The Absent Father's Presence in Modern and American Gay Drama

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only basis for family life.

It is no secret that our most prominent myths of cultural origins are founded on murder, specifically on the murder of the father. In the scientific version favored by Darwin and Freud, the primal father is slain by the band of brothers who then consume the evidence in a love-feast; afterwards, suffering an acute case of moral indigestion, they institute a complex symbol system of totem and taboo to undo the deed and insure against its recurrence. Freud eventually backed away from an actual prehistoric event in favor of an internal psychic conflict universally suffered by oedipal males, while Lacan retained the mythical material as the basis for a patriarchal system of law (Symbolic Order) founded on the father's name. In creative versions, the father is named either Agamemnon and killed by his jealous wife, or named Laius and killed by his physically-abused son. Shakespeare's embellishments of the cultural myth enacted the parricidal crime as in Julius Caesar or the son's dilemma as in Hamlet.

In Ernest Jones's psychoanalytic reading of the play, Hamlet is actually assigned two fathers—the one living/bad father Claudius whom the other undead/good father wants slain. Of the two, the ghostly father casts the longer shadow of absence over future stages. In fact, a recent study entitled The Absent Father in Modern Drama (Rosefeldt 1995) has traced this endemic condition from Ibsen to Sam Shepard and Marsha Norman. To be absent, the father must be more than simply dead or missing; he must be alluded to, represented (often metonymically), and affect the action. His absence must register. Some absent fathers that so qualify are: Nora's dead father