Irresistible forces: Father/daughter romance in nineteenth century fiction

In four novels of the nineteenth century marriages of chief female characters to father figures provide a focal point for examining the depiction of the female character within the patriarchal order. The representation of these father/daughter relationships reveals the complex and shifting dynamic between the female's ambivalent psychological and social impulses, the conflict between her need for connection and the desire for self-definition, as well as the tension between the romance of the desiring daughter within the form of the realistic novel. Jane Austen's commitment to the need for rational order dictates that the desiring female figure in Emma be united to the community's most authoritative and insightful male to check the heroine's romantic impulse toward re-ordering connections. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre depicts a realm of romance which privileges the desire of the displaced daughter figure, though the price in anguish and suffering she must pay for her sense of freedom is very high. Her retreat into isolation with her maimed husband at the end of the novel suggests the impossibility of reconciliation of the desires of the self with the demands of an ordering and hierarchical society. Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady demonstrate increasingly problematic resolutions to the crisis of the daughter's expression of desire in the nineteenth-century novel. George Eliot embeds an ambivalent attitude toward the conflict between subjective and communal visions in her novel of the daughter figure who marries a father substitute in hopes of gaining fulfillment for her own need to express herself meaningfully. Henry James allows his heroine to realize the manipulative nature of her father-figure husband but to find no escape from her relationship with him. Like the figure of Beauty in "Beauty and the Beast," each heroine demystifies, to some extent, the power of an authoritarian figure, while expressing the allure of the daughter's desire even while it is contained, finally, by the limits of the realistic novel and the patriarchal order.