SETTING UP THE PROBLEM
It has always seemed a mystery to me that so many asymmetrical verbal formations exist in American English when it comes to the creation of an embryo, that embryo’s development as a viable organism, and his or her birth as a human being. A man impregnates while a woman becomes pregnant. These phrases sound as if people still held the same beliefs as the ancient Greeks: that only the male was the progenitor of another human being, while the woman was a passive receptacle for that being’s initial growth, placing each gender in distinctly different power and creative relationships to the next generation. Such inequality and distortion of contributions to life are replicated in the use of to mother and to father. The former takes a lifetime but doesn’t seem to begin until after the woman has given birth to a child, as if the nine months of pregnancy don’t constitute a part of mothering. With the male’s contribution, in contrast, every instant of his effort is credited, but apparently only up to the moment of birth.
With human beings, it would seem that in contemporary American culture a man can father a child in a few minutes—a far cry from a woman’s lifetime of mothering. And yet, at the same time, if he is working on a project, such as inventing the atomic bomb, all of his work from the conception of the idea through the parturition of the object by means of a demonstration of its ability to function (or explode) is given due credit. Hence the amazing ability of the script writers for the 101 Dalmatians movie to have the male human owner credit the male dog with the birth of so many puppies in one litter while crediting the female dog only with being too exhausted to bring the last puppy live into the world. From popular culture through scientific and historical discourses our culture is riddled with such examples. Men are credited with creating but are not expected to nurture what they create, while women are expected to nurture what men create without being credited for participating in that creation.
As a result of such language and the thinking it both reflects and continuously regenerates, nurturing remains a concept rarely applied to men and an area of male practice inadequately studied, discussed, and promoted. Responding to the early 1990s research of Sara Ruddick, which complained of the lack of analytical attention “to fathering as a kind of work,” Stuart Aitken noted that “Little is written or understood or problematized about fatherhood and domestic responsibility, whereas much more is understood about work separation, the productive capacities of men, and the power they wield over women and children” (1998, 69). Aitken goes on to paraphrase the claim of Victor Seidler that “men traditionally have great difficulty imagining the emotional space of child rearing, and their attempts are often fruitless because they have learned within a rationalist culture to deny that their emotions and feelings are a source of knowledge” (1998, 69). Charles Gaines confirms this insight in A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life, previously discussed in chapter 2: “No one had ever told me that men could have access to those particular emotions and, during that time” of his children’s infancy, “every day of my husbanding and fathering seemed to present me with some new impossible surprise of feeling” (1994, 33).
Indeed, men do remain too removed from their own emotions, not only because we devalue them but also because we fear them as an indication of weakness and vulnerability—with these two words functioning fundamentally as synonyms, even though they need not be so understood (see Aitken 1998, 69). I can think of no other experience in our lives that generates such frightening emotions and feelings of vulnerability and, at times, helplessness and inadequacy as child raising, where we assume we are not the experts but the inferiors. In the negotiated space and process of child raising we have the greatest difficulty in retaining and confirming the identities and personae that we have cultivated in the public sphere.
Why does such a strong disconnection seem to exist between fathering as procreating and fathering as nurturing; between men thinking about children in terms of our roles as providers, controllers, and patriarchs, and feeling about our children as care givers, emotional bonders, and interdependents? Carolyn Merchant and numerous other ecofeminists, such as Susan Griffin and Ariel Salleh, would tell us that historically, philosophically, and politically this disconnection is rooted fundamentally in the dualisms of mind versus body, reason versus emotions, masculine versus feminine, and culture versus nature. The chaos of child development and the situatedness and indeterminate outcomes of child raising, as well as the strong emotional reactions in us fathers that children’s resistance and spontaneity elicit, contradict a rationalistic separation of mind and body, especially since these children arise from our own bodies. It is from deep within those bodies that our emotional reactions well up and overcome our fragile, mechanistic reasoning. And these emotions often intensify one such emotion, fear, in many fathers as not only do their children negate their rational, intellectual domination of the moment, but also fathers’ own bodies betray us as our emotions, most dangerously anger and rage, break through our veneer of logic. An especially powerful failure of the dualisms on which we rely is reflected in the rapid resort to violence to maintain control that so many fathers elect to use against children and spouses.
These terrible—at least from the perspective of control—outbursts of emotion of any type can be particularly frightening to fathers because not only do they occur on the terrain of nurturing—traditional female territory—but also because we fathers find ourselves embodying the worst stereotypes laid on women in the man versus woman dualism: emotion, loss of control, ambivalence, self-doubt, viscerality. If fathers almost immediately become womanly in the face of infantile resistance, quickly surrender to all of the attributes used to define not-man, and succumb to the imperatives of their corporeality in feeling for their children, and thus let the body overrule the mind, then how on earth can male-dominated and codified culture rule over nature? The instability, being-in-the-moment, the non-separation of identities fostered by parenting expose the big lie of the illusion of control upon which men have built arguments for domination over nature, over women, and over their own bodily senses. No wonder we find such issues so hard to discuss, because the moment of parenting threatens us with so many realizations that few of us wish to face. But what a difference to our lives would it make for us to turn toward these contradictions of our cultivated sensibilities, to turn toward the son and the daughter, rather than toward the continuing darkness of disconnection.
Robert J. Ackerman noted in his preface to Silent Sons: A Book for and about Men: “when I did seminars and lectures, consistently 90 percent of my audiences were women. Women made up 80 to 90 percent of those in dysfunctional family support groups. Where were the men, I wondered? What do sons from dysfunctional families do with their pain, their feelings, their potential? Did someone put up a ‘Men Keep Out’ sign, or did we put it up ourselves?” (1993, 11–12). Not only must we join Ackerman in asking, “Where were the men,” but continue to update the question: “Where are the men?” A 5-year study of 12,000 teenagers and sexual activity produced considerable information about teens and their mothers, but not about their fathers. Dr. Robert Blum, the study’s author, is quoted as saying that “Fathers are harder to come by.” In response, columnist Susan Reimer surmised, “if the fathers didn’t have time to fill out the surveys and they weren’t there when the interviewer arrived for the follow-up interview, then the whole ‘closeness’ thing isn’t happening, either” (2002, E4). Such closeness would require connection, emotional bonding, and vulnerability.
I want to consider here, then, not only how we can meet these requirements to become nurturing fathers in a culture that still fundamentally expects men to create things and people (and destroy them as well), while women care for and sustain these things and people. I also want to argue that for men such nurturing cannot take adequate hold if limited only to a consideration of how to alter and reconfigure our relationships to other people, but must extend to an ecological sense of world interconnectedness and what that indicates for an altered relationship with the rest of nature. I see a way of promoting this necessary male orientation toward human nurturing grounded in a larger view of ecological nurturing. In order to do that, we need to embrace the other sides of the dualisms of culture versus nature and the masculine versus the feminine, and in particular accept our own emotions as part of our minds, our minds as part of our bodies, our bodies and those of our children as part of a natural world. Fundamentally, to undertake such an embrace means to accept interaction rather than strive to control. In order to accept how we are totally part of a series of multilayered processes and not some end product of either evolution or of culture, we will need to define ourselves as living in a world beyond our control.
In other words, all men need to become fathers in the sense of assuming ongoing responsibility for the rest of the world, not through patriarchy and the logic of domination, but through heterarchy—mutually constitutive, nonhierarchical relationships. Through extending that reconstruction of men toward nurturant behavior ecologically, we can also embrace the belief and practice that nurturance constitutes a fundamental form of being in the world on this “symbiotic planet” (see Margulis 1998). Accepting the responsibility of nurturing others begins with the recognition, as Lynn Margulis points out, that “All beings alive today are equally evolved. . . . Human similarities to other life forms are far more striking than the differences” and “Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing kinds of life” (1998, 5). And yet, this physical contact seems increasingly estranged rather than intimate as we continue to deny and fruitlessly fight to destroy or control even the microorganisms that both keep us alive and threaten our lives in the daily order of the world.
My father was an alcoholic who started drinking as a teenager and never stopped drinking completely until he died. He never joined AA, but if he had, he would have been confronted with the need to address this issue of control. If people know nothing else of AA, most know that it is based on a twelve-step program. Today, millions of people in the United States, as well as many other countries, participate in a variety of twelve-step programs, all of which are based on those steps worked out originally for Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s. The first step of all of these programs addresses a basic orientation that men need to adopt in the search for consciously nurturant behavior. It provides a vehicle for the personal ideological reconstruction of men as lifelong, rather than one-shot, fathers, whether they pass their DNA on directly to anyone else or not. In the foreword to Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the anonymous author observes that “Many people, nonalcoholics, report that as a result of the practice of A.A.’s Twelve Steps, they have been able to meet other difficulties of life. They think that the Twelve Steps can mean more than sobriety for problem drinkers. They see in them a way to happy and effective living for many, alcoholic or not” (Anon. 1996, 15–16). And it is in the spirit of these words that I introduce the first of those twelve steps here. Step One reads, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” (Anon. 1996, 21).
Certainly, anyone who believes that human beings are currently living in a period of ecological crisis, locally and globally, would agree that the second phrase of the first-step slogan describes the condition of existence for millions, if not billions of people. But often, those on any one of several sides of major debates about environmental threats or particular crises will see the solution as lying in exercising greater human control over other humans and, all too often, over particular aspects of the nonhuman participants of the natural world. In my experience such has also been the case with many people who have various addictions, predilections, or obsessive desires or compulsions. If we just exercise greater control, if we just further tighten down the screws, if we just tie up all the loose ends, shore up the ramparts, more vigilantly police our children, spy more extensively on our employees, and so on, we can eliminate the variables that threaten a human-ordered world or an individually ordered micro-world. For many men that effort to exercise control can only be practiced in the micro-world of the family home, with violence often the result, but for others it can be practiced in an entire nation or even the entire world, again with violence often the result.
Such efforts at control prove devastating, whether creating the dysfunctional individuals that are Robert Ackerman’s primary focus or world leaders ready to incinerate millions in an effort to consolidate political power. As Gary Snyder so succinctly states, “It is not nature-as-chaos which threatens us, but the State’s presumption that it has created order” (1990a, 92). It is the presumption by men that they can wield any state apparatus to generate some kind of static, human conceived order over the natural diversity and processes of life that threatens all. Hence, we must admit that we are powerless over the power of domination and that it has made our lives unmanageable.
LEARNING FROM THE LITERATURE
In The Blood of Paradise by Stephen Goodwin, originally published in 1979 and recently reprinted, Steadman, the protagonist, decides to turn his back on inheriting the management of a development company, a position of significant power with a legacy of patriarchal control, and returns to the land, buying a small, neglected farm in rural Virginia. He takes along—and the verb here is carefully chosen—his wife, Anna, and their daughter. As with so many gentrified homesteading and return to the rural life texts, Steadman not only sees his main career as creative writing but also has a sinecure through inheritance to cushion the financial uncertainty of his move. What arise time and again in this novel and provide the strength of the plot are uncertainty, instability, and unexpected events and actions. These contingencies challenge Steadman’s illusions of control and his benevolent domination of his family. Steadman can to a large extent continue to move in the direction he would like to go in terms of rural living, but he cannot control the unfolding of the path toward this lifestyle. Anna finds that her acquiescence in traveling this path cannot be maintained and is brought to crisis when she finds herself pregnant for a second time and not prepared to bear another child. She also realizes that she has let Steadman dominate her sense of reality and her sense of self, just as her twin sister had in childhood.
Rightfully so, the novel ends on a positive note of possibility, but wisely does not end on a note of clear-cut resolution or guaranteed stasis. In terms of the farming that they will do and the relationship they will attempt to continue building, they both accept tentativeness into their lives. Probably evidence of the greatest likelihood of a positive resolution for the relationship can be found in the couple’s relationships with their daughter. Here Goodwin portrays a man able to spend time, demonstrate patience, and provide nurturing opportunities for his daughter, on the one hand, and a woman who involves her daughter in gardening and other outdoor activities around the farm, on the other hand.
While, then, child raising receives a very positive representation in Goodwin’s novel, certain ironies about control over birth and death also appear. Goodwin presents birth control, irresponsible sexual activity, and abortion as part of these individuals’ common experience, but points out that the birth control often fails to control. Steadman imagines that he has both freedom and certainty in his sexual relations with his wife and another woman passing through, but he is wrong. His wife becomes unexpectedly pregnant and the result is a secret abortion. The infidelity and the abortion nearly destroy their marriage, even though both Steadman and Anna believed that they could control the outcome and impacts of these events. In particular, both of them somehow imagine that they can keep secret from the other such emotionally devastating events, with both repressing their emotions during their precipitate actions, but finding themselves overcome by emotion afterward.
An additional unintended irony surfaces as a result of Goodwin’s particular portrayal of birth control. In The Blood of Paradise the women use the kinds of IUDs that caused irreparable harm, and in some cases death, to thousands of women in the United States. As with the side effects of the currently popular control device Depo Provera, the unintended consequences prove to be both injurious and destructive. It seems virtually a cosmic irony that men continue to expect women to assume primary responsibility not only for raising the next generation but also for controlling the population of that generation. And how often when their plans or illusions fail to maintain their control do they blame the victim or blame the technology, without assuming any responsibility?
Another novel set in approximately the same area of Virginia, Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, written twenty years after Goodwin’s, takes a somewhat different approach to pregnancy. Interestingly enough, Prodigal Summer also contains an accidental pregnancy that results from a failure of birth control. But Kingsolver’s character Deanna accepts the accident as part of the prodigality of nature and decides to see the pregnancy through to term, even though her lover has gone his own way unaware. Likewise, another female character accepts the responsibility of raising her dying sister-in-law’s two children, while an old man finally learns through love to accept his estranged grandchildren. Not just this grandfather, but other male characters learn valuable lessons about symbiosis that help them in their relationships with human nature, domesticated nature, and wild nature, from lovers to sheep to coyotes. In essence, they accept the connections Kingsolver identifies at novel’s end that solitude is something that only humans imagine because every step we take echoes throughout the lives of the rest of the world and alters, even if seemingly imperceptibly, the rest of the world.
Certainly Goodwin would concur with Kingsolver, for such are the realizations of Steadman in The Blood of Paradise, but the noticeable discrepancies between the novels deserve attention. There are good, strong women in Goodwin’s novel, but they do not seem capable of articulating anything beyond an instinctive maternal caring in terms of Steadman’s rural retreat self-education. In contrast, in Prodigal Summer both male and female characters learn from each other, articulate ideas to each other, and engage in verbal and sensuous dialogues with each other and the interanimating world in which they grow, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. In accepting a world beyond their control, these characters act and interact in constructive, nurturant ways with the kind of responsibility that refuses the fanciful escape routes either of fatalism or autonomy, passivity or isolation, the escape routes that Steadman and Anna pursue but eventually must reject.
LOOKING IN THE MIRROR
When I look at my history as a father devoted to promoting an ecological sensibility through my writing and teaching and at least some aspects of my lived experience, I have to admit my similarities to the real and fictional fathers I have been criticizing in this essay. Although I think I showed considerable attention to my wife in the later stages of her pregnancy and supported her during labor, I almost immediately began pulling away emotionally, quickly feeling jealousy toward our daughter, inadequacy in the face of her needs, and doubts about my identity. Like some of the fathers in Stuart Aitken’s study of San Diego families, Family Fantasies and Community Space, after our daughter was born I immediately buried myself even further in house remodeling and the next summer signed up for more summer teaching. For several years I would pit remodeling and doing things for my daughter against doing things with my daughter. Likewise, I would use the need for devoting time to financial and career success to provide economic security for our family as an excuse for emotional distance from, and a lack of time for, family activities. Gradually I became better, or at least less bad, at these activities.
Bonnie, the woman to whom I am married, has commented on the basis of talking with other mothers that they tend to be the ones to shield and shelter the children, whether a boy or a girl, while the fathers tend to be the ones to expose them to risk and adventure. She often uses the image of fathers throwing their small children up in the air and catching them or swinging them in circles off the ground. Bonnie sees this difference as necessary for children’s early development and one of the differences that suggests the benefits, if not the need, for children to have more than one parent—if not in a nuclear model then in an extended one with people who represent some of the gender differences that typically appear in society. Along these lines, I decided when to take down the baby gate to the second story stairway in our house, even in the face of Bonnie’s concern. And it was our daughter who decided whether or not she was ready to have a sky fort with an eight-foot slide. I had built the contraption and had set it up with a chicken coop–style ladder, a railed platform, and a steep slope to the slide. While Bonnie and I were discussing whether or not Mariko was ready for such an adventure, our daughter took it upon herself to climb up the slide and then slide down. Was that adventurousness innate or at least partly a result of our raising her with early experiences of traveling, hanging around while I worked with power tools and put up stud and sheetrock walls, or what?
Looking back not on my actions, but on my emotional reactions to our daughter, I find a lopsided reflection. Pride, anger, and jealousy more quickly come to mind than empathy, fear, and affection. But I began admitting that asymmetry a long time ago. So, which has been more important, that I expose her to adventures that her mother might choose to bypass, or that I have made a point of telling her that I love her every day? That after I have been angry, I apologize, and explain that I still love her and that sometimes anger arises from love? Why do I even need to think of these actions as dichotomies?
Let me mention the areas where I have had the most difficulty with my daughter. One, when she challenged me about my helping her with homework, I proved more likely to become uncontrollably angry over that once she reached middle school than anything else she did. Why? I am an English professor, I have a Ph.D., and I know the answers. How dare she challenge my public identity and my authority, my control over the educational environment? Need I say more? Two, in fifth and sixth grade she became more feminine, less interested in football and basketball and being outdoors and more interested in makeup, fashion, and shopping. This behavior doesn’t anger me, but I tend to let it alienate me. The less she is interested in the kinds of activities a father would typically do with a son, the less she acts in gender neutral ways, and the more she engages in activities that emphasize her being a girl becoming a woman, the more distant I feel from her in that process of separation of the male parent from the female child. She is not mine; she is her own person; she is, as she always has been, beyond my control in terms of her personality, her gender, her desires and goals.
One consequence of my actions for which I would like to take partial credit had been our daughter’s strong and fairly long-lasting desire to become a veterinarian. We would like to imagine that our decision to live on the edge of town with 2.5 acres of land, our appreciation for ecological diversity, our conversations about environmental problems in front of and with her, and our general eco-attitude influenced her in this direction (although we don’t live there anymore, we live on a smaller but similar kind of property in Orlando). My own role, however, I usually believe has been quite small. I think instead that it was Bonnie’s stubborn, painstaking, and prolonged care of the two cats we had who died of feline leukemia that probably propelled our daughter in that direction. Saying that, of course, makes me feel inadequate, especially since I felt jealousy toward those cats because of the attention Bonnie lavished on them. So, I asked Mariko a set of questions a few years ago about why she wanted to be a vet, what events might have influenced her, and if anything her parents had done played a role. Perhaps typical of a “tweener” at the time of the survey, no longer a child but not yet a teenager, she basically gave us no credit at all! Yet she clearly credited literature and games. I have decided to include her responses to the following three questions as an appendix to this chapter: “What events or actions in your life caused you to want to be a vet?” “What actions, ideas, or comments by your parents caused you to want to be a vet?” “Have any books or movies helped make you want to be a vet?”
I had hoped for much praise from her for the various things that I think we have done, but then I realized that the way we have lived has to a large degree seemed fairly normal to her, except for our attention to organic food, which she knows is unusual among her peers. While she has not commented in her responses to our efforts to engage her with local wild nature, she does reveal a sense of an intimate contact with the nonhuman. Also, perhaps very typical of her generation, she credits books and movies with a strong influence on her thinking. And from my own view now, as indicated in chapter 4 of this volume, I see the necessity of not positing a dichotomy between direct experience and mediated experience, between practice and simulation, but rather of positing the need for more mediation and simulation to point her toward the intimacy that so many of us have lost or have had such a difficult time finding.
As it turns out, Mariko as she approached her fifteenth birthday turned increasingly away from the dream of becoming a veterinarian toward the idea of studying psychology to become a teen counselor. It seems at this point in time that, as we might expect, her social circle and her peers’ experiences are shaping her more now than her parents’ influence. Whereas a year or two ago she would have poured her empathy and assistance into pet rescue volunteer work, she now seems to spend countless hours on the phone, in My Space, and on IM, providing empathy and assistance to her peers. It could be the case that she has just shifted her focus from one kind of animal to another, rather than changed direction. And, of course, animal psychology has been booming as a career field of late as well.
LOOKING AT ANOTHER LOOKING IN THE MIRROR
In this light or reflecting on my relationship with our daughter, I come to look at Scott Russell Sanders’s writing about his daughter. Scott is one of the few nature writers I know who has actually treated this relationship. Even though many others also have daughters, they are far more likely to write about their sons. Such is the case also with Scott, but he has at least made the effort to include his daughter in his nature writing. In Writing from the Center, she has already reached college age, an adult child. While she is introduced in “The Common Life,” she provides only a springboard to a meditation on community. In “Voyageurs,” however, she remains a focus of the essay, which treats father and daughter participation in a group canoe trip. Scott treats her fundamentally the same as he depicts his treatment of his son on similar excursions, as in Hunting for Hope. But he does note that within the group there is a tendency for people to try to “coddle her” (S. R. Sanders 1998, 126), due more to her gender than her age. He reveals a sense of obligation to provide her with these opportunities to engage wild nature, to take risks, and to learn her own identity in relationship to the rest of the world. He provides a healthy lesson to learn about the maintaining of a certain familial intimacy while encouraging his daughter’s own relational individuation. Also, he clearly sees a causal relationship between her interest in the biological sciences and the study of birds with his own commitment to promoting such experiences as this canoe trip.
In The Force of Spirit, Scott publishes a letter, “To Eva, on Your Marriage.” In it he emphasizes her developing relationship with nature as a member of their family, but frets about her coming of age in a world still riddled with sexism. And there arises a feeling of concern at letter’s end about his, in a sense, turning her over to another man, in a world of men: “And while I was making the world safer for you, I would work a few changes on men as well. The prospect of your wedding has made me worry afresh about my half of the species, with our penchant for selfishness and surliness, our insecurities, our aimless hungers, and our yen for power” (S. R. Sanders 2000, 133). A beautiful piece, it is followed by a similar letter to his son and I find it significant the different sense of burden that Scott expresses here in terms of his role as a father. This role is permeated by his own position of having been a son, a burden not carried in his relationship with his daughter, such that the father-daughter relationship actually allows greater freedom for his own personal growth with, perhaps, fewer expectations about particular outcomes than he feels in his relationship with his son. This difference comes out clearly in the differing ways he depicts his relationships with his two children in Hunting for Hope, where he focuses on the tensions between him and his son.
While Sanders points out the cultural forces stacked against his daughter as a major concern, and rightly so, he displays an optimism about his daughter’s future and the possibility of her and her husband’s being able to “fashion [their] own history” (1998, 133). It is necessary to remind ourselves that no matter how cultured and acculturated they may become, our daughters remain, like all of us, a partial product of wild nature, genetically, intellectually, emotionally, and physiologically. Influence may be possible; control never. And as Mariko matures into adulthood, I have to struggle to relinquish the illusions, the ego gratification, the fear-driven desires, of exercising power over in order to help her through sharing power with her in order for her to realize her own interdependent existence. But I am afraid that I don’t find much in literature to help me with this task. Even in nature writing or nature-oriented literature, I find mostly failed examples of distant, dysfunctional, and emotionally vacant fathers. Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, for instance, depicts just such a person.
FINDING NEGATIVES WHILE SEARCHING FOR POSITIVES
Haruf opens Plainsong with the main character, Tom Guthrie, clearly in crisis at work and at home: trouble as a high school teacher with disaffected and bullying students; trouble at home with a wife suffering from severe depression unable to care for her children. Tom tries to maintain some connection with the natural world through helping old friends with their cattle and involves his two young sons in the work. Yet, in that scene the sons seem to bond better with the friends than with their father, who remains throughout the novel emotionally distant from them. Haruf depicts no scenes where Tom discusses their mother’s illness with them, where he shows them any significant emotional engagement, where he spends time with them away from town or ranch, even though the boys themselves are clearly interested in such adventures.
Although Tom develops into a sympathetic character, at least for male readers, he remains emotionally dysfunctional and distant. He looks to me like a prime candidate for Ackerman’s workshops and a depressingly faithful rendition of far too many American fathers. Although not a fanatic for control or domination, we see him reacting with tremendous difficulty and poor judgment to the obvious loss of control he experiences in his home and in his classroom. Although his personal situation improves by novel’s end, Haruf chooses not to show Tom as developing any intimacy with his sons through the course of the novel and thus not developing into a nurturing father, perhaps because Haruf remains too committed to a typically realistic portrayal of the situation to do so. One suspects similar distance in the relationship between the protagonist of Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects and his sons. And these novels focus only on a man dealing with his sons, not with daughters.
When I look for literary representations, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, of father and daughter relationships, I find numerous examples of daughters writing about such relationships, but little from fathers. For example, one can look at the dismal relationship portrayed in Gretchen Legler’s All the Powerful Invisible Things, or the distant relationships depicted in Barbara King-solver’s Animal Dreams and Teresa Jordan’s Riding the White Horse Home. Jane Brox provides a portrait of a loving father of a farming family in Here and Nowhere Else, but one who cannot break out of a patriarchal mind-set to invest his daughter with the authority she craves, and which she eventually assumes in the sequel, Five Thousand Days Like This One.
A rare exception to the absence of fathers’ depictions of father-daughter relationships in nature-oriented literature would be Chris Bohjalian’s Water Witches. In this novel, the protagonist father initially embodies the male stereotype of dichotomous thinking. A lawyer, who is also an outsider to the community, he emphasizes dispassionate logic, admissible scientific evidence, litigation, and rules, while his wife, a member of the Vermont community in which the novel is set, represents empathy and intuition through her family’s history as dowsers. Initially the father sides with the ski resort industry and its expansion plans, which while boosting the economy also threaten the ecology of the area. The novel reaches its crisis when the daughter claims to have seen an endangered species on the mountain slated for expansion and the father finds himself having to believe in the truth of his daughter in contradistinction to the facts he has at hand. Refusing to place career, logic, and science first, the father accepts into his heart the primacy of nurturing. To reinforce the significance of the daughter’s role in the father’s transformation, Bohjalian ends the novel with a coda spoken in the first-person voice of that daughter, which emphasizes not the father’s education, control, or logic, but his “heart” (1995, 340).
WISHING
I wish that more fathers would take the risks that Sanders and Bohjalian have taken in writing about father-daughter relationships in both nonfiction and fiction. Especially, I think, we need the nonfiction works that can match the willingness of daughters to write about their fathers. Critics also will have to begin to give this subject more attention. In the meantime, fathers would do well to read the works by daughters, to learn from the many negative and the few positive models they depict. If nothing else, both the negative and the positive fathers portrayed in the literature by both male and female writers can help me learn to relinquish the illusion of control—the same illusion that Bohjalian’s depicted father relinquishes—but I have to join that relinquishment with an engagement and enlargement of my own emotions in a nurturance based on interanimation, dialogue, and an acceptance of continuous ignorance, while all the while having to make decisions and take actions that have consequences beyond any horizon I can envision.1
APPENDIX: MARIKO’S RESPONSES (SIXTH GRADE, 2002)
1. What events or actions in your life caused you to want to be a vet?
When I was younger I wanted to be someone who helps people or things. Since I didn’t know what a veterinarian was I wanted to be a doctor or a nurse. Then when I was six I saw a veterinarian. Then I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor. I knew though that I was born to love animals and I never met one that didn’t like me. Since I loved animals so much I wanted to be a veterinarian. As I got older I loved animals even more. When I was born I already had a cat. When I was one I got another cat. I have always had animals that I loved.
2. What actions, ideas, or comments by your parents caused you to want to be a vet?
My parents never really do anything to make me want to be a veterinarian. They did do things though that helped me want to be a veterinarian after I already knew I wanted to. They bought me a book called Emergency Vet, which is written about real life veterinarians. Also they bought me veterinarian play equipment, which I use on stuffed animals. My parents also bought me a CDROM for the computer called Emergency Vet, which is a game where you try to save animals that is created by real life veterinarians. They also helped me keep my dream strong.
3. Have any books or movies helped make you want to be a vet?
Yes, I have books and have seen movies helping me want to be a vet. I have a book called Emergency Vet that really inspired me. The way they (veterinarians) dedicate their lives and time to saving animals. I have seen millions of movies about vets. Two of my favorite movies are Dr. Doolittle and Dr. Doolittle 2. I thought they were so funny. I have seen another movie. I can’t remember the title but it was about a vet who loved animals and dedicated her life and time to saving and helping animals. There are so many books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen I can’t name them all.
NOTE
1. I found it an unfortunate situation that not long after I completed the original version of this chapter, I put out a call for a collection of critical and creative essays on this subject and received too few abstracts to put together a book proposal. Further, I heard from more women than men who were willing to address the subject. If not yet, then when will the time arrive for men to engage in such a discussion?