Father-Daughter Separation Dramas

 

Catherine Deneuve in Donkey Skin

Catherine Deneuve in Donkey Skin

My wonderful daughter-in-law Betsy, in response to one of my posts about father-son relationships, began meditating about father-daughter relationships on her own blog. We agreed that, while the dynamics are different, in one way they are similar: daughters like sons must establish separate identities, a process that is difficult and often involves a struggle.

Betsy notes that fathers can be particularly challenged by their daughters’ emerging sexuality. They can also feel threatened by the prospect of being upstaged by their daughters’ affections for another man. I don’t have any experience with daughters, or even sisters, but I told Betsy I would think of some father-daughter stories and examine the guidance and support that they offer.

The disturbing fairy tale “Donkey Skin,” by Charles Perrault, was the first that came to mind. (The Grimm Brothers version of this story is called “Many Fur.”) In it the king falls in love with his beautiful daughter, whom he wishes to take the place of her mother the queen, who has died. After demanding that he make her three impossibly beautiful dresses and then that he sacrifice a donkey that excretes gold instead of dung (all of which he does), the daughter then flees in the donkey skin. Outwardly ugly, she is given menial tasks but, in a Cinderella-type sequence of events, is discovered by a prince, who marries her.

Under the relatively safe guise of fantasy, fairy tales enter dangerous realms of human desire, such as (in this case) incest. “Donkey Skin” reveals a dark element in the father-daughter relationship, just as the Oedipus story gets at a dark side of the mother-son relationship. The princess learns that her father’s desire is so strong that he will do anything to possess her, even if it means sacrificing his most prized possession. In a way, her donning of the ugly donkey skin (something once precious, now dead and ugly) is a turning against her sexuality, which has rendered her vulnerable. The story has a self-empowerment dimension: she finds a way to take action to protect herself. Hiding behind her disguise, she begins to reclaim her sexuality, letting herself gradually be known to a more appropriate partner.

In other words, one way to use the story is to see it as a violent but necessary separation from the father. And as reassurance that women can reclaim their sexuality on their own terms.


Of course, another famous father-daughter drama is King Lear. Shakespeare’s play has fairy tale elements, what with the two older (bad) sisters and a young (good) sister. As my son Toby points out in a recent response to one of my posts, different responses can get portioned out amongst different characters. Here, the resentment that a daughter may feel towards a demanding father is relegated to the older sisters, thereby allowing Cordelia to be daddy’s good little girl, sweet and loving even when he spurns her. A daughter watching the play can recognize her own anger, and even revenge fantasies, in Cordelia and Regan, and then assure herself, through a martyr fantasy, that she isn’t like that: she will love her father even when he mistreats her. (And won’t he be sorry when she dies!)

Lear represents the tyranny of parents, using his charade love contest (he already knows that Cordelia loves him best) to lock his daughter into a perpetual sense of obligation. Maybe he plays the obligation card at this point in his life because separation is on the horizon: Cordelia is being courted and will soon be married. Obligation, however, is not love, even though parents often confuse the two. Rather, it is a power move they can make since, as Cordelia puts it, “You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me.”

By responding to Lear ironically with contractual language, it is as though Cordelia is trying to teach him the difference between obligation and love while, at the same time, refusing to participate in his desecration of love.

I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

If separation anxiety is what is driving Lear, then the mention of husbands only exacerbates his insecurity. He responds in panicked fury, rejecting her before she (as he sees it) rejects him. Only at the end of the play does he discover what true love is. In this dark, dark play, his final realization, bought at a heavy price, is more precious than anything he has ever had or known.

So fathers, don’t panic when your daughters get married. You don’t lose a corresponding percentage of her love. In fact, you can’t because love is indivisible.

In his response to another of my father-son posts, Darien, my other son, mentioned Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses as one that successfully captures a good father-son relationship. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show us a good father-daughter relationship. When Alejandra’s father discovers that she has been sleeping with Grady, he rejects her and ceases to love her. She is shattered. And because she allows herself to remain caught up in family dramas, she doesn’t achieve a successful separation. She does not become her own woman and ride off into the future with Grady. In this way, the novel works as a cautionary tale.

I’m interested in hearing more examples and in getting other perspectives on the stories mentioned above.

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