2 - Fathers and Daughters

Summary

Compared to the extensive narrative interest in father-son relationships, fathers and daughters are afforded far less attention in Old Norse myth and legend and in ancient and medieval literature more widely. In a rather extreme analysis, Lynda E. Boose has argued that the entire Western family unit has been constructed deliberately to exclude the daughter and hide her from view, making absence her defining feature. It is an erasure even more complete than that which frequently threatens the mother in medieval texts, as will be discussed in the next chapter. If ‘the daughter's presence is normal to the biological realities of family,’ she suggests, then ‘her absence is therefore loaded with significance’. She elaborates:

In the four-cornered nuclear enclosure that is at once the source for and product of Western ideologies about the family, the father weighs most and the daughter least. To consider the daughter and father in relationship means juxtaposing the two figures most asymmetrically proportioned in terms of gender, age, authority, and cultural privilege. Each of these asymmetries is controlled by the idiom of presence, which defines the father, or absence which identifies the daughter.

Boose makes a valid point about the imbalance of power between father and daughter which must inform their interactions, but there has been some dissent over such a bleak portrait of father-daughter relations and several studies have modified Boose's analysis with a more positive appraisal.

Judith P. Hallett has studied fathers and daughters in Roman society and argues that, for all their legal disenfranchisement, daughters were nevertheless at the heart of the Roman family, an effect she dubs ‘filiafocality’. In her study of fathers and daughters in the Hebrew Bible, Johanna Stiebert concluded that ‘things are not as grim as is so widely claimed in feminist examinations of biblical fathers in relation to daughters’. All agree that the difficulty in understanding the relationship lies in the contrast between the daughter's legal and social disenfranchisement, which diminished her impact in the historical and literary record, and the emotional intimacy which likely mitigated the harsh effects the daughter's powerlessness would otherwise have had on the father-daughter bond.