Domestic Happiness Research Articles

Does the intensity of conflict-Induced internal displacement influence national happiness scores?

ABSTRACT Recognizing that internal displacement is a global humanitarian catastrophe, this article seeks to examine whether or not conflict-induced internal displacement affects a country’s happiness scores. Results were drawn from 35 nations with complete data reported in eight world indexes including the Global Report on Internal Displacement 2023 and the World Happiness Report 2023. Datasets were analyzed for linear regression and path analysis. Among others, results show that while the intensity of internal displacement (represented in terms of the number of internally displaced persons per country) is positively linked to country-level peace perceptions, the same is not influential to the overall domestic happiness scores. In other words, happiness perceptions, at the national level, seem to be unaffected by the intensity of conflict-induced internal displacement. Hence, countries with cases of conflict-induced internal displacement may be seen as less peaceful but not necessarily less happy.

The Anti-Marriage Plot: The Mistress as Heroine in G.W.M. Reynolds's Rosa Lambert

Abstract: This essay uses George W.M. Reynolds's novel Rosa Lambert; or, The Memoirs of an Unfortunate Woman (1853) as a case study to illustrate various types of "anti-marriage" plots circulating in Victorian popular fiction in the 1850s—representations of romantic and sexual relationships that challenge and even subvert middle-class Victorian views of marriage as the only desirable path to domestic happiness, particularly for women. Reynolds's representation of Rosa's successful career as a courtesan and professional mistress demonstrates the parallels between marriage and prostitution while also exposing marriage as primarily an institution that served the interests of men, highlighting many of the same flaws in English marriage laws that mid-century feminists were trying to reform.

معالم الحسبة في الاجتماعات الأسرية Hesba (al-Hisbah) milestones in family meeting

By nature, a man is a social being who interacts with the people around him, mainly if he interacts with his family members through their regular family gatherings. These interactions can be positive, such as being considerate, polite, and conducting good relationships, and they can be negative interactions, such as lying, backbiting, and gossiping. So, this study aims to identify the negative interactions that may occur in recurring family gatherings and dive into the negative aspects and ways to deal with them. This research method relies on historical, library and analytical approaches to reach results. Among the most important findings is hisba, an act to improve a person in the context of his interaction, and that hisba is also a way to deal with an individual's behaviour with the members of his community, including during family gatherings where there is a lot of family social interaction. Then this paper also makes some recommendations, among which is the need for more studies in the field of family and issues related to hisba, the importance of finding a good solution that ensures Muslim families achieve domestic happiness, and the need to establish hisba in family meetings because of its capability of reforming individuals and society.

معالم الحسبة في الاجتماعات الأسرية Hesba (al-Hisbah) milestones in family meeting

By nature, a man is a social being who interacts with the people around him, mainly if he interacts with his family members through their regular family gatherings. These interactions can be positive, such as being considerate, polite, and conducting good relationships, and they can be negative interactions, such as lying, backbiting, and gossiping. So, this study aims to identify the negative interactions that may occur in recurring family gatherings and dive into the negative aspects and ways to deal with them. This research method relies on historical, library and analytical approaches to reach results. Among the most important findings is hisba, an act to improve a person in the context of his interaction, and that hisba is also a way to deal with an individual's behaviour with the members of his community, including during family gatherings where there is a lot of family social interaction. Then this paper also makes some recommendations, among which is the need for more studies in the field of family and issues related to hisba, the importance of finding a good solution that ensures Muslim families achieve domestic happiness, and the need to establish hisba in family meetings because of its capability of reforming individuals and society.

Feeling Good, Living Well: The Importance of Happiness for Health

Feeling Good, Living Well: The Importance of Happiness for Health

L’Art du Bonheur: Rituals of Domesticity in VideoSchetsboek, Pink 1983

This contribution analyses Pink’s artwork VideoSchetsboek (1983), a performance part of the project L’Art du Bonheur, which shows the same ‘De Koning family’ repeatedly in different interiors within the same street by means of a series of photographs and videos. The emphasis on ritual and domesticity in this series explains its recent inclusion in the collection of the Royal Antiquarian Society (KOG). The ideals of the KOG after its foundation in 1858 reflected, for example through the Atlas of Manners and Customs, those of a nineteenth-century society in which an orderly interior was seen as a core value: domestic happiness was deemed to be good for the development of the nation. Those values ​​changed after 1900 with discussions about individuality and a sense of taste. With the increasing prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century, it became possible for everyone to furnish a home interior as a reflection of their own identity. Pink’s work questions this individualization. Since 1980, the values attributed to marriage and family have declined sharply and all kinds of alternative types of households and discussions about them have arisen. In conjunction with the KOG’s older collections, Pink’s work makes it possible to gain insight into this ever changing culture of living and its domestic rituals and provides context to discussions on their meaning.

The Ecological Footprint of Happiness: A Case Study of a Low-Income Community in the City of São Paulo, Brazil

An ecological footprint is an accounting tool that reports the balance between resource supply and demand to assess environmental sustainability. Among the many available indicators of social progress, happiness reflects how a person feels about their quality of life. We combined these two approaches to assess the ecological efficiency of social performance in the low-income community of Felicidade, in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2019. We assessed the ecological footprint and gross domestic happiness (GDH) through questionnaires. We found that the community has a lower environmental footprint than higher-income communities in Brazil. However, the per capita ecological footprint in the community is still above what is available per person globally. We found that the community has a high level of life satisfaction (GDH = 0.86) and that the main contributor to happiness is health, time use, psychological wellbeing, education, good governance, and community vitality. The results suggest that other contributors unrelated to income are more robust determinants of happiness. In Brazil, despite higher footprints characterizing higher-income communities, further efforts in low-income communities are needed to reduce environmental footprints, ensure dignified income, and nurture the underlying conditions for high levels of happiness and social capital.

Familial hypercholesterolemia in China requires greater efforts

Familial hypercholesterolemia in China requires greater efforts

PLAISIR ET BONHEUR DANS LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN

The first best seller of Balzac, the novel La Peau de Chagrin (1831) features more than a fantastic story about a pact with the devil and the destructive consequences it brings about. In reality, the adventure of the young intellectual Raphaël de Valentin reveals a moral and ontological significance, relying on the choice between an active life of frivolous pleasures and a calm life of domestic happiness. In this paper, we shall examine how the tragic destiny of the protagonist derives from his confusion between enduring happiness and the ephemeral pleasure offered by a hedonistic lifestyle, all within the social context of the birth of capitalism in the early 19th century.

Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn

Setsuko Koizumi (1868–1932) was the daughter of a Japanese samurai family in Matsué. In 1891 she married a foreigner — Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) — and their union lasted 13 years and produced three children. Hearn adopted her family name, becoming Koizumi Yakumo 小泉八雲,and spent those years in Japan writing, teaching, and achieving international recognition. Setsuko’s Reminiscences tells something of the couple’s moves and travels, but focuses mostly on the character, habits, and eccentricities of her husband. The book is a heartfelt and intimate portrait of a marriage that brought Lafcadio the home and family he had never before enjoyed. This book shares a charming story of domestic happiness, told by his closest companion, collaborator, and interpreter of life, death, and afterlife in Meiji Japan.

Décroissance et « déconsommation » face aux enjeux du « vert » dans les territoires fictionnels de Jean Giono

This article proposes to explore a part of Gionian poetry that is still little known. From the point of view of ecocriticism, it unfolds from the hypothesis according to which concerns relating to degrowth and "deconsumption" emerge in Gionian narratives. By verifying this postulate which combines economic aspects, sociological factors and ecological questions, by calling to the rescue the theories of so-called happiness economists and those relating to ecosophy, the analysis reveals the mechanisms by which Giono imagines a society where the environment ceases to be brought into line, even if it means producing and consuming little but decently. For such a society, it is necessary to invent other criteria for measuring wealth. These new criteria give a clear place to the management and the conservation of nature promoted to a new order of (over) priority. As a result, they relegate the classic and ecocidal GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to the background to highlight the GDH ecophil (Gross Domestic Happiness). In a world threatened by various ecological challenges, literature then appears as a cosmos generating new values ​​capable of pulling society towards minimal consumerism.

LIZZIE LEIGH! Or, the Murder Near the Old Mill: A Story of Three Christmas Nights – A Domestic Drama, in Three Acts by W. R. Waldron

Richard Waldon’s play Lizzie Leigh can be interpreted as a domestic drama, a temperance play, or a sensational melodrama. In editing the script we asked ourselves which generic frame – the domestic or temperance – enables the sensation narrative to speak to an audience more powerfully today. Since the discourse of temperance is effectively culturally dead, our first editing decision was to delete the opening temperance dialogue and all subsequent references to temperance as such. We open our version of the play in the midst of an action, and all subsequent deletions to the script were made in the service of keeping the core action of the play in the foreground. We strived to capture how the action might speak to our audience within the contexts that we carry with us from our own cultural moment, our heightened awareness of forms of violence against women, and uncertainties about truth claims being the most prominent. Thus, we shortened the long paeans to lost domestic security and happiness, keeping domesticity as a thread but not a preoccupation. In other words, we kept enough of the domestic context to highlight the action with the intention to make the action as legible and as credible as we could.

Criticism Against Feminist's Thinking About Husband's and Wife’s Rights and Obligations

Marriage is a legal place to foster a peaceful, harmonious and loving household (Sakīnah mawaddah wa rahmah). In marriage, the fulfillment of the rights and obligations of husband and wife is the main means for achieving domestic happiness. In the Islamic perspective, the husband is the head of the household and the wife is the housewife. However, in modern times, along with the emergence of feminists, the concept of the rights and obligations of husband/wife are thus re-interpreted and reconstructed on the grounds that many wives are no longer serving as housewives but also help husbands in earning a living. As a result, the aspect of equality is more prioritized than the concept of mu'āsyarah bil ma'rūf (harmonious relationship). This article examines the views of Muslim feminists about the role of husband/wife in a household, while comparing them with concepts that exist in Islamic teachings. In conclusion, the Islamic concept of the rights and obligations of wife and husband, if it is carried out consistently, will actually bring more benefit and permanence in the household than the feminist’s which is only based on the equality argument.

Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection’ by Heidi Thomson

 Reviews covering a vast range of issues relating to textual variants, subtextual meanings, cultural legacies, and historical contexts. Pittock describes the Museum as a ‘monument to the musical and generic fusion culture of eighteenth-century Scotland’ (, ); this edition might equally be described as a monumental contribution to the study of Burns and Scottish music, whose influence will be felt for decades to come. U  L A B Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: e ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection ’. by H T. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . xii+.£.. ISBN ––––. In the first few pages of Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper, Heidi omson poses the question ‘why, you may well ask, another book inspired by “Dejection”?’ (p. ), which one might supplement by asking whether we need another book about Coleridge and Wordsworth and, more specifically, the protracted collapse of their friendship, founded largely in mutual disillusionment and played out with the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; her answer is simple: ‘because I wanted to find out more about Coleridge’s compulsive expression of what could be considered private matters’ (p. ). Accordingly, this book focuses on just a few years of Coleridge’s life—–—during his ‘intense involvement with the Morning Post’ as a way of ‘unlocking his personal and poetic interests’ in a study that is primarily biographical, but also ‘textual and contextual’ (p. ). e results are surprising and persuasive, and throughout her book, omson provides sustained and illuminated readings of largely neglected pieces, excavates Coleridge’s complex and ever shiing state of mind (in part produced by his infatuation or limerent devotion to Sara Hutchinson and his compromised feelings towards his wife, whom he admired as a mother but struggled to adore as a lover), and also exposes and explores his friendship with Mary Robinson. Biography and creativity are seen to be interwoven to the point of co-dependency—which is, perhaps, on the face of it, an obvious point to make; but the book unpicks and unpacks the intricacies of their self-involvement in a consistently compelling way. omson examines Coleridge’s ‘reluctant, painful realization’ that ‘neither Wordsworth nor Sara Hutchinson were as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with them’ and his ‘need to publicize it’ (p. ). She further reveals that ‘his ideas about poets and poetry were to a surprising degree associated with his frustrated expectations of domestic happiness’ (p. ). In assessing how he publicized these frustrations, she presents a Coleridge who always needed to have the last word. e second chapter (aer the Introduction) sets the scene for what follows, examines Coleridge’s return from Germany in July , discusses how ‘the two most important relationships’ in his life—his marriage to Sara Fricker and his friendship with Wordsworth—‘came to a watershed’ (pp. , ), and considers his love of the North (geography being an important theme in the book: Coleridge was always MLR, .,   concerned with his proximity to those who were in—or moving out of—his life). e third discusses Coleridge’s work at the Morning Post and devotes considerable space to a prolonged assessment of the largely neglected poem ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ (later retitled ‘Love’), considering it in relation to ‘e Eolian Harp’, ‘To William Wordsworth’, and ‘Lewti’. e fourth considers Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Georgiana’ (the Duchess of Devonshire) and his fascinating essay on Pitt, which reveals much of Coleridge’s talent for astute insight. Aer this Coleridge leaves London and heads north to Greta Hall. omson traces the origin of the depression that would be immortalized in ‘Dejection’ from this period, combining newspaper pieces with letters and notebook entries to build up a full picture of his mental and emotional state. e next two chapters focus on Coleridge’s surprisingly close relationship to Mary Robinson and how it complicated the Coleridge/Wordsworth paradigm. e penultimate chapter contextualizes ‘Dejection’ in relation to ‘lesser known poems and texts which were published at about the same time in the Morning Post’ (p. ). e conclusion concentrates on the differences between the April and October versions of ‘Dejection’, and claims that ‘the poem that Coleridge published in the Morning Post is just as much both...

Das narrativas de fundação às narrativas de dissolução. A questão da identidade nacional no cinema contemporâneo

Resumo Apesar das inúmeras problematizações dos conceitos de “nação” e “nacionalismo” no âmbito da historiografia, e das discussões sobre a atualidade e a utilidade da categoria “cinema nacional” no campo dos estudos cinematográficos (BERRY, 2006), essas noções continuam sendo usadas tanto pelos estudos cinematográficos quanto por festivais e premiações. Em contraponto às chamadas “narrativas fundacionais” (SOMMER, 2004), que entrelaçavam felicidade doméstica e ideal nacional, em alguns filmes contemporâneos as esferas “individual” e “nacional” continuam ligadas, mas em chave negativa. Isso nos leva a propor o conceito de “narrativas de dissolução”, com base na análise de filmes do realizador chinês Jia Zhang-ke, e mais especificamente As montanhas se separam (2015).

Au revoir Man Tine par Mérine Céco

dédouanant la mère de toute culpabilité. Thomas, lui, a changé et s’installe avec Pénélope. Même s’il garde ses jouets, il les a remis dans des vitrines. Collector, bien écrit et rondement mené, opère sa propre magie sur les lecteurs qui ont connu les eighties et offre à tous une réflexion profonde sur l’Enfance. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Céco, Mérine. Au revoir Man Tine. Paris: Écriture, 2016. ISBN 978-2-35905-211-4. Pp. 176. 17 a. This author is quickly becoming an up-and-coming representative of a new Martinican créolité. After her first novel, La mazurka perdue des femmes-couresse (2013), she has now written a short story collection, a complex work that demonstrates both intertextuality with Martinican literature and distinctive developments beyond that tradition. The book can be read on several levels. First, as a collection of short stories, it builds on that genre in the Caribbean tradition. In addition, because the short stories are autobiographical, Céco continues the tradition of autobiographical writing so important within French literature (Nathalie Sarraute’s L’enfance,for example) and Martinican letters, bringing to mind collections such as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une enfance créole or Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour. Furthermore, Au revoir Man Tine takes as direct inspiration one of the classics of Caribbean literature, Joseph Zobel’s La rue Cases-Nègres. The conceit of the collection is that Man Tine, the grandmother of José Hassam, the protagonist of La rue Cases-Nègres, never received a proper goodbye from José after he had gone off to work in the big city. They both represent more than themselves for Céco, however. They represent entire generations—Man Tine a forgotten Martinican past, and José the newer generation that desired the best possible modern French life for their children, who are the current generation of technology-saturated, history-starved young people. Céco seeks to bid goodbye to Man Tine, literally opening her book by saying: “Il est enfin temps de réparer cette trouée de l’Histoire: au revoir Man Tine!” (10), and also by bringing the past and present together throughout the collection. In three parts (“Libellules en pluie,”“Âmes du péyi d’enfance,”and“Autoportraits”), with four short stories in each part, Céco recounts her childhood, adolescence, and ultimately her adulthood and motherhood. Using a distinctive stylistic feature, she often ends her stories with a paragraph or two of reflection on the characters, places, or traditions mentioned therein and what they are like today. For example, in her first story “Une allée de mahoganys,” Céco recounts her school days as the daughter of her own teachers and shows the clash of bringing European Catholic education into contact with rural culture of the Martinican campagne.And at the end, she tells her readers that the allée de mahoganys that led to their school no longer exists, as so much has changed with the changing of time:“L’herbe de Guinée continue de pousser devant les portes closes 266 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 267 des petits camarades qui se sont dispersés dans le monde et que je retrouve, au hasard de Facebook ou Twitter”(26). Her twenty-first-century style and content set her apart in Martinican literature as a writer who appreciates both past and present, unlike the somewhat more nostalgic créolités of Chamoiseau and Confiant. Céco has managed to produce an essential work of Martinican literature by recounting her own experiences situated in the past and present of the island while avoiding the traps of excessive nostalgia and of historical amnesia. Bob Jones University (SC) Jeremy Patterson Darrieussecq, Marie. Être ici est une splendeur: vie de Paula M. Becker. Paris: P.O.L, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8280-3906-9. Pp. 160. 15 a. This book recounts the life and early death of the German painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), from a perspective that emphasizes the tensions between her personal desires (notably marriage and domestic happiness) and her artistic ambitions. Modersohn-Becker has...

Theoretical and Empirical Examinations of Happiness in Korea

This study begins to overview the causes of a “positive turn” that tends to place a greater emphasis upon joy, fun or pleasure rather than deferred gratification. External factors of socio-cultural changes, such as increasing non-work time and increasing disposable income due to the diffusion of high technologies in the world of work, are examined. Internal, intrapersonal factors, the rise of post-materialist values, the shift in life interest from production to consumption and changing conceptions of work-life balance are also considered. Next, models of happiness that encompass the main thrusts of the past research on happiness across areas of philosophy, economics, psychology and sociology are explored. Then, the “component model,” “need satisfaction model,” “additive integration model” and the “multiplicative integrated model” are discussed. Given the discussion, a “cubic model of happiness,” that takes into account the effects of utility, need and value is suggested. Finally, based on the selections of world survey data on happiness, the levels and correlates of happiness are compared and the current state of the happiness in Korean society is explicated in terms of typical mentalities of contemporary Koreans including relationalism, inner-worldliness and returnism. In that process, special attention is paid to the discrepancies between economic indices and social indices, and policy measures that help to promote GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness), or overall life satisfaction of the nation, is proposed.

Impossible Ideals: Reconciling Virginity and Maternity in Goethe’s Werther

IN THE SEPTEMBER 10,1771, letter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Lotte recalls the death of her mother and the heavy responsibility she is assigned in her absence:Sey ihre Mutter! Ich gab ihr die Hand drauf! Du versprichst viel, meine Tochter, sagte sie, das Herz einer Mutter und das Aug' einer Mutter. Ich habe oft an deinen dankbaren Thranen gesehen, das du fuhlst, was das sey. Habe es fur deine Geschwister, und fur deinen Vater: die Treue und den Gehorsam einer Frau. Du wirst ihn trosten.1[Be a mother to them.-I gave her my hand.-Dear daughter, she said, you are promising is a great deal. It is the heart of a mother and the eye of a I could often tell from your grateful tears that you felt what that means. Show a mother's care to your brothers and sisters, and be as faithful and obedient to your father as a wife. You will be a comfort to him.2]With these deathbed words, Lotte's mother simultaneously secures her replacement in the family and complicates the familial bonds that must be renegotiated in her absence. Lotte, in adopting her mother's caregiving role, ref lects a contradictory and complex social ideal of woman as both a maternal and a being, a figure whom I call the virginal mother. A young, chaste woman who provides unpaid care for children not her own and simultaneously practices her maternal skills before consummating marriage, the mother marks a departure from the sexualized woman of the seventeenth century and negotiates the eighteenth-century fetishization of virginity with contemporary discourses of domestic motherhood.3 Rousseau, in particular, was influential in emphasizing the role of maternal nurture in the child's moral development, and it was assumed that a woman's natural body predisposed her to this role. In the eighteenth century, this maternal nature is located in the mother, who is charitable and self-sacrificial. She represents an impossible ideal, but one recurring throughout German culture, from Sophie Sternheim in Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim) in 1771 to Maria in Thea von Harbou's novel and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis in 1927.4Although examples of motherhood are more prevalent in the works of female authors,5 Lotte is not Goethe's only mother figure. Both Therese and Natalie in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-96) willingly serve as surrogate mothers, and even Gretchen in Faust I (1808) selflessly devotes herself to her young sister before her encounter with Mephistopheles and Faust. In the works of Sophie von La Roche and later female authors, the mother functions to negotiate prescribed gender roles along with the pursuit of education. Her devotion to reading does not inspire sexual passions, as was feared with the reading of novels,6 but rather benefits the children in her care. As a positive example for young girls, the mother thus serves as an appropriate character for women writers to enter the male-dominated publishing world.7 Goethe, however, did not write under the same social constraints as his female contemporaries. And although he maintained relationships with many educated women (including La Roche), he did not argue for advancements in female education like Christoph Martin Wieland or Johann Christoph Gottsched. Why then does the mother represent the ideal feminine in Goethe's work? And how is the love of the mother- represented as ennobling and a precursor for domestic happiness in other texts-linked to Werther's suicide?Much has already been written about Lotte. Where Goethe's contemporaries heralded her as ein Kind der Natur (a child of nature), modern scholars debate her role in Werther's suicide.8 But little attention has been paid to her unique position as mother in relation to her siblings and father and as the love object of Werther. …

Sarah Ellis's The Women of England: Domestic Happiness and Gender Performance

As both a reaction and a complement to Lockean liberalism and the mechanism of capitalist markets, separate spheres ideology fostered an expectation that domestic women work to off-set fears about ...

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Like Mother, Like Daughter Dinda L. Gorlée (bio) The Darkness That Divides Us Renate Dorrestein Hester Velmans, trans. World Editions www.worldeditions.org 241 Pages; Print, $14.95 The Dutch novel translated into English was the real reason behind this review. The preparatory work was to read the original novel, Het duister dat ons scheidt (2003), written by Dutch best-selling author Renate Dorrestein, followed by the English translation by Hester Velmans, who translated The Darkness That Divides Us. Trying to follow the translator’s perspective, this novel turns out to be a stunning mixture of many genres. The criminal story provides popular, psychological, folkloric, parodic, and psychological hints of secret codes to solve the murder case. All the events and ideas of the Dutch original bring into sharpened focus that the translator, as co-author, has the task of reducing Dutch words, sentences, and fragments into British or American ones. The similarities and differences challenge and threaten the translator’s skill in carrying out the “fortune-telling” art of translation. In a Dutch village, the 6-year-old protagonist Lucy quarrels with her school friend Matthew. The parents gather to discuss the problem. During the negotiation, Matthew’s father is found “dead as a doornail.” Lucy’s eccentric mother is sent to prison for murder, while Lucy becomes a scapegoat at school. During the years in prison, the male lodgers Luducos (the team of Ludo and Duco) are fathers to poor Lucy. In the second part of the novel, Lucy is a woman-child of 12 years. Her mother returns from prison, but their relationship has become cool and hard-edged. Mother continues to be seen as the murderer in the village. To avoid the good and evil of the gossip in the Dutch village, the family of Lucy’s mother, Lucy herself, and the Luducos escape to remove to the Outer Hebrides, north of Scotland, but their problems continue. Lucy has secrets to conceal but grows up in the closed and brutal nature of the island of Lewis. In the third part, Lucy is 18 years old and returns to Holland. Struggling to transcend the violence in her, she meets her mother again. Lucy sheds her isolation when her mother tells the true secret to her. From childhood to the magical time of late adolescence, Lucy comes of age. But Lucy’s head is swimming (cover page) with a “blindfolded” balance on the real world, “sitting with her back to the sea.” Lucy’s mother is a Tarot enthusiast. Her cards give the ace of hearts (love, warmth, domestic happiness). Combined with swords and spades (proposition in love or business), the Tarot cards are for her a triumph of love over hate (clubs). Tarot gives the mother-figure the physical and spiritual power to invent the changes of consciousness. For her, the Tarot cards represent the voyage of “restlessness and change” for the life of “travellers and wanderers.” She stimulates the family to move from the yes-no clichés of the stupid villagers to the strange island of Lewis in order to take some rest. She also raises new thought-forms of the household, such as the practical chores of cooking, washing, and cleanup by the Luducos. Unfortunately, the mother loses the divinatory touch with the Tarot when seized by force and confined in prison. Crossing the boundaries between the two worlds, the team of the Luducos represent the joker card. They simply keep the furniture of the family, more or less, together without questions. The translator’s goal is that the English reader will find the novel the same as the emotive and intriguing melodrama of the original Dutch novel. This is the (im)possible ideal of equivalence between both works. Instead, literary translation is not complete and perfect but achieves the high degree of quasi-equivalence (or sometimes non-equivalence). The grammar and syntax can be easily transposed as regular forms of language, but the cultural syllables, proverbs, and formulas are not conventional forms and must be creatively translated along the pages of the novel. The free-form culture is more of a problem play in the translation of...