Homecoming (novel) - Major Themes

Major Themes

• Belonging: The theme of belonging runs throughout the whole book. The children search for a home, a physical place where they can belong. They search for belonging within themselves, realising that they are stronger as a family and that, although they have different personalities, strengths and weaknesses, they belong together. The children also struggle to see where they belong in the wider world, in society.
• Breaking societal conventions: This theme is strongly linked, and often inseparable from, that of Belonging. Because the Tillermans come from a non-traditional family (their parents remained unmarried, and their father left before the youngest child was born), they are to some degree on the margins of society. Dicey lies to the younger children, saying she remembers a wedding. At school, all the children are bullied because of their parentage: James and Dicey do not have friends, Sammy and Dicey get into fistfights. Cousin Eunice and her religious adviser similarly disapprove of their status and lack of religion: Dicey is told that she "must have another name". Gram is a woman who has deliberately removed herself from mainstream society, choosing to live alone and adopt "eccentric" behaviour, such as bare feet, and odd dress. Both Gram and (to a lesser extent) Dicey grow to realise that it is not possible to live in isolation. Gram accepts first her grandchildren and then the Welfare money necessary to help feed and clothe them. She takes charge of enrolling the children in local schools. Dicey accepts that she, too, will go to school and learn like a normal child. She learns at various points in the novel that she must accept outside help (just like her grandmother), or that she must rely on others rather than on just herself, if she is to survive. Yet, at many points in the novel, breaking conventions is shown to elicit personal growth, or at least to help the characters survive a difficult situation, whereas following convention is shown to inhibit growth and harm characters. By breaking gender roles, Dicey is able to escape authority and look after her family. However, by her rigid adherence to habit, Cousin Eunice (who wants to literally clothe herself in a nun's habit) is unable to properly love the children, bound as she is by her ideas of "duty" and of doing what she believes the world to expect of her. Gram, too, has harmed herself and those around her by adhering to convention and to "duty": by sticking by her rigid husband even when she knows in her heart he is wrong, she has destroyed her family.
• Family as home: The children learn the importance of families throughout the novel. Their "Homecoming" is a journey that leads them to a long-lost grandmother, the mother of their beloved - and now lost - Momma, and a key to unlocking their family history. They start to learn that families can be fragile, and that if they are not nurtured and protected, they can fall apart as Gram's family has. This is a theme that is explored in much more depth in the next novel in the Tillerman Cycle, Dicey's Song.