Snag Daughters, Fathers, And The Novel: The Sentimental Romance Of Heterosexuality Narrated By Lynda Marie Zwinger Expressed As Print

primary texts are Clarissa, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O, along with a final chapter on Austen, C.
and E. Brontë, and George Eliot. And what's brilliant about this book is that it shows the ways in which The Story of O is a lineal descendant of the sentimental in its technical sense novels of the nineteenth century.
O's efforts to remake herself into something that Sir Stephen will love is the same struggle, in a different register, as Florence Dombey's or Jo March's: the desire to please the patriarch, The Man.
Zwinger's reading also makes sense, for me, of Little Women, for it points out that Jo's struggle is not to become an adult, independent woman writer as we, as modern feminist readers, wish it was, but to become a daughter her father can be proud of.
And, yes, cue the teethgrinding venom about Bronson Alcott,

Zwinger is very clear on the ways in which feminist readers will find themselves misled and trapped in novels like Little Women.
She is also brilliantly, brutally clear about Freud's selfinterest in creating the family romance in such a way that the father is never at fault.
The best Freudian criticism is always that which insists on pointing out that Freud himself was not a disinterested observer, that uses his ideas on his own writing.


As for example:

The sentimental gloss enables us to divide and separate the father from his wishand his "no" and his "nom"so that we can continue to pretend that it all, somehow, just happens to work the way it does.
Or to take refuge in the authorized view that it happens just the way the daughter wants it,
In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father.
I was driven by what to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies whose and not from real occurences.
It was only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women.
And now we find the phantasy of seduction once more in the preOedipus prehistory of girls but the seducer is regularly the mother.
Here, however, the phantasy touches the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities over the child's bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals.
"Femininity,"
Freud, archeologist of Western desire, can acknowledge a ubiquitous maternal seduction and its ground in reality.
But any suggested ground in reality for a paternal seduction undercuts the asserted daughterly origin of the fatherdaughter "phantasy.
" Father must remain absolutely guiltless of real action the "seduction" must be seen as originating with her, And yet, leaving him out of the account cannot mask his active role:
The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father.
The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence "Femininity,"
Where is the subject occulted by the passive constructions "is.
. . established" and "is replaced" Who was in charge of those ancient symbolic equivalences anyway What would make the girl assume her father would give her what he had already refused her mother Where on earth would the girl get all these ideas to begin with From the parent who literally touches in baths and dressing Or from the parent who remains distant, touching her only metaphorically, with ideas and symbols and negations The pertinent question to put to the peniswish/babywish progression is whose idea could it be to begin with Whom does she aim to please in manifesting such a wish What is missing from the account is the activity of the passive, untouching fatherthe activity, that is to say, of the culturally constructed and continuously reinforced place of the father.
His place places her, and the figure of the daughter of sentiment serves to reveal the question begged by the infamous "What does woman want"which is, I submit, "Who told her she wants that"
Zwinger

Freudian criticism has to be approached warily, skeptically.
Freud's assertions about the gendered responsibilities of parents only works in the ideal bourgeois nuclear family, for instance, in which there are two parents, one of each gender, and the feminine parent cares for the children while the masculine parent leaves the house to work But Zwinger uses it well and carefully, and she never forgets to examine her own subjectposition as she goes.
Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel is a provocative study of the fatherdaughter storya neglected dimension of the family romance.
  It has important implications for the history of the novel, for our understanding of key texts in that history, and for theories concerning the representation of gender, family relations, and heterosexuality in Western culture.

    In the English and American novel, argues Lynda Zwinger, “the good woman” ,  .

 .   is a fathers daughter, .  .  .   constructed to the very particular specifications of an omnipresent and unvoiced paternal desire, ”  Zwinger supports her case with an analysis of both “highbrow” and “lowbrow” novels and with ingenious textual analyses of five novels:  Clarissa Harlowe, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O.

    In the dominant discourse of AngloAmerican culture, the fathers daughter provides the cornerstone for the patriarchal edifice of domesticity and the alibi for patriarchal desire.
  Zwingers analysis of the sexual politics embodied in the figure of this sentimental daughter raises compelling critical and cultural issues.
  Zwinger shows how different readings of Clarissas story form a sentimental composite that  makes her available in perpetuity to heterosexual desire.
  Dombey and Son  illuminates the erotic dimension of the sentimental, the titillation always inherent in the spectacle of virtue in distress.
  Zwingers analysis of Little Women  in the context of Louisa May Alcotts own lifetext focuses upon the problems of a daughter trying to write the filial romance.
  The Golden Bowl deploys the daughter of sentiment as a “cover story” for a feminine version of the Oedipal story, founded on the daughter who cant say yes, but doesnt say no.
  The Story of O reveals the pornographic dimension in romantic and sentimental love,
    In her conclusion, Zwinger offers an overview of the nineteenthcentury novel, asking what difference it makes when the writer is a daughter.
  She shows how the daughters family romance pictures the father as inadequate, ironically requiring the sentimental daughter as a patriarchal prop.
  She develops a useful concept of hysteria and argues that generic “disorder” and hysterical “intrusions” mark the family romance novels of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.
  And finally, she makes the case that the daughters choice to stay home is not necessarily an act of simple complicity,  for by staying home she comes as close as she can to disrupting the fatherdaughter romance.
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