Written on the Wind

"Ideally, the family represents a 'natural' as well as a social collective, a self-contained society in and of itself. But in the melodrama this ideal is undercut by the family's status within a highly structured socioeconomic milieu, and therefore, its identity as an autonomous human community is denied-the family roles are determined by the larger social community. The American small town, with its acute class consciousness, its gossip and judgment by appearances, and its reactionary commitment to fading values and mores, represents an extended but perverted family in which human elements (love, honesty, interpersonal contact. generosity) have either solidified into repressive social conventions or disappeared altogether" (Schatz 153).

  

"The family's status is enhanced by its role within the community, whose economy and social climate it controls either directly or through benign neglect... the socioeconomic lifeblood of the community generates much of the tension" (Schatz 161).