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

A frequent component of college courses on the 1950s is a showing of the classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the iconic James Dean film that speaks clearly to the themes of cultural dislocation and youthful alienation in post-WWII American life. These motifs are usually examined through the relationship of Jim (Dean’s character) to his father and mother (“If he had guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she’d be happy and then she’d stop picking on him. Because they make mush out of him!”). Yet the equally unhappy relationship of Jim’s girlfriend Judy with her father (“He must hate me . . . He looks at me like I was the ugliest thing in the world”) generally remains an unexplored subtext. Rachel Devlin’s book builds a powerful and persuasive case for moving this relationship from subtext to center.

Devlin points out an “unprecedented scale of interest in the father-adolescent daughter relationship during the war and postwar era” (2). Wading through well-known and more obscure novels, magazines, plays, and magazines, like the 1941 bestselling Broadway hit Junior Miss, Edward Street’s Father of the Bride, and F. Hugh Herbert’s Meet Corliss Archer short story series and plays, Devlin argues that American popular culture both informed and reacted to an increasing normalization of eroticism between father and daughter during the war and postwar periods. Just how and why the sexual nature of the father-adolescent daughter relationship became a “national preoccupation,” (1) and its implications for evaluating the revolutionary nature of the sexual revolution for teenage girls, forms the crux of Devlin’s book.

Devlin joins a line of historians ala Nathan G. Hale and John Burnham who investigate America’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, in this case as a means of understanding and reversing postwar delinquency trends among white, middle- and upper-class girls. Devlin draws upon Helene Deutsch’s The Psychology of Women (1944), now largely unremembered but once “the unchallenged authority on all aspects of girls’ psychological passage from girlhood to womanhood” (25). Deutsch’s work typified a postwar theory of female adolescence that focused on a pubescent phase of Oedipal desire, and linked a girl’s healthy transition to womanhood with sexual attention and appreciation from her father; an unresolved Oedipal complex was thought to lead to antisocial behavior, promiscuity, and delinquency. Unsurprisingly, this newly eroticized father-adolescent daughter relationship was ambiguous and uncomfortable, and since the psychoanalytical community failed to specify the boundaries of the ideal relationship between the two, popular American culture became the testing ground.

The Oedipal theory of female adolescence, according to Devlin, provided the “intellectual paradigm” (8) through which broader changes in postwar American society (in family dynamics, socioeconomic power, and consumption patterns) could be understood. The father-adolescent daughter relationship recast the role of paternal authority in the context of the postwar nuclear family as one of guided sexual acknowledgement and approval, moving away from an antiquated paternal role of protecting girls’ sexual innocence. And if “the dictates of the adolescent Oedipal complex provided the reason for the eroticization of the teenage girl’s relationship to her father, [then] the commercialization of youth culture provided the rationale” (173). Therefore, popular culture returned again and again to depictions of fathers standing sentinel over the coming-of-age rituals of their teenage daughters (buying her first cocktail dress, her first pair of high heels, sending her off on her first date). And as Americans attempted to define the line between healthy and aberrant father-daughter interaction, these depictions often took on a comedic slant. Thus we can understand the image of the passive, bumbling, befuddled 1950s father not as a disparagement of the ineffectuality of postwar paternal authority, but as a means of delineating the thin line between a girls’ healthy psychological development, and an overly-sexualized, aberrant relationship.

Thoroughly researched and animated, Relative Intimacy is as incisive as it is insightful...