By Ehud Would
I recently viewed a remarkable film — Frank Lloyd’s Children of Divorce, a 1927 silent film now digitally restored and available free online. Definitely worth viewing.
Not to worry, this review avoids any significant spoilers.
Sure, modern cinephiles sneer at silent films, but cinematically, this one is quite well done. What’s more, it offers a rare gestalt with respect not just to divorce generally, but its central role in the fall of the WASP aristocracy, that linchpin presaging the internal collapse of broader WASP society.
Based on Owen Johnson’s book by the same title, and boasting an all star cast, Children of Divorce spans the years prior to and following WWI without ever acknowledging the war itself. But the moral vertigo of the war haunts the story, nonetheless.
Written and based as it was in the mid-1920s, it is a story of the Lost Generation demoralized by a third internecine war of Christendom which abandoned all Christian ethics. Those three being the War Between the States, the Anglo-Boer War, and the supposed “war to end all wars”, WWI. This third war, WWI, especially shook Christendom’s Postmillennial confidence. And beyond the ravages of the war itself, the declension which followed would seem to reverse engines and throw Christendom into deep retrograde.
The film opens with these words:
“Even a generation ago there was an American divorce colony in Paris — and nearby convenient convents where inconvenient children might be left.”
Up through the early 20th century divorce remained such a rare occurrence and dire taboo in America any instance of it was printed in the local papers. Thus any municipalities granting easy divorce became known as ‘divorce colonies’. Though the stigma may be lost on modern ears, at the time the term ‘divorce colony’ was one of infamy — morally speaking, a leper colony. Indeed, broader Christendom regarded ‘divorce colonies’ as camps of apostates and traitors to the Covenant.
The only reason convents assumed charge of the children of these broken homes was on account that they were regarded ostensible orphans, and therefore under the protection of the church.
Although exploration of these consequences may be grim business (the Hays code would shortly prohibit such salacious allusions), the film neither glorifies nor even takes a neutral stance on the matter. It rather treats these things as genuine tragedy.
But to understand why this story of the fall of WASP aristocracy opens in Paris one must consider the mass movement of aristocrats and artists in the immediate wake of the War Between the States. Since that brothers’ war had so decimated the American cultural centers (predominantly in the South), many artists and their patrons repaired to old world cultural redoubts.
Backdrop of which was the trans-regnum Victorian/Edwardian era — a time of intrigue punctuated by Industrial Revolution, the rise of Modernism, Textual Higher Criticism, and Darwinism. All of which acted as a conspiracy of circumstance multiplying pressure into a civilization-wide spiral of despair.
Beguiled to personal decadence and infidelity in the anything-goes Roaring Twenties, the countervailing guilt amongst the trans-Atlantic WASPs would manifest as morbid navel-gazing preoccupations and clear malformations of noblesse oblige. All of which defined their incremental estrangement from the Christian faith.
Yet the shadow of the Faith looms large over the whole tableau.
The story centers on the devastation which divorce visits on posterity, the malformed allegiances which develop amongst children in lieu of family, and the effects which ripple down the generations after. Which is to say, it is a story about the internal fracture of the Covenant and the curses which tend to follow covenantally.
In this sense, it is a more thoroughly Christian story than any being produced by supposed Christian filmmakers today. Because where divorce is now portrayed only as personal hardship, or a badge of feminist liberation, Children of Divorce presupposes divorce to be Treason against the family, and a lineal curse with dire ramifications for broader society. For more on the mainstreaming of divorce, see Devon Stack’s terrific presentation on the subject.
Unlike modern dramas, Children of Divorce does not push progressive ideology, but rather laments all its fruits.
And it isn’t just some yarn hatched from the imagination. It was autobiographical. The author, come of WASP aristocracy himself, and having undergone several divorces amidst the same community, knew full well of what he wrote.
Neither was Johnson’s book an apologetic for his own rebellion. On the contrary, he fully indicts himself. Per time, place, and race, Johnson retained ample enough reference to covenantal normalcy and implications of the alternative that he was able to confess his own guilt and yearning for salvation from it on behalf of himself and posterity.
Johnson was a lesser known figure, but he was of that famed Lost Generation who wrote concerning all the social fissures recently opened beneath the feet of Western Man. Though most of the literati in the wake of WWI waxed Nihilist, Johnson was among the number whose work mourned that loss of moral certainty.
Even though Children of Divorce tells a straightforward story of internal collapse of WASP family, its focus on parental abandonment also analogizes Western Man’s sense of alienation from God in the wake of WWI and the rise of Modernism.
And the characters in the story act as archetypes for the internalized liberalism besetting Occidental Man:
1- Kitty Flanders stands for the Jezebel spirit, wanton, selfish, unrestrained in rebellion against God.
2- Jean Waddington, by a skewed maternal instinct, represents tolerance unmoored from objective morality. In the name of benevolence, she will never condemn evil if it means banishment of the guilty. Like modern liberals, she blames the circumstance which made Kitty a monster rather than the monster herself. This is the archetype who, bereft of children, seeks to mother the world, and in her promiscuous sympathy, fling wide the gates to destroyers.
3- Ted Larrabee emblematizes Western Man at large: despite his many gifts and assent to Christian normalcy, his jumping churchyard walls and hedgerows as well as the application of his engineering talents for “building bridges” weave a metaphor for hurdling social boundaries. And rather than leading the restoration of Christendom as his gifts suggest to be his natural role, he falls obsequious before the women in his life and their twisted sentimentality.
4- Count Vico represents connection with deep Old World roots, and a last stand for the united morality of the Old World Order; albeit now decimated by WWI and Rothschild hegemony. Though he resists Kitty’s solicitations of an extramarital affair, and cites the Christian faith for that resolve, he yet pines for the would-be adulteress, and is compromised enough that, like the others, he cannot bear to condemn Kitty’s succubine mania.
5- But Divorce itself may be said to play the leading role. It stands for Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man which leaves posterity to wrestle with the lineal curse.
The morbid inward focus which these circumstances create reminds one of the internal gravity astronomers attribute to collapsing stars: little to no light escapes. For when the houses of our patrician class were internally subverted, their attention shifted from defense and advance of the nations of Christendom to management of their own shame.
Despite the collapse of moral bulkheads to that point these matters were still understood by audiences of the time. Today, by contrast, even our clergymen typically scoff at such covenantal implications and denounce those who yet believe in them as nothing but “hateful bigots”. But in 1927 these natural consequences were yet taken for granted by the American people.
Far from rebuking the archetypes in question, the feminized pulpits of our day will not even utter the biblical term “whore” for fear of offending whores and the patchwork associations they call “families”. Never mind even that these whoredoms have surpassed the question of children of divorce into every recombinant form of bastardy imaginable. The Alienist church of today, brimming with bastards (another biblical term), will countenance no reference to them as such. Whores and bastards deny the existence of whores and bastards. No stigma is allowed except upon those who remind them of the alternative of the old Christian normalcy.
But it is precisely this inversion and internal collapse of definition which at length prove the thesis of the film: the ramifications of familial treason in frivolous divorce reverberate down the generations, fracturing more pillars of Christian order until all moral equilibrium is lost. But that ensuing collapse of meaning proves the essentialness of Christian order by impossibility of the contrary.
Or as Johnson’s wayward contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, said, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Because, no matter how far we roam, nor how we strive against Him, Western Man cannot escape the Covenant of his God. The Hound of Heaven cannot be shaken. Even our rebellions, by inverse corollary, testify unmistakably of Christ. And it is only by His touch that we shall return to the Paradise we knew before we became children of divorce.