Reconciling the Relationship Between "Literary Fathers" and Their "Literary Daughters
In “Literary Paternity” Sandra Gilbert explores the metaphor of the pen as a phallic symbol in order to examine the hierarchy of male “author-ity” in the Western literary tradition. Gilbert explains, “[T]he patriarchal notion that the writer ‘fathers’ his text just as God fathered the world is and has been all-pervasive in Western literary civilization, so much so that…the metaphor is built into the very word, author, with which writer, deity, and pater familias are identified” (“Literary Paternity”). Gilbert argues that the Western literary tradition, having been determined by the male imagination, has caused women struggle to be the “[authorities] of [their] own existence” (“Literary Paternity”). The historical significance of “Literary Paternity” cannot be overstated in terms of its contribution to feminist discourse in literary studies. Sandra Gilbert continues to explore similar issues of paternity and inheritance in her poem “Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet.” Interestingly, Gilbert introduces a father/author who fails as an “authority” in both his role as father and as poet in her poem. While “Literary Paternity” focuses primarily on the negative impact of the male dominated literary tradition on female writers and readers, the dead father in “Thirty Years” suggests that the Western literary tradition ultimately harms both women and men. In “Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet” Sandra Gilbert explores themes first developed in “Literary Paternity” while furthering her vision of women (and men) reclaiming their “own artistic authority” and their “own power of self-creation” (“Literary Paternity”).
In “Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet” Sandra Gilbert describes a “seventeen-year-old classicist” who “never knew [her father] except in photographs” (line 12; line 2). The narrator says, “She has your high clear polished forehead, but/’No my sister has his dimple, the cleft/in his chin’” (lines 3-5). In this passage, the young poet sees her father’s physical traits in her sister who she “envies” because she “remembers the dead father” (lines 14-5). The young poet finds it difficult to see the obvious similarities between her father’s physical appearance and her own, though the narrator says that the aspiring poet clearly looks like her father “in a girl’s body” (line 8). Gilbert writes, “A man cannot verify his fatherhood by either sense or reason, after all; that his child is his is in a sense a tale he tells himself to explain the infant’s existence” (“Literary Paternity”). If it is true that a “man cannot verify his fatherhood,” reason would follow that a child cannot verify her father is hers either—especially if that father has been absent for her entire conscious life. The seventeen-year-old struggles define herself in relationship to her father because she has never consciously known him. Nevertheless she still desires to cultivate her gift as a poet which is arguably her greatest inheritance from her father. Gilbert writes, “Father God as the only creator of all things, and the male metaphors of literary creation that depend upon such an etiology have long ‘confused’ literary women—readers and writers alike” (“Literary Paternity”). Like other literary women, the young poet in “Thirty Years” is confused about how to reconcile herself to her father. The estranged relationship between the young poet and her dead father highlights the tension between women and the literary fathers who neglected them.
Unlike the female writers described in the concluding remarks in “Literary Paternity,” such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, and Adrienne Rich, who are not necessarily well known for writing in male-dominated literary forms like the sonnet, the seventeen-year-old in “Thirty Years” considers herself to be a “classicist” who considers Latin to be her “favorite” language (lines 12-3). In her poem “Thirty Years” discusses the issue of what it means to be a daughter of a literary tradition in a light not previously explored in “Literary Paternity.” As mentioned, the young poet wishes to separate herself from her father while still cultivating the gifts she has inherited from him.
Gilbert writes, “As Harold Bloom has pointed out, ‘[F]rom the sons of Homer to the sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence had been described as a filial relationship, [a relationship of] sonship….’ The fierce struggle at the heart of literary history, says Bloom, is a ‘battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads….” (“Literary Paternity”).
In a literary tradition in which sons inherit “authority” from their fathers, being a “literary daughter” can be a “confusing” task. Through the dilemmas faced by the aspiring poet in “Thirty Years” Gilbert addresses the questions of: “[W]hat if such a proudly masculine cosmic Author is the sole-legitimate model for all earthly authors? Or worse, what if the male generative power is not just the only legitimate power but the only power there is?” (“Literary Paternity”). Utilizing concepts from “Literary Paternity” one can interpret “Thirty Years” as a way to explore the implications of being a literary daughter who inherits literary forms from a tradition she both admires and feel alienated from.
In “Thirty Years,” the young poet clearly has ambivalent, even anxious feelings toward her father who was once a “young Shelley” (line 26). The young poet confesses, “I don’t want to read my father’s poems,/they’re all in tatters in the closet,/they scare me” (lines 21-3). Of course it is interesting to consider who tore her father’s poems to bits and hid them in the closet. Perhaps it was the young poet’s mother who could not find it within herself to dispose of the skeleton in the closet, an eerie reminded of the past. Perhaps it was the young girl, who in a bought of frustration wished to tear to shreds what remained her father’s legacy but, in the end, felt too guilty to through something so precious away. Maybe it was her father, before he “OD’d on morphine” who finally crippled under the “weight of thought” that was too “hard to bear” (line 35; line 18). Like the tattered poems in the closet, the father’s presence can be felt throughout the poem; the narrator consistently addresses the dead father throughout the work. (After all, the poem is entitled: “Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet.” [My emphasis.]). He “[lives] in [his daughter’s] blood” and she cannot escape him (line 31). Regardless of who destroyed her father’s poems and left them in the closet, it is interesting to consider why does the seventeen-year-old fears the “tattered” work of a father that is has been long dead. (As do a significant the “tattered” works of long-dead men in the Western literary tradition.) Clearly, even the tattered remains of her father’s poems still have power over the young poet. Perhaps, in truth, all literary daughters fear our fathers’ poems, and for good reason. Gilbert writes, “[W]omen have not only been excluded from authorship but in addition they have been subject to (and subjects of) male author-ity” (“Literary Paternity”). She goes on to write:
The pen…is not only mightier than the sword, it is also like a sword in its power—its need, even—to kill…Simone de Beauvoir has commented that the human male’s ‘transcendence’ of nature, her role as a symbol of immanence, is expressed by her central involvement in that life-giving but involuntary birth process which perpetuates the species. Thus superiority—or authority—has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth life but to that which kills. (“Literary Paternity”)
For the female poet, writing within the literary forms that have been traditionally used to fulfill the male desire to “figuratively…’kill’ women” can be intimidating—frightening, even (“Literary Paternity”). As Gilbert explains, “[B]ecause a writer ‘fathers’ his text, his text, his literary creations…are his property. Having defined them in language and thus generated them, he owns them, controls them, and encloses them on the printed page” (“Literary Paternity”). Again, the young poet is in the confusing situation of wanting to be poet like her father but being too afraid to read his work, and maybe afraid to find that she is herself one of his metaphorical “creations,” which emphasizes the greater concerns literary women in general much contend with.
Unlike the literary fathers outlined in “Literary Paternity” such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton, and Plato, the dead father in “Thirty Years” is a failure, both as a father and as an author. When the narrator shows the aspiring poet a picture of her father when he was young, the narrator says, “[I tell her] about the photo of you as (you said) ‘the young Shelley’—/about your huntsman’s now, opera, baseball,/endless games of chess in the dorm parlor with you/boasting your prowess” (lines 26-9). The dead father was once a reckless, careless young man who did not, and possibly could not, cultivate his gift as a writer. Though gifted he fills his early life with diversions, conceivably as a ways to avoid the pressure of performance. His desire for escape eventually results in his ultimate escape reality: his death at “thirty-seven-year[s] old” through a drug overdose (line 33). Is the young poet’s fear undone by the picture of her father as the so-called “young Shelley”? In reality, her father was not an all-powerful, threatening author/god. After her meeting with the narrator, a “kind of…long-lost aunt,” the seventeen-year-old says, “It meant a lot to me to talk about my dad” (line 40). This line is significant because she calls him “dad” instead of “father,” indicating that she feels a stronger bond with him, as if the relationship is somehow less estranged. Perhaps her father is no longer the pile of hidden and tattered papers, the image in an old photograph, the tortured-literary God/author/father, the malevolent phantom—instead he is simply a human being who lost himself in “the blanks/that always framed [his] mind” which is the enemy of all poets (lines 36-7). In “Thirty Years,” Gilbert illustrates the devastating effects of the pressure to perform to the rigid standards of the male-dominated literary tradition in the life and death of the seventeen-year-old’s father. In this way, Gilbert strengthens and furthers the discussion originally discussed in “Literary Paternity”: not only is the tradition of literary paternity deadly for women, it can also be deadly for men.
In “Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet,” Sandra Gilbert ultimately arrives at a similar solution for how women and men should go about salvaging their “own artistic authority” and their “own power of self-creation” (“Literary Paternity”). The narrator exclaims, “I want to believe this, want to believe/you’re really starting out again!” (lines 42-3). Gilbert writes, “[W]omen themselves have the power to create themselves as characters, even perhaps the power to reach toward the self trapped on the other side of the mirror/text and help her to climb out” (“Literary Paternity”). She goes on to say: “[O]ne significant way in which the female artist can bring this secret self to the surface of her own life: against the traditional generative authority of the pen/penis, the literary woman can set the conceptual energy of her own female sexuality” (“Literary Paternity”). Though the aspiring poet hopes to write in the tradition of her literary fathers, she “adores her mother” and listens to her “long lost aunt” (line 46; line 25). The influence of women as life-givers is important in understanding the meaning of the text.
In the concluding statements of the poem the narrator says:
Do me a favor:/Forget/Catullus, Horace, love and hate/and think, instead, of the epic/cell, the place where the chromosomes/are made and made for a moment perfect.//Translate those lines from Virgil/some of us once liked to chant,/the ones about beginning, about those who first/left Troy to seek the Italian shore.
In this passage, it is significant that the narrator alludes to The Aeneid. It is as if she is saying that the young poet should leave behind the carnage and wreckage of the past so that she can make a new life for herself in a new civilization. The young poet should not do this for her sake alone—she should do this for her father, who lives and breathes in her bones.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra. "Literary Paternity." Cornell Review (1979): 1-9. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra. "Thirty Years Later I Meet Your Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter the Poet." The Poetry Foundation. N.p., 2000. Web. 4 Oct. 2013.