Broken Homes
The theme of broken homes is pervasive throughout the short fiction of Mary Hood, but not always in immediately detectable ways. In a great many stories, the break is quite literal and shocking such as a sudden demand for a divorce after forty years of marriage in “Solomon’s Seal.” Often, the broken home is more symbolic and doesn’t carry the shock of instant recognition that something has shattered. Whether obvious or not, literal or symbolic, the effect is usually the same: a dislocation from the norm that stimulates the narrative and links the stories together as a broad tapestry of southern culture on the skids.
Alienation and Isolation
The dislocation of being cut off from home—or “the norm”—is the result of that stimulus to the narrative. Once the break from home occurs, people must react to the change and it does not always settle in for permanence. In “After Moore” from Hood’s second collection, there is another divorce, but it turns out not to be exactly the sort of final word on the marriage that one usually expects from such proceedings. Nevertheless, the break from the normalcy of what was home has had its effect and is revealed to have served a secret purpose. The same collection features a quite different riff on the theme of the effect of isolation after a severance from the norm can have in the story “Nobody’s Fool” which turns on a single momentary lapse of judgment which is the stimulus for the dislocation at the center of its narrative. Throughout Hood’s stories in all her collection, change or the lack of it is usually connected to a period of isolation and alienation resulting from a break with the familiarity of home.
Suburban Sprawl
An example of how broken homes works literally, but even more so symbolically, is Hood’s analysis of the effect of suburban sprawl on rural Georgia over the period of time in which she’s been writing. As towns become cities and Atlanta becomes a metropolis, growth must move outward from the center. What was nothing but lonely country roads slicing through pastures and farms in the 1960’s and 1970’s became indistinguishable and homogenous strip malls, fast-food restaurants, mobile home parks, planned communities, malls and lots and lots of asphalt. Rural Georgia and the peaceful and comfortable and slow-paced life lived there becomes a symbolic broken home as Hood’s stories move into the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. Suddenly, there is no opportunity to be isolated, but the alienation not only stays, but starts to define not just individuals, but entire geographic areas.
Respect for Elders
Part of the Southern experience is learning to respect your elders; this is a mandate for the characters trying to map their way through a changing cultural and topographic landscape in Hood’s fiction. The elderly in her fiction are not just old people, they represent a way of life and a way of working off the land and making a home more than a structure. Thus for them, when a home is broken it means more than just a family coming apart, it is a way of life that they see collapsing around them. Hood endows her older people with all the foibles and biological breakdowns that are a natural part of growing old, but she is quick to point out that this not automatically transfer into a breakdown of dignity and wisdom and experience. As the strip malls and fast food joints replace the land, her older characters are the ones that most palpably connect to that loss because they are—sometime explicitly and sometimes without any direct reference—the generation that literally built their homes and tended that land with their hands.
