Looking Beyond the House

Looking Beyond the House

Desperate loss and hopelessness fill so many homes. It is all too common to hear about a father walking out the door, a mother broken and defeated, and the children suffering through it all in fear and abandonment. Feelings such as these are found in Jim Stevens' poem "Schizophrenia." The poem shows the conflicts that exist within the house. However, the crisis that the family is experiencing is not expressed directly, but indirectly, through the house. By personifying the house in every aspect, "Schizophrenia" reveals the family's relationships, or lack there of.

The poem is entitled, "Schizophrenia," for what I believe are two reasons. The first is that the word "Schizophrenia" means "varying degrees of emotional or behavioral disturbances within one's mind (OED/Perez, 4)." Obviously, the house is full of emotional and behavioral disturbances. The second reason, is that Schizophrenia is a disease; it is incurable. The house is stricken with the disease of the family's conflicts, and will never be fully cured. It will always be marked by abuse.

I sense that the speaker is a male. I get this feeling from the way he hides his pain. Concealing your feelings is often considered the masculine thing to do, and the speaker does this throughout the entire poem. He is writing about a past experience in his childhood. I sense that the poem comes from an outside perspective, yet not too far out. The speaker is not the one doing the fighting, but, perhaps he is watching it-living it-as the child of two disputing parents. The stanza "certain doors were locked at night, feet stood for hours outside them . . . " indicates to me that the speaker was a child when this took place. He watched as his father stood outside the locked bedroom door, shouting to be let in. He watched as the dishes piled up in the sink and his mother was too occupied with the fights to clean them. These are the images that the poem puts into my head, therefore, the latter part of my analysis will be based around them.

It seems to me that the speaker of the poem weaves his personal pain and suffering into the poem by personifying the house. Each feeling that the house has is, in some way, his own. For example, "lines were drawn, borders established" suggests that walls were put up between the parents to avoid the pain. Then, the statement "some rooms declared their loyalties . . . the house divided against itself" personifies, giving the rooms the ability to choose to whom they will be loyal, which may indicate that because of the parents' differences, the child is torn between them. He may feel like he, too, must take sides.

The "front door banging in the wind" signifies someone leaving-an end to the struggles and fights. After the front door is left open (perhaps the father had left for good), the line "It was the house that suffered most" is restated. Taken literally, this means that the permanent damage was done to the house itself. The years of anger had left scars on the house. The speaker may truthfully not be distraught, not sad, but relieved that this person was gone. In this case, the speaker must have become incapable of emotion. Any person who lived in a house of such pain must feel effected in some