![]() ![]() And the difference is that, if you indicate as a society that you're indifferent between a same-sex couple marrying and a heterosexual couple marrying, then it means our schools and other institutions are going to have to indicate that there is no difference whatsoever, and that obviously has societal consequences that are important. But there is a difference, even when just the word is the difference. I don't want civil unions or gay marriage. A year later, in an interview with Chris Matthews on the television show Hardball, Romney complicated his stance: His comment here implies that the victims of such unions would be the children raised by same-sex parents. The children of America have the right to have a father and a mother" (Gallagher). ![]() In an interview with 'the national review' following the legalization of same-sex marriage in his state, the then-Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, stated, "Marriage is principally for the nurturing and development of children. To what extent does The Road’s horrific mise-en-scène comprise a labor of mourning and a working toward relation? This essay also pays particular attention to the figure of the child in The Road and, by introducing the category of “ethical abandonment,” considers the extent to which McCarthy’s “son” fails to conform to Lee Edelman’s account of a hegemonically reproductive futurism. Klein’s trajectory from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position (and beyond) provides one way of thinking about how a subject responds to loss (and thus to the fear associated with one’s own or another’s death), but it also offers a persuasive account of the developmental movement in McCarthy’s novel. This essay begins by reading The Road’s dystopic psycho-political terrain in terms offered by Melanie Klein and Jessica Benjamin. But despite the narrative’s symptomatic displacement of the protagonist’s wife (the mother of his child), and notwithstanding its desperate idealization of the father-child relationship, The Road nevertheless bears the traces of an ethical encounter with the other that resists humanist or paternalist recuperation. As such, the novel invites its dismissal as an extravagantly solipsistic elegy for patriarchy. From such modeling, I argue, comes the essential capacity for faith and trust-in God and in others-that allows the boy to bring the love they've shared to its fulfilment.Ĭormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, depicts a decidedly masculine subject contemplating a death that is simultaneously imagined as, and as taking place at, the end of the world. The example of love as virtue in the other makes possible the hope that there may be other "good guys" with whom a future that is not simply rapine and predation might be built. Their love for one another means father and son must remain pledged to hope, for the other's sake, even in the most hopeless of settings. Charting the centrality of each of the theological virtues to the physical and moral survival of McCarthy's father-son pair in an altogether hostile world, the paper demonstrates that it is precisely these virtues that constitute and ensure this duo's on-going humanity. Arguing that McCarthy frames his apocalyptic narrative of paternal love and filial survival with a specifically Christian imagery and idiom, I maintain that what The Road offers us is a meditation on the good first in terms of modeled and habituated virtue, and then more particularly in terms of Christian virtue. This essay seeks to enrich a scholarship on The Road that has thus far skirted the novel's explicit grounding in Christian thought, and more specifically, its reliance on the elaboration of the three theological virtues. ![]()
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