child of god essay

Themes in “Child of God” by Cormac McCarthy Essay

Introduction, plot overview, main themes, language and style, works cited.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most talented and outstanding writers of the present times. While he is known as a commercial success and canonical literary figure, some of his books did not generate financial benefit (Frye 175). Child of God is one of such works, although it was complemented by critics. The third McCarthy’s novel was published in 1973. The author addresses a wide range of topics with a pinpoint accuracy: he does not hide or soften the appalling events and exposes interest in the utmost circumstances that influence a person and gradually make them what they are.

The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the novel from several points of view. After a short summary, the main themes represented in the novel from different angles are described, namely cruelty, isolation, and victimization. Later on, the linguistic and stylistic techniques that help the author convey his conception are examined. Finally, the conclusion is made.

The plot is based on a real murder case in Tennessee (Frye 63). The author describes the story of Lester Ballard in three sections in which the protagonist descends from a man deprived of his family farm to a dehumanized murderer and necrophile. In the first part of the book, Lester’s property is auctioned off: his attempts to stop it fail, and he receives a severe blow that probably worsens his mental state. Since that time, he has to live in an abandoned cabin and survive by means of hunting or theft. He roams around the neighborhood and awkwardly seeks human warmth. Sometimes, the plot is interrupted by community people’s voices. From their words, a reader learns Lester’s past: his mother abandoned her family, and father hanged himself. After that, the boy “never was right” (McCarthy 21). Ballard is wrongfully accused of raping a whore he met one morning. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more frustrated and mad.

The second section depicts the event that triggers the protagonist’s insanity: Lester finds a dead couple on Frog Mountain and takes the girl’s body to his dwelling. However, he loses his “first love” when his efforts to get warm and thaw the body accidentally cause a fire. He has to become a cave-dweller: this transfer is not only the consequence of the fire but also the symbol of the main character’s moral deterioration and blindness. Lester’s rage embodies in his intention to kill Greer, the person who purchased his land. Another Ballard’s occupation is to murder couples to provide himself with fresh bodies. It is the second section where Lester’s moral degradation is pictured most strikingly.

The third part of the book deals with the investigation of the murders. Sheriff Fate Turner collects evidence. Obviously, Lester’s crimes are to be detected. Despite occasional moments of sanity, he has lost himself. He tries and fails to kill Greer who, in his turn, injures Ballad. The protagonist wakes up in a hospital with his arm amputated. A mob makes him show where the dead bodies are hidden, but Ballad fraudulently takes them to the cave and escapes. He wanders for five days and finally comes to the hospital. Lester dies in incarceration, and students dissect his body.

The core themes of the novel are intertwined with the author’s reflection on the relationship between a person and the surrounding society. Cruelty, isolation, and victimization form the framework on which more topics – mercy, love, crime, punishment, responsibility – are raised.

In general, McCarthy’s fiction contains many forms of cruelty and deviation from more common examples to the most extravagant ones (Frye 79). Child of God is not an exception. The theme of cruelty is primarily expressed through the extended comparison of two concepts: innocence and cruelty.

Defining the American ideal, one may state that one of the biggest problems is its ambiguity. In general terms, it is possible to regard innocence as the inability to accept evil, such as murder. However, the existence may bring the opposite results: vigorous fighters might commit crimes in the name of innocence. Naturally, the community people wish to protect themselves and avoid Lester. They do not accept violence, but at the same time turn to it when they treat Ballad the way they do. The protagonist suffers from everyone’s cruelty and immediately reacts to it with the relapsing violence.

As for Lester’s innocence and cruelty, they are the dire consequence of the society’s duality. The character is a picture of savagery and primitivism. In this context, the comparison with Adam is illustrative: “I’ll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all” (McCarthy 81). In other words, Lester personifies the innocence coupled with wildness similar to the innocence of the prehistoric times.

Actually, neither mercy nor true love is connected with the types of innocence pictured by the author. In this environment, there is no place for mercifulness. As it is shown, cruelty is the inevitable product of innocence.

It is Lester’s isolation that becomes the root of all evil. It began early in his childhood when they boy saw his father’s body and suffered from psychological trauma. There was nobody to help Lester. Due to this, he did not develop traits common for ordinary people and remained an innocent child of nature who follows instincts.

McCarthy portraits two types of isolation: firstly, Lester is excluded from the society but remains with it, and then, he is insulated physically and mentally. At the beginning of the novel, Lester lives next to people but does not seem to belong to them. He is simply rejected by everyone even in church where miserable souls are supposed to receive peace and love. Nevertheless, he needs attention and connection just as any person. Under the circumstances, this need is perverted when Lester starts living in a cabin.

The natural desire to make bonds with people is encapsulated in the distorted form of contacts with dead bodies. It may be assumed that Lester who did not feel motherly love yearns for women’s acknowledgment only to compensate his loneliness but does it in a twisted way because of his mental illness. No woman ever showed Lester that he was significant. Even the meeting with a whore, when Lester demonstrates a sort of compassion asking if she is cold, ends up in the police station. As a result, he is afraid of rejection and deals with dead people with whom he allegedly gains control: he can dress the girl’s body, talk to it, or rape. When Lester lies next to the body under the same blanket, he wants to be intimate with a woman.

To summarize, isolation causes the inability to distinguish between right and wrong. Being alone, Lester has no moral guideline and blindly obeys natural impulses.

Victimization

Being a victim and committing crimes against innocent persons become two sides of the same coin in the novel. As the natural inclination to cruelty is backed with the circumstances, such as isolation and impossibility to come into contact with people, one may turn into a victim who victimizes other individuals. That is what happens to Lester Ballad.

While the dysfunctional family is the matter out of control, community people’s rejection becomes the key form of victimizing. It is the turning point in Ballad’s life. The combination of objective and subjective factors is pressing for him. It is not surprising that he breaks down mentally and starts committing crimes. Taking into account all pain and torments he went through in his childhood and adolescence, one can see that the protagonist is a victim.

Lester’s status of a victim should not, however, prevent a reader from condemning the aggressive actions. It is the actions that should be disapproved. The person who did something without realizing is not to be hated. Apparently, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Lester murders a number of people, even though the first victim was Ballad himself. In fact, he only mimics the behavior of people he watches. At the fair, he sees a grown man who childishly cheats in a simple game. He is a mirror in which the world and its immoral actions, minor and major, are reflected.

What the protagonist deserves in this situation is to be put into prison. However, he should receive appropriate mental help. Without the external assistance, one cannot improve one’s mental state. He does not know there is something wrong with him. He may be considered a dangerous child who has no idea what his actions are. Thus, the community that took no notice of Ballad and let this turn of events happen should care about him.

McCarthy combines different narrative voices that constitute a complexity and at the same time create the polyphonic effect. He skips from a distant third-person narrator to intrusive narration: descriptive style is followed by the direct address to readers, for instance, the presumption that Lester is “a child of God much like yourself perhaps” (McCarthy 4).

What arrests attention is the nonuse of literary standards: for example, quotation marks are not present. Overall, the language contains colloquial and poetic elements. It is spare yet amazingly expressive. Blue and black colors prevail: they create a gloomy atmosphere close to what fills Lester’s mind and help reflect the real events: “In the black smokehole overhead the remote and lidless stars of the Pleiades burned cold and absolute” (McCarthy 133). A reader can understand that stars symbolize Ballad’s victims.

To sum up, Child of God is McCarthy’s masterpiece that sheds light on the darkest side of human souls. The author explores the most complicated processes that take place if a mentally exhausted person is abandoned and pays attention to what extent society influences such people. Cruelty, isolation, and victimization become the most significant themes of the novel. By means of the poetic and simultaneously laconic language, the author creates a devastating and striking book.

McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God . New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010. Print.

Frye, Steven . The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy . Bakersfield: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

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• Published: 09 February 2023

A novel of de-formation: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God as a postmodern Gothic parody of the Bildungsroman

• Mona Jafari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3838-7541 1 ,
• Maryam Soltan Beyad 1 &
• Zohreh Ramin 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  48 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Cormac McCarthy’s fiction has been widely acclaimed for its unstinting exploration of the subterranean recesses of human subjectivity and its inarticulate horrors. His third novel, Child of God (1973), achieves the foregoing by tapping into Gothic and postmodern features, both of which demonstrate a corresponding concern with human subjectivity. As a literary tradition intimately intertwined with the teleological discourse of humanism, the Bildungsroman or the novel of formation can provide an optimal point of departure for participation in the contemporary debate on human subjectivity. Despite the distinct imbrication between Child of God and the Bildungsroman, a systematic study of its significance vis-à-vis the novel’s stance on human subjectivity in postmodern times has not been conducted. Accordingly, the present study stakes out a new terrain in postmodern Gothic studies by establishing a line of communication between the Gothic, postmodernism, and the tradition of the Bildungsroman based on their relationship with the discourse of humanism. The interplay reconfigures the significance of Gothic horror in the postmodern world. In particular, the current paper argues that Child of God is a postmodern parody—in accordance with Linda Hutcheon’s definition—of the Bildungsroman, which draws on subversive Gothic elements in order to make a polemic statement about the status of Man in the postmodern world. It will be demonstrated that the novel reiterates the elements of the Bildungsroman with ironic critical distance, portraying the horrid dissolution of humanist subjectivity rather than its teleological progress toward positive identity formation and social integration. It will be indicated, however, that although the protagonist edges toward posthuman monstrosity in such a way as to limn the failure of the Bildungsroman and its humanist tradition, the posthuman liminality and marginality ensuing from this disintegration are not celebrated in the novel, as its Gothicity serves to voice the consequent horrors of this dissolution.

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Introduction

“Reckon you could do it now from watching? He said. Do what, said Ballard.”

—( Child of God , p. 58)

As one of the greatest living American novelists, Cormac McCarthy is renowned for his daunting plunge into the darkest, scarcely plumbed recesses of the human mind and subjectivity, particularly when his writing is entangled with the Gothic with its unflinchingly visceral confrontation with the grossly material horrors of human existence. McCarthy presents one of his most morbid explorations of human degradation and monstrosity in his third novel, Child of God ( 1973 ). The novel traces the life and monstrous becoming of a rural Tennessee man called Lester Ballard, who gradually turns into a cave-dwelling serial killer and follows a path to ruin. Although various studies have explored certain aspects of the novel appertaining to identity and the psychological formation of the protagonist, Footnote 1 the relationship between the novel and the tradition of the Bildungsroman vis-à-vis human subjectivity has been afforded scant critical attention. Eric Hage is one of the very few scholars to point out the link between McCarthy’s novel and the Bildungsroman, but even his study gives it a passing mention. In Cormac McCarthy: A Literary Companion ( 2010 ), Hage argues that Child of God is “as much bildungsroman as work of grotesque horror; it just happens to be about a serial killer” (p. 57). Nevertheless, perhaps partly because of the encyclopedic format of the book, Hage does not delve into this uncharted territory of Child of God , which could shed more light on the multifaceted nature of the foregoing novel as an example of the postmodern Gothic genre, particularly as it pertains to one of the most central concerns in the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say, human subjectivity. Moreover, Hage contends that McCarthy’s novel fits comfortably into the tradition of the Bildungsroman, as it follows a trajectory consonant with the progressive development and self-realization of the protagonist typical of that tradition. Taking into consideration the original contribution of the discourse of humanism to the Bildungsroman and their inextricable relationship, which make for a cogent point of departure, the present study posits that Child of God targets the tradition of Bildungsroman or novel of formation in order to partake in the postmodern debate about the condition of human subjectivity. This study, however, dissents from Hage’s argument that the novel stands in an uncritical and harmonious relationship with the Bildungsroman. Instead, foregrounding the humanist tradition of the Bildungsroman, the current study argues that Child of God is a postmodern Gothic novel that parodies the tradition of the Bildungsroman and its humanist ideals. It will be demonstrated that the use of parody in the novel corresponds to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern parody propounded in her A Theory of Parody (1985) and A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), as “imitation characterized by ironic inversion” ( 2000 , p. 6). Exploring the intimate connection between the Bildungsroman and humanist principles, this study will subsequently indicate that the target of this parodic reprise of the Bildungsroman is specifically its reliance on such humanist notions as self-acculturation, self-empowering reason, mastery, social acceptance, and harmony. Furthermore, it is indicated that this parodic representation is actualized by dint of the Gothic, whose parodic nature and horror-filled obsession with human subjectivity dovetails with and amplifies its correlates in postmodernism. As a result, the disturbing playfulness of the Gothic, intensified by its combination with postmodern ontological and epistemological subversion, which lends Child of God its concurrently “comic and tragic” tenor (Pacientino, 2006 , p. 199), disrupts the wonted path of the Bildungsroman toward positive development and social acceptance, thereby registering the critical “difference at the heart of similarity” characteristic of postmodern parody (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 8). In other words, the advancement of the narrative depicts the disintegration of the humanist subjectivity in lieu of its positive consummation, leading, instead, to the formation of a posthuman subject with monstrous overtones and radically liminal, as well as marginal, modes of existence. The parodic representation of the Bildungsroman serves as a semi-transparent pall beneath which Child of God lends voice to the Gothic horrors of the dissolving humanist subjectivity in the postmodern world. Accordingly, this study probes into a fresh reconceptualization of the significance of Gothic horror within a postmodern context as depicted in McCarthy’s novel.

The following sections will break down and coherently expound on each of the foregoing elements that comprise the theoretical framework of this study. Following an investigation of the intimate link between the tradition of the Bildungsroman and Enlightenment humanism, it will be demonstrated that the novel can be regarded as a special imitation of the Bildungsroman according to Wilhelm Dilthey’s five characteristics of the genre presented in his Poetry and Experience ( 1906 ). Subsequent to the introduction of Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern parody, the apt imbrication between parody, the Gothic, and postmodernism—with particular emphasis on the question of subjectivity—and its relevance to the novel are discussed. Lastly, by tracing the protagonist’s ironically degenerative process of becoming a posthuman monster, which is represented through contributive Gothic elements deployed in the setting and characterization of the novel, it will be shown that Child of God is a postmodern parody of the humanist tradition of the Bildungsroman. Furthermore, as it will be indicated, the postmodern Gothic nature of the novel undercuts any optimistic vision of the posthuman alternative in the wake of the dissolution of humanist subjectivity.

The Bildungsroman and the humanist tradition

Save for the German origin of the term Bildungsroman, virtually every other aspect of the genre has been open to debate. According to Tobias Boes, the term Bildungsroman was first coined by a professor of rhetoric called Karl Morgenstern in a lecture entitled “Concerning the Spirit and Cohesion of a Number of Philosophical Novels” delivered in 1810. The term, however, was discussed in a more systematic manner by Morgenstern in another lecture entitled “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman ” nine years later (Boes, 2012 , p. 1). Nevertheless, it was with Wilhelm Dilthey’s 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher and his 1906 study Poetry and Experience that the term gained traction in modern criticism (Boes, 2006 , p. 231). It has been commonly acknowledged that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) is the “paradigmatic example” of the German Bildungsroman or the novel of formation (Boes, 2012 , p. 1), which is “linked to Humanität as harmonious development of individuality” through “a metamorphoses of role and character” (Ryan et al., 2022 ). Despite the lack of general consensus as to the specific definition of the term, its birth, as Sarah Graham points out, is “deeply implicated with the German Enlightenment” ( 2019 , p. 2). The association with Enlightenment humanism has been noted by Dilthey, who posits that the Bildungsroman is “an aesthetic expression of the Enlightenment concept of Bildung and… presents a regulated development of the hero or heroine who has to reach fulfillment and harmony by passing through various conflicts of life” (Golban 10). Jean Francois Lyotard also points out the intimate relationship between Cartesian philosophy and the Bildungsroman when he notes that in Descartes the legitimacy of science is demonstrated “in a Bildungsroman , which is what the Discourse on Method amounts to” ( 1984 , p. 29; italics in the original). As for the translation of the word into English, although the “roman” in the word Bildungsroman means “novel,” “bildung” is more elusive and could be translated into English as “formation,” “development,” or “growth” (Graham 2). Nevertheless, as Petru Golban notes, the “novel of development” and the “novel of formation” are the most frequently used English equivalents of the Bildungsroman ( 2018 , p. 8), the latter of which is the one used in this study because of its correspondence to Dilthey’s definition of the genre. Dilthey’s insistence on the idea of formation is also in tune with Mikhail Bakhtin’s “process of becoming” ( 1986 , p. 23), which he identifies as the focal point of the genre in “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” (1936–38). Although this study employs the five characteristics stated by Dilthey and his definition of the Bildungsroman as “a type of novel that portrayed personal emergence simultaneously as a psychological maturation and social integration” (Graham, 2019 , p. 90), it dissents from Dilthey’s insistence on its peculiarity to German literature. It need not be stated that this study also rebuts the claim made by a number of scholars that the novel formation is “primarily a nineteenth-century phenomenon” (Boes, 2006 , pp. 230–231).

Although the term “humanism” resists a single unified definition, the definitional framework used in this study focuses on the Western ideal of Man formulated by “Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’” with bodily normativity and a capacity for mental perfectibility, which constitutes the warp and woof of the humanist conception of subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013 , p. 13). While this study refuses to reduce Western humanism to a caricature of the Enlightenment, its focus is mainly on the Enlightenment aspects of the humanist discourse, rather than the primarily pedagogical humanism of the Renaissance. As Tony Davies argues, although some of the notions frequently associated with the tradition of humanism can be traced back to the Renaissance, the term was coined for the first time by Enlightenment scholars, such as Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, in Germany in the nineteenth century ( 1997 , p. 9). Although Davies stresses the protean and elusive nature of the concept, it is possible to demarcate some of its constitutive convictions, which extensively overlap with Enlightenment ideals as one of its phases. According to Rosi Braidotti, humanism “combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress” ( 2013 , p. 13). There is fundamental faith, Braidotti continues, “in the unique, self-regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason” embedded in the discourse of humanism ( 2013 , p. 13). In particular, the Cartesian subjectivity enmeshed in the Enlightenment discourse, which Charles Taylor regards as an “epistemological revolution with anthropological consequences” ( 1977 , p. 4), operates as one of the emblems of the doctrine of humanism. The Cartesian subject with its mind/body dualism is predicated on three notions vis-à-vis the subject’s relation to knowledge and the external world, that is to say, the “self-defining, all-knowing, and formally empowered subject of consciousness” comprises the Cartesian subject of humanism (Gandhi, 1998 , p. 35). Accordingly, it is easy to discern the imbrication between the thematic concerns of the Bildungsroman and such humanist notions as self-acculturation, self-empowering reason, mastery, social integration, and harmony. As Paul Sheehan aptly puts it, the Bildungsroman is “essential to an emplotment of the transactions between the human (humanism, humanitas ) and the novel” ( 2004 , p. 5). Sheehan further argues that

If Cartesian individualism gave to the novel a model of subjectivity, Cartesian dualism provided the dilemma that only the Bildungsroman could overcome: Enlightenment frustration with the relationship between res cogitans (rational human subjects) and res extensa (lifeless objects, including animals). The ‘solution’ proffered was to see discursive philosophy as a kind of category mistake. It is fiction that can perform this task, not philosophy. (p. 4, italics in the original)

Consequently, “humanistic historicism, conceived as an ideology of perfection through time” (Boes, 2012 , p. 157) constitutes “the logical domain of the novel of formation” (Boes, 2012 , p. 150). In a similar vein, Stanley Bates argues that the formation of the Bildungsroman somehow “confirm[s] Hegel’s view that a central line of literature will concern the formation and development of individual consciousness in a variety of contingent circumstances. Hence, a character in this kind of literature is both a component and a topic of the work of art” (Bates, 2009 , p. 403) In other words, in this type of literature, “the plot is the character—the representation of ‘how one becomes who one is’” (Bates, 2009 , p. 404; italics in the original). Thus, the idea of individual advancement toward a final destination constitutive of the Bildungsroman concurrently suggests a “universal” rather than a “merely singular telos” (Boes, 2012 , p. 19) and is, therefore, inextricably interwoven with the discourse of humanism. Following a discussion of the congruence between the Gothic, postmodernism, and parody, the following section will attempt to demonstrate that “the realization of the self,” particularly in terms of “a sense of who one is, gender distinction, family and professional perspectives, social and interhuman status and role,… communication and behaviour, [and] personal discernment” (Golban, 2018 , p. 18) is subverted in Child of God .

Child of God as a postmodern Gothic parody of the Bildungsroman

As Maria Beville argues in her insightful study of Gothic postmodernism, a link could be forged between the Gothic and postmodernism based on the notion of terror as well as an emphatic concern with (de-centred) human subjectivity. According to Beville, the terror of the Gothic, “often inherent in its monsters and othered bodies, functions as a deconstructive counter-narrative which presents the darker side of subjectivity, the ghosts of otherness that haunt our fragile selves” ( 2009 , p. 41). The enunciation of the sublime effects of terror is the “primary function” of both Gothic rhetoric and postmodernist literature, both of which can be perceived as routes to “the unknown, unrepresentable aspects of self and reality” (Beville, 2009 , p. 15). Accordingly, presenting a hybrid mode that “emerges from the dialogic interaction of Gothic and postmodernist characteristics in a given text” ( 2009 , p. 9), Beville contends that the Gothic serves “as the clearest mode of expression in literature for voicing the terrors of postmodernity; a mode that is far from dead and in fact rejuvenated in the present context of increased global terrorism” (Beville, 2009 , p. 8). However, as Catherine Spooner points out, the components of the Gothic can be “reordered in infinite combinations, because they provide a lexicon that can be plundered for a hundred different purposes, a crypt of body parts that can be stitched together in myriad different permutations” ( 2006 , p. 156). Thus, unlike Beville who analyses postmodern texts that are characteristically Gothic ( 2009 , p. 10), this study regards Child of God as a primarily Gothic text that is embedded in a postmodern context, which, according to Jean Baudrillard, is also “a culture of death” ( 1993 , p. 127). Postmodernism can be regarded as being similarly concerned with “excess, anxiety, fear and death” (Beville, 2009 , p. 11). Baudrillard notes, however, that this death does not simply affect “a subject or a body” as “the real event” but is “a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost” ( 1993 , p. 5). Therefore, in the postmodern world, identity “is untenable: it is death” (Baudrillard, 1993 , p. 4). Furthermore, the Gothic “fascination with terror, the negative and the irrational, and its hostility toward accepted codes of reality, place it firmly in the realm of revolution,” and what makes it more “terrifying is that this revolution is against humanity itself” (Beville, 2009 , p. 19). According to Fred Botting, the Gothic “shadow[s] the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values” ( 2005 , p. 1). In other words, the Gothic “condenses the many perceived threats to these values, threats associated with… imaginative excesses and delusions,… human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption” ( 2005 , p. 1). The Gothic, Botting continues, “remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic” ( 2005 , p. 1). Accordingly, both the Gothic and postmodernism disrupt “the narrative construction of the [humanistic] self” and undermine its validity in their idiosyncratic contexts (Beville, 2009 , p. 16). Botting suggests that the imbrication between the postmodern and the Gothic transpires with “[t]he loss of human identity and the alienation of the self from both itself and the social bearings in which a sense of reality is secured,” materializing “in the threatening shapes of increasingly dehumanized environments… and violent, psychotic fragmentation” ( 2005 , p. 102). A fusion of Gothic and postmodern characteristics can, therefore, synergize their effects and better voice the more recent terrors of the postmodern age, whereby the inherent hybridity of the fusion echoes the liminality of the postmodern subject. Nevertheless, the current study also establishes a connection between the two based on another common and equally hybridizing, denominator, namely parody.

As Leslie Fiedler argues, “the Gothic mode is a form of parody, which carries out its attacks through exaggeration to the limit of grotesqueness” ( 1960 , p. 406). This study expands on the parodic nature of the Gothic by forging a complementary link with Hutcheon’s notion of postmodern parody. In A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Hutcheon explores the role of parody in postmodern fiction, maintaining that it is “a perfect postmodern form” as it “paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies” ( 2004 , p. 11). For Hutcheon, postmodern parody does not rely on humour to provide playful pleasure. Rather, the pleasure of its irony comes from “the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual ‘bouncing’… between complicity and distance” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 32). Thus, Hutcheon defines parody as “a stylistic confrontation, a modern recoding which establishes difference at the heart of similarity” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 8). In other words, “in its ironic ‘trans-contextualization’ and inversion,” parody is “repetition with [critical] difference” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 32). Hutcheon speculates that the ubiquity of parody in postmodern world could be traced to “a crisis in the entire notion of the subject as a coherent and continuous source of signification” ( 2000 , p. 5). As Arthur Kroker also notes, the situation of postmodernity involves humans who are “[n]o longer the Cartesian thinking subject,… but a fractal subjectivity in an ultramodern culture where panic science is the language of power” ( 1987 , p. 181). Both the Gothic and postmodernism exploit exaggeration and intertextuality to produce a polemic relationality to another discourse. Moreover, the parodic effects of both the Gothic and postmodernism show a consistent concern with the failure and disintegration of the humanist subject. Their combination affords the author an opportunity to “speak to a discourse from within it” (Hutcheon, 1985, p. 35; italics in the original) by relying on the difference between “parodic foreground and parodied background that is ironically played upon” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 31). This “dialogic, parodic reappropriation of the past” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 72), which corresponds to the Gothic as also a “reappropriation of the past” (Punter, 1996 a, p. 27), makes a statement about the present as well. As Robert Miles argues, “the Gothic is a discursive site, a carnivalesque mode for representations of the fragmented subject” ( 1993 , p. 4). In other words, as two comparable discursive sites, postmodernism and the Gothic rework and synthesize the past and the present with critical intent. Nevertheless, it bears noting that the Gothic is not a mere fictional reflection but, rather, a forerunner in the struggle to tackle the growing horror of floundering “masternarratives about humanity” (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995 , p. 4). According to Jerold E. Hogle, Kristeva argues that “grotesques” were “explicitly created to embody [the] contradictions” and indeterminacy of our identities ( 2002 , p. 7), or in Beville’s terms, “those obstacles to subjective knowledge and the creation of coherent identity” ( 2009 , p. 39). In fact, as David Punter and Glennis Byron note,

The distortion of perspective which is a constant hallmark of Gothic fiction finds a further ‘home’ in the postmodern, and… this twist of history has precisely to do… with the Gothic’s ‘origin’ as a counter-discourse to the modernizing impulse of the Enlightenment, and with postmodernism’s complex rebuttal and development of Modernism’s own post-Enlightenment progressive dictates. ( 2004 , p. 53)

As a result, it is easy to discern how the parody embedded in both the Gothic and postmodernism could be trained at the Bildungsroman with its humanistic conception of subjectivity. Now that a synergic relationship between the Gothic and postmodernism has been established through their mutual engagement with terror, human subjectivity, and parody, these elements and their function can be examined in McCarthy’s Child of God , which this study considers a postmodern Gothic novel that makes a statement about the present through a parodic reappropriation of the humanist Bildungsroman.

In order to establish a link between Child of God and the tradition of the Bildungsroman, an examination of the characteristics of the Bildungsroman and their compatibility with the novel would be vital. As stated above, the primary features of the Bildungsroman on which this study draws are those proposed by Dilthey. G. B. Tennyson enumerates the five main characteristics Dilthey attributes to the Bildungsroman in the chapter entitled “Friedrich Hölderlin” in his Poetry and Experience as follows:

(1) the idea of Bildung , or formation… shaping of a single main character, normally of a young man; (2) individualism, especially the emphasis on the uniqueness of the protagonist and the primacy of his private life and thoughts, although these are at the same time representative of an age and culture; (3) the biographical element… in what Dilthey calls the ‘conscious and artistic presentation of what is typically human through the depiction of a particular individual life’; (4) the connection with psychology, especially the then-new psychology of development; and (5) the ideal of humanity, of the full realization of all human potential as the goal of life.’ ( 1968 , p. 136)

Similarly, McCarthy’s Child of God depicts the conflict-plagued life and identity formation of a single character, that is, a young man named Lester Ballard. The pervasive concern with identity could be summarized in Ballard’s reflection rendered in free indirect style when he watches “cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wonder[s] what stuff they [are] made of, or himself” (p. 107). The individualism in the novel is evident, as the narrative pivots around Ballard and the process of his becoming. The Frankenstein-like isolation and claustrophobic focus on Ballard highlight the individualism and the concern with individual identity formation in the novel. However, the uniqueness of the protagonist has culturally representative overtones, which will be further analysed in the postmodern Gothic context of the novel. As Philip L. Simpson argues, “any given depiction of the Gothic killer will be inextricably linked to the historical context in which the author composes his or her work” ( 2000 , p. 135). In other words, the serial killer opts to “write an identity on the body politic” ( 2000 , p. 135). Accordingly, in keeping with the Bildungsroman, the elements of identity formation and individualism surrounding McCarthy’s Gothic serial killer have socio-historical implications.

The biographical element is manifest in both the concentration of the narrative on Ballard’s life as its focal point and the episodic, yet significant, information about Ballard’s childhood and background, which the postmodern Gothic nature of the novel accommodates. In a number of chapters, the reader learns about Ballard’s troubled childhood through minor characters. For example, the reader learns that Ballard’s father committed suicide by hanging himself when Ballard was about “nine or ten year old [ sic ]” (p. 22). Moreover, his “mother had run off,” which, following the death of his father, made him an orphan (p. 22). In another chapter, it is related that Ballard “worked for old man Whaley settin fenceposts” to buy a rifle “when he was just almost a boy,” and he was a crack shot, who could “hit anything he could see” (p. 47). One character recounts an anecdote about Ballard’s grandfather, who was a cheat, and had a younger brother, who was hanged (p. 63). At the end of his account, he concludes, “You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all,” suggesting that the Ballards’ genealogy has followed a degenerative trajectory (p. 63). Analysing the Gothic body in the nineteenth century by drawing on Bénédict Morel’s degeneration theory, Kelly Hurley notes that “degeneracy was [deemed] progressive in its effects, as the original contamination… intensified itself in the offspring, and was manifested in the increasing mental and physical deformity of each successive generation” ( 1996 , p. 68). As it will be demonstrated, a similar degeneration can be detected in Child of God , which is not merely genealogical but also individual. Accordingly, the reiteration of the foregoing characteristics in the novel does not follow an uncritically affirmative trajectory. Rather, it is in the psychological formation and the progress of the protagonist toward the ideal of humanity by the realization of his potential that postmodern parody intercedes, as the narrative and character development depart from the wonted path of the protagonist in a typical Bildungsroman.

Regarding the postmodern context of the novel, Robert L. Jarrett argues that Child of God “trace[s] the outlines of postmodern alienation in which the solitary consciousness—the narrator’s and the reader’s—reflects and operates on an externalized nature, man, and history” ( 1993 , pp. 29–30). According to Jarrett, “McCarthy’s fiction places an increasing emphasis on interpolated tales, exhibiting thereby a pronounced self-consciousness about narrative and the function of the novels within the postmodern world” ( 1993 , pp. 145–146). Furthermore, the theme of “the quest undertaken through a visionary landscape” (Jarrett, 1997 , p. x), which involves a concern with human subjectivity, and the role of “interpolated tales” (p. x) accommodate the engagement with intertextuality through the use of parody. As stated earlier, the postmodern parody in Child of God operates through Gothic elements, whose principal effects are horror, terror, and degenerative excess associated with “the primitive, the barbaric, and the tabooed” (Punter, 1996 a, p. 4). Underscoring the pivotal roles of character and setting in the Gothic, Punter and Byron maintain that there is “a double sense of dislocated space and threatened subjectivity” in postmodern Gothic ( 2004 , p. 51). Similarly, as it will be indicated in the following sections, the Gothic elements turning the wheels of postmodern parody in Child of God materialize, for the most part, in the setting and the monstrous characterization of the protagonist, who follows a path toward becoming posthuman, which the novel equates with monstrosity. It bears noting that the primacy of the setting and characterization in the Gothic corresponds to the dominance of the same components in the Bildungsroman, making them an apt target for parody.

Degeneration and Gothic space in Child of God

As K.L. Poe points out, the setting is “[c]rucial to the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman ” so much so that it is “practically a character itself” ( 2002 , p. 147; italics in the original). The series of settings in the Bildungsroman usually follow a “controlled sequence… each a further step towards the harmonious and meaningful integration of the… individual into society” (Ehland, 2003 , p. 92). A cognate concern with the setting feeds into both the Gothic and postmodernism insofar as “the complications of postmodern writing, particularly in the areas of subjectivity and location (the inner and outer worlds), reflect back onto and into the Gothic” (Punter and Byron, 2004 , p. 53). The Gothic setting usually deals either in “claustrophobia, so often the obvious image for the repressed and dislocated psyche,” or “in anxieties about being… dwarfed into insignificance by [nature]” (Punter, 1996 b, p. 81). Both effects can be found in the spatial setting of Child of God , in whose procession the typical progressive setting of the Bildungsroman is subverted. Nevertheless, even though there are scenes when Ballard is dwarfed by nature, Footnote 2 the Gothic setting in the novel primarily serves a playfully specular purpose for the reflection of the growing alienation and degenerative journey of the protagonist. Images of decay pervade Ballard’s surroundings. The novel opens with a scene in which the narrator compares the auctioneer’s voice to “a ghost chorus among old ruins” (p. 10). The “empty shell of a house” Ballard squats (p. 33) is strewn with “old newspapers,” “dried dung of foxes and possums,” and “bits of brickcolored mud fallen from the board ceiling with their black husks pupae” (p. 16). There is “a spider hung” in the chimney, which reeks of “a rank odour of earth and old woodsmoke,” and the floor of the hearth is “ashy” (p. 16). Other houses also evoke images of decay and degeneration. For example, when Ballard stops by Ralph’s house and brings a robin for Billy, the place is described thus: “familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perenially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud” (p. 60). As Jarrett notes, McCarthy’s setting functions both as “realistic regional detail and as universal symbols of postmodern contemporary existence” ( 1993 , p. 47). The ruined house, for instance, is a recycled Gothic image indicative of contemporary alienation. Cars are also described as “degenerate” (p. 25), leaving “coiling dust” behind (p. 33), or “rusting” in a corner (p. 32). The ashy snow, too, is a Gothic “palimpsest” revealing “old buried wanderings, struggles, [and] scenes of death” (p. 106). Nevertheless, it is not only that the novel is riddled with Gothic images of decay, but that an incremental degeneration pervading the Gothic setting feeds the parodic effect of the novel by undermining the advancement of the narrative toward positive progress and social integration. The further the narrative advances, the more claustrophobic and primitive the atmosphere of the setting becomes. Following the loss of the relatively civilized house in the fire, the cave, which is the quintessential image of the primitive, the barbaric, and the tabooed, becomes Ballard’s new home. There is a subversive edge to the irony that permeates the image of the cave succeeding that of the ruined house. The irony intimates the “primal wilderness” (Jarrett, 1997 , p. 41) lying beneath the rusting patina of postmodern civilization that had been precariously sustained by the image of the ostensibly civilized house before giving way to the veritably primitive cave. In other words, the already crumbling image of civilization collapses into the archetypal image of the cave. This spatial degeneration correlates to its counterpart in characterization. It is “in the bowels of the mountain,” where the convoluted walls were “slavered over… with wet and bloodred mud [and] had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast ” (p. 102; italics added), that the setting evolves into a double character embodying the extreme alienation and degenerative transformation of the protagonist, who undergoes an ironically regressive rebirth into a cave-dwelling, corpse-hoarding posthuman monster. The ironic rebirth, in turn, parodies the epiphanic sense of regeneration typical of the Bildungsroman.

Toward the end of the novel, the setting occasionally employs the phantasmagorical character of the Gothic as a morbid harbinger of death. At one point in the cave, the setting melds with Ballard’s morbid dream, in which “he was riding to his death” as “each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread” (p. 129). The inextricable relationship between Ballard’s stage of degeneration and the setting is once again suggested in the hospital, where he was taken following his assault on John Greer, which resulted in the loss of his arm. In the hospital, Ballard “lay in a waking dream,” as “the cracks in the yellowed plaster of the ceiling and upper walls seemed to work on his brain” (p. 130). His “spindly legs lay pale and yellow looking on the sheet” (p. 132). It is easy to discern that the yellow in the setting, which symbolizes decay, correlates with the yellow of Ballard’s body and mind. The collapse of the setting into more degenerative and claustrophobic spaces continues when Ballard is symbolically interred in “a cage next door but one to a demented gentleman who used to open folks’ skulls and eat the brains inside with a spoon” (p. 145). Even following his death, the space Ballard occupies shrinks as he is shipped to the basement room of the state medical school at Memphis, where he is “flayed, eviscerated, [and] dissected” before being “scraped into a plastic bag” to be taken to a cemetery outside the city reserved for his kind (p. 145). Accordingly, the degenerative setting of the novel is most strikingly manifest in Ballard’s habitation shifts from a passably civilized house to a cave, a cage, the dissection table of a medical school, a plastic bag, and ultimately a remote cemetery. Consequently, instead of progressing toward a better condition of life and successful social integration, which are typically reflected in and facilitated by the setting, the Gothic setting of Child of God is subversively degenerative in a way that mirrors both the physical and psychological degeneration of the protagonist. In other words, the Gothic setting in the novel directly contributes to “the ironic inversion” constitutive of the parody at play. Nevertheless, the setting supplements the overriding component of the Bildungsroman, namely, characterization, which comprises the focus of the following section.

Lester Ballard: a “bedraggled parody” of Bildung

McCarthy, 1993 (originally published in 1973), p. 116.

The Bildungsroman pivots around the identity formation and psychological development of the protagonist. Since it consists of a teleology of individuality as “an ideal type” that “carries with it many assumptions about the autonomy and relative integrity of the self [and] its potential self-creative energies” (Sammons, 1991 , pp. 41–42), characterization is arguably its most vital constituent. If the plot and the character are virtually identical in the Bildungsroman (Bates, 2009 , p. 404), one can go so far as to argue that the character is the plot. Thus, in order for the “critical ironic distance” of parody (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 34) to work in the novel, it needs to target characterization above all. Similarly, in Child of God , postmodern parody operates chiefly through Gothic lineaments in characterization. Through postmodern parody as “the [concurrent] inscription of continuity and change” (Hutcheon, 2000 , p. 36), the novel depicts the life and becoming of Ballard in imitation of the typical Bildungsroman but with ironic critical distance finessed by the Gothic, which undercuts “the humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual self from its innate potentialities through acculturation and social experience” (Sammons, 1991 , p. 41). Instead of approximating to the ideal Man, the protagonist is portrayed as becoming a monster, which the novel equates with the posthuman. There is a relatively implicit congruence between the Gothic and the posthuman, which Child of God vehemently underscores in order to vent the horrors of the postmodern world. At the heart of the Gothic resides “materialism without transcendent anchor” (Hurley, 1996 , p. 9), which “discloses bodies as partial and plural categories rather than definite objects” (Botting, 2019 , p. 241). Along similar lines, what is meant by the posthuman here corresponds to Cary Wolfe’s conceptualization of posthumanism as the condition of being mired in corporeality as opposed to the humanist insistence that “‘the human’ is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether” ( 2010 , xv). If we add Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory to the equation, the overlap between Gothic monstrosity and the posthuman becomes more striking. According to Cohen, the monster is “the harbinger of category crisis” ( 1996 , p. 6) and “stands at the threshold of becoming” ( 1996 , p. 20). The category crisis characterizing the monster consists in the very essence of human subjectivity. As a liminal body, the Gothic monster, or in Hurley’s terms the abhuman body “that retains traces of human identity but has become, or is in the process of becoming, something quite different” threatens “the integrity of human identity,” while “occupying the space between the terms of such oppositions as human and beast, male and female, civilized and primitive” (Punter and Byron, 2004 , p. 41). Characterization in Child of God capitalizes on both of the foregoing features in order to exert its parodic effect. McCarthy infuses Ballard with “the primitive, the barbaric, and the tabooed” (Punter, 1996 a, p. 4) characteristic of Gothic monstrosity through animal imagery, sexual behaviour, as well as physical and psychological characterization. Animal imagery is used both to describe the physical features of the protagonist and convey his increasing alienation from human society. Ballard’s life is crowded with animals. Throughout the novel, he keeps a household with all kinds of animals: spiders, crickets, snakes, dogs, cats, fish, doves, a robin, and even teddy bears and a stuffed tiger, which he won in a shooting contest at the country fair. At multiple points in the narrative, the narrator blends the protagonist’s subjectivity with animals and beasts using the Gothic element of grotesque exaggeration. Ballard is limned as “a misplaced and loveless simian shape” (p. 20), a “gargoyle,” which represents animal-human hybridity (p. 37), “a crazy winter gnome” (p. 83), “a crazed mountain troll” (p. 114), “a part-time ghoul” (p. 130), and even as an infra-animal “thing” (p. 88, p. 115). At several points in the novel, Ballard visits a house belonging to a man named Ralph. There he meets a child named Billy, whom the narrator introduces as “a huge headed bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house” (p. 60; italics added) and could hardly be perceived as a child (p. 61). Ballard brings a robin for Billy and seems to understand him very well. In fact, the narrative suggests that there is an affinity between Ballard and Billy, whose names also tellingly resemble one another. When Billy chews off the legs of the robin, Ballard remarks understandingly: “He wanted it to where it couldn’t run off” (p. 62). Analogously, Ballard murders people so that they can never run off and keep him company forever. Later on, Ballard observes affirmatively, “Why that boy’s got good sense” (p. 87). It can, therefore, be argued that Billy mirrors the posthuman monstrosity of Ballard. Accordingly, one of the categories that Ballard undermines is human/beast and human/animal.

Another category Ballard problematises is male/female. Apart from animal-like and beastly features associated with Ballard, his gender performance is incrementally blurred when his longtime habit of “wearing the underclothes of his female victims” develops into “appearing in their outerwear as well” (p. 107). The category crisis feeding into Ballard’s monstrosity and becoming posthuman is reasserted when he is described as a “gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape” (p. 107). Subsequently, when he confronts John Greer, Ballard is again “in frightwig and skirts” (p. 127). It will be additionally demonstrated that Ballard’s category crises are also degenerative as he gradually moves through regressive stages of the posthuman: becoming-animal, monster, thing, (living) corpse, and, ultimately, apparition. In that sense, posthumanism is portrayed as a kind of primitivism in the novel. As Austin Lillywhite also notes, like posthumanism, the “primitivist worldview disrupts the traditional Western category of a fully bounded, autonomous, white humanity that is opposed to an inert, passive materiality” ( 2018 , p. 114). Thus, the ulterior logic shared by both “hinges on undoing binaries of inner/outer, person/thing; the result is a crisis of subjectivity, brought on by the desire for… the rank of brute thingness” (Lillywhite, 2018 , p. 114). When this primitivism is conceived of as degenerative regression, it becomes a “gothic” discourse (Hurley, 1996 , p. 65). The cynical nature of the Gothic, as also reflected in McCarthy’s novel, amplifies the desire of the foregoing primitivism for “brute thingness” (Lillywhite, 2018 , p. 114) and divests its transgressive tenor of its positive potentialities, suggesting that when primitive impulses and modes of existence remain “unchecked,” humans are apt to “perform acts of perversity than poetry” (Magistrale, 1996 , p. 31). In this sense, the primitive regression of the protagonist from the paradigms of humanism into further entrapment in gross materiality and transgressive becoming—in accordance with the posthuman—recasts the process of becoming the liminal posthuman into a violent objectification of the subject, which is itself a murderous act. In addition to the foregoing category crises, Ballard’s act of serial killing and his symbolic affinity with corpses is another behaviour linking him to posthuman Gothic monstrosity. In that sense, Ballard recalls Frankenstein’s monster to some extent. According to Ashley Craig Lancaster, “McCarthy combines the tradition of the British Gothicism with the realism of American Gothicism to create an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ” (132). Both Ballard and Frankenstein’s monster, Lancaster continues, are rejected companionship, ostracized by society, and subjected to a “system of social othering” ( 2008 , p. 133), which fuels their process of becoming “degenerate” monsters ( 2008 , p. 142). In particular, Ballard’s social alienation progresses to the point where his communion with animals increasingly lapses into a community of corpses, which seems to echo his own subversively posthuman mode of existence. Ballard takes a step further than Frankenstein’s monster and becomes a thoroughgoing necrophile in addition to being a serial killer. As pointed out by Punter, “Gothic fiction is erotic at root,” and sexual perversion is often the corollary of the repressed “Eros,” which “returns in the form of threat and violence” ( 1996 b, p. 191). In Ballard’s case, the deviance involves the corpse, which carries several implications. According to Erin E. Edwards, “the corpse marks the cessation of rationalist control over the body, the moment when the socially defined person is given over to biological forces, and the molar form of the human yields to the molecular processes of decomposition” ( 2018 , p. 3). As a result, the corpse is bound up in “a retrospective unraveling of the exclusionary category of the humanist subject, even as it imagines what comes ‘after’ this traditionally defined human form” (Edwards, 2018 , p. 3). At first blush, Ballard’s exploitation of corpses may seem to reaffirm the liberal humanist subject’s treatment of the body “as an object for control and mastery rather than as an intrinsic part of the self” (Hayles, 1999 , p. 5). This “Gothic commodification” characterizing Gothic monstrosity “exploits the disconnect between genuine human connection and the need to control every aspect of the human victim, particularly the body after death” (Coughlin, 2015 , p. 143). Nonetheless, Ballard’s underground monstrous dollhouse is a posthuman community intended for catering to his desperate need for companionship and integration. Ballard’s collection of corpses, in Vereen Bell’s terms, consist of “facsimile people” ( 1988 , p. 61) assembled as compensation for Ballard’s social alienation and symbolic or “psychic death” (Jarrett, 1997 , p. 44). As Jarrett notes, Ballard’s inhabitation of caves is itself “a form of self-entombment or life-in-death that mirrors the death-in-life of his corpses” ( 1997 , p. 45). In other words, Ballard’s ostensible control over corpses through Gothic commodification as a substitute for genuine human connection collapses into the subversion of the category of the humanist subject on account of his own identification with the corpse as a symbol of the loss of rationalist control over the body. Death seems to be the only medium through which Ballard can find a semblance of integration and companionship. He gradually tries to achieve integration by assembling a grotesque community of corpses, which corresponds to his own symbolic death. It does not stop there, however. Ballard’s dream of “riding to his death” could be construed as “a form of suicide: his inarticulate wish to join his true family composed of his dead father [who had committed suicide] and collection of corpses” (Jarrett, 1997 , p. 42). It is only through his actual death that Ballard receives an ironic semblance of social assimilation, which proves to be yet another form of exclusion. In other words, he is temporarily incorporated into society only as a posthuman Other, namely a monstrous corpse, to be “laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected” and after three months of class, “scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and here interred” (p. 145; italics added). Thus, the world of Child of God is a postmodern Gothic world where “the body is turned inside out—actually peeled open—as its organs are splayed, like negative photographic images, across the field of a dead, relational power” (Kroker, 1987 , p. 185). The Cartesian self implodes into a “dangling” subject in a body that alternates between “the frenzy of the schizoid ego and the inertia of hermeticism” with its organs hanging out (Kroker, 1987 , p. 185). Accordingly, rather than conclude with “a certain practical accommodation between the hero and the social world around him” (Swales, 2015 , p. 34), Ballard’s journey “terminate[s] in nothingness” (McCarthy, 1993 , p. 138). Virtually none of the aspects involved in the identity formation of the typical protagonist in the Bildungsroman, which includes “the realization of the self, and, along with it, of various other aspects such as a sense of who one is, gender distinction, family and professional perspectives, social and interhuman status and role… communication and behaviour” (Golban 18) is achieved in the novel. As a result, the foiled entelechy of the humanist subject and his posthuman disintegration render the Bildungsroman phantasmatic in postmodern times.

It must also be noted that even the ironic closure afforded Ballard is precarious. On the surface, Ballard’s degenerative journey may seem conclusive. However, as Cohen points out, the monster “turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else” ( 1996 , p. 4) and “each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event” ( 1996 , p. 5). Similarly, toward the end of the novel, Ballard catches a glimpse of a boy on a church bus, who uncannily “looked like himself” (p. 140), suggesting that others like him are bound to emerge. Later on, when “the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations” (p. 145), again it is implied that postmodern monsters akin to Ballard will most likely reappear. Thus, the sense of closure characteristic of the typical Bildungsroman is parodied in a synthesis of continuity—Ballard is dead and disposed of—and critical difference—other monsters will arise. The deep complicity between the Gothic and postmodernism in Child of God is predicated on the Gothic horror’s correspondence to the postmodern concern with the dissolution of human subjectivity and its dire consequences. Gothic elements are, therefore, utilized so as to advance postmodern parody in a bid to make a critical statement about the condition of human subjectivity in postmodern times, while voicing the horrors that stem from its disintegration. Accordingly, although Child of God portrays the failure and dissolution of the humanist subjectivity at the core of the Bildungsroman through postmodern parody, the image of the posthuman subjectivity it depicts as its successor is by no means affirmatively positive. As Punter notes, the Gothic is “too tentative” and “hesitant” to categorically endorse a position ( 1996 b, p. 191). Child of God takes posthumanism back to its primitive origins in monstrous becomings by representing the vengeful reemergence of “the structural others of the modern humanistic subject” (Braidotti, 2013 , p. 37) in a postmodern Gothic context. In other words, by equating the posthuman with a monstrosity, the novel undercuts any self-congratulatory celebration of a chaotic, liminal, and uncategorizable mode of existence. The foregoing demarcates the point at which the Gothic and postmodernism depart from posthumanism in their insistence on the horrors of the faltering status of Man. Whereas posthumanism seeks to avoid the postmodern collapse into “the rhetoric of the crisis of Man” (Braidotti, 2013 , p. 37) by salvaging a new alternative with a celebratory air following the dethronement of the discourse of humanism, the Gothic maps onto the “postmodern fear of the disintegration of the human subject” (Bolton, 2014 , p. 2) while pointing “implicitly and constantly to the insupportability of the accepted alternatives” (Punter, 1996 b, p. 191). Therefore, it can be concluded that the primary source of horror in Child of God as a postmodern Gothic novel resides in “the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change” or dissolution of the human subjectivity (Bolton, 2014 , p. 3). The fusion of the Gothic and postmodernism in Child of God represents a controversial mode of writing along the lines of what Beville dubs “a literary monster” ( 2009 , p. 16), which mirrors its own protagonist. Accordingly, as “a literary monster” that parodies the tradition of the Bildungsroman, Child of God voices the harrowing fears that engulf the situation of human subjectivity in postmodern times by engendering a “dark and mutant” posthuman monster (McCarthy, 1993 , p. 118), who ultimately fails to achieve positive self-knowledge, self-realization, social integration, and companionship and succumbs, instead, to incomprehension, alienation, and indeterminacy.

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God tackles the crisis of Man and its haunting horrors in a postmodern world of disorienting alienation and decentred subjectivity. To achieve the foregoing, the novel fuses Gothic and postmodern elements into a synergy calibrated for the optimal representation of the horrid disintegration of a master narrative about humanity, namely humanism. Since one of the paradigmatic literary incarnations of the discourse of humanism is the Bildungsroman, it provides the novel with an apt target in the postmodern debate about the condition of human subjectivity. In particular, Child of God addresses the crisis of Man by establishing a specific line of communication with the Bildungsroman through postmodern parody in such a way as to both partake in and critique the tradition’s humanist ideals. Thus, Child of God can be interpreted as a postmodern parody of the tradition of the Bildungsroman in accordance with Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern parody as “imitation characterized by ironic inversion” ( 2000 , p. 6), which is itself a corollary of the postmodern crisis of subjectivity. The target of this parodic reprise of the Bildungsroman is specifically its reliance on such humanist notions as self-acculturation, self-empowering reason, mastery, social acceptance, and harmony. Exploiting the synergic relationship between the Gothic and postmodernism, the novel relies on the Gothic and its indelible association with the primitive, the barbaric, the tabooed, monstrosity, and horror in order to consummate the parodic representation. Accordingly, the disturbing playfulness of the Gothic that complements postmodern parody disrupts the typical path of the Bildungsroman toward positive development and social incorporation. In particular, the setting and characterization are the two vital components that enact and mirror the theme and plot in the Bildungsroman. Similarly, the Gothic cogs in Child of God ’s machine of postmodern parody operate primarily in the setting and the characterization of the protagonist, who follows a path toward posthuman subjectivity, which the novel equates with monstrosity. Above all, the Gothic degeneration of the setting crystallizes in Ballard’s habitation shifts from a relatively civilized house to a cave, a cage, the dissection table of a medical school, a plastic bag, and ultimately a remote cemetery reserved for outcasts. Thus, in lieu of progressing towards a better condition of life and positive social integration, which are often mirrored in and facilitated by the setting, the Gothic setting of Child of God is characterized by subversive degeneration consonant with the physical and psychological degeneration of the protagonist. Similarly, the Gothic lineaments in characterization undercut the teleology of individuality that informs the Bildungsroman. Rather than approximate the ideal Man, the protagonist becomes a posthuman monster, who, as the harbinger of category crisis, threatens the very essence of human subjectivity. Ballard occupies the space between such binary oppositions as human/beast, male/female, and civilized/primitive. He seeks companionship and ventures to find it in a collection of posthuman beings, namely corpses, which reflect his own posthuman mode of existence. Thus, Ballard’s life becomes increasingly crowded with animals and then corpses, rather than an accommodating community of people. Moving from real and toy animals to posthuman corpses, the non-human community escalates in a way that echoes Ballard’s progressive alienation and dehumanization. Therefore, Ballard’s category crises are also degenerative as he passes through regressive stages of the posthuman, ultimately becoming an apparition to rematerialise in new shapes. The upshot is that Dilthey’s theorization of the Bildungsroman as personal emergence encompassing psychological maturation and social integration is disarticulated in the novel. Nevertheless, by equating the posthuman condition with monstrosity and Gothic primitivism, the novel eschews endorsement of posthumanism as the viable alternative to the crumbling discourse of humanism. Accordingly, Child of God accommodates a complementary relationship between the Gothic and postmodern parody in order to lend voice to the most harrowing fear plaguing the haunted postmodern subject, that is, the disintegration of the humanist subjectivity and its dire repercussions.

For more recent studies of the novel, particularly with respect to identity and subjectivity, see for instance, Michael Madsen’s “The Uncanny Necrophile in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Child of God;’ or, How I Learned to Understand Lester Ballard and Start Worrying” ( 2011 ), in which he examines Lester as an instance of the uncanny whose liminal position between man and savage reflects the reader’s “liminal state of uncomfortable familiarity” (p. 26). Or, Christopher Jenkins’s “One Drive, Two Deaths in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God” ( 2015 ), which situates the Freudian notions of Eros and Thanatos within what he dubs “the spiritual reality” of the novel, highlighting the spiritual death of the protagonist as a result of his moral degeneration (p. 97). Also, in “A Peculiar High Synthesis: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and the Community-Created Other” ( 2022 ), Trevor Jackson traces Lester’s actions and identity formation to the epistemological assumptions of modernity, contending that Lester’s actions and ideas proceed from his modern social milieu.

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Jafari, M., Beyad, M.S. & Ramin, Z. A novel of de-formation: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God as a postmodern Gothic parody of the Bildungsroman. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 48 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01543-y

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Articles/Essays – Volume 55, No. 1

I Am a Child of Gods

“Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.” D&C 132:20

The doctrine of Heavenly Mother is cherished among Latter-day Saints. [1] She is birthed from necessity in a physicalist theology. Though she has feminist roots, her theology in Mormonism is laced with latent gender essentialist and complementarian theories. Both have been used in modern Mormonism to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from Mormonism. The assertion that God is composed of one fertile, cisgender, heterosexual couple, namely Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, is a narrow interpretation of the broadness of Mormon theology. Though gender essentialist interpretations of Heavenly Mother are queer-exclusionary, her presence in Mormon theology opens the door to a robust polytheism that includes an entire community of gods, diverse in gender, race, ability, and desires. In this paper, I argue that if we are all made in the image of God, God is significantly larger than a fertile, cisgender, heterosexual female and male coupling. Through deification, we all have the potential to become gods. In Mormonism, our theology cannot be fully understood unless it is developed within the bounds of the concrete, material, physical, and practical experiences of our human experience. Theosis, or the process of becoming gods, implies a polytheism filled with generational gods as diverse as all humanity.

The doctrine of Heavenly Mother can be traced back to many early Saints, including Eliza R. Snow, W. W. Phelps, Edward Tullidge, Orson Pratt, and Erastus Snow. The earliest references to Heavenly Mother in Mormon theology were found in poetry and theologically committed to physicalism, also called “materialism.” In Mormonism, heavenly beings and families are material like our earthly bodies and families. Not only that, our earthly existence functions as a pattern for a heavenly existence.

One of the earliest and most popular affirmations of Heavenly Mother comes from Eliza R. Snow, polygamous wife to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Her status in the patriarchal order of the Church gave her significant credibility in her poetry and theology. For many, Eliza R. Snow’s poem “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother” is the most notable beginning of Heavenly Mother in Latter-day Saint worship. Today, Latter-day Saints now sing Snow’s poem in a hymn called “O My Father.” In this poem, Snow potently infuses theology with “reason”: “Truth is reason; truth eternal tells me I have a mother there.” In the first and second verses, she writes about her premortal existence and her longing to return to an “exalted sphere.” In the third verse, she “reasons” that heavenly families must be patterned after earthly families, which include mothers and fathers. She asks, “In the heav’ns are parents single?” To this she replies that the thought of a single parent “makes reason stare!” This seems to defy all reason to Snow. Single parents existed in Snow’s social world, so the allusion to needing both a mother and a father is likely a biological one. The thought of a single Heavenly Father asexually creating all these spirit children is so strange that the “truth” of her “reason” is that we must have “a mother there.” Lastly, the final verse concludes with her desire to meet both her Father and Mother after her earthly probation is over. [2] Snow’s poem is a testament to Mormonism’s commitment to physicalism. In Mormon theology, the earth and heavens are physical or supervene on the physical. In this case, if it takes a fertile cisgender man and woman to make children on earth, it stands to reason, in Snow’s mind, that it takes a fertile cisgender man and woman to make children in the heavens.

Edward W. Tullidge, literary critic, newspaper editor, historian, and influential Latter-day Saint, also wrote about the union of man and woman as a necessary component of celestial glory. In his poem titled “Marriage,” he uses Heavenly Mother to promote complementarian themes and views on gender differences. In short, men and women, in Tullidge’s view, are complements and are perfected through one another. In the first verse of his poem, he uses couplings and pairs to demonstrate that it is by design that man and woman are created for one another. He muses that, when unionized, “two lives, two natures, and two kindred souls” are completed. When separated, they are only parts, “not two perfect wholes” but only incomplete halves to a whole. For Tullidge, “sexes reach their culminating point” when they merge as one. In the second verse, he explicitly states that sexes will never end and asks rhetorically, “Himself sexless and non-mated God? A ‘perfect’ man and yet himself no man?” Here, Tullidge is suggesting that a perfected god cannot be a sexless god. According to Tullidge, sex is a material reality on earth and will continue into heavenly realities: as he writes in the poem, God’s “works on earth” are patterned on “things above.” This is another demonstration of the early Saints’ commitment to physicalism. Finally, in the last verse of the poem, Tullidge concludes with a reference to theosis. In wedlock, couples become like the “first holy pair” and may become “parents of a race as great.” [3] In summary, Tullidge’s poem “Marriage” demonstrates that earthly realties and lived experiences of Latter-day Saints are seen as a pattern for heavenly imaginings.

In both Eliza R. Snow’s and Edward W. Tullidge’s creative works, the doctrine of Heavenly Mother appears to be rooted in the idea that “[God’s] works on earth, but pattern things above.” For Snow, the thought of having a mother on earth and no Mother in the heavens made reason “stare” due to her physicalist views. Tullidge’s praise of the “universe” and “great nature” is another manifestation of physicalism in Mormon theology. God, the heavens, and celestial glory are not a metaphysical paradise beyond the scope of our reality. Again, physicalism is a very important philosophy embraced by early Saints that led them to believe that God must be composed of a fertile, cisgender man and woman.

The completeness of God through the union of man and woman was a common teaching in this period. For instance, in 1853 Orson Pratt affirmed, “No man can be ‘in the Lord,’ in the full sense of this passage, that is, he cannot enter into all the fullness of his glory, ‘without the woman.’ And no woman can be ‘in the Lord,’ or in the enjoyment of a fullness, ‘without the man.’” [4] A couple decades later in 1878, Elder Erastus Snow avowed, “If I believe anything God has ever said about himself . . . I must believe that deity consist of man and woman.” [5] David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido argue that Erastus Snow’s God is not a “hermaphrodite,” but a God composed of male and female through marriage. In a footnote they argue, “The passage reads much clearer within Mormon discourse and Snow’s own declarations if read from a perspective describing social unity in marriage.” [6] Again, even our contemporary interpretations of early Mormonism are committed to physicalist interpretations of our theology.

These sentiments would persist throughout Mormonism in the following years. In the Mormon imagination, Heavenly Mother is a practical necessity and could not be erased even though some began to question her status as a deity. In 1895, George Q. Cannon contended that “there is too much of this inclination to deify ‘our mother in heaven.’ Our Father in heaven should be the object of worship. He will not have any divided worship.” [7] Here we can see that though Heavenly Mother is an essential part of Mormon theology, her robust and equitable inclusion in worship is at times repressed by patriarchal authority. This continued all the way to the late twentieth century. In a general conference talk by President Gordan B. Hinckley in October 1991, he affirmed the doctrine of Heavenly Mother but simultaneously excluded her from explicit worship through prayer. In his words,

Logic and reason would certainly suggest that if we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven. That doctrine rests well with me. However, in light of the instruction we have received from the Lord Himself, I regard it as inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven. [8]

For Hinckley, Heavenly Mother is a matter of “logic and reason,” just as Snow suggested in her poem written over a century ago. Throughout Mormon history, there seems to be a persistence among patriarchs to keep Heavenly Mother under control as a necessary but hidden cog in a physicalist theology.

Feminist Gods

All along the way, Mormon feminists have championed the inclusion of Heavenly Mother in Mormon discourse. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to give a robust history or analysis of Mormon feminism, it is worth noting that Mormon history is deeply influenced by Mormon feminists both past and present. [9] Mormon feminists have been both friend and foe in the development of a gender-expansive theology. While non-queer feminist interpretations of Heavenly Mother broaden the story of God to include cisgender, heterosexual women, they often also promote gender essentialist interpretations of godhood. Mormon feminists have written poems, articles, essays, and even entire books on Heavenly Mother that further the goals of monogamous, cisgender, heterosexual women but fail to include or comprehend the needs of queer women, and often women of color. At best, non-queer feminist works have attempted to be queer inclusive with sincere intentions but with little understanding of how to actually do it. At worst, feminist works have weaponized Heavenly Mother against the queer community, furthering our exclusion from church pews, temple worship, and ultimately celestial glory with our families. [10]

Non-queer feminists might more thoroughly follow their own physicalist philosophy to more inclusive vistas. In the history of Mormon theology about her, Heavenly Mother generally isn’t queer-inclusive, not because feminist theology is wrong but because it is incomplete. It’s no wonder why some critics suggest that the inclusion of queer genders and relationships in Mormon theology could destroy the very foundation of the Church when the ultimate archetype of God in Mormon culture is shaped by gender essentialist, binary, ableist, monogamist, and complementarian biases.

Monogamy is one way that some Mormon feminists have constricted the possibilities of a theology of Heavenly Mother. For instance, Carol Lynn Pearson’s The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy advocates for a single Heavenly Father and a single Heavenly Mother in an eternal pairing. [11] In this monogamous, cisnormative, heteronormative relationship, she strangulates theological veins that could lead to the inclusion of a multiplicity of diverse gods, including queer genders, queer pairings, and queer groupings. [12] The potential of polygamy could be an opportunity for lesbian, bisexual, trans, infertile, asexual, non-monogamous, and intersex Heavenly Mothers. [13]

Gender essentialism is another limitation that Mormon feminists have placed on teachings about Heavenly Mother. As pointed out by religion scholar Taylor Petrey, many feminist theologians fail to see how their theological ambitions lack queer representations, just as the patriarchs fail to include women. [14] Margaret Toscano wrote in response to Petrey’s criticism: “If there is one regret I have about Strangers in Paradox that I wrote with my husband Paul, it is that we didn’t make homosexuality visual and theologically viable in Mormonism.” [15] While this sentiment is appreciated and represents an improvement on the standard feminist rhetoric in the Church, it suggests a limited focus on homosexuality rather than a more capacious vision of how to include queer women and people in Mormon feminist theology. Mormon feminists should consider how to better include intersex, nonbinary, and trans women in their ambitions. Queerness is more than homosexuality.

Queer Mormon women are women. Feminist and queer approaches should work together to accomplish shared goals of inclusion. These tensions about which women are included in feminism is a long-standing one. Sojourner Truth confronted the hypocrisy of white feminism as far back as the 1850s in her unforgettable speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” [16] These criticisms have been echoed by many women of color throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [17] To advocate for some women and not all women hardly seems like a feminism worth championing and does not embody the notion that “all are alike unto God.” [18]

People are very good at fashioning God in their own image. This observation is not intended as a slight, nor is it intended to discourage anyone from equitable representation in godhood. My observation that we fashion gods in our image is not an affront but an invitation for LGBTQ+ Saints, Saints of color, single Saints, infertile Saints, and disabled Saints to tell the story of God too. We are all made in the image of God and thus, as believers of Mormon theology, are called to champion the creation of gods as diverse as ourselves.

God is “they” in Mormonism. [19] Many Mormon feminists, Church leaders, and scholars of religion alike have insisted that God is plural—not simply “he” or “she” but “they.” [20] Even modern prophets have referenced Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father as “them.” Dallin H. Oaks is just one example of this when he wrote in an Ensign article, “Our theology begins with heavenly parents. Our highest aspiration is to be like them.” [21] Though God and heavenly parents have both worn “they” pronouns, the preceding analysis has shown that it is more often than not used to represent a fertile, cisgender, heterosexual, male and female pairing.

While many agree that God is “they,” few consider the ramifications of a “they” God beyond cisnormative, heteronormative, and mononormative assumptions. As previously discussed, many early Mormons considered God to be “they” by earthly reproductive default. For many feminists, God is “they” because women lack divine representation. Yet, for many queer Latter-day Saints, God is “they” because God is a community composed of diverse genders, orientations, abilities, races, bodies, and families. God is “they” because if we are all made in the image of God, “they” is the only pronoun we have in English to adequately signify the plurality and diversity that exists within our heavenly family. [22] God is “they” because God is a community as diverse as our earthly existence, with a diversity of Heavenly Mothers.

Under the umbrella of “God” there are many possible parental formations and familial dynamics, as exemplified in our earthly life. The union of man and woman does not need to mandate heteronormative ideas concerning reproduction, sex, or marriage. It mandates the possibility of multi-gender alliances, partnerships, and cooperation, just like here on earth. Keep in mind that Zion was called Zion because the people were of one heart and one mind. [23] The intimacy of being joined together in heart and mind is not limited to heterosexual relationships between men and women. Zion is bigger. Even families sealed in the temple share more than genetic material. [24]

If life on earth is a pattern for life above, we can see that there are many different family formations on earth right now. Yes, there is the mono-cis-hetero nuclear family model, but there are a lot of other different family groupings too. There are also eternal polygamist groupings. Many Church authorities, from Joseph Smith to President Russell M. Nelson, have been sealed to more than one partner. [25] President Nelson’s eternal family includes two wives, two mothers, two lovers. Some families have two moms, be they polygamist or lesbian. Some families have two dads, be they gay or stepfathers. Some families are single-parent families, and some families have no children. Some families have biological children while others have adopted children. Family relationships in mortality are varied, but under cis-hetero supremacist ideas, we are taught that some of these families are less than, imposters, or counterfeit. [26] Yet, once again, Snow and Tullidge set a powerful precedent when it comes to celestial glory. If life on earth is a pattern for life above, life above is just as diverse as the socialities that exist here among us on earth, and that includes queer families and genders. [27]

Furthermore, in Genesis 1:27, we are symbiotically created in the image of God, both male and female. People have read this passage of scripture and quickly assumed that this excludes queer, trans, or nonbinary genders, but that hasty reading of scripture is incomplete. In Genesis we also read about how God created night and day—two contrasting polarities separated from one another through lightness and darkness. [28] At first glance it might seem like the division between day and night creates a clear binary. However, in the following sentence, it states that God also created evening and morning. [29] Night and day, both necessary and lovely, are opposites resting at the ends of a broad spectrum. In transition between them is morning and evening. Yes, God created night and day, but God also created dawn and dusk. Dawn and dusk are no less godly than night and day simply because they are transitions. The same is true of humanity. God created man and woman—two lovely binaries made in the image of God. Yet in transition between them are nonbinary bodies and spirits. Though we are rare, we are no less godly. We are the dawn and dusk of humanity. There is a spectrum of transitions between lightness and darkness, day and night, earth and water, man and woman. We are all made in the image of God—intersex, nonbinary, and trans—because God created more than binaries.

Each of us is the coeternal image of God. [30] In a physicalist theology, we are literally made in their likeness. God is a community intimately intertwined with the materiality of every living entity. God is life eternal—wholly, singly, and plurally. [31] Any other reductive, androcentric, cisnormative, heteronormative, ableist, or white aesthetic of an all-encompassing God would be an incomplete, even harmful, representation of God’s plurality. The community that is God is reflected in all life, not just men, women, or even humans. God told Moses, “Behold, I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name; for I am without beginning of days or end of years; and is not this endless?” [32] It stands to reason that an endless God, at the very least, has the potential to include queer bodies, queer genders, and queer families in our coeternal nature. We have the potential to be just as diverse and endless as God through theosis.

Theosis, or the process of becoming gods, is at the core of LDS religion. It undergirds all other doctrines and policies of the Church. It does not dishonor God to emulate them. Quite the opposite. Our emulation of God is our highest respect and worship. Again, as stated by Dallin H. Oaks, “Our theology begins with heavenly parents. Our highest aspiration is to be like them.” [33] If it does not dishonor the Father for men to emulate him, use his priesthood power, and strive to divinity, then it does not dishonor the Mother that her daughters should emulate her. Likewise, queer folks in no way dishonor God when we emulate and worship them in our works, worship, and theology. Quite the opposite—it’s a manifestation of our highest respect, faith, works, and reverence.

Generational Gods

In Mormonism, gods create gods in worlds without end, and no god exists independent of their community, heritage, or posterity. [34] We are taught this through scriptures, hymns, and temple ritual. Even beyond the Mormon Godhead being composed of three separate beings, including a God composed of a full spectrum of genders, marriages, alliances, relationships, and partnerships, Mormon theology can be taken even further.

In Mormonism, God is a community of generational beings. Godhood is not a one-time occurrence. From early Saints to modern prophets, we all have the potential to share in the same glory as our heavenly parents. [35] We do temple work because the hearts of the children turn to their parents. [36] The spirit of Elijah, also defined as the spirit of familial kinship and unity, demands the plurality of gods. [37] Being a child of God isn’t just a theoretical or metaphysical proposition but has a material lineage and posterity. In the taxonomy of gods, we are the same species as God. [38] We are all made in the image of God with the potential to join the endless network of gods above and partake of our heavenly inheritance. Our theology is so much grander than a single Heavenly Father or Mother. God is expansive, dynamic, generational, and endless. Yet at the same time God is as familial, personal, and physical as a great-grandparent or great-grandchild. [39]

God wasn’t always God but became God. [40] God was once a child of God, too. God also has heavenly parents. Likewise, those heavenly parents have heavenly parents, and those heavenly parents have heavenly parents. Not only that: if our children make it to godhood they will become gods too, and their children will become gods, and their children’s children will become gods. Gods birth gods in an eternal, interconnected round. God is an eternal, never-ending cycle of creation without beginning or end. [41] As Joseph Smith taught, “The intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will it have an end.” [42] If our prophets, scriptures, and rituals are to be taken seriously, God is not just God, but Gods—communally, generationally, and endlessly. [43]

Mormon theology leads to the inclusion of innumerable, diverse, generational gods reflected in our earthly experience. This concept is beautifully and artistically iterated in the hymn “If You Could High to Kolob,” with text written by W. W. Phelps. In this iconic hymn, philosophy and poetry articulate the doctrine of generational gods. According to this hymn, no one knows where gods begin, nor if they will end.

If you could hie to Kolob In the twinkling of an eye, And then continue onward With that same speed to fly, Do you think that you could ever, Through all eternity, Find out the generation Where Gods began to be? Or see the grand beginning, Where space did not extend? Or view the last creation, Where Gods and matter end? Methinks the Spirit whispers, “No man has found ‘pure space,’ Nor seen the outside curtains, Where nothing has a place.” [44]

Phelps’s poetry echoes the teachings of Joseph Smith. He taught, “If [we] do not comprehend the character of God [we] do not comprehend ourselves.” [45] Joseph Smith is inviting us to understand that God is so much more than our limited perceptions, not just of gender, orientation, or anatomical differences, but of space, time, and eternity. The image of God includes the whole of humanity. Not just one Heavenly Mother, but many diverse, unique, and exquisite Heavenly Mothers. Not just one Heavenly Father, but many diverse, unique, and exquisite Heavenly Fathers. Not just one pairing of heavenly parents, but many diverse pairings, even groupings, of heavenly parents—polygamous or otherwise.

Joyful Gods

God is so benevolent and grand that we all could have a place in the community of gods if it is the desire of our hearts. [46] We are taught in Doctrine and Covenants that we are not meant to passively wait for godhood to come to us. Mormonism is a religion of praxis—a religion of doing. Faith without works is dead. [47] To become gods requires us to bring to pass righteousness of our own free will without idly being told what to do and to be anxiously engaged in good causes. [48] Godhood is a fruition of our desires and efforts. As taught by Jeffrey R. Holland, if we want to become gods, we must do godly things with our godly desires.

We’re the church that says we’re gods and goddesses in embryo. We’re the Church that says we’re kings and queens. We’re priests and priestesses. People accuse us of heresy. They say we’re absolutely heretical, non-Christians because we happen to believe what all the prophets taught and that is that we are children of God, joint heirs with Christ. We just happen to take the scriptures literally that kids grow up to be like their parents. But how does that happen? How does godliness happen? Do we just pop up? Are we just going to pop up out of the grave? Hallelujah, it’s resurrection morning! Give me a universe or two. Bring me some worlds to run! . . . I don’t think so. That doesn’t sound like line upon line or precept upon precept to me. How do you become godly? You do godly things. That’s how you become godly. And you practice and you practice and you practice. [49]

Now is not the time to “procrastinate the day of our salvation.” [50] Now is not the time to idly “dream of our mansions above.” [51] This is not the time to revel in smug complacency about a completed Restoration. [52] The Restoration is still happening. [53] Godhood is still and always will be in a creative and formative process. There is no end to “restoration” in a theology that believes in eternal progression. There is no end to an endless God. The inclusion and creation of queer gods beyond a single paring of fertile, cisgender, heterosexual Gods called “Heavenly Mother” and “Heavenly Father” depends on us when we are both the creator and inheritors of godhood.

In Doctrine and Covenants we are taught that the same sociality that exists here will exist in the next life, only it will be coupled with eternal glory. [54] Our relationships are so important that Joseph Smith declared “friendship” to be “one of the grand fundamental principles of ‘Mormonism.’” He also commented that, “Friendship is like Brother Turley in his blacksmith shop welding iron to iron; it unites the human family with its happy influence.” [55] Smith knew the value of friendship. When he was isolated from friends he said, “Those who have not been enclosed in the walls of prison can have but little idea how sweet the voice of a friend is.” [56] As he was escorted to his death at Carthage, he said, “If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself.” [57] Godhood is not simply about couples being sealed, it’s also about friendship. The friendships, relationships, and sociality of what we have here on earth is only a taste of things to come. What we learn here from Joseph Smith is that the community of gods should be linked together on the bonds of friendship for our enjoyment, happiness, and joy.

Sadly, at present, LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints are not included fully in the bonds of celestial friendship. [58] Queer Saints are abused, excluded, rejected, isolated, ridiculed, and persecuted. We have been taught implicitly and explicitly to hate ourselves, our bodies, our genders, and our orientations. [59] From reparative therapy to folk doctrines of transfiguring queer bodies into straight bodies, fellow Saints work toward our extinction. [60] At best, we are placated by false platitudes of love by those who know little of our world. [61] At worst, fellow Saints advocate for our celestial genocide. [62] It wasn’t that long ago that Spencer W. Kimball was lamenting the fact the homosexuals could not receive the death penalty. [63] The sociality that exists within the Church does not bring us a fullness of joy and happiness and it is not because LGBTQ+ Saints are unworthy of happiness.

The book of Job shows us that not all suffering is a product of sin. Even God’s most “perfect and upright” children suffer at the hands of other. [64] Even though he suffered greatly, “Job sinned not.” [65] As was the belief of the time, Job’s friends insisted that he must have sinned and brought this suffering upon himself. [66] However, Job rejected this assessment of his suffering and stood firm in his beliefs that unhappiness is not always caused by sin. [67]

Likewise, the suffering of queer Saints is not a product of sinful gender identities, expressions, pronouns, surgeries, or relationships. Queer suffering stems from being greeted with prejudice, fear, misunderstanding, falsehoods, skepticism, violence, and ignorance from what feels like every possible vantage point. If ever there were a group of people in need of a friendship, it is queer Latter-day Saints. The sociality that exists among the Saints today is not glorified and will not be glorified until it includes us as equitable members of the community of gods.

Though the Mormon understanding of Heavenly Mother is carving a path to a more inclusive physicalist theology, she is not the only godly archetype in our repertoire. God certainly includes visions of a fertile, cisgender, heterosexual Heavenly Mother, but God also includes so much more. LGBTQ+ theologians, like myself, argue that deification includes us too. We are all made in the image of God, which includes queer, intersex, trans, and nonbinary bodies. [68] Deification includes diverse marriages, children, relationships, families, and socialities, even if queer sealings are delayed by prejudice set against the fulfillment of joy. We belong, if nowhere else, among the gods.

We are not just children of God. We are children of gods in an endlessly creative, dynamic community of diverse deities reflected in our earthly existence. The sociality here is that of the gods. Under this more robust vision of God, cherished hymns like “I Am a Child of God” could be enhanced by using more inclusive terminology. Surely, I am a child of gods.

I am a child of Gods, And they have sent me here, Have given me an earthly home With parents kind and dear. I am a child of Gods, And so my needs are great; Help me to understand their words Before it grows too late. I am a child of Gods. Rich blessings are in store; If I but learn to do their will, I’ll live with them once more. I am a child of Gods. Their promises are sure; Celestial glory shall be mine If I can but endure. Lead me, guide me, walk beside me, Help me find the way. Teach me all that I must do To live with them someday. [69]

Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of this article as a courtesy. There may be unintentional differences from the printed version. For citational and bibliographical purposes, please use the printed version or the PDFs provided online and on JSTOR.

[1] “ Mother in Heaven ,” Gospel Topics Essays.

[2] “O My Father,” Hymns, no. 292.

[3] Edward W. Tullidge, “Marriage,” Millennial Star 19, no. 41 (1857): 656.

[4] Orson Pratt, “Celestial Marriage,” The Seer 1, Apr. 1853, 59.

[5] Erastus Snow, Mar. 3, 1878, Journal of Discourses, 19:269–70.

[6] David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, “‘A Mother There’: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven,” BYU Studies 50, no. 1 (2011): 70–97.

[7] George Q. Cannon, “Topics of the Times: The Worship of Female Deities,” Juvenile Instructor 30, May 5, 1895, 314–17.

[8] Gordon B. Hinckley, “ Daughters of God ,” Oct. 1991.

[9] Joanna Brooks, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright, eds., Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[10] Valerie Hudson, “ Women in the Church—A Conversation with Valerie Hudson ,” Faith Matters (podcast), Dec. 29, 2019.

[11] Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pivot Point Books, 2016).

[12] Blaire Ostler, “ Queer Polygamy ,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 52, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 33–43.

[13] I want to make clear that no one should enter a marriage, polygamous or monogamous, if it is not their desire. Asking women who desire monogamy to practice polygamy for all eternity is just as oppressive as asking homosexual people to practice heterosexuality for all eternity. However, if fear of polygamy causes someone to oppress those who are different from them, they have now become the oppressor they so desperately tried to liberate themselves from.

[14] Taylor Petrey, “Rethinking Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother,” Harvard Theological Review 109, no. 3 (2016): 16.

[15] Margaret Toscano, “ How Bodies Matter: A Response to ‘Rethinking Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother,’ ” By Common Consent (blog), Aug. 30, 2016.

[16] Sojourner Truth, “ Ain’t I A Woman ?,” speech, Women’s Rights Convention, May 29, 1851, Akron, Ohio.

[17] bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981).

[18] 2 Nephi 26:33.

[19] Genesis 3:22; Doctrine and Covenants 132:20.

[20] Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, Martin Pulido, eds., Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Poetry (El Cerrito, Calif.: Peculiar Pages, 2018), 4.

[21] Dallin H. Oaks, “ Apostasy and Restoration ,” Apr. 1995.

[22] Genesis 1:27; Genesis 3:22.

[23] Moses 7:18.

[24] General Handbook: Serving in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [July 2021], 38.4.2., “ Sealing Children to Parents .”

[25] “ Elder Russell M. Nelson Marries Wendy L. Watson ,” Newsroom, Apr. 6, 2006.

[26] L. Tom Perry, “ Why Marriage and Family Matter—Everywhere in the World ,” Apr. 2015.

[27] Doctrine and Covenants 130:2.

[28] Genesis 1:3–5.

[29] Genesis 1:5.

[30] Joseph Smith, “ King Follet Sermon ,” Apr. 7, 1844, in History of the Church, 6:311. “There never was a time when there were not spirits; for they are co-equal [co-eternal] with our Father in heaven.”

[31] John 17:3; Doctrine and Covenants 14:7; Moses 1:4; Moses 1:39.

[32] Moses 1:3.

[33] Oaks, “Apostasy and Restoration.”

[34] Moses 1:33.

[35] Jeffrey R. Holland, “ Elder Holland Arizona April 2016 ,” YouTube, Apr. 30, 2016.

[36] Malachi 4:6.

[37] Doctrine and Covenants 138:47–48; Doctrine and Covenants 110:13–16.

[38] Andrew C. Skinner, To Become Like God: Witnesses of Our Divine Potential (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 13.

[39] Doctrine and Covenants 76:24.

[40] Smith, “ King Follet Sermon ,” in History of the Church, 6:305. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret.”

[41] Hebrews 7:3.

[42] Smith, “King Follet Sermon.”

[43] Psalm 82:6; John 10:34–35; Acts 17:29.

[44] “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” Hymns, no. 284.

[45] Smith, “King Follet Sermon.”

[46] Psalm 37:4; Psalm 20:4.

[47] James 2:20.

[48] Doctrine and Covenants 58:26–27; 2 Nephi 26:33.

[49] Holland, “Elder Holland Arizona April 2016.”

[50] Alma 34:35.

[51] “Have I Done Any Good?,” Hymns, no. 223.

[52] Hebrews 6:12.

[53] Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “ Are You Sleeping Through the Restoration? ,” Apr. 2014.

[54] Doctrine and Covenants 130:2.

[55] Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 5:517.

[56] Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 3:293.

[57] Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 6:549.

[58] General Handbook, 38.6.15, 38.6.16, 38.6.23.

[59] Andrew E. Evans, “ Rise and shout, the Cougars are out ,” Outsports, June 8, 2017.

[60] Blaire Ostler, Queer Mormon Theology: An Introduction (Newburgh, Ind.: By Common Consent Press, 2021).

[61] . Blaire Ostler, “ More Than a Statistic ,” Queer Mormon Transhumanist (blog), Sept. 10, 2018.

[62] . Blaire Ostler, “ Celestial Genocide ,” Queer Mormon Transhumanist (blog), Sept. 19, 2019.

[63] Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1969), 79.

[64] Job 1:1.

[65] Job 1:22.

[66] Job 36:1–12.

[67] Job 31.

[68] 2 Nephi 26:33.

[69] Revised version of “I Am a Child of God,” Hymns, no. 301.

2022:  Blaire Ostler, “ I Am a Child of Gods ”  Dialogue 55 .1 (Spring 2022): 99–119.

The doctrine of Heavenly Mother is cherished among Latter-day Saints. She is birthed from necessity in a physicalist theology. Though she has feminist roots, her theology in Mormonism is laced with latent gender essentialist and complementarian theories. Both have been used in modern Mormonism to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from Mormonism. The assertion that God is composed of one fertile, cisgender, heterosexual couple, namely Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, is a narrow interpretation of the broadness of Mormon theology. Though gender essentialist interpretations of Heavenly Mother are queer-exclusionary, her presence in Mormon theology opens the door to a robust polytheism that includes an entire community of gods, diverse in gender, race, ability, and desires. In this paper, I argue that if we are all made in the image of God, God is significantly larger than a fertile, cisgender, heterosexual female and male coupling. Through deification, we all have the potential to become gods. In Mormonism, our theology cannot be fully understood unless it is developed within the bounds of the concrete, material, physical, and practical experiences of our human experience. Theosis, or the process of becoming gods, implies a polytheism filled with generational gods as diverse as all humanity.

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Child of God: A foster parent finds grace in letting go

The anticipation was stifling. For days we knew that our little one would be leaving us forever, on her way to a place where she would be a part of a family forever. We readied ourselves as best we could. We threw her a going-away party, though at only 9 months she knew nothing of the life-changing event that lay ahead of her. The party, we knew, was merely an attempt to ease the pain of letting her go out into an unfamiliar world without the safety of the arms she had known since foster placement in our home at the age of one week.

From her perspective, the drive to her new mother could as well have been a trip to the grocery store. But this day would end very differently from any other day in her short life. And though I knew the day would come and that it was the best thing for her, my inability to make her understand was one of the most difficult circumstances I have ever had to confront. Giving her away caused me anguish not only because we would miss her, but because I felt I was blindsiding her, setting her up only to knock her little legs from under her. I feared that in her eyes, I was abandoning her. After leaving my first foster baby to her new mother, my body underwent an intensity of emotions unlike anything that I had experienced in my life.

For nine months, I had worked to help this child learn how to bond with her “forever” mother. From the beginning of our relationship, I knew that she would leave. However, as was necessary over those months, she became a part of me and I a part of her. When I left her in the care of her new mother, my heart felt it was betraying this part of “us.” For days after, I cried tears of grief unlike any I have shed in years; yet, simultaneously, I experienced an overwhelming joy for her as she embarked on her wonderful new adventure.

Some people ask why I became a foster parent if it causes so much pain. Why would anyone invite this type of anguish into his or her life? And why will I do it again? But I see these emotions—pain, suffering, wondrous joy—as evidence that God has called me as a Catholic, a Christian and, most of all, as a mother. When I was given the gift of motherhood, I received with it the grace necessary to understand that being a mother requires me not only to teach and serve, but also to let go and suffer loss. Why then, should I confine these graces to raising my five birth children? I am called to serve all of God’s children. I am called to be also a mother to the motherless.

Many people wanted to know how I could give her away. The answer for me is simple. She was never mine to begin with—not because she was a foster child but because she, like each of my own children, is God’s child. She belongs ultimately to God.

This is not to say that foster care is required of every Christian parent. This is to say that if you are a Christian, God is calling you. Your call and mine will be different, but one way or another, we are all called to serve. And when we answer God’s call—and by doing so enter into the very heart of Christ—we are filled with the grace necessary to rely on our faith to carry us through, not away from, life’s challenges. But if we remain idle, fearful of the emotional pain attached to entering the emotional struggles of the world, we will not fulfill God’s call, and we will undoubtedly feel an emptiness that is insatiable by any other means.

At times, we measure gratification with perceived success. Did we succeed? How much did my family influence the life of this beautiful little girl? We may never know. But we do know that for the first nine months of her life, she was the baby of our household and a member of our parish community. She was our universe. She was an answer to a prayer for fulfillment. This child filled an empty spot that God had created just for her.

Donna M. Maccaroni , a special education teacher and the mother of five children, lives in Lawrenceville, N.J., with her husband. She welcomes foster children through the Children’s Home Society of New Jersey.

Susan Kaup Kelley 10 years 11 months ago I am a developmental psychologist and a specialist in adult-infant attachment (see Bowlby/Ainsworth for details). I must protest most strongly against the cruel foster care system which seems to be accepted without qualm by social service agencies. The writer is indeed a primary, perhaps the primary, attachment figure for this 9 month old infant. The family in which the baby has lived comprise her attachment system. These technical terms disguise emotional and cognitive realities which are destroyed by the separation of the baby from the family. The effects for the child are lifelong. Except in cases of abuse and neglect, our society should not allow such attacks upon defenseless children.

Christie Martin 10 years 11 months ago I am also a foster mother and have been fostering for 10 years. We have had 10 children placed in our home, and have adopted two of them: the only two who were adoptable. I was fostered as an infant and then placed with another family for adoption. Infants come into the system singly when their circumstances are so horrific that someone cried out for them. Foster care is hard on everyone involved, but until it the system is improved or replaced, please consider that the children who have come into our home through the foster care system as infants have invariably been in such dire circumstances that the alternative was death. Everyone would prefer a better system, to be sure, but please do not condemn those of us who are trying our best to work with what we have to make infants' lives better and safer by getting them to safety. With your passion, we sure could use you and your skills. Have you considered looking into starting your own agency, becoming a child advocate or a foster parent yourself?

Barbara DiGangi 10 years 10 months ago Donna, Thank you for sharing such a personal experience. I am currently a licensed social worker and supervisor at Bridges to Health, a program that provides services for children with developmental disabilities in foster care. I've never had a foster child myself, but I can imagine the feelings a foster parent naturally can go through. Foster parents inspire me and I admire them greatly. I agree that there are numerous flaws within the foster care system (and other social service systems). As professionals, we do the best we can to advocate for improvements, protest cuts and do our best work in our day to day activities. I know when children are placed as infants it is most definitely in the worst case scenario. As also someone who has experience with attachment (you can learn more at www.theprojectbond.com), I want to reassure you that you provided this child with the attachment she needed at this time in her life. Secure attachments are formed over time but they can be formed with multiple like-minded adults. As long as the transition was healthy and smooth to the "forever" family, I am sure she will be just fine. In fact, although feeling a sense of loss, you should focus on the love and crucial attachment you provided her with. Her relationship with her "forever" mom and/or dad will be better because of the early "tools" and trust you instilled in her. My goal for Project Bond is to educate foster care agencies and policymakers to incorporate bond-sensitive practices that can enhance the lives of children who have undergone traumatic circumstances and early childhood instability. As professionals, we have to do more than just point out the flaws and actually think of innovative ways to make it better. When people like you write articles like this and draw attention to the realities of "the system" - it can only help. I have a feeling that any child that enters your home will be very blessed to be there. I also imagine that the process of "letting go" will get a bit easier for you as you continue your journey as a foster parent - don't be afraid to ask for help and support when needed!

Karlrod Nick 10 years 1 month ago Thanks for adding this type of informative message, getting some knowledge. Childhood is a very pleasure time for everybody, how can people maintain their child for the future is most important. In the childhood every people should learn the children about the bond with parents and family members. baby goods

celia unga 9 years 10 months ago @Karlrod Nick I know what you mean, but sometimes it is not so simple to do it. I will try to apply the same strategy and I will be back with reviews! Let's hope that I will have a girl using these methods!

Kris Wake 9 years 3 months ago I always proud of foster parents because they're willing to open their lives for children that are not their own. Kris

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Comparison of Family of Origin and Child of God

Introduction.

Childhood, family, community, religious or spiritual beliefs, political stances, and other factors influence one’s social environment. Identity and values are shaped by upbringing, including interactions with parents, siblings, and other family members. Despite their significance, they might not be as significant as accepting a biblical worldview and the conviction that one is a child of God. The paper considers how their own families and spiritual traditions have molded them. This essay will investigate how this influences people’s predisposition for secrecy, religious reliance, and strict limits.

A person’s early growth and development are grounded in their family of origin. Personality can be shaped through one’s educational experiences by being exposed to inspiring role models and intellectual debate (Parrott & Parrott, 2012). My supportive childhood has equipped me with a strong sense of identity and the resilience to overcome adversity. Career paths are also heavily influenced by one’s family of origin. My parents’ expectations, ideals, and advice heavily influenced my path to adulthood. They put a premium on making money, so even as a kid, I felt compelled to go into a field that paid well, even if it was not a good fit for my interests and skills. My family was my model for interacting with and comprehending others. The habits of talking things out, making up, and being close that I picked up at home have served me well in my subsequent relationships(Parrott & Parrott, 2012). Family of origin influences may also include ideas and beliefs about marriage, commitment, and gender roles. Compared to being a child of God, a relationship with the Lord emphasizes love, forgiveness, compassion, and honesty. My identity and worldview have been dramatically changed due to this connection. I am God’s child because I am a miraculously particular product of the Creator—a person’s sense of worth, confidence, and belonging all benefit from this realization. In addition, the moral concepts I learn from a biblical perspective help me make decisions and shape my values. For example, the passage in Deuteronomy 32:7-9 emphasizes the value of seeking advice from the past and respecting the knowledge and comprehension passed down to us from our predecessors. It emphasizes the significance of considering their insights and perspectives while making decisions. This ethical maxim reminds me of the value of honoring our history and learning from the experiences of those who came before us.

Impact on Masks, Trust, and Boundaries

In my view, the masks people use to get by in life might be influenced by their family of origin and their spiritual walk with God. Due to pressure from their families and society, many people learn to wear masks to disguise their authentic selves. Conversely, as it values genuine human connection and trust in God’s grace, a biblical worldview encourages honesty and openness. One’s ability to trust in God’s provision, guidance, and constancy can be influenced by upbringing and life circumstances. Happy memories from childhood may bolster trust in God, but painful ones may severely test it. However, people can discover comfort, restoration, greater trust in the Lord, and a more comprehensive biblical perspective.

For one’s mental health and the well-being of one’s relationships, boundary setting is a need. Their family of origin may have shaped one’s conception and use of personal space. Blurred boundaries or difficulties articulating personal limits may result from unhealthy family dynamics such as enmeshment or neglect. However, the biblical emphasis on love, respect, and self-care can serve as a basis for establishing and upholding healthy limits.

Critiquing Responses and Interaction

Maintaining these safe zones requires introspective thought about one’s reactions and exchanges. An individual’s upbringing and religious beliefs have a significant bearing on whom they become as an adult, and each deserves consideration. It is essential to consider how one’s upbringing might have influenced forming and maintaining boundaries while examining personal responses and interactions (Campbel et al., 2020). Someone may find it difficult to set appropriate limits in their adult relationships if they learned to do so as a child in a hostile setting. The ability to recognize these patterns is crucial for locating potential improvement zones.

Setting appropriate boundaries can also be aided by having a relationship with God and having a Christian perspective. Self-care, respect for others, and the pursuit of relational wisdom are all emphasized in the Bible. Aligning one’s behavior and outlook with these teachings allows people to create protective barriers that benefit their health and dignity as God’s children. Setting and maintaining appropriate limits is not always easy, though, so that is something to keep in mind (Fuchs et al., 2021). Obstacles and difficulties can be spawned by a person’s upbringing, individual experiences, and the nuances of interpersonal interactions. Finding someone you can trust for advice, motivation, and accountability is essential, such as mentors, counselors, or spiritual leaders. When evaluating other people’s reactions and interactions, consider whether your personal space is respected and acknowledged. Consider whether or not one effectively conveys and advocates for one’s opinions, values, and needs. By frequently evaluating the state of one’s boundaries, one can make appropriate adjustments, seek reconciliation when necessary, and cultivate healthier, more satisfying relationships.

One’s upbringing and spiritual connection to God significantly impact their personality, career path, social circle, and values. A person’s family life and the relationships they form throughout their early years significantly impact their sense of self and level of maturity. However, adopting a biblical viewpoint and comprehending that you are a child of God positively impacts your character, decisions, and relationships. It is crucial to consider how these factors affect the use of disguises, faith in God, and personal boundaries while assessing their impact. A person’s healthy boundaries, familiarity with early-life patterns, and adherence to scriptural principles can all be gauged through thoughtful consideration of responses and interactions. People can grow, have more satisfying relationships, and honor their identity as God’s children by learning from and incorporating the best of their families of origin and spiritual lives.

Campbell, M. C., Inman, J. J., Kirmani, A., & Price, L. L. (2020). In times of trouble: A framework for understanding consumers’ responses to threats.  Journal of consumer research ,  47 (3), 311-326.

Fuchs, D., Sahakian, M., Gumbert, T., Di Giulio, A., Maniates, M., Lorek, S., & Graf, A. (2021).  Consumption corridors: Living a good life within sustainable limits  (p. 112).

Parrott, L. & Parrott, L. (2012).  Real relationships .

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Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on God’s Importance In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Understanding god’s role.

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guide who helps them choose right from wrong. When life gets tough, thinking of God can give comfort and hope.

Learning Through Stories

Religious books are full of stories about God’s love and power. These tales teach kids about bravery, kindness, and honesty. They often look to these stories for lessons on how to live well.

Prayer and Strength

Praying to God is like talking to a friend. It can make you feel strong and calm. When you’re scared or sad, praying might bring peace and a sense of not being alone.

Belonging to a Community

Believing in God can connect you with others. Many gather in places like churches or temples to worship together. This can create a feeling of family and support among the people.

250 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guiding force in their lives. For those who believe, God is very important because He gives them hope and purpose. When they are scared or unsure, thinking of God can bring comfort and courage.

Learning Right from Wrong

God is often seen as a teacher of what is good and what is bad. Different religions have their own rules that God has given them. These rules help people decide how to act and treat others. With God’s teachings, they learn to be kind, honest, and fair.

Finding Strength in Tough Times

Life can be hard sometimes. When people face problems, they may pray to God for help. They believe God listens and gives them strength to get through tough times. This belief can make them feel less alone and more able to handle life’s challenges.

Bringing People Together

Belief in God can bring people together. In churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, people gather to pray and celebrate their faith. This creates a sense of community and belonging, which is very important in life.

Hope for the Future

Thinking about God can give people hope for the future. They believe that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope can keep them going when things are difficult and can inspire them to work towards a better future.

500 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a source of strength, guidance, and love. In this essay, we will explore why God plays a significant role in the lives of believers.

Comfort in Tough Times

Life can be hard. Sometimes, we face problems that seem too big for us to handle alone. This is where God comes in. For those who believe, God is like a friend who is always there to listen and help. When something bad happens, like losing a loved one or feeling very sad, believers find comfort in praying to God. They feel that God understands their pain and helps them through it.

Guidance for Right Choices

Every day, we make choices. Some are easy, and some are hard. Believers turn to God for help in making the right decisions. They may read holy books, like the Bible or the Quran, to learn what God teaches about living a good life. By following these teachings, they feel they can choose the path that will make them and the people around them happy.

Feeling Loved and Valued

Everyone wants to feel loved. Believers find this love in God. They think of God as a parent who loves them no matter what. This love gives them confidence. It makes them feel important and valued. When they know God loves them, they also learn to love themselves and others.

Thinking about the future can be scary. There are so many unknowns. But believers find hope in their faith in God. They trust that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope helps them stay positive, even when things look uncertain.

Learning to Forgive

We all make mistakes, and sometimes we hurt others. God teaches about forgiveness. Believers try to follow this teaching by forgiving those who have wronged them. They also ask God to forgive their own mistakes. This helps them live without anger and bitterness.

Building a Community

Believing in God often brings people together. They gather to worship, celebrate, and help each other. This creates a community where people care for one another. In this community, they share their love for God and find friends who support them in their beliefs.

In conclusion, God holds an important place in the lives of those who believe. God offers comfort, guidance, love, hope, and a sense of community. These things help believers lead a fulfilling life. Whether it’s finding strength in tough times, making the right choices, feeling valued, looking forward to the future, learning to forgive, or being part of a community, God’s role is central to many people’s lives. While not everyone believes in God, for those who do, God’s importance in life is clear and deeply felt.

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Child of God Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

By cormac mccarthy.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Symbol of the oxen

The oxen in one of the stories told by the narrator are symbols of Lester himself, and serve to reveal his character. In the story, the oxen are pushed by their owner to move when they do not want to, and they eventually turn on the owner. This is symbolic of the first scene in the novel, when Lester’s home is being auctioned off against his will. He pushes back against the auctioneer before being physically forced to stand down. The oxen turning on their owner is symbolic of Lester eventually turning against the community.

Motif of isolation

One of the main motifs of this novel is that of isolation. Lester is isolated throughout the book, whether by choice or by the community forcing him out. This isolation continued throughout his entire life, with first his mother abandoning him and his father committing suicide, then with his inability to form normal social bonds with the community. This motif of isolation creates the conflict of Lester vs. society.

Symbol of the stuffed animals

The stuffed animals, two bears and a tiger, that Lester wins at the carnival in a shooting game are symbolic of the human relationships that he so desperately desires. The entire book describes Lester’s attempts to have relationships with women, and subsequent rejection by these women. He eventually turns to necrophilia. The animals that he wins and bring back from the fair to keep in his cabin are symbolic of him replacing traditional relationships with his relationships involving the nonliving. The stuffed animals represent the dead women that he brings to his cave because of his desperation for companionship.

Gothic motif

One motif used in this text is that of gothic details. There are recurrent images of dark and haunted settings, especially when describing Lester’s cabin and the cave. The dogs that attack Lester are described as ghastly and white in the dark night, and Lester’s own voice in the black cave is heard as an ethereal echo. The dark and supernatural are examples of gothic motifs that contribute to the mood of the narrative.

Motif of sexual deviancy

The motif of sexual deviancy has a heavy impact on the second and third parts of the book. Lester’s failed attempts to be with women are documented, and the height of his decline into depravity is reached when he begins killing women and engaging in necrophilia to attain this sexual intimacy. This extreme sexual deviancy highlights Lester’s great immorality, and makes the idea that he is a “child of God much like yourself” even more shocking.

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Child of God Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Child of God is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Child of God

Child of God study guide contains a biography of author Cormac McCarthy, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Child of God
• Child of God Summary
• Character List

Essays for Child of God

Child of God literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.

• The Mascot- Lester Ballard as the Southern Other
• Local Perspective in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God
• The Devolution of Man: Animalistic Sexual Desire in Tobacco Road and Child of God
• The Exemplification of Freudian Sexual Development in McCarthy’s Child of God

Wikipedia Entries for Child of God

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Historical references