Indeed, she cannot because she would then also have to face the fact that she may not have been the best mother, and being the ideal, projecting the aura of the ideal, is vitally important to her. The seeming normalcy that Beth maintains is all surface, and always beneath that surface is the reality of her son's death and her own refusal to adapt to it in a healing way. Her greatest concern seems to be the mess made by Conrad in his suicide attempt, and she has rearranged the world so that every action within her family is taken as a personal affront to her. Beth is almost a caricature of the doting housewife who cares more for the house than her family. We meet her in the middle of her new life of illusion, an illusion created to hide her deep depression and unhappiness. However, their view of her is important because her deteriorating mental state affects them and shapes the way they react to their own place in terms of their membership in the family.īeth Jarrett is ultimately a woman brought to a point of despair by the death of her son, a death she will not truly acknowledge and cannot truly mourn. Beth is not the central character in the book, and much of what we see of her is through the eyes of others. Judith Guest develops this character through a series of interactions with other members of the family. She is a family woman, and her family becomes the center of her illusion. Beth Jarrett in Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People is a woman who uses illusions to protect herself from the outside world and from the reality that would destroy her completely.
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