"An Advocate, a Defender, an Intimate": Kristeva's Imaginary Father in Fictional Girl-Animal Relationships

I was twelve years old, and I wanted a dragon. My desire was partially, I admit, because I thought it would be amusing and convenient if my school were burned down (and the math textbooks not rescued). But most of my longing was a direct result of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (1968). In McCaffrey's imaginary world of Pern, every young dragon forms a close bond with a human present at its hatching. Not just any human will do. For each dragon, there is one and only one human who is the right one.

When Lessa, the adolescent protagonist, "Impresses" Ramoth, her dragon, the girl's life is transformed as she telepathically receives Ramoth's response to her:

A feeling of joy suffused Lessa; a feeling of warmth, tenderness, unalloyed affection, and instant respect and admiration flooded mind and heart and soul. Never again would Lessa lack an advocate, an intimate, aware instantly of the temper of her mind and heart, of her desires. How wonderful was Lessa, the thought intruded into Lessa's reflections, how kind, how thoughtful, how brave and clever!

(90)

It was this bond between girl and dragon that drew me. I read and reread the book, daydreaming of impressing my very own dragon. But what did that relationship between girl and dragon mean to Lessa—and to me, the young reader? In this article, I want to suggest that, in Dragonflight and many other novels, the powerful relationship between adolescent female protagonist and animal plays a vital part in the protagonist's psychic development. Moreover, I wish to make the argument that Kristevan theory is an especially useful lens for examining this bond and for considering the appeal these books have for many adolescent readers.

The Imaginary Father

McCaffrey's description of the immediate and satisfying bond between dragon and girl sounds a good deal like that between infant and the "imaginary father" described by Julia Kristeva. She elaborated on Freud's brief description of the "father in [one's] own prehistory," before the Oedipal process, with whom the child makes "a direct and immediate identification" (Freud 639). This father differs from the Oedipal father the child will later encounter. "He" is a "father-mother conglomerate" (Kristeva, Tales 40), who offers the child "a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity," while the Oedipal father is a "stern" one associated with separation and judgment (Kristeva, Tales 46).

However, it is the imaginary father that prepares the child to enter social and linguistic orders dominated by the Oedipal father. "He" does this by offering the child a deeply satisfying love, while yet recognizing her as an individual.¹ With this assistance, the child is able to separate herself from the symbiotic relationship with her mother and so begin developing the set of boundaries she will need for the Oedipal father's world. In Black Sun, Kristeva suggests that the two fathers are actually separate aspects of a single process. She believes it is essential that the imaginary father "be capable of playing his part as oedipal father in symbolic Law, for it is on the basis of that harmonious blending of the two aspects of fatherhood" that the child is able to connect abstract symbol with feeling (23–4). Even though the fathers seem opposed to each other, it is only with both—the father of love and the one of symbols—that words have real meaning.

Abjection

The time of boundary establishment is difficult and painful for the infant. On the one hand, she longs to continue the blissful unity with her mother's body. But on the other, she fears being reincorporated with her mother, "falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling" (Kristeva, Powers 13). In order to establish herself as autonomous, she needs to separate herself from her mother's body. Kristeva calls this period between unity-with-mother and autonomy "abjection." Abjection is uncomfortable, both to the abject and to those within the social order. Kristeva describes it as that which "disturbs identity, system, order. [It...