What I'm Reading: Absent Fathers in Hamlet & Other Lit
Before the COVID-19 crisis shut down libraries, I had a number of books on inter-library loan from college and university libraries in Minnesota, within a few hours of where I live. The books are now long overdue, but as libraries are all closed, I’m getting no notices of late books.
Two of these books are about absent fathers, one by Avi Erlich relating to Hamlet (Hamlet’s Absent Father, Princeton University Press, 1977), the other by Paul Rosefeldt relating to modern drama in general (The Absent Father in Modern Drama, Peter Lang, 1995).
The second book (Rosefeldt) gives a good overview of work on absent fathers by Freud and some of his contemporaries, and also an essay on Oedipus, The Libation Bearers, and Hamlet.
Yet quite a bit of the thinking on absent fathers seems muddied in a number of ways:
1. FREUD ON KILLING THE FATHER:
Freud’s position is one of atheistic scientific reductionism. He assumes that religions and the idea of a father-god are human inventions, which is fine. Of course, all religions are human creations, social constructs. But his scientific reductionism is that he seems to wish to apply certain assumptions from Darwin and others regarding human origins, blended with his assumption that everything is at root about sex. According to Rosefeldt, Freud claims that, long ago, some great father of our ancestors wanted to keep all the women to himself, so the sons (note, not the uncles, but perhaps the younger ones) decided they had to kill the father so more of the males could get access to the females.
Notice how the story Freud created is quite male-centered. For all we know, females in many places may have risen up to kill (or poison, or stab, or hit over the head with a rock) the harem-tending father. If we’re going to create a story, why should we assume men are the only ones with agency?
It makes one wonder what sort of relationship Freud had with his dad, eh?
Other positions relate the absent father to the seasons, with winter being killed by spring and/or summer in a mythology cycle, etc. But still, these are projections, applying a male metaphor of a father or king to the seasons, with one king defeated by another. It’s only when we take the metaphor or myth too literally that we assume winter means the loss, defeat, and death of summer or autumn, and the impending death and absence of winter, to be defeated by spring.
And yet the idea that people would project these father-metaphors onto the seasons would seem to indicate that the people creating or repeating such myths (ancient or modern) must have had some kind of mourning and hunger for lost father-figures.
2. WHEN IS A FATHER’S ABSENCE GOOD OR BAD?
Discussion of absent fathers sometimes seems to idealize them: If the king/father is absent or murdered, terrible things occur, and this must prove how necessary fathers are as representations of law and order. Well, maybe. But shortly, scholars also note that characters such as Laius, father of Oedipus, was a terrible father to his own son. Laius hears a prophecy that his son will kill him and marry his mother, so he abandons him to die in the wilderness. In other words, Laius would like to murder his son, but doesn’t want to be guilty of such a murder, so he assumes he can avoid guilt by abandoning him to die.
But the questionable character of King Laius has a longer history. As a youth, he had to flee and seek asylum with a neighboring king. While enjoying this king’s hospitality, Laius abducted and raped the host-king’s son.
So why is it that the death of such a man must be avenged? Why is it that, upon the death of Laius, a plague of crop failures (the failure of the fertility of the land) is blamed on the unsolved, unavenged murder of Laius? Laius was too selfish and egotistical, so it makes sense that the son of such a man would end up being incestuous (although he doesn’t know it’s his mother he weds).
What of these fathers with such spotted histories, whom wiser sons might be better off leaving behind in favor of better habits, better traditions? It would seem that, if one’s father is dysfunctional and unwilling to reform, finding a better, surrogate father could be a blessing.
And yet sometimes what we flee only manifests itself in us in other, sometimes stronger ways. Laius as father of Oedipus is not merely a point on a map to be left behind, but in many ways, through his DNA and perhaps the scars of his abuse, Laius still lives inside of Oedipus.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion of absent fathers neglects the details of the stories and myths that inspire them in favor of its own theories. (I would not blame this on Rosenbeldt and Erlich so much as on some of their sources).
3. OTHER CULTURAL IDEAS AND TRADITIONS RELATING TO ABSENT FATHERS:
All of this reading about absent fathers has reminded me of the ideas of many others about absent fathers: If many cultures assign women to be in charge of child-raising and the home, and men to be in charge of work, farming, hunting, and also soldiering outside the boundaries of the home, then it makes sense that the idea of an absent father has long been a theme in myth and literature. But various people have noted how industrialization and urbanization have heightened this and made it much more problematic: Whereas in many cultures, older children can join the father in the hunt, or in planting the fields, and can often see the father at mealtimes throughout the day, industrialization resulted in fathers being removed from the home and from mid-day meals. Institutionalized education (especially early education) has often tended to employ more women as teachers than men, perhaps for a variety of reasons, but eventually as a kind of tradition. In higher education, the reverse was usually true, with colleges and universities preferring to hire and tenure men rather than women.
Something similar has long been true of men and women as caregivers for young children: It was long assumed that the man was the breadwinner, the woman the hands-on parent as mother. Even in the 1990s, when I taught university classes at night and took care of our children during the day while my wife taught grade school, I would get strange looks from young mothers when I would take my children to a local playground, as if, as a male, I didn’t belong.
Many cultures have marginalized men as fathers and care-givers in these ways, while of course affording them much more freedom to seek employment and exercise a kind of agency about their economic future, while denying the same freedom to women.
4. GOD AS ABSENT FATHER:
Examination of the absent father eventually, inevitably, includes discussion of God as absent father. This comes up not only in Oedipus and The Libation Bearers, but also in discussion of Hamlet (and for some, discussion of King Lear and other plays as well).
But this sort of thinking reminds me of the cartoon where a person climbs out on a limb of a tree, and then begins to saw off the very limb he is sitting on.
This reality that some religions identify as the transcendent father-god is not really a father. That was just a flawed analogy that some have, sometimes, found useful. Religions became too dependent on such flawed metaphors, losing touch with the mysterious and transcendent realities that inspired such analogies in the first place.
Instead of pointing to the transcendent mystery of life that surrounds and pervades our existence, many people became too focused on the metaphors, symbols, and language of religion. When they fail to account for their experience, or failed to provide the old insights in fresh, relevant ways, it has seemed to many that God and religion are dead.
This is in part what Nietzsche meant when he wrote of a madman, lighting a lantern, proclaiming, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”
But the reality some call God was never really a father, and the mystery and transcendence of experience is still transcendent, and still offers us gifts that sustain us, as well as suffering and mystery and plague. If we didn’t have existence in the first place, that comes to us like a strange gift, we would not experience and wrestle with the challenges and hardship.
Mystery and transcendence are not dead, but some manifestations of religion may be, or seem to be. Some ideas outlive their usefulness. Just because King Lear feels abandoned by the gods, like one who no longer enjoys their favor, this doesn’t mean mystery and transcendence have abandoned him, or that they are not offering him gifts. In fact, Lear may have fallen more deeply into the embrace of transcendence and mystery after his abdication of his throne, forcing him to transcend his old habits and ways of seeing the world.
And transcendence, mystery, and their often seemingly fickle gifts, are the realities that religions and myths originally attempted to describe with their flawed analogies like “father” and “mother” and “spirit/breath/wind.”
So I am both enjoying, and wrestling with, the ideas in these two books.
5. How does all of this relate to Hamlet? Erlich’s book is more focused on that, and I may address this more in a future post. But like Laius who was an ambiguous father-figure with numerous faults, Hamlet’s father is also an ambiguous figure, not only because Hamlet is uncertain whether he’s from purgatory or hell, but also because he died with some sins on his conscience (if he is in fact from purgatory; note that if the soul of the father went to heaven, and the apparition Hamlet and the guards see is a demon in disguise, then it complicates this approach). And Hamlet clearly idolizes him, preferring to emphasize his best qualities and to ignore his faults. Like Oedipus, who is adopted by a neighboring king, Hamlet had a surrogate father in Yorick, a downgrade in social standing but an upgrade in affection and humor. Like Oedipus, who repeats some of his father Laius's patterns, Hamlet also seems to repeat some of his own father's patterns, and yet he does so perhaps with a difference, reconciling with many enemies in the end, even with Laertes who poisons him.
6. A DOG’S ABSENT FATHER:
No, I didn’t mistype that, did not intend to type, “A GOD’S ABSENT FATHER.” This part is actually about a dog and an absent dog-father (not “god-father”).
We recently adopted a 1-year-old puppy, an Anatolian-Pyrenees mix, who has also inspired some thoughts about absent fathers. She was first adopted as a newly-weaned pup in Oklahoma, but was not spayed, so while she was still under a year, she became pregnant and was returned to the same shelter. A Minnesota shelter heard of her plight and took her in, where she had her pups long enough for them to be weaned. We heard about her and adopted her (but not her pups, adopted by others).
But a mystery remains: What dog in Oklahoma was the father of her pups? If dogs were allowed to roam in packs, what sort of relationship might our dog and her pups have developed with the father of the pups? Do fathers of pups in packs bond with the pups as mother dogs do? When they lack such opportunities to form attachments, do male dogs feel an emptiness, a sense of incompleteness? Is that more than just a human existential crisis we project onto our canine friends?
This is just another of those many mysteries that transcends, surrounds, and infuses me.
While many of you are staying home during the COVID-19 crisis, what are you reading? Any Shakespeare, or Shakespeare-related scholarship?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
Two of these books are about absent fathers, one by Avi Erlich relating to Hamlet (Hamlet’s Absent Father, Princeton University Press, 1977), the other by Paul Rosefeldt relating to modern drama in general (The Absent Father in Modern Drama, Peter Lang, 1995).
The second book (Rosefeldt) gives a good overview of work on absent fathers by Freud and some of his contemporaries, and also an essay on Oedipus, The Libation Bearers, and Hamlet.
Yet quite a bit of the thinking on absent fathers seems muddied in a number of ways:
1. FREUD ON KILLING THE FATHER:
Freud’s position is one of atheistic scientific reductionism. He assumes that religions and the idea of a father-god are human inventions, which is fine. Of course, all religions are human creations, social constructs. But his scientific reductionism is that he seems to wish to apply certain assumptions from Darwin and others regarding human origins, blended with his assumption that everything is at root about sex. According to Rosefeldt, Freud claims that, long ago, some great father of our ancestors wanted to keep all the women to himself, so the sons (note, not the uncles, but perhaps the younger ones) decided they had to kill the father so more of the males could get access to the females.
Notice how the story Freud created is quite male-centered. For all we know, females in many places may have risen up to kill (or poison, or stab, or hit over the head with a rock) the harem-tending father. If we’re going to create a story, why should we assume men are the only ones with agency?
It makes one wonder what sort of relationship Freud had with his dad, eh?
Other positions relate the absent father to the seasons, with winter being killed by spring and/or summer in a mythology cycle, etc. But still, these are projections, applying a male metaphor of a father or king to the seasons, with one king defeated by another. It’s only when we take the metaphor or myth too literally that we assume winter means the loss, defeat, and death of summer or autumn, and the impending death and absence of winter, to be defeated by spring.
And yet the idea that people would project these father-metaphors onto the seasons would seem to indicate that the people creating or repeating such myths (ancient or modern) must have had some kind of mourning and hunger for lost father-figures.
2. WHEN IS A FATHER’S ABSENCE GOOD OR BAD?
Discussion of absent fathers sometimes seems to idealize them: If the king/father is absent or murdered, terrible things occur, and this must prove how necessary fathers are as representations of law and order. Well, maybe. But shortly, scholars also note that characters such as Laius, father of Oedipus, was a terrible father to his own son. Laius hears a prophecy that his son will kill him and marry his mother, so he abandons him to die in the wilderness. In other words, Laius would like to murder his son, but doesn’t want to be guilty of such a murder, so he assumes he can avoid guilt by abandoning him to die.
But the questionable character of King Laius has a longer history. As a youth, he had to flee and seek asylum with a neighboring king. While enjoying this king’s hospitality, Laius abducted and raped the host-king’s son.
So why is it that the death of such a man must be avenged? Why is it that, upon the death of Laius, a plague of crop failures (the failure of the fertility of the land) is blamed on the unsolved, unavenged murder of Laius? Laius was too selfish and egotistical, so it makes sense that the son of such a man would end up being incestuous (although he doesn’t know it’s his mother he weds).
What of these fathers with such spotted histories, whom wiser sons might be better off leaving behind in favor of better habits, better traditions? It would seem that, if one’s father is dysfunctional and unwilling to reform, finding a better, surrogate father could be a blessing.
And yet sometimes what we flee only manifests itself in us in other, sometimes stronger ways. Laius as father of Oedipus is not merely a point on a map to be left behind, but in many ways, through his DNA and perhaps the scars of his abuse, Laius still lives inside of Oedipus.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion of absent fathers neglects the details of the stories and myths that inspire them in favor of its own theories. (I would not blame this on Rosenbeldt and Erlich so much as on some of their sources).
3. OTHER CULTURAL IDEAS AND TRADITIONS RELATING TO ABSENT FATHERS:
All of this reading about absent fathers has reminded me of the ideas of many others about absent fathers: If many cultures assign women to be in charge of child-raising and the home, and men to be in charge of work, farming, hunting, and also soldiering outside the boundaries of the home, then it makes sense that the idea of an absent father has long been a theme in myth and literature. But various people have noted how industrialization and urbanization have heightened this and made it much more problematic: Whereas in many cultures, older children can join the father in the hunt, or in planting the fields, and can often see the father at mealtimes throughout the day, industrialization resulted in fathers being removed from the home and from mid-day meals. Institutionalized education (especially early education) has often tended to employ more women as teachers than men, perhaps for a variety of reasons, but eventually as a kind of tradition. In higher education, the reverse was usually true, with colleges and universities preferring to hire and tenure men rather than women.
Something similar has long been true of men and women as caregivers for young children: It was long assumed that the man was the breadwinner, the woman the hands-on parent as mother. Even in the 1990s, when I taught university classes at night and took care of our children during the day while my wife taught grade school, I would get strange looks from young mothers when I would take my children to a local playground, as if, as a male, I didn’t belong.
Many cultures have marginalized men as fathers and care-givers in these ways, while of course affording them much more freedom to seek employment and exercise a kind of agency about their economic future, while denying the same freedom to women.
4. GOD AS ABSENT FATHER:
Examination of the absent father eventually, inevitably, includes discussion of God as absent father. This comes up not only in Oedipus and The Libation Bearers, but also in discussion of Hamlet (and for some, discussion of King Lear and other plays as well).
But this sort of thinking reminds me of the cartoon where a person climbs out on a limb of a tree, and then begins to saw off the very limb he is sitting on.
This reality that some religions identify as the transcendent father-god is not really a father. That was just a flawed analogy that some have, sometimes, found useful. Religions became too dependent on such flawed metaphors, losing touch with the mysterious and transcendent realities that inspired such analogies in the first place.
Instead of pointing to the transcendent mystery of life that surrounds and pervades our existence, many people became too focused on the metaphors, symbols, and language of religion. When they fail to account for their experience, or failed to provide the old insights in fresh, relevant ways, it has seemed to many that God and religion are dead.
This is in part what Nietzsche meant when he wrote of a madman, lighting a lantern, proclaiming, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”
But the reality some call God was never really a father, and the mystery and transcendence of experience is still transcendent, and still offers us gifts that sustain us, as well as suffering and mystery and plague. If we didn’t have existence in the first place, that comes to us like a strange gift, we would not experience and wrestle with the challenges and hardship.
Mystery and transcendence are not dead, but some manifestations of religion may be, or seem to be. Some ideas outlive their usefulness. Just because King Lear feels abandoned by the gods, like one who no longer enjoys their favor, this doesn’t mean mystery and transcendence have abandoned him, or that they are not offering him gifts. In fact, Lear may have fallen more deeply into the embrace of transcendence and mystery after his abdication of his throne, forcing him to transcend his old habits and ways of seeing the world.
And transcendence, mystery, and their often seemingly fickle gifts, are the realities that religions and myths originally attempted to describe with their flawed analogies like “father” and “mother” and “spirit/breath/wind.”
So I am both enjoying, and wrestling with, the ideas in these two books.
5. How does all of this relate to Hamlet? Erlich’s book is more focused on that, and I may address this more in a future post. But like Laius who was an ambiguous father-figure with numerous faults, Hamlet’s father is also an ambiguous figure, not only because Hamlet is uncertain whether he’s from purgatory or hell, but also because he died with some sins on his conscience (if he is in fact from purgatory; note that if the soul of the father went to heaven, and the apparition Hamlet and the guards see is a demon in disguise, then it complicates this approach). And Hamlet clearly idolizes him, preferring to emphasize his best qualities and to ignore his faults. Like Oedipus, who is adopted by a neighboring king, Hamlet had a surrogate father in Yorick, a downgrade in social standing but an upgrade in affection and humor. Like Oedipus, who repeats some of his father Laius's patterns, Hamlet also seems to repeat some of his own father's patterns, and yet he does so perhaps with a difference, reconciling with many enemies in the end, even with Laertes who poisons him.
6. A DOG’S ABSENT FATHER:
No, I didn’t mistype that, did not intend to type, “A GOD’S ABSENT FATHER.” This part is actually about a dog and an absent dog-father (not “god-father”).
We recently adopted a 1-year-old puppy, an Anatolian-Pyrenees mix, who has also inspired some thoughts about absent fathers. She was first adopted as a newly-weaned pup in Oklahoma, but was not spayed, so while she was still under a year, she became pregnant and was returned to the same shelter. A Minnesota shelter heard of her plight and took her in, where she had her pups long enough for them to be weaned. We heard about her and adopted her (but not her pups, adopted by others).
But a mystery remains: What dog in Oklahoma was the father of her pups? If dogs were allowed to roam in packs, what sort of relationship might our dog and her pups have developed with the father of the pups? Do fathers of pups in packs bond with the pups as mother dogs do? When they lack such opportunities to form attachments, do male dogs feel an emptiness, a sense of incompleteness? Is that more than just a human existential crisis we project onto our canine friends?
This is just another of those many mysteries that transcends, surrounds, and infuses me.
While many of you are staying home during the COVID-19 crisis, what are you reading? Any Shakespeare, or Shakespeare-related scholarship?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
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