Introduction: Fictions About Fatherhood

Today's newspaper headlines and magazine articles reflect a world in which fathers barely exist. We read about the father so wrapped up in his work that he knows no details of his children's lives; the sexually abusive father who makes home not haven but horror; the "deadbeat dad" who, living apart from his family, refuses to help support his children; even (in these biotechnological days) the man who insists upon the destruction of his ex-wife's fertilized ova so that fatherhood can't be forced upon him. Men, says society, are afraid of commitment; although our personal experience may contradict the rumor, we hear that marriage is dying and fatherhood well-nigh dead.

Clearly our culture feels considerable anxiety about fatherhood—an anxiety that long predates the supermarket self-help book and the network talk show. We can trace the rise of this concern, as we can follow so many cultural obsessions, in the pages of literature for children, a genre that is of course designed in part to explain to its young readers their position within the family and the larger world. The fathers described in the children's stories of the pre-industrial era are not merely reassuringly responsible; more, they are at the center of the family instead of on the periphery. Following the Old Testament pattern that establishes the father-son relationship as paramount (just as God creates Adam first, the patriarchs often seem to measure their worth in terms of the number of boys they sire), religious and rationalist texts for children alike depict the father as firmly in control and warmly interested in his offspring's development.

Sons, especially, reap the benefits of older men's expertise both worldly and moral. We have only to recall Mr. Fairchild's efforts with little Henry—and, to a lesser extent, Henry's sisters—in The Fairchild Family, or contemplate the spate of stories about the tutelage of boys (Émile, for instance, or Sandford and Merton), to discover a world in which fatherhood or surrogate fatherhood seems enviably unproblematic. There is seldom a suggestion in these books that Father might not know best; not only does he know more about morality and plain good sense than do his children, he generally knows more about childrearing than does his wife.

As Jani L. Berry observes in her article in this issue on Jacob Abbott's Rollo books, this vision of the domestic realm went hand in hand with a conviction that order is a cardinal virtue. As the head of the family, the father derives his authority from God; in a sense he takes God's place for his wife and children, not only insofar as he provides for them, but also insofar as he must serve as moral arbiter and teacher. Especially for his sons, he is required to be both overseer and role model so that in due course they may take his place, reproducing the pattern. Should he abdicate this duty by excessive severity or excessive laxness, commentators during this period warn, chaos will result. The precarious balance of the day depends upon respect for properly constituted authority.

But the world was changing, and the father's role within the family changing with it. With the advent of industrialization, fewer and fewer men worked within the home, and the values of the marketplace began to seem inimical to those of domesticity; inevitably, as fathers spent less time with their sons, they were increasingly depicted as a species of amphibian, dividing their time between the antithetical spheres of public and private life. Simultaneously, the mother began to take over the father's erstwhile role as guardian of the middle-class family's morality. What is sometimes styled the "golden age" of children's writing, the period commencing with the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 and closing with that of Peter Pan in 1911, is also a low point for the fictional father; the most he can hope for seems to be ineffectuality. Take a look at paternity in some milestones of American children's literature from this period: Mr. March is merely a less...