43 pages • 1 hour read
Natalie Savage CarlsonThe Family Under The Bridge
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Natalie Savage Carlson
Natalie Savage Carlson was an accomplished writer of children’s literature. She was first published at the age of eight by The Baltimore Sunday Sun newspaper and went on to publish 18 works of children’s literature. Carlson studied journalism in college and worked for three years as a newspaper writer for the Long Beach Morning Sun. She then married a naval officer, whose job involved a lot of travel. Carlson lived in Mexico, Canada, Hawaii, and Paris. Befana’s Gift (1969) is set in Italy, The Song of the Lop-Eared Mule (1961) in Spain, and The Tomahawk Family (1960) in South Dakota. The range of locations in her stories reflects Carlson’s own experiences traveling and living around different kinds of people.
Carlson’s books tend to feature warm, loving, and diverse family structures. The Family Under the Bridge focuses on the fatherless Calcet children. The main character in another novel, Ann Aurelia and Dorothy (1968), lives in a foster home. The Happy Orpheline (1957) tells the story of 20 orphaned children living together. Two autobiographical works of Carlson’s—The Half Sisters (1970) and Luvvy and the Girls (1971)—feature a close-knit family, which suggests that Carlson’s works are influenced by her own loving family unit.
Cultural Context: Bohemians and Les Clochards
Paris is famously a city of romance, and that romance makes its way into the language used to describe everyday things. One example of this is the name that the French have long used to describe their unhoused population: les clochards. The word is derived from the word cloche (bell), and its original evolution for this purpose is uncertain. Les clochards are a legitimate figure in the history of “bohemians,” or those who live a socially unconventional lifestyle marked by few permanent ties. The Roma people were commonly considered Bohemian. Bohemians are seen as free to pursue art and passion, but they are also marginalized and discriminated against, in part due to their typically unconventional or nomadic lifestyles. Works of art, including songs, literature, and painting, have featured les clochards as their subjects.
The concept of les clochards is reflected in the text through Armand’s attitude toward his lifestyle. He is unhoused by choice, preferring to avoid a life of obligations and responsibilities. This reflects the Bohemian lifestyle. Armand’s point of view portrays les clochards as noble and free, living unfettered by mortgages, jobs, and other such societal expectations. Armand often references some of the legends of les clochards, though he does not use the name—when he talks about the “Court of Miracles” and the “good old days of Paris” when an unhoused man could live well on his own wits (58-59), he is referencing this long tradition. The novel was published in the late 1950s and set in an unnamed year earlier in the century; Armand’s nostalgia for the way Paris used to be reflects a changing, modernizing society that no longer views les clochards through such a romantic lens.
