UBC #13: Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel

[truepenny]

UBC #13
Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

This is, yes, fifteen-year-old feminist literary criticism. But it's very intelligent and it has things to say that I found very useful.

Zwinger's primary texts are Clarissa, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O, along with a final chapter on Austen, C. and E. Brontë, and George Eliot. And what's brilliant about this book is that it shows the ways in which The Story of O is a lineal descendant of the sentimental (in its technical sense) novels of the nineteenth century. O's efforts to remake herself into something that Sir Stephen will love is the same struggle, in a different register, as Florence Dombey's or Jo March's: the desire to please the patriarch, The Man. Zwinger's reading also makes sense, for me, of Little Women, for it points out that Jo's struggle is not to become an adult, independent woman writer (as we, as modern feminist readers, wish it was), but to become a daughter her father can be proud of. (And, yes, cue the teeth-grinding venom about Bronson Alcott.)

Zwinger is very clear on the ways in which feminist readers will find themselves misled and trapped in novels like Little Women. She is also brilliantly, brutally clear about Freud's self-interest in creating the family romance in such a way that the father is never at fault. The best Freudian criticism is always that which insists on pointing out that Freud himself was not a disinterested observer, that uses his ideas on his own writing.

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As for example:

The sentimental gloss enables us to divide and separate the father from his wish--and his "no" and his "nom"--so that we can continue to pretend that it all, somehow, just happens to work the way it does. Or to take refuge in the authorized view that it happens just the way the daughter wants it.

In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven [by what?] to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue andd so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies [whose?] and not from real occurences. It was only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women. And now we find the phantasy of seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of girls; but the seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the phantasy touches the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities over the child's bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals. ("Femininity," 120)

Freud, archeologist of Western desire, can acknowledge a ubiquitous maternal seduction and its ground in reality. But any suggested ground in reality for a paternal seduction undercuts the asserted daughterly origin of the father-daughter "phantasy." Father must remain absolutely guiltless of real action; the "seduction" must be seen as originating with her. And yet, leaving him out of the account cannot mask his active role:

The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father. The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence. ("Femininity," 128)

Where is the subject occulted by the passive constructions "is ... established" and "is replaced"? Who was in charge of those ancient symbolic equivalences anyway? What would make the girl assume her father would give her what he had already refused her mother? Where on earth would the girl get all these ideas to begin with? From the parent who literally touches in baths and dressing? Or from the parent who remains distant, touching her only metaphorically, with ideas and symbols and negations? The pertinent question to put to the penis-wish/baby-wish progression is whose idea could it be to begin with? Whom does she aim to please in manifesting such a wish? What is missing from the account is the activity of the (passive, untouching) father--the activity, that is to say, of the culturally constructed and continuously reinforced place of the father. His place places her, and the figure of the daughter of sentiment serves to reveal the question begged by the (in)famous "What does woman want?"--which is, I submit, "Who told her she wants that?"
(Zwinger 90-91)

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Freudian criticism has to be approached warily, skeptically. (Freud's assertions about the gendered responsibilities of parents only works in the ideal bourgeois nuclear family, for instance, in which there are two parents, one of each gender, and the feminine parent cares for the children while the masculine parent leaves the house to work) But Zwinger uses it well and carefully, and she never forgets to examine her own subject-position as she goes.

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I had a grand old time with Freud in my undergrad lit crit courses. The funnest part was asking questions like, "But where does a baby girl find out about penises, if she hasn't got one herself? If she hasn't got close male siblings? Who is showing her this thing she's supposed to want, and how can we get that man arrested?"

It's funny, because so many little details from Freud do clang off true things -- reaction formation; the description of decision-making modules in the mind -- but so much else is total claptrap.

[cleverthylacine]

Oh lord, Little Women.

Professor Bhaer just makes me ill, what with all that crap he tells Jo about what not to write about. I read that book at 12-13, when I was already writing slash, and set it aside, knowing that if Professor Bhaer had trouble dealing with Jo's pirates mine would give him a heart attack.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

(And, yes, cue the teeth-grinding venom about Bronson Alcott.)

One can never have too much tooth-grinding venom about Bronson Alcott.

[larryhammer]

Well, technically speaking you can. Around the point it takes away time from considering something actually interesting and important.

---L.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of Little Women that way; it's obviously a valid reading and my first reaction to it is that it makes Alcott's adult novel Work where the woman eventually ends up becoming a woman she herself can be proud of, that much more significant.