Chesterton continues, are largely made for us by strangers. But the family “is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

Pemberley. Bleak House. Tara. Brideshead. Downton Abbey.

The family household is the prime locus where we use our freedom to make or break our happiness, and thus it is the place where our dramas necessarily tend and concentrate.

* The image above is of Castle Howard, Yorkshire, where the BBC Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was filmed. Reprinted courtesy of diverstonefly at Wikimedia Commons.