ABSTRACT

In the world of romance, as Shakespeare’s Gower memorably tells us, “wishes fall out as they’re willed” (Pericles 22.16). 1 Echoing Gower’s gnomic utterance, Northrop Frye describes romance as the “nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream” (Anatomy of Criticism 186). Similarly Derek Brewer locates the essence of romance in “a fantasy story … in which quest and conflict culminate in a happy ending … ” (“The Nature of Romance” 46). Romance does not imitate life; it reshapes it to bring us, in Frye’s words, “the world we want,” a world in which “reality is what is created by human desire” (Natural Perspective 116, 115). From a feminist perspective, however, it is clear that the “human desire” that has shaped romance narratives in the western tradition has typically been male, and in family romances—narratives in which families are separated and reunited 2 —the wishes of fathers, not mothers, have dominated. Thus in The Odyssey, the ancient “fountainhead” of romance (Reardon 6), the hero returns home, as if from the dead, after a 20-year absence to recover an heroic son, a chaste wife and a devoted father. His mother, who has died of grief at his absence, is irrelevant to the happy ending. 3 In the biblical story of Joseph (Gen. 37–47) the hero is providentially reunited with his brothers and father in Egypt; 4 his mother, now deceased, has no part in the felicity. What matters finally is that Israel (Jacob) recovers the son he had believed dead: “Now let me die,” he declares to the weeping Joseph, “since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive” (Gen. 46: 30; King James Version). In Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story—“the apogee of ancient romance” (Heiserman 186)—the heroine is lost and recovered not only by her biological father, but by three surrogate fathers as well; 5 although she also recovers her birth mother, the narrative emphasis is overwhelmingly on father-daughter bonds. The Latin romance of Apollonius of Tyre—the ultimate source of Shakespeare’s Pericles—is structured around contrasting father-daughter pairs, and reaches its climax when the hero is reunited with his daughter: “You are my daughter Tarsia,” he cries, “my one and only hope and the light of my eyes. I have been mourning you and your mother for fourteen years. Now I shall die happy, for my hope has been brought back to life and restored to me” (The Story of Apollonius 767). Although Apollonius subsequently recovers his wife as well, the narrative’s emphasis is again overwhelmingly on the father-daughter reunion. 6 In short, the outcomes of these stories are shaped according to paternal desires, and when a mother is present for the happy ending her pleasure is clearly subordinate to that of the father. 7