Parenting in Literature

[tatekate]

I am currently searching for AP worthy literature in which parents play an influential role in forming a character's personality. Both good parenting and bad parenting work well for me. Some works that I am investing now include Ordinary People, Hamlet, and Papa's Waltz. I would like a wide variety of film, literature, poetry, short stories, etc.

Thanks so much!
:hurray:

[Scheherazade]

Matilda

Oranges are not the Only Fruit

To Kill A Mockingbird

[kelby_lake]

I am currently searching for AP worthy literature in which parents play an influential role in forming a character's personality. Both good parenting and bad parenting work well for me. Some works that I am investing now include Ordinary People, Hamlet, and Papa's Waltz. I would like a wide variety of film, literature, poetry, short stories, etc.

Thanks so much!
:hurray:

The ultimate guides of bad parenting are Oedipus Rex and Medea. An important theme in Greek drama is the relations between generations of a family. Whatever the parents or other members of the family do, it will have an enormous impact on what the protagonist's fate is.

I highly recommend Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence if you're looking for a novel. It's about the protagonist's struggle to break away from his mother. She basically hovers over everything he does and he prevents himself from loving other women.

Also, Long day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.

[Bill 42]

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens has a dysfunctional family as its central theme. It won the Man Booker prize for 1970.

[varnish7]

The ultimate guides of bad parenting are Oedipus Rex and Medea.

How is Oedipus Rex a guide to bad parenting? Is it because of the whole kill your father, sleep with your mother thing? Or is it about Oedipus's biological parents leaving him to die? The first part wasn't really anyone's fault. And, as bad as it is to abandon a child to die, since I don't think Oedipus ever knew about that, or even that he was adopted, until later on I don't see how that would have any real effect on him growing up. AFAIK, Oedipus's adoptive parents were loving people.

I haven't read the play in a while, but I'm seriously not getting how bad parenting plays any real part in Oedipus Rex, much less as the "ultimate guide".

[Dark Muse]

Sons and Loves by D.H. Lawrence

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Blind Assassin and Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Private Altars by Katherine Mosby

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (I don't know if it makes a differences but it is about a girl in her adopted family)

[JuniperWoolf]

Yeah, Atwood's always good when you're looking for a book on bad parenting (I think someone had mommy issues).

More:

-Romeo and Juliet (duh)
-Mommy Dearest, by Christina Crawford
-A lot of the works by Kafka (Metamorphosis, The Judgement)
-Haha, you could take a weird spin with Paradise Lost and see Satan's relationship with God as a father/son dynamic, that would be pretty impressive
-Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams (highly reccomended, by me)
-Budding Brooks, by Thomas Mann

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, though the shear volume of the text may be too great for the time allowed in the semester, assuming you will have other projects.

Gilliatt

[kelby_lake]

How is Oedipus Rex a guide to bad parenting? Is it because of the whole kill your father, sleep with your mother thing?

Yeah, banging your son and having his four babies does not exactly equal the perfect mother.

Ah yeah, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof is great :) V. steamy.

[kiki1982]

What about Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles? That is BAD PARENTING! I mean, drunkenness, getting your daughter pregnant with a creep and everything when you know he's no good!

Jude the Obscure is also maybe a work of his that would appeal to the 'you are no good'-parent who shapes the later personality of a person. Quite sad, actually, although I found it somewhat boring in an odd way (sorry, Neely, was it?).

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights might be interesting as a case for both good and bad parenting and how it not always takes a hold. If you read Nelly as a kind of 'mother' to the children and Heathcliff... And how Catherine (Linton), Linton and Hareton turn out...

Did someone already mention King Lear? The two brother Edgar and Edmund and the three sisters Cordelia, Goneril and Regan and how they are shaped because their parents' attitude.

[Lokasenna]

I'm not a fan, but Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy is a powerful piece about her troubled relationship with her father.

[Dark Muse]

Yeah, banging your son and having his four babies does not exactly equal the perfect mother.

Ah yeah, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof is great :) V. steamy.

Though to be fair, as I recall they did not at the time actually know they were mother and son.

[Whifflingpin]

Bambi

[Veho]

I think Silas Marner by Eliot has examples of good parenting.

[JuniperWoolf]

Though to be fair, as I recall they did not at the time actually know they were mother and son.

But they did ditch him on some rock (or they thought that they had). If you wanted to work hard enough you could use some heady symbolism and make a connection between abandonment issues and sexual confusion, but that sounds like a lot of work for a loose thread when there were so many other good examples given (go with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I'm telling you).

[Dark Muse]

But they did ditch him on some rock (or they thought that they had). If you wanted to work hard enough you could use some heady symbolism and make a connection between abandonment issues and sexual confusion, but that sounds like a lot of work for a loose thread when there were so many other good examples given (go with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I'm telling you).

There were certainty a lot of morally questionable things they did, but I do not believe they were consciously committing incest.

[varnish7]

Yeah, banging your son and having his four babies does not exactly equal the perfect mother.

But it's not as if she knew he was her son. You can't really blame her for that.


But they did ditch him on some rock (or they thought that they had). If you wanted to work hard enough you could use some heady symbolism and make a connection between abandonment issues and sexual confusion, but that sounds like a lot of work for a loose thread when there were so many other good examples given (go with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I'm telling you).

The abandonment thing doesn't really work here either. Oedipus didn't grow up knowing that he had been abandoned and subsequently adopted. He thought his adoptive parents were his "real" parents and that's why he left his home town. It was to prevent the whole prophecy of killing his father and sleeping with his mother. Of course, you have to wonder about Oedipus sleeping with a woman who was, well, old enough to be his mother. Plus there's the fact that she's somehow young enough to be able to have 4 sons fathered by her oldest son.

For the parenting thing, maybe Flowers in the Attic .

[stlukesguild]

Lawrence Sterne's Tristan Shandy gives a loving, if dysfunctional look at parenting from the very point of conception. Of course there's always As I Lay Dying (among others of Faulkner's) for true dysfunctional parenting.

[OrphanPip]

The abandonment thing doesn't really work here either. Oedipus didn't grow up knowing that he had been abandoned and subsequently adopted. He thought his adoptive parents were his "real" parents and that's why he left his home town. It was to prevent the whole prophecy of killing his father and sleeping with his mother. Of course, you have to wonder about Oedipus sleeping with a woman who was, well, old enough to be his mother. Plus there's the fact that she's somehow young enough to be able to have 4 sons fathered by her oldest son.


Considering the time, it wouldn't be outrageous to presume Jocasta could have been 14 or 15 when she had her first child.

Edit: Though, people tended to be dead by 30 back then too.

[Wilde woman]

Since some of the discussion here is hinging on incest as a source of bad parenting, you may want to check out Book 8 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis for a Christian take on incest. Since in Christian mythology, the world began with only one man and woman, incest had to occur to keep the human race reproducing. Gower goes through and explores at what point it's NOT okay for incest to keep happening.

[bouquin]

An Obedient Father - Akhil Sharma
A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie
The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Abichie
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

[papayahed]

Barn Burning - William Faulkner
This probably doesn't count as lit. but those VC andrews novels where the kids are locked in the attic.
I am Charlotte Simmons (it's really about a chick going off to college but there is a good deal of her parents influence)

[papayahed]

How timely:

10 of the Best Parents in Fiction :
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/70203

[Taliesin]

Considering the time, it wouldn't be outrageous to presume Jocasta could have been 14 or 15 when she had her first child.

Edit: Though, people tended to be dead by 30 back then too.

This is getting terribly offtopic, but the average life expectancy at birth at those times tends to misrepresent the age most adult people would die at due to the high infant mortality. People who survived their first five years would probably die later than 30 years.

As for ontopic and outright abusive parenting, "The Evil" by Jan Guillou comes to mind. Also, "East of Eden".
Frankly, I'm afraid that there will be too many suggestions in this topic since very many books deal with the relationship between parents and their children.

[OrphanPip]

This is getting terribly offtopic, but the average life expectancy at birth at those times tends to misrepresent the age most adult people would die at due to the high infant mortality. People who survived their first five years would probably die later than 30 years.

As for ontopic and outright abusive parenting, "The Evil" by Jan Guillou comes to mind. Also, "East of Eden".
Frankly, I'm afraid that there will be too many suggestions in this topic since very many books deal with the relationship between parents and their children.

I'm pretty sure they base the estimates off of archeological samples of adults, its artificially lowered by war deaths more than child deaths. Although, high estimates place men at around 45 and women in their early 30s, because of the higher risk of death in childbirth. This doesn't mean though that some people didn't manage to make it to their 80s back then, just much less did.

If you include child deaths I think it drops to the early 20s.

(edit: Although, quality of life for upper class Athenians, when the play was written, would be higher than the general population too.)

[byquist]

film Billy Elliot; how a father changes his attitude

the father Mafia "Don" in "Mickey Blue Eyes" -- love for his daughter, respect for her finance. (comedy)

[kiki1982]

I'm pretty sure they base the estimates off of archeological samples of adults, its artificially lowered by war deaths more than child deaths. Although, high estimates place men at around 45 and women in their early 30s, because of the higher risk of death in childbirth. This doesn't mean though that some people didn't manage to make it to their 80s back then, just much less did.

If you include child deaths I think it drops to the early 20s.

(edit: Although, quality of life for upper class Athenians, when the play was written, would be higher than the general population too.)

Ok, off-topic me too :D.

I do believe that they do not actually correct the 'life-expectancy' by actually taking out all the babies that died. I also wonder how accurate those estimates are about ages where there are no records or registers at all. Essentially, the data they are dealing with consist of incomplete material.

Doing genealogical research, however, the life expectancy in the 19th century does not seem to be accurate. Like Taliesin said, once a child lived past 5, it had a good chance of becoming 60-70-80 though I must conceide that 90 and 100 was quite out of the question.
I just wonder how accurate 30 would be for women in Greek times as then they do not have a very great lot of time to have babies. Even if there were too many for the amount of men, then still, to have ten babies to replace the amount of deaths of both babies and adults, counting also the amount that dies in a first birth because of complications, I don't think a life-expectancy of thirty is good enough.

Though, of course as you said, Pip, the life expectancy of the well-to-do class in Athens must have been higher than that of the Greek workers.

[MUMUKSHA]

'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Little Women' are the only two that come to my mind right now as far as good parenting goes.
The ones that I can remember for bad parenting are Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman', Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers', Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' and 'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams.

[kelby_lake]

The Glass Menagerie is a good one, as is Death of A Salesman. Quite a few 20th century American plays are about the family, particularly for Miller and Williams.

[OrphanPip]

Doing genealogical research, however, the life expectancy in the 19th century does not seem to be accurate. Like Taliesin said, once a child lived past 5, it had a good chance of becoming 60-70-80 though I must conceide that 90 and 100 was quite out of the question.
I just wonder how accurate 30 would be for women in Greek times as then they do not have a very great lot of time to have babies. Even if there were too many for the amount of men, then still, to have ten babies to replace the amount of deaths of both babies and adults, counting also the amount that dies in a first birth because of complications, I don't think a life-expectancy of thirty is good enough.

Though, of course as you said, Pip, the life expectancy of the well-to-do class in Athens must have been higher than that of the Greek workers.

I'm not sure they would have that good a chance of making those ages. Even today, much of the world has life expectancies under 40, and this is with the near eradication of polio (mostly), eradication of smallpox, the rise in effective treatments to malaria and Tb, and the relatively common access to antibiotics. 30 is plenty of time to have babies, if they started at 16, they could manage as many as 14.

I looked it up, and the specific numbers, 34 for women and 45 for men, was derived from a sample of skeletons from an Athenian burial site. Aristotle apparently thought it was natural that women died younger than men, because they had less "heat" in their bodies. This is to be expected, many people would be dying regularly from infectious disease, so just by chance you don't expect the average lifespan to get much higher than that until modern medicine was developed. The ancient Greeks didn't understand infectious disease any more than Medieval Europeans did. I'd be fairly surprised if the massive slave labour pool the Athenians thrived off of really even lived that long on average.

[Snowqueen]

East of Eden serves a suitable example of both and good and parenting. Cyrus prefers Adam over Charles and when Adam plays role of a father he also fails to treat his boys equally. On the other hand Samuel Hamilton does a good upbringing of his nine children though he is a poor man.