Father Knows Best: Manhood In David Bradley and Philip Roth

This essay examines concern over “father absence,” men’s inability to act as primary breadwinners in “intact” biological families, a widespread topic of political discourse from the 1960s to the 1990s. The novels examined in this essay, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981) and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), characterize the erosion of paternal roles and masculinity as the result of the movement away from segregated folk communities and assimilation into mainstream American society. By mooring fatherhood to an idealized culture, however, Bradley and Roth censure any modification in paternal roles as emasculation, and more importantly, as a betrayal of an ethnic identity rather than a response to shifting historical realities.