It’s a commonplace that fathers develop special relationships with their ever admiring daughters, guard them jealously as they enter the world of sexuality, and loathe to give them over to other men whose designs they know too well. In Victorian fiction, where mothers are so often dead, patriarchal fathers turn their growing daughters into all but overtly sexual partners, while daughters willingly comply out of love and duty, sometimes maintaining their primary bond even after marriage. At its simplest, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) is the story of a young woman who recognizes that in order to save her marriage and win over her straying husband, she must somehow give up her primary allegiance to her rich and powerful father. She needs to become a woman, not simply a daughter, and take the reins of her life into her own hands.
Women as various as the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, Simone de Beauvoir–both of whom regularly ensconced themselves under their fathers’ desks, sites of knowledge and power–and Margaret Thatcher, long idealized their fathers, with whom they shared a whole sphere of aspiration. This active identification with father brought in tandem a spurning of mother. To the latter the first two attributed a suffocating world of either materialism or narrow conformist religiosity, together with a focus solely on their daughter’s eventual marriage. Helene Deutsch noted that during adolescence, when a ‘powerful sensual current’ takes the father-identified girl over, she may need to split the father in two, to find a father figure who is also a lover. Alternatively, she may sublimate the erotic capacity altogether to pursue altruistic ideals. ‘The danger of such a relation to the father,’ Deutsch further elaborates, may be that when the father, often prompted by the mother, recognizes that his daughter should have more feminine interests, ‘he refuses to have “active” communion with her. Very often his own subsequent anxiety drives him to repudiate this relation.’
A son’s relationship with his father has different outlines. In sons’ accounts fathers are regularly experienced, at least until sons grow into fathers themselves, as admonitory and punishing. They are opponents, initially for mother-love and then for a place in the world. For the father, as Tolstoy describes so well in the scene where Levin’s babe is born, the son, in representing generational continuity, also signals his own death, his replacement.
Franz Kafka graphically evoked the torments at the heart of the patriarchal family. In his gnomic writings timid sons are singled out for cruel and unusual punishment by ruthless fathers or their authoritarian stand-ins, all the while acquiescing in their terrible fates. Never quite rising to the challenge of rebellion or totemic murder, they remain hapless children, confined like the metamorphosed Gregor Samsa to his room, to be tended by mother and sister until he reverts to mere dust. In his short story ‘The Judgement’ Georg Bendemann is arbitrarily sentenced to death-by-drowning by a wilful father, and remains obedient and loving for all that. Kafka’s view of the traditional patriarchal family is a sobering one. ‘All parents want to do,’ he wrote to Felice Bauer in 1912 at the age of twenty-seven, ‘is drag one down to them, back to the old days from which one longs to free oneself and escape: they do it out of love, of course, and that’s what makes it so horrible.’
The contradiction inherent in this family model is that the son will grow up, become a man emancipated from the family, by following the father’s example, yet the obedience and gratitude that are demanded chain him to the position of an eternal child–not the limitless all-desiring, narcissistic infant of the mother–child couple before the paternal rival has arrived implacably on the scene, but one whose desires have been forcibly suppressed in an Oedipal conflict with an authoritative paterfamilias.
Kafka’s ‘Letter to His Father’ (1919) details the conundrum and the ambivalence that shadows all our loves. A grown man of thirty-six, he still lives in fear of the ‘hot-tempered’, commanding, threatening father he describes as a ‘true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature’. He, in contrast, remains infantilized, unable to marry, still prey to the memory of himself as a timid child, ever fearful of the punishment meted out when he whimpered one night for a glass of water and was promptly carried on to the balcony and locked out in cold, solitary isolation, reduced as it were to a nothing, a no one. Instead of encouragement, a little friendliness for the person that he was, there was only denial, an attempt to compact him into the fatherly mould. When his father, regularly only present for dinners or punishment, takes him swimming and makes him undress in the same bathing hut as his huge self, the boy Kafka feels like a miserable specimen. ‘When we stepped out of the bathing hut before the people, you holding me by my hand, a little skeleton, unsteady, barefoot on the boards, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes’, he feels humiliated. Yet in his unobserved anguish, he is still ‘proud of my father’s body’.
A sense of failure, an inner anxiety combined with self-contempt, follows Kafka, self-avowedly, through his days, and prevents his attempts at marriage: the women in question are cheapened and dirtied by his father’s casual slurs on sex. He is, he suggests, emasculated, rendered at least metaphorically impotent, eternally a son. It’s worth noting that Freud’s discourse of repressed sexuality and the boy’s fear of castration by the ever huge and prohibiting paterfamilias–a fear that also sets up in his psyche that superego which is conscience and duty–grows out of this traditional regime of patriarchal command.
Traditional fathers hover over the household, their great symbolic function a direct outgrowth of their remoteness and their social power. The Great War, the modern moment, the Freudian revolution, all combined to abet the gradual and always spasmodic decline of their power. When new, slightly looser, sexual and marital forms came into being in the post-First World War epoch, the father’s role vis-à-vis his children began very slowly and unevenly to shift. Loving took on softer contours.
In the idealized family of the 1950s, paternal love still manifests itself primarily in the provision of security. Fathers may regularly engage in weekend or holiday ball games, sport and outings with their growing children, but contact is seldom daily or necessarily prolonged. There’s a laconic element to it. Themselves the children of depression and war, this generation of parents were often indulgent, fathers treating their young to the goods they themselves had never enjoyed. In the remembered childhoods of my cohort, the period at its best often emerges as a nostalgically ordered world, both hierarchical and caring. Fiercely possessive early mother-love and protective father-love are both in place, though ever shadowed by parental memories of war and austerity.
A fierce disillusion with parental limitation and choices followed, in part occasioned by a Cold War that had grown too hot in its nuclear capability and in its manifold eruptions, notably in Vietnam. The baby-boomers vociferously rebelled against the conventional bourgeois family. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do,’ Philip Larkin wrote in 1971, crystallizing the sentiments of a generation and several since. Fucked-up themselves ‘by fools in old-style hats and coats’, parents visit their faults on their children, handing on misery. The only way to halt the cycle of generational wretchedness, Larkin counsels, is to get out early and not have children yourself.
This is precisely what the coming of the oral contraceptive permitted. With it came women’s liberation and the dawn of a new parental settlement, often more wish than fact. Women’s greater voice and power ushered in a more tender epoch, one alert to the vulnerable and the relational. Dual, hands-on parenting, once children were had, now emerged as not only desirable but necessary. Men began to be seen showing an interest in the birth process, walking babes, playing with toddlers, waiting at school gates. In a good many instances the responsibility awakened men to that tenderness they had earlier only shown when they reached grandparenthood. None of it happened uniformly, all at once, or without contention, but gradually affectionate and early fath
er-love took on a normative cast, though one ever questioned by traditionalist and clerical forces.
The Academy Award-winning film Kramer vs Kramer (1979) captured the moment and also distilled some of the attributes of contemporary father-love. Tracing the process and fall-out of a divorce between a couple and their four-year-old son, the film begins with Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) saying goodnight and ‘I love you’ to a sleepy Billy (Justin Henry), before packing a bag. She is poised to leave her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman), a workaholic advertising executive, who is late home. It is clear when he arrives that the couple don’t know how to speak to one another and that love has foundered. Long depressed, Joanna is leaving so that she can become a functioning person again. Her love for her son, though palpable, is doing neither of them enough good.
Left to the duties of childcare on top of demanding work, Ted flounders and is at first barely attuned to his son’s needs, all the more intense given the sudden absence of his mother. But gradually through the eighteen months that the film spans, he learns to listen and to communicate, to play and shop, to provide the requisite food and appear at the school gates. Mutual love, care and attentiveness blossom between father and son, changing Ted in the process into a far more attractive and textured being. Egocentric high-flier becomes sensitive daily cuddler. Parenting begins to take precedence over the demands of work, and when Ted is late for a key meeting, his boss, who has never heard of that thing called work–life balance, asks him to go.
The moment coincides with a custody hearing. Joanna wants her son back. She’s been living in California, had therapy and is now back in New York with a well-paying job. She loves her son and is now ready to raise him.
In order to have a chance of keeping a Billy he now can’t bear to be parted from, Ted has to get a new job, and quickly. He moves down the hierarchy and settles for a lower-paying post, proudly taking Billy to see the new premises, which offer spectacular views of Manhattan. The court, we have been told, is predisposed to rule in favour of mother-love, according to the so-called tender-years doctrine, a default legal position which at the time was already being contested. So Ted, at the hearing, has to do particularly vigorous battle to keep the son he so wants: he knows, too, that a second adaptation to new circumstances would hurt Billy deeply. Nonetheless, the new man that he has become is aware that the picture Joanna’s attorney paints of him was once accurate. It is only through the process of enforced hands-on fathering that he has actually learned to love his son fully. He has also, it is made clear, learned to understand Joanna: while wanting to contest her claim, he is alert to her needs. When the judge rules in Joanna’s favour, he decides not to appeal: it might mean putting his son on the stand and forcing him to make the impossible choice of one parent over another. He prepares, painful as it is, to give his son over to his former wife. In the last scene we see that Joanna, too, has recognized not only the change in her former husband, but that a second rupture would do Billy no good, and she abandons her claim.
For all its inevitable sentimentality and its underscoring of the need to put the child’s interest first, Kramer vs Kramer points to a cultural shift, often more wished for than lived. A new parenting balance between the sexes is in play. Ruthless macho man and subjugated wife have given way to the tender, paternal male implicated in the daily life of his children, and the working mother: a woman whose life is now larger than home and children. In the film’s last shot, the hope is even raised that the estranged couple may come together again in a more harmonious constellation.
The new man–though perhaps not altogether as equally as some women may wish–at least aspires to sharing in the tasks of child-rearing, even when mothers choose to be at home. If the balancing act between partners in the new domesticity is rarely altogether unfraught, men’s interest in small children and this tenderer version of paternity can only be a good.
Some, however, not least on the psychological side, have worried about the decline in the father’s symbolic function as the bearer of authority, compounded in the cultural sphere by a general postmodern suspicion of authority and power as a whole. In combination with an advice culture particularly intent on ensuring that a child shall suffer no lack of self-esteem, this decline in what was once paternal clout can result in the shaping of individuals who have no sense of boundaries and no recognition of bad behaviour. With lives premised on a feeling of self-entitlement, little heed is paid to the needs of others. In a nutshell, we appear to have been breeding a generation of uncontrolled toddlers who have become unbounded, grasping adults. Anxious, restless in their dissatisfactions, they are nonetheless certain the cause lies not in themselves but elsewhere.
It matters little what gender, male or female, generates the parental limits, but evidently they need to come from somewhere. This, too, is part of parental love.
So, too, is the fraught task of keeping in touch with children if separation or divorce takes place. In the period of enmity and high emotion that accompanies divorce, children become trapped in each parent’s contesting and hateful view of the other, often dragging along a sense that somehow they, once so important, are the cause of the fray. There are no simple rules here, except to repeat that the child isn’t at fault, and for both parents to carry on recognizing and acknowledging what it is he or she feels, which may be quite contrary to what they themselves experience. The psychoanalyst Enid Balint writes of the importance of this recognition: it is what gives the child a sense of his own reality. And it is another aspect of parental love, far more crucial than spirited weekends with ever guilty absentee fathers or, indeed, mothers. Without it, children’s thinking or feeling is never joined up with what they live, and a false sense of themselves comes into being, covering over a core emptiness.
Love’s Crucible
Each in our own idiosyncratic way, we learn to love in the family. Though it can sometimes provide a sentimental idyll, the family is also the site of tempestuous drama. All shades of love from bright to dark are there. It’s a school in intimacy and power, hierarchy and democracy, passion and ambivalence.
The ancient myths shine a dazzling Mediterranean light on the powerful subterranean emotions that hurtle through life in the family. Like tragedy and opera, they enact the passions on a grand scale. If Oedipus still speaks to us–and not only in Freud’s interpretation–it is because his story embodies the turbulence of family relations. Consider: fathers want sons, as Laius, King of Thebes, so desperately does–even though in some versions his desires are homosexual. But the arrival of sons also signals the death of the father and a new lover for the mother. So Laius sends his infant son Oedipus, destined to displace him, out to die on a mountaintop. But the generational fate, time’s deadly arrow, can’t be stopped. Unbeknown to him, Oedipus, now caught up in the conflicts of adoption, leaves his adoptive family: in a scuffle over pre-eminence on a country road, he kills the man who is his blood father. As if to underline that this father-murder is part of the human condition, Oedipus then proceeds to solve the riddle of the sphinx: ‘What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?’ To which swollen-footed Oedipus answers, ‘Man’. We may be the same creatures throughout, but at different points in our lives, we get about in different ways, first on all fours, then upright, then with the help of a stick.
The doors to Thebes open to him, Oedipus is presented with and married to Jocasta, the mother he originally lost when she succumbed to paternal wish, and becomes her lover/husband. When the gamut of cross-generational sins–old against young and young against old–finally comes to light after much resistance, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus puts out his own eyes, a punishment which no longer allows him to see the havoc he has helped to engender. He is then utterly dependent on his daughter and half-sister, Antigone, who in that sense displaces Jocasta. Antigone provides him with a metaphorical third leg and loyally guides him through the years to Colonnus, where he will die.
First, howe
ver, he learns that his two sons, to whom he has granted the throne of Thebes to occupy in yearly rotation, have risen against each other. Legacies ever generate jealousy and turmoil. Asked by his brother-in-law/uncle Creon, to bless Eteocles in single succession, Oedipus refuses. Both sons, Eteocles and Polynices, have been negligent towards him, he deems. The warring brothers thus slaughter each other in a battle for single inheritance. Creon, who has stepped in as King, allows only Eteocles official burial, since Polynices was effectively a rebel against the law of the land, having raised help from a foreign power.
Enter ever loyal Antigone, upholder of family honour and kinship ties above any contractual duty of citizenship to the state, keener than ever, we might say, given her family’s taints, to uphold that honour. Polynices, too, must be appropriately buried. She asks her sister Ismene for help, but Ismene refuses: she isn’t as brave as her sister, she says. So Antigone carries out the burial rites alone. She is caught and condemned to be interred alive. Now, Ismene, in retrospective loyalty to her sister, tells Creon that she too is guilty of this ‘illegal’ burial. Meanwhile, Creon’s son, betrothed to Antigone, pleads for her life to his father, is refused, and when he learns that Antigone has hanged herself he, too, commits suicide. Creon’s wife, learning of her son’s death, does the same.
This is, we might say, family dysfunction on a grand scale. Equalling it are the passions in Shakespeare’s tragedies: the sins of fathers or mothers rebound on their children. Hamlet avenges his ghostly father, replacing him in rank jealousy of Gertrude, a mother sexualized through her marriage to the one-time King’s brother. His thoughts poisoned by his mother’s sexuality, Hamlet turns on Ophelia. His actions lead to her death, his mother’s and his own.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 37
