A Domestic Dilemma - Dealing With Alcoholism
A Domestic Dilemma - Dealing with Alcoholism
What would you do if you come home from work and found all of the lights on in the house, your children unattended, plugging electrical cords into sockets and your wife upstairs drunk and clueless to what is going on downstairs? Martin, the main character in “A Domestic Dilemma” by Carson McCullers, finds just that when he comes home from work. In this story Martin is faced with dealing with his wife Emily’s drinking and depression and how it is affecting his life at home and at work. This fiction addresses such problems as what would the neighbors think, what would people at the office say, how safe are the children around their mother when she is drunk, and what can Martin do to help his wife and their marriage. This story is about the dilemma or decisions Martin feels forced to make dealing with alcoholism.
Alcoholism can cause families to face difficult decisions in their lives and the abuse of alcohol usually goes undetected until it is too late. In this story, Martin is trying to understand how Emily’s alcohol abuse started;He himself had always enjoyed a good drink. When they were still in Alabama they had served long drinks or cocktails as a matter of course. For years they had drunk on or two—possibly three drinks before dinner, and at bedtime a long nightcap. Evenings before holidays they might get a buzz on, might even become a little tight. But alcohol had never seemed a problem to him… (66-67). McCullers writes about the abuse of alcohol and how it causes domestic violence, child abuse or neglect and an emotional strain on the family as a whole.
Dealing with a loved one’s alcohol abuse can be emotionally draining and that causes domestic violence to accelerate; “There were times of unexplainable malevolence, times when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger” (McCullers 67). Martin is trying to keep his life stable and picture perfect in everyone’s eyes. Hiding the fact that Emily...
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