The Heirs of Amphitryon

The Heirs of Amphitryon: Social Fathers and Natural Fathers Marie Maclean (bio) pater semper incertus est, mater sed certissima When Freud first used the adage which contrasts the uncertainty of fatherhood with the certainty of motherhood, he used it as a basis for the edification of the “family romance.” 1 In the fantasy of the “family romance” the young child imagines itself a foundling or bastard in order to lay claim to a more illustrious paternity than nature has provided for it. The family romance has a special place in Freud’s work because it is a fantasy which does not and can not go back to the experiences of infancy. We can only construct stories of this nature when we are already conscious of the nature of stories. What is more, these are not just anecdotes of everyday life. A child of six becomes, as Freud says, aware of the uncertainty of fatherhood and may have heard stories of local bastards or foundlings. But the attempt to fabricate a more satisfying paternity stems from a more literary source, whether oral or written (as I endeavored to show in The Name of the Mother). 2 It is from the early performances or readings of folktale or myth (the most obvious of which used to be the weekly ration of religious observance) that the child of six is most likely to have acquired the idea of another and more illustrious paternity. The family romance is often in fact the first fiction of adultery. It is also the first example of what René Girard calls mimetic desire. If the shepherd boy of folktale can be revealed to be a king’s son, then why cannot I? The myth of Heracles, which begins when Zeus decides to find the perfect woman in order to create one last perfect son, 3 can be read in this light; we can all dream of being offspring of Zeus. “It is human to desire an immortal child” Giraudoux, Amphitryon 38, 2.2 Yet there is another less recognized variation which can be given to the “family romance.” It is not only children who dream of divine or royal parents. Parents too may be sadly dissatisfied with the hand which [End Page 789] fate has dealt them. There is a parental fantasy which complements that of the unhappy child, a fantasy of the perfect offspring, physically beautiful, mentally a genius, strong and adept, immortal in fame and repute. Like the child, the parent may be prepared in imagination to sacrifice biological certainty to the promptings of desire. In 1961, in Mensonge romantique, vérité romanesque, 4 René Girard formulated the theory of triangular desire, the notion that the object of our desire is always something or someone we know to be wanted by a third person. Girard takes a very bleak, and particularly in the case of love, a very masculine view of his discovery of mimetic desire. He starts with the simple case of the man who desperately desires his best friend’s lover or wife, only to lose interest in her the moment she reciprocates his interest. As he applied it to the novel, and as others have used his idea, it has come to be associated almost exclusively with sexual desire: “I want her because he wants her.” It has been a theory less universally adopted than the Oedipal story, perhaps because, unlike Freud, Girard does not allow absolution by the unconscious. His mimetic desire occurs at the age of responsibility and can be condemned as based on “envy, malice and all uncharitableness.” Yet we have only to observe the devastating effects of peer group pressure from a very early age to see the power of Girard’s observations. I should make it clear that I find certain aspects of both Freud and Girard’s theory both dubious and antipathetic, particularly their misogyny. Yet this cannot invalidate the force of their master narratives, especially in their applicability to patriarchal society. Indeed, it is fascinating to compare the force of two different patriarchal ideologies meeting head-on, as developed by thinkers who differed in almost every way. From its base in his work on the novel

Adultery · Art · Certainty · Epistemology · Fantasy · Literature · Mythology · Natural (archaeology) · Order (exchange) · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy