Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - László Dányi: On the Bad Side of the Fence: Fiascos of Southern Ethos
The second part of this paper aims to adapt the aforementioned principles to a specific character's striving. Peyton Loftis' fiasco is foreshadowed by the description of her desperate struggle to deliver herself. The same idea is worded by Sophie Zawistowska in Styron's Sophie's Choice : "It was like finding something precious in a dream where it is all so real —something or someone, I mean, unbelievably precious —only to wake up and realize the precious person is gone. Forever! I have done that so many times in my life, waking up with that loss" (Styron, Sophie 282). Peyton's quest for meaning which leads to the "absurd awakening" is the realization of Peyton Loftis's certainty about the absurdity of her life. Peyton Loftis, who is a from a family in the American South, commits suicide, and the novel starts with her funeral where the other members of the family are also present. Peyton's life rushing into her tragedy is revealed in the novel, which chronicles the efforts Peyton, Helen Loftis and Milton Loftis make to achieve the allure of personal identity in their chaotic world. Peyton's mother, Helen, is damned by her obsessive piety, and her father, Milton, is a fallen, middle class, aged alcoholic, who meditates over the absurdity of his life when he discovers that "his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover" (Styron, Lie 152), and his marriage has been a failure, too. Living in this family Peyton starts her quest to establish personal order, but her search is always undercut by recurring threats of the vanity of her quest. Her longing for personal order is expressed by longing for a father-figure. The search for the father is absurd since Milton is unable to live up to Peyton's father-image, furthermore he cannot balance the mother's obsessional dominance. Milton "has hoped to transform a common mistress into a divine Beatrice, and drink into the ambrosia that preserves to the last the dregs of mortality, shields him against age, despair, loss, inadequacy, pain, impotence; the quester who has found life a depressing recurrence of half-open doors through which he followed a dream, hoping to open the final door and look upon a beautitude instead, as he does, of peering into the horror and nothingness" (Morris 4). The characters of the family are embodiments of each other's strivings for balance and meaning. They search for innate values in the others, and it takes quite 180
