The Collapse of American Dinner Rituals in Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Abstract

Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) explores the dissolution of the family unit, and the psychological impact on its characters when they can no longer fit into the idealized Dick and Jane hetero normative family paradigm.The dinner place, the empty place that Tyler’s father Beck Tull no longer occupies, is the complex focus of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. In this essay, I explore how Tyler delves deep into this absence of place and space during the dinnertime ritual as a metaphor for the collapsing family, no father figure dynamic—a world where mother-woman struggles to survive.