How Little Comfort the Home Circle May Avail

In the rather romantic view the prevailing bourgeois culture takes of "home" and "family" it is a shelter from the brutal world of individual striving outside.

Alas, it is a far from perfect shelter--and that great teller of truths Balzac, who dramatized what the cutting-edge social thinkers of his day discussed (not least that in the "cash nexus" "all that is solid melts into air"), was not unmindful of the fact. In the third and last volume of the three-decker novel Lost Illusions (Eve and David), Lucien Chardon/de Rubempre, returning home from his pursuit of his career in Paris not in glorious triumph but the shattering defeat far, far more common for those who walk his particular path (or any other career path, for that matter), seeing how little his sister regards him, thinks to himself that "In the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity." The realization cuts him so deeply in that low moment for him that he takes himself off to do away with himself.

So it goes--if you are a nobody out in the big world, command no respect out there, you can expect to be a nobody at home, without respect at home.

It is probably one of the more painful psychological and emotional aspects of inequality--and ought to be better acknowledged than it is in the ever misleading conventional wisdom.