Daughters and Fathers

"It says something," write Lynda Boose and Betty Flowers, "that of the possible structural permutations of parent-child relations inscribed in our literary, mythic, historical, and psychoanalytic texts, the father and son are the first and the mother and son the second pair most frequently in focus." Daughters and Fathers shifts this focus to offer a provocative contribution to current discourse about representations of "the family."

Among the contributors, Lynda Boose explores the structural implications of Western culture's central daughter-father kinship exchange stories; Leah S. Marcus examines the politics of daughter-father relations in a historical study of Mary I and Elizabeth I as daughters of Henry VIII; and Diane F. Sadoff treats "good girl" novelists George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anne Brontë. Hortense J. Spillers focuses on the incest theme in works by Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker, while David Willbern examines Sigmund Freud's strange alteration of testimonies by women describing seduction by their fathers.

Representing a wide range of fields, the authors give special emphasis to daughter-father relationships in British and American literature. They discuss the lives and works of such authors as Richardson, Hawthorne, Christina Rossetti, Dickinson, Thackeray, Yeats, Woolf, and Plath. In an afterword, Carolyn G. Heilbrun widens the scope of discussion to suggest that questioning conventional parent-child relationships "may lead to quite other concepts of the family, moving. further and further from the oedipal or nuclear family and the system that family-construct inevitably produces."