Chapter 4: Fathering Daughters: Oedipal Rage and Aggression in Women’s WritingHow does the daughter respond to a chapter about the conflict between father and daughter when she never knew her father? How do you respond to something that is not a part of your experience?
As I read this chapter, I kept wondering where my rage was. Why am I not angrier? Should I be angrier?
I never met my father. My mother says I look lke him. I don't look much like my mother although we share so many of the same mannerisms that it is hard not to recognize the relationship. What I've been told by those few who eer saw my father is that I look very much like him. His relationship was brief but intense. Then he was gone.
Do you grieve for a loss you never had? How do you experience a hole in your life that was never there?
Is this why the anger I have in my poems towards the few men in my life who have inspired my ire often focus so closely on a single person that they cannot be seen as feminist rage? When Plath writes about her father, it is her father and men and the patriarchal society. When I write about my father, it is about a phantom. A man who owned an ocelot, who painted, who sold Good Humor ice cream from an ice cream cart on the streets of Manhattan, who had a Purple Heart for a wound he received during the Korean War. Random details, dna, and supposedly his face in the mirror.
I just don't know that for me it is unhealthy not to be angry with a man who holds no meaning in my life. It would almost take more energy for me to find a way to be angry with him that is healthy than it does to just be . . . what? Apathetic? Ambivalent? Not angry?
There is no denying that I had moments of missing the idea of him. I would see my friends whose fathers would come home from work, would sit at the head of the table, would buy their little girls gifts. I would also see the fathers who were angry, who were neglectful, who were too busy to be there.
Sometimes these men were one and the same, both loveable and loathesome. I was also selfish, an only child who did not share easily so maybe not sharing my mother was more a blessing than a curse. Or perhaps it was an insult added to a personality injury. Had I had to share her would I have been less selfish? Possibly.
It is all hypothetical. As are my feelings towards this idea of father. I could speculate about how my life would have been different had he not disappeared from my life. I could dig down and stir up some hostility towards him for not being there. I could judge and jury him for abandoning me, us. But to what end?
When I think of my father I feel a vague absence, something not there. I remember a friend of mine once asked me what it was like to look so young. How would I know? When I look in the mirror, I see a 45 year old woman. How do I feel towards a man I've never met? I don't know. Mostly I feel like I probably deserved better but it could have been worse. And when I look in the mirror, I like what I see, even if I don't see my mother clearly stamped in my face.
As I read this chapter, I kept wondering where my rage was. Why am I not angrier? Should I be angrier?
I never met my father. My mother says I look lke him. I don't look much like my mother although we share so many of the same mannerisms that it is hard not to recognize the relationship. What I've been told by those few who eer saw my father is that I look very much like him. His relationship was brief but intense. Then he was gone.
Do you grieve for a loss you never had? How do you experience a hole in your life that was never there?
Is this why the anger I have in my poems towards the few men in my life who have inspired my ire often focus so closely on a single person that they cannot be seen as feminist rage? When Plath writes about her father, it is her father and men and the patriarchal society. When I write about my father, it is about a phantom. A man who owned an ocelot, who painted, who sold Good Humor ice cream from an ice cream cart on the streets of Manhattan, who had a Purple Heart for a wound he received during the Korean War. Random details, dna, and supposedly his face in the mirror.
I just don't know that for me it is unhealthy not to be angry with a man who holds no meaning in my life. It would almost take more energy for me to find a way to be angry with him that is healthy than it does to just be . . . what? Apathetic? Ambivalent? Not angry?
There is no denying that I had moments of missing the idea of him. I would see my friends whose fathers would come home from work, would sit at the head of the table, would buy their little girls gifts. I would also see the fathers who were angry, who were neglectful, who were too busy to be there.
Sometimes these men were one and the same, both loveable and loathesome. I was also selfish, an only child who did not share easily so maybe not sharing my mother was more a blessing than a curse. Or perhaps it was an insult added to a personality injury. Had I had to share her would I have been less selfish? Possibly.
It is all hypothetical. As are my feelings towards this idea of father. I could speculate about how my life would have been different had he not disappeared from my life. I could dig down and stir up some hostility towards him for not being there. I could judge and jury him for abandoning me, us. But to what end?
When I think of my father I feel a vague absence, something not there. I remember a friend of mine once asked me what it was like to look so young. How would I know? When I look in the mirror, I see a 45 year old woman. How do I feel towards a man I've never met? I don't know. Mostly I feel like I probably deserved better but it could have been worse. And when I look in the mirror, I like what I see, even if I don't see my mother clearly stamped in my face.
Satia
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