Fathers Who Care: Alternative Father Figures in Annie E. Proulx’s The Shipping News and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a profound revision of the meanings of fatherhood. Since the 1990s, terms such as “involved fatherhood” or “new fatherhood” ¹ represent a new understanding of the shifting roles fathers have come to play in o pposition to the normative father-as-provider role that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, the varying family patterns and an increasing attention to the rights of fathers have contributed to redefining the nuclear US family centered around the breadwinning father by positing a whole array of alternative family arrangements (Tanfer and Mott; Hearn; Wall and Arnold). These topics have gained c enter stage in the study of fathering, and scholars such as Michael Kimmel, Victor Seidler, Jeff Hearn, Anthony Rotundo, Glenda Wall and Stephanie Arnold, William Marsiglio, or Ralph LaRossa, among many o thers, have produced a great amount of evidence on the contemporary meanings of fatherhood.