When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I admired Mr. Bennet. There he was, sitting in his library surrounded by books, urbane and ironic, taking pithy potshots at Mrs. Bennet, fixated on getting her five daughters married. Only much later did I realize that Mr.
Bennet is too lofty to concern himself with his daughters’ prospects, leaving Mrs. Bennet to do the frantic, socially humiliating work of matchmaking.
Because the truth was that marriage was one of the only avenues for advancement for women at that time; staying unmarried would mean being a dependent poor relation or at best a governess.
This is the great double standard of both literature and life: we vilify the flawed mothers who stay in the trenches, while romanticizing the inconsistent and often absent fathers.
There has been a spate of recent books on mothers who have traumatized their children; Arundhati Roy’s magnificent Mother Mary Comes to Me, Jennette McCurdy’s hard-hitting I’m Glad My Mom Died, and Molly Jong-Fast’s angsty How to Lose Your Mother.
I have read every one of them, for their emotional truth and also because I am obsessed with mother-daughter stories. And while I sympathize with these daughters, it also seems to me we tend to blame mothers a lot more for our trauma.
Of course, literature and life are full of fathers who traumatize their children—Tara Westover’s bipolar, fanatic father in Educated, the poet Safiya Sinclair’s abusive father in How to Say Babylon, or all the alcoholic fathers in books like Angela’s Ashes.
But many literary fathers are idealized despite the harm they do. Think of the drinking dad in ATree Grows in Brooklyn with his extravagant, splashy gestures.
Then there are those literary fathers that are idealized because they had to play the role of both father and mother—like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird or Dr. Carr in What Katy Did.
I love them both, but I can see now, it’s the equivalent of the adoration a father gets when he takes his kids to the playground, whereas when a mother does it, it’s simply her job. And then there are fathers that are idealized despite their absence, or maybe even because of it.
Take the fathers in Ann Patchett’s new novel Whistler. I admired parts of the book like the lunch party scene in a wealthy Connecticut home which is a masterpiece of dialogue and description. But what stayed with me most was the novel’s emotional truths about fathers.
There are three fathers in Whistler. There’s Daphne’s biological father, a sailor who abandons his wife and their two daughters to return to sea, coming back occasionally to service the car. Then there is Eddie the storyteller stepfather, empathetic and endearing, who suddenly disappears.
And there’s the current stepfather, self-help guru Lucas, physically present but emotionally absent. The novel begins years later when Eddie suddenly reappears. The story unspools back to show us the wonder of that relationship.
Eddie, the stepfather who had to leave is glamorized, glorified, forgiven. He is the one who is loved. And the mother, the one who stayed. She weathered the betrayals of the men in her life, but she gets the blame.
On Father’s Day, I think about my own father, a professionally successful man who was largely absent. I think about the father of my children, another professionally successful man who tries hard to be present. And I realize maybe this is the real Father’s Day argument.
Don’t retire the idealizing; save it for the fathers who don’t take pithy potshots at the mothers. Save it for the fathers who are supportive of the mothers. The ones that do the school sports days. The ones that don’t walk away.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail. com.