ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff reads the Elliotts as a healthy subversion of family from the perspective of archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s subversive psychotherapy. If, as Hillman put it, “psychology has discovered an entire demonology within family” (197), Ray Bradbury’s Elliotts can be understood as enfranchising the archetypal family’s witches, vampires, and mummies with gentleness, goodness, even love. There is even something psychological at work in Bradbury’s capitalization of this cluster of monsters and freaks living on American soil as the Family. This chapter looks at the stories collectively, focusing especially on “Uncle Einar” and “The Homecoming”, in order to better understand the Family as fantasy. Psychotherapist R. D. Laing’s view of family as a fantasy shared by its members finds a happy home when considering the Elliotts: “The family as a shared fantasy image is usually a container of some kind in which all members of the family feel themselves to be, and for which image all members of the family may feel each should sacrifice themselves” (9). In this light, From the Dust Returned, wherein Bradbury collected and stitched the Elliott stories together toward the end of his life, is itself the introduction and welcoming in of Timothy, the newest member to the Family, whereby its myth is bestowed. Hillman observed, “[Family] love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home” (201). Bradbury’s stories about the Family fully support this view, whereby its gothic mismatch of members reveals the post-war American myth of family: that this group of horror-show personalities functions ably as a family unconsciously implies that seemingly normal families are often enough quite at home with monstrosities gathered under their own roofs.
