Authoritarian, Missing, or Nurturing? Fathers in American Drama

Abstract

Some 20 years ago we were looking at the dearth of plays about mothers and wondering why we so rarely appear in both fiction and drama. Now it seems to be the turn of the fathers; where are they in American drama? Although the study of fathering and fatherhood has occupied sociologists and anthropologists for many decades, Thomas W. Laqueur could still lament in 1990 that “Fatherhood, in so far as it has been thought about at all, has been regarded as a backwater of the dominant history of public power” (205). And Josep M. Armengol, in a recent article, argues that “paternal absence is a recurrent theme” (212) in mid-twentieth-century American literature and that “fathers tend to remain absent and distant figures” (213). He quotes Arthur Miller’s 1949 Death of a Salesman, which has become a classic of the American stage; Willy Loman’s flute-playing father went missing early on in the son’s life, and Loman himself recognizes that this desertion left him feeling “kind of temporary about myself” (159).¹ He poignantly begs Ben to tell him how he should bring up his sons—so acknowledging that parenting is neither easy nor intuitive: we have to learn how to be mothers or fathers and in many cases, our best teachers are our own parents.