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History of Popular Culture—Week 2, Assignment 1

Analyze a Norman Rockwell painting and discuss how it portrayed the “American family” of his time. Create a rough sketch of your interpretation of today’s American family, and compare it with Rockwell’s portrayal.

Norman Rockwell’s rich paintings capture the spirit of American life during his time, and the differences between that spirit and today’s sentiment toward family life are shocking and disheartening.

In Freedom From Want¹, Rockwell presumably portrayed a family of eleven sitting at the dinner table, anxiously anticipating the feast that was set before them. Such family dinners are rare at best in today’s hurried culture, often reserved only for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The family is united around one shared experience. There is no stress from work or school evident on their faces. The joy around the table is genuine; in today’s culture, spending quality time with family around a traditional dinner is too rare.

Freedom From Fear² is perhaps Rockwell’s most moving piece. It is humbling to realize from its reflection of family values of the era how far we as a culture have come—strayed—in pursuit of a more just society: equal opportunity, women’s rights, civil liberties, etcetera.

In this intimate portrait of what is likely a nighttime ritual, a husband and wife are seen tucking their two daughters into bed. The man puts aside his newspaper, adoring his girls, focusing his thoughts on them instead of the “horrors” his newspaper suggests. His job, politics and news are all set aside for at least this one moment of domestic unity; he is not too busy for his family.

The loving mother pulls the girls’ flat sheet up to their chins. Her apron suggests a hard day performing daily household chores—perhaps washing the dishes, vacuuming carpets or rugs, gardening, and preparing the family’s evening meal. This traditional arrangement of household duties—mother as homemaker, father as breadwinner—is subconsciously assumed in today’s liberal, politically correct society to be sexist and prejudicial against women. In many cases nowadays, the childrens’ caretaker would be putting the kids to bed while the father and mother were commuting their two hours from jobs in the city.

Even the innocent children have been affected by our culture’s sense of entitlement. In this scene, the two girls are tucked into the same bed, and in the same room. Today, many children feel entitled to their own bedroom and their own bed. Civil liberties activists’ ideologies have trickled down and been interpreted even into what should be the protected realm of the bedrooms of today’s children.

1. Freedom From Want [back]
2. Freedom From Fear [back]