The Theme Of Family In Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, includes overarching themes of family and society that uses advanced language techniques as well as multifaceted characters to enrich the readers process of opinion development and gives many examples of word choice power. Family is an obvious theme that premise the book itself. However the concept of family is not so black and white as it even permeates boundaries and choices of characters you’d otherwise not believe be influenced by family. During Denise’s escapades with other women, her struggles with internal homophobia doesn’t stem from herself, but rather is a causation by her mother and societal views. This is seen when Denise attempts to speak with her mother about her sexuality but her mother, rather than think that her daughter isn’t straight, would rather assure her that she will marry again one day and she needn’t be so gloomy. (513) Enid is trying to assure her daughter but during this time period, the prospect of having a gay marriage was very low, so Denise was always right in this situation of being assured that she’ll never marry.

To some characters like chip, the status quo is evil and everyone else but him are all sheep. Even then, he only keeps up this persona of being against ‘the man’ when he’s really conforming into what he thinks others expect him to be.
To others, like Enid, the status quo is to be held sacred. She doesn’t want to admit that her husband is sick and needs to accept the change to better care for