The Family Reunion

The Family Reunion
By Thomas Stearns Eliot
Mihai Andreea
English- French Group, 3rd year
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965)
★ poet, critic, playwright and editor was born in St. Louis, Missouri;
★ son of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns;
★ the youngest of seven children, born when his parents were
prosperous and secure in their mid-forties;
★ afflicted with a congenital double hernia, he was in the constant
care of his mother and five older sisters;
★ attended Smith Academy in St. Louis until he was sixteen;
★ in 1905 he departed for a year at Milton Academy outside of Boston,
preparatory to following his older brother Henry to Harvard;
★ he began his studies at Harvard in the fall of 1906.
The Family Reunion
★ The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot written mostly in blank verse. It incorporates
elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth century detective plays to portray the
hero's journey from guilt to redemption.
★ the play was unsuccessful when first presented in 1939, and was later regarded as
unsatisfactory by its author, but has been successfully revived since the 1940s. Some
critics have thought aspects of the tormented hero reflect T.S. Eliot's own difficulties
with his estrangement from his first wife.
Plot
★ the play is in two acts set in Wishwood, a stately home in the north of England. At the
beginning, the family of Lady Monchensey is assembling for her birthday party. She is, as
her doctor later explains, clinging on to life by sheer willpower:
“I keep Wishwood alive/ To keep the family alive,
to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I keep them.”
★ Lady Monchensey's two brothers and three sisters are present, and a younger relation,
Mary, but none of Lady Monchensey's three sons. Among other things they discuss the
sudden, and not to them wholly unwelcome, death at sea of the wife of the eldest son Harry,
the present Lord Monchensey.Neither of the younger sons ever appears, both being slightly
injured in motoring accidents, but Harry soon arrives, his first appearance at Wishwood for
eight years. He is haunted by the belief that he pushed his wife off the ship.
★ Mary, who has been earmarked by Amy as a future wife for Harry, wishes to escape from life at
Wishwood, but her aunt Agatha tells her that she must wait:
“You and I, Mary/ Are only watchers and waiters, not the easiest role.”
★ Agatha reveals to Harry that his father attempted to kill Amy while Harry was in her womb, and
that Agatha prevented him. Far from being grateful, Amy resented and still resents Agatha's
depriving her of her husband. Harry, with Agatha's encouragement, announces his intention to
go away from Wishwood, leaving his steady younger brother John to take over. Amy, despairing
at Harry's renunciation of Wishwood, dies (offstage), "An old woman alone in a damned house",
and Harry and his faithful servant, Downing, leave.
1969 december 2008/
january 2019
Structure
★ the play is partly in blank verse and partly in prose;

★ the work has superficial resemblances to a conventional 1930s drawing room drama, Eliot uses
two devices from ancient Greek drama:
○ Harry's uncles and aunts occasionally detach themselves from the action and chant a
commentary on the plot, in the manner of a Greek chorus
○ Harry is pursued by the Eumenides – the avenging Furies who pursue Orestes in the
Oresteia; they are seen not only by Harry but by his servant and the most perceptive
member of his family, Agatha.
★ Stephen Spender commented that the whole play was "about the hero's discovery of his religious
vocation as a result of his sense of guilt”
★ The play is divided in two parts, each divided in three scenes.
★ the play ends with Agatha, saying that the knot is unknotted, the cross is uncrossed and the
crooked is made straight as a conclusion of what she said before:
"The eye is on this house Be at last straightened

The eye covers it May the weasel and the otter
There are three together Be about their proper business
May the three be separated The eye of the day time
May the knot that was tied And the eye of the night time
Become unknotted Be diverted from this house
May the crossed bones Till the knot is unknotted
In the filled-up well The cross is uncrossed
And the crooked is made
straight."

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The Family Reunion

By Thomas Stearns Eliot

★ the play is partly in blank verse and partly in prose;

"The eye is on this house Be at last straightened

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