Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (review)

Devlin argues that in the postwar United States, a sexually charged father–daughter relationship was hardly a matter for concern. A father could express his love for his daughter by paying the bills and giving approval to her purchases. He could show admiration for her sexual maturation through admiring looks, even wolf whistles, and providing his arm as he walked the bride down the aisle. Fathers were encouraged to take on largely symbolic but not time-consuming acts to help control a daughter's sexual maturation. Fathers were assumed to be breadwinners without much time for the daily routines of home management. Situated in the context of a postwar eroticized relationship, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) stands not as a sophisticated European comic novel but as a slightly exaggerated, but unfailingly accurate, portrayal of the relationship between step-fathers and step-daughters in American fiction of the 1950s.

In this highly imaginative reading of a wholly neglected feature of family life, Devlin provides a fresh vantage point for understanding teen culture, the sexualized nature of the 1950s' family, and the limited, and even troubling, style of fathers' involvement in that decade. She does not seek to refute the idea of the emergence of a separate peer culture but instead shows that teen daughters were dependent on paternal approval and highly curious about their fathers' extramarital romantic inclinations.

Devlin attributes the interest in and writing about the father–daughter relationship to psychoanalytic practice during World War II. Followers of Sigmund Freud prior to the war had been largely interested in the Oedipus complex with regard to young children, a stage of development completed by boys and girls by the age of five. Analysts during World War II formulated new ideas about a second stage of Oedipal conflict in adolescence based on clinical experience with truant adolescent girls. Because these girls, the analysts argued, had failed to develop a proper Oedipal relationship with their fathers, they were prone to antisocial behavior. Helene Deutsch, Psychology of Women (New York, 1944) suggested that the second stage of the Oedipal complex in adolescence was experienced much more strongly among girls than boys.

Although Devlin sees wartime sexual revolution and postwar affluence as important causes for greater interest in the father–daughter relationship, she is largely interested in representation and in its "cultural meaning." With insight and imagination, she investigates elite and mass-cultural materials from psychoanalytic treatises to hit Broadway plays, films, and articles in Seventeen magazine. Black magazines, she argues, did not play up the eroticized father–daughter relationship because they were intent on demonstrating black sexual respectability and refuting racial stereotypes of African Americans as hypersexual. Devlin chooses a cultural approach to this topic because she finds that playwrights and novelists had more to say about eroticized father–daughter relations than social investigators or the psychoanalytic studies of father–daughter incest. Given her interest in cultural materials, however, the absence of a discussion of rock and roll is surprising. This new kind of popular music provoked paternal ire for its effect on adolescent girls and was part of the separate teen culture, not something shared by fathers and daughters.

Devlin shows that the eroticized father–daughter relationship was not as harmless and innocent as portrayed in such plays as Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields' "Junior Miss" (1957). Nonetheless, psychoanalysts not only approved of "normal" eroticized behavior between fathers and daughters but regarded actual cases of father–daughter incest as relatively benign, placing the blame for it on mother–daughter conflict.