17.

The Meaningful Life

It is common in literature for a protagonist to struggle to lead a meaningful existence. The novels we have read are not solely narratives, but explorations of what it is that makes life valuable. For every character, or author, this investigation is distinct.  In Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, Jyoti believes that the meaning of her life resides in the completion of  her "mission." Other characters find purpose, not in completing a divinely-sent task, but in what they will become, or what they will make of themselves.  In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh reflects upon Clarissa's insistence that value comes from one's ambition to be an accomplished member of he upper class. 

What she would say was that she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets; must do something, be something; and these great swells, these Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one met in her drawing-room, unspeakably remote as he felt them to be from anything that mattered a straw, stood for something real to her (67).

Clarissa sees these class distinctions as real. They are kind of accomplishments that make her life valuable. 

I've also noticed that the idea that life meaning  derives from the approval of one's parents, or oppositely,  the success of one's children is commonly at play in women's literature.

Perhaps this is because women are so inextricably tied to the process of birth. To many women, children are like extensions of one's own life, or one's own purpose. Mothers are sincerely invested in what becomes of their children.  Oppositely, I think that a person's parents can be extremely involved in one's life purpose.  It is natural to feel that we must prove to our parents what we can do with what we've been given, where we will go given where we are from. It seems this approval can validate our own meaning.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores this tendency when Peter Walsh imagines the mind of Clarissa:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed? (36).

Here, Woolf expresses the human desire to posses a full life and to present this before one's  own parents. In the imagination of Peter Walsh, she carries a life that is full and concrete in a completely physical sense, able to be completely possessed by the individual. Like a product, Clarissa shows it to her parents, hoping for approval. Peter Walsh imagines Clarissa as "child" and as a "young woman," suggesting that the desire for this validation is timeless - a thing that haunts her throughout her entire life. 

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the protagonist struggles to separate her own meaning from the legacy of her mother. In a fight with her mother, Offred heatedly retorts, "I am not your justification for existence"(132). Though her mother is tempted to equate her life's success in the pursuits of her child, her daughter resists. 

I think it is natural to look to family  when assuring that one's life has meaning. Perhaps it is because family are the most direct source,  in the biological sense, of "where we are from." 

In The Hours, loosely influenced by Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf speaks to a child about death. When her niece enquires as to what happens after death, Woolf replies "we go back to where we are from." When the child responds that she has forgotten "where she is from," Woolf replies, "so have I." With life's complexities, it is easy to forget where, exactly "one is from." Relatives are the easiest way to ground an individual because, despite life's events, they are constant figures in a lifetime. They are the people from whom we are born, or to whom we have given life. Genetically, they are the people through which we transcend mortality - as generations pass, characteristics of ourselves float seamlessly through time. 

Maybe it is this sense of being more than an individual, tied to others by heredity, that makes us turn to family for meaning. At the the same time, we often seek separation from family in order to reaffirm our positions as distinct individuals. Perhaps at the root of this issue is the question of whether one needs to be an individual or, rather, a member of a group to live a meaningful life.