It’s a literary trope, the father who disowns or betrays a daughter. I don’t say that to make light of it, but on the contrary, to point out the way it has haunted the human imagination, which underlines how horrible it is. (This applies to all combinations of parents and children, but fathers and daughters gets noticed less than fathers and sons.)
Agamemnon, you know. He sacrificed Iphigenia – which is to say, he killed her on an “altar” – to get a wind when the attack on Troy was becalmed. Not very fatherly, as one of the Mitfords might have put it. Lucretius used it as the occasion for his famous comment, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum – religion can persuade [people to perform] such evils.
And then there’s Shakespeare, who repeatedly portrayed fathers disowning daughters. In other Elizabethan plays, fathers who do that are defending “honor” (does it sound familiar? Of course it does, because it’s the same) and the daughters either deserve it or are betrayed by fate or bad luck or some such thing, not by their fathers. In Shakespeare’s many plays on the subject, the father is always dead wrong.
Juliet’s father tried to force her into a marriage and when she refused he disowned her. Hero’s father believed lying tricksters who said she’d been letting men in her bedroom window so they could fuck like weasels. Desdemona’s father disowned her because she married a Moor – a man of Another Race. Cordelia’s father not only disowned her, but cursed her – meaning not he swore at her but he called down curses on her, curses that were meant to be efficacious – for declining to flatter him in the way he expected. Imogen’s father was another who accepted a trickster’s claim that she was a Secret Slut. Perdita’s father disowned his wife because he got it in his head (for no reason) that she was humping his best friend, and he tried to have the infant Perdita killed.
Juliet dies disowned, as does Desdemona. Cordelia and Lear, and Perdita and Leontes, however, get the chance for reconciliation at the end. It’s interesting how thoroughly Shakespeare puts the fathers in the wrong.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)