Tuesday, June 11, 2024:
A couple of days ago, someone on the LitForum asked me why William might feel that he (having arrived at Fraser’s Ridge) now belonged to a family—didn’t he already belong to the Grey family? (I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.)
That was an interesting question, and I thought some of you might be interested in the answer—which comes with a brief excerpt to illustrate. (There’s spoiler space, for those who don’t want to read the excerpts…)
My LitForum Post:
Dear Elizabeth—
Hmm. Well—fwiw <g>—my sister and I have/had literally hundreds of cousins (our father having been the 13th child of his parents—he had several nieces who were thirty years his senior). My paternal grandmother died on my 11th birthday (which is why I recall it vividly), and as he was packing to catch the train to L.A. for her funeral, my Dad asked us to see if we could calculate how many descendants Grandma Inez had at that point. We came up with roughly 600—and that was sixty years ago.
I did not feel as though my cousins’ family/lies were my own. My own (small <g>) family was my parents, my sister and me, period. I felt some sense of kinship with my younger cousins—and now feel that sense toward all my relatives, known and unknown—but no, I don’t feel a sense of belonging in any of their families. That particular sense of belonging is engendered by being in the household/group, etc., in a context where food and activities and sleep are shared. (It was common, during the summers when we were children, to wake up in the morning and find a cousin in our beds; we lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, and half of Dad’s siblings (and attached families) lived in New Mexico, and the other half in California. So whenever there was a wedding, a birth or a funeral in California or New Mexico, the other half of the relatives would drive to the place where the event was happening. Even with modern highways (and they weren’t), the trip would take two days, so the migrants always stopped at our house for the night. We felt quite close to the cousins who woke up with us
So, yes, William would certainly feel a familial bond with Hal, Minnie and their children—but it’s not his nuclear (if we can use that term) family. That would have been his mother’s family—his grandparents, his Aunt Isobel (whom he thinks of as “Mother Isobel”and his real mother as ”Mother Geneva”) and his stepfather, Lord John). Those are the people he lived with.
The army offers another sort of family—but one that’s often closer than one’s birth family. Again, people in the army live in the army, and thus form often very close ties with other soldiers—often, closer than those with the birth family (again, depending on person and circumstance).
We haven’t seen enough of William’s life in the army (nor yet in school in England—and old school ties are more than just a garment <g>) to know how he feels about his friends in those contexts, but he’s many years past those relationships.
So here he is, more or less severed from all his previous connections and at something of a loss as how to proceed, as he’s lost a large part of his sense of self and his identity in society (not meaning “Society” <g>, but just how to live in a community of people who don’t necessarily share any of his assumptions about himself or about how things work). You can see him struggling to get a grip on things, figure out the right thing to do, contemplate what the hell to do with his life, etc., all the way through the last two books.
So now he’s kind of come into safe harbor, at least temporarily. He knows and loves Claire, he’s wary but fond of his sister, and… well, he’s had some time to come to terms at least with the idea of Jamie. But he truly loves Lord John, who has been his father since he was a child. And Lord John has been taken.
So he’s come to the only place he can, for help.
(Added spoiler space because this bit isn’t in BEES – thank you, Karen)
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And he gets it, and his family takes him in, not only metaphorically, but literally. They feed him, physically and emotionally, with both food and affection. For someone who’s been seriously adrift and alone for a long time… yes, he wants to belong somewhere, to someone—and he’s becoming aware (even if not consciously yet) that this is where, and these are his family.
(spoiler space for those who don’t want to read excerpts, though this one is brief)
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[Excerpt from Book Ten (Untitled), copyright © 2024 Diana Gabaldon]
William opened his eyes and lay still. He’d got used to not knowing quite where he was upon wakening, save when he slept in the woods. Woods at night are mysterious places, and his inner ear heard sounds all night, some deep part of his brain evidently recognizing and dismissing things like wind through leaves, the falling of acorns or the patter of rain on the canvas of his lean-to, but still sensitive enough to apprise him of the heavy pad of a walking bear nearby—to say nothing of the branches snapping in its path.
The result of this behavior on the part of his brain was to keep him aware of his circumstances all night, even if he never woke all the way, and thus unsurprised at dawn.
He’d slept like a log last night, though, worn out from his journey, plied with good, hot food and as much alcohol as he could drink. His memory of going to bed was confused, but he was lying now on the floor of an empty room—he lay on a ticking of some sort, but felt the smooth boards under his hands, something warm over him. Light filtered through a burlap-covered window…
And quite suddenly, the thought was just there in his mind, without warning.
I’m in my father’s house.
“Jesus,” he said aloud, and sat up, blinking. All of the day before came flooding back, a jumble of effort, sweat and worry, climbing through forest and cliffs, and finally seeing a large, handsome house emerge, its glass—glass. In this wilderness?—windows twinkling in the sun, incongruous amid the trees.
He’d pushed himself and the horse past fear and fatigue, and then—there he was, just sitting on the porch. James Fraser.
There had been other people on the porch and in the yard, but he hadn’t noticed any of them. Just him. Fraser. He’d spent miles and days deciding what to say, how to describe the situation, frame his request—and in the end, had simply ridden right up to the porch, breathless, and said, “Sir, I need your help.”
Read more excerpts released so far on my official Book Ten (Untitled) webpage.
This excerpt (aka “Daily Lines”) was first posted by me on the LitForum on Tuesday, June 11, 2024, and on my official Facebook page.