Frank Bascombe’s Loss of Hegelian Familial Love in Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land

Abstract

This article attempts to read and analyse Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land (2006), the third Frank Bascombe book, with a specific focus on Frank, the protagonist, in light of Hegel’s theory of familial love. As Hegel’s notion of familial love relies on the constant unison of family members as well as their individual involvement with self-consciousness as an unavoidable prerequisite of familial love, this article argues that one potential reason for Frank’s unending feeling of loss and identity crisis might lies in the substantial influences of his divorce from his former wife, Ann Dykstra, who could be regarded as his Hegelian true, original source of love and the only origin of his self-consciousness. It is hoped that this article provides a different approach to examining family and identity crises not only in Ford’s Lay of the Land and his well-known hero but in similar modern works of fiction through the lens of Hegelian familial love.