The Absent Father's Presence in Modern and American Gay Drama

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only basis for family life.

—Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

It is no secret that our most prominent myths of cultural origins are founded on murder, specifically on the murder of the father. In the scientific version favored by Darwin and Freud, the primal father is slain by the band of brothers who then consume the evidence in a love-feast; afterwards, suffering an acute case of moral indigestion, they institute a complex symbol system of totem and taboo to undo the deed and insure against its recurrence. Freud eventually backed away from an actual prehistoric event in favor of an internal psychic conflict universally suffered by oedipal males, while Lacan retained the mythical material as the basis for a patriarchal system of law (Symbolic Order) founded on the father’s name. In creative versions, the father is named either Agamemnon and killed by his jealous wife, or named Laius and killed by his physically-abused son. Shakespeare’s embellishments of the cultural myth enacted the parricidal crime as in Julius Caesar or the son’s dilemma as in Hamlet.

In Ernest Jones’s psychoanalytic reading of the play, Hamlet is actually assigned two fathers—the one living/bad father Claudius whom the other undead/good father wants slain. Of the two, the ghostly father casts the longer shadow of absence over future stages. In fact, a recent study entitled The Absent Father in Modern Drama (Roseveldt 1995) has traced this endemic condition from Ibsen to Sam Shepard and Marsha Norman. To be absent, the father must be more than simply dead or missing; he must be alluded to, represented (often metonymically), and affect the action. His absence must register. Some absent fathers that so qualify are: Nora’s dead father whose signature she forges in A Doll House; the general’s guns used for the daughter’s suicide in Hedda Gabler; the Count’s boots in Miss Julie; the undoing of paternity in The Father; the deceased Captain Alving’s smoldering pipe symbolic of his social disease inflaming and infecting his son Osvald in Ghosts; and most famously, M. Godot in the play spent waiting in vain for his arrival. Pirandello’s two masterpieces offer intriguing variants. In the one, a madman achieves power only insofar as he can successfully play a medieval German emperor (Henry IV); in the other, a discredited father is effectively absent until he can realize himself through an actor’s presence (Six Characters in Search of an Author).

Thus, as the older plots staged the father’s killing in contexts of justice and revenge, increasingly modern plots stage his absence. The father emerges as he who has always already been slain; we know him by his legacy, we are defined by his Symbolic Order, which we are always approaching or repudiating. By producing his absence, we hope to reproduce his presence. Along these lines, Rosefeldt adroitly assimilates Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Williams’s Glass Menagerie. Initially the two plays seem quite dissimilar, but both Tom Wingfield and Willy Loman (though a titular father himself) express longings for fathers who have long since abandoned their families for travel and adventure, leaving their hapless sons to soldier on in their vacated spaces.

This degree of sameness, however, raises questions of difference: are there dissimilarities in the way the father is represented in heterosexual versus homosexual drama? Does the straight son recreate the absent father differently from the gay son? If so, how can a discourse of psychodynamic differences, as opposed to one of traits and essentialism, be distinguished? Also, how should nongendered determinants be factored in? Far exceeding the playwright’s gender identity, the question extends to creative processes, genealogy, mastery of origins, and cultural roles of the artist. Whenever appropriate, this inquiry may summon psychoanalysis to highlight issues that arise beyond the comparative method.

Unfortunately, psychoanalytic thinking on development as conflict, on same-sex identification/other-sex object-choice, and gender-identity disorders has at times been inconsistent, overly-confident, reflexively normative, and...