Morris, Wright - Delmore Schwartz (review date 1951)

Delmore Schwartz (review date 1951)

SOURCE: A review of Man and Boy, in Partisan Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 5, September-October, 1951, pp. 575-76.

[In the following review, Schwartz focuses on Morris's treatment of the domineering and indomitable mother figure in Man & Boy.]

The attack on the American Mother attains a new intensity and dimension in Wright Morris' Man & Boy. Mrs. Ormsby, the mother of the novel, rules with an iron hand not only in the region of emotions and mores, but she commands and transforms language as well. Mr. Morris has dramatized the extent to which much of her power comes from a mastery of language, an aspect of the American mother which has been neglected in most descriptions of her. Mrs. Ormsby uses language to make her own values devastating tabus. She is the absolute monarch, through her fund of formulation, of decorum, rectitude, prohibition, inhibition, and permission. She has...

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