Family Theme Analysis

The idea of an intact family haunts Father Comes Home from the War. Hero’s father was lynched for attempting to run away. Hero and Penny cannot conceive children. Even Boss-Master and Missus lost a son. The number of characters in the play who yearn for or make appeals to the idea of family suggest that it’s a deeply human thing to want to be with the people you love—that’s why Old Man adopts Hero, and Penny and Hero initially consider themselves spouses even though they’ve not had an official ceremony.

But the play illustrates how the institution of slavery perverted and undermined this very human desire to build close connections. In its world, the destruction of families can be read as a metaphor for the horrors of slavery itself. One sign of Boss-Master’s moral baseness is that he thinks that having to free his enslaved workers would be more painful than the death of his biological son. And none of the Black characters seems to have fully intact families. In addition to the examples above, each member of the chorus of Runaways specifically names people they have lost. Only when all people are free, the play suggests, can families flourish. Hero/Ulysses legally marries a wife and Penny becomes pregnant with Homer’s child only after the Emancipation Proclamation (which legally freed enslaved people) has been issued. In this way, the play uses families as a window into the horrors of slavery—and the promises of freedom and human dignity.