Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Catharine Ginna Mellick was Faust’s mother. She was born in New Jersey in 1918 and had a privileged upbringing in a wealthy family. However, as a woman, Catharine’s education wasn’t prioritized. She spent a few years at a prestigious girls’ school without distinguishing herself academically, before enrolling in a “finishing school” in Florence. In the six years between returning from Europe and marrying Faust’s father, Catharine flitted from activity to activity. She was an accomplished horsewoman and, for a time, volunteered as a courier for a nursing service in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. While Catharine enjoyed the work, she gave it up to become a housewife after her marriage.

Faust uses Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to describe her mother’s growing unhappiness. Friedan argued that women who do not use their “aggressive energy […] in the world” (25) turn that anger on themselves to avoid placing it on their husbands or children. This eats away at women, just as Catharine became thinner and thinner until she passed away at the age of 48. Faust describes how the strict gender roles of Catharine’s time and socioeconomic class left no option for her to develop her sense of self and “left her living her life through her children” (14-5). She was an oppressive and domineering presence in her children’s lives, particularly for Faust, who constantly fought with her mother about the expectations that came along with girlhood.

Through telling her mother’s story, Faust illustrates how someone with “extraordinary privilege” can experience limited opportunities due to other aspects of their identity. She writes, “Whatever her advantages of class and wealth, she could not evade the constraints that her era’s gender expectations placed upon her” (36). Catharine was never given the social or educational resources to “fight for her self—for a self,” which Faust suggests “contributed to the tragedy that was her life” (12).

McGhee Tyson Gilpin was Faust’s father. He grew up in Virginia in a well-to-do family, where his father bred Thoroughbred racehorses. Tyson continued the family custom of attending Princeton University, where he was one of the top students in his class. After he met Catharine, the impending war sped up their courtship, and the couple married in 1942. In 1944, Tyson was deployed to Europe, fighting in France for a year and a half. Tyson later described World War II as “the biggest experience of [his] life” (22), yet he never spoke of the war in any detail. Faust wonders how her father’s unspoken memories affected their family as they “grew up in a strange, foggy aftermath of war that no one explained or ever overtly discussed” (65).

Upon returning, Tyson was more or less “directionless.” Despite his charm and academic achievements, he struggled to commit to a career, and his parents worried about his and Catharine’s inability to manage money. Throughout Faust’s childhood, she remembers her father jumping from one failed business venture to another in a “scramble against downward mobility” (81). Tyson’s inability to fulfill Catharine’s financial expectations significantly strained their marriage. Faust remembers him as a distant but easy-going father.  

Faust uses her father’s story to illustrate how 1950s gender roles were just as inflexible for men as for women. To fulfill the requirements of manhood, Tyson was compelled “to bury [his] true feelings [and] show no weakness” (83). He was expected to fight in the war, provide for his family, and put the family pet out of its misery if needed. Consequently, Faust remarks that he never really got to know his children, and they didn’t get to know him.