Father-Daughter Relationship in the Film, William Faulkner: A Life on Paper :: Movie Film Essays

Father-Daughter Relationship in the Film, William Faulkner A living on PaperWhile the relationship betwixt fathers and sons has been documented at length, the father/ daughter dynamic manakins less conspicuously in literary tropes in fact the last canonical part I can recall reading was Euripedes Electra in high school. The excellent relationship between Daddy and his little girl, however, harbors depths more fictional characterl and glaring than Greek tragedy and psychological analyses invoking the Electra complex. The emotionally void or reserved father in particular often burdens the female psyche, for his absence proves sound as palpable as his sought after presence, shaping the embellish of a daughters future relationships and the construction of a self-image disordered and disjointed by an early and intimate knowledge of rejection and abandonment. Transcending characterizations attached in general to filial duty as experienced by the matriarch, the father figure rem ains the subject of mythologization, just as Sylvia Plath turned her father into a Colossus, a cold, inanimate st hotshot edifice revealing none of his secrets or affection. If the absent or emotionally unavailable father takes on shades of grandeur for the daughter that knew little of him, one can only surmise the impression left by the father figure whose imagined significance in the eyes of his child is only matched by the reality of his fame. William Faulkner, A Life on Paper conveys an image of the literary colossus that both perpetuates the persona of the great American writer and deflates it. Representing the author as a feeble man who endows the world with a narrative legacy while passing his own daughter little more than a few innocent glimpses into his character, the film relays the commentary of Faulkners daughter as she attempts to piece in concert a sketch of an apathetic, mercurial, and brilliant father. Jill Faulkner Summers pulls from her memory pictures of her f ather as super courtly and elegant but lacking a depth and earnestness in his personal relationships Pappy didnt really care about people. I prize he cared about me, but I also think I could have gotten in his way and he would have walked on me. Faulkners coarse words penetrated more than the page as well. later imploring pappy not to succumb to another drinking bout, Faulkner informs his daughter, no one remembers Shakespeares child. The film, then, relates a father/ daughter dynamic make upon emotional lack, as the father expressly negates the significance of his own child.