The Shifting Family Dynamic in John Updike's "Separating" Gabriella Calvino College

The family has long been the most basic unit of human society. In a traditional sense, it typically functions as a support system, often both financially and emotionally, with each spouse supporting the other and together the parents supporting their children during their ascent into adulthood where they are expected to continue the trend. In more recent generations, however, this traditional model for the familial entity in America has experienced significant change due to evolving social norms and with increasing secularism, more specifically, the more common occurrence of divorce. While the separation of a married couple is often a necessary and beneficial development for the mental health and happiness of one or both members of the union, the effects on the other half of the kin equation, the children of the couple, tend to be mixed and many. John Updike, a prominent realist writer during the 1970s, was witness and participant in the start of this shift in the family dynamic that came along with the spread of progressivism and a vast number of social revolutions associated with this era. From his saga of the suburban middle-class Maple family titled Too Far To Go, one story in particular, “Separating”, written in 1974,...