The Bookshelf: Exemplary Fathers in Classic Literature

The request of Public Discourse’s editors that we name our favorite literary fathers turned out to be more difficult than it first appeared to be, at least for me: the more I thought about it, the more it struck me how many of the notable figures of literature are orphans, or at least fatherless. Charles Dickens’s novels are planted thick with fatherless protagonists: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Nell Trent, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Esther Summerson, and Pip Pirrip—all have lost their dads, and sometimes both parents. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer is an orphan, and Huck Finn has a ne’er-do-well father whose death can only be considered a boon to him. Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins is an orphan. C. S. Lewis’s Pevensie children have their great adventures while parted from their nonentity parents. P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster is an orphan, beleaguered by domineering aunts. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is an orphan, as is her sister Emily’s Heathcliff. George Eliot’s Dorothea and Celia Brooke are orphans taken in by their uncle. And so on. Even the supreme novelist of domestic life does not give us much paternal material to work with: Jane Austen’s heroines either have no fathers (Elinor and Marianne Dashwood), or their dads are disappointed men (Mr. Price, Rev. Morland), or foolish ones (Mr. Elliot, Mr. Woodhouse); only Mr. Bennet shows any admirable qualities, and he doesn’t exactly rule his household very effectively. 

Thank heaven for Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn. Who? He is the father of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, and a major character in the first two volumes of Undset’s trilogy set in fourteenth-century Norway. Lavrans is a good man through and through, a noble landowner who sincerely cares about his tenants and servants. When we meet him, he and his wife, Ragnfrid, have already suffered the loss of three infant sons, and Lavrans dotes on the lovely Kristin. Pious and just, Lavrans can be righteously judgmental but is never self-righteous; when his beloved Kristin strays into grave sin with a man she was not supposed to marry—but then does—Lavrans ultimately reconciles himself to his daughter’s choice of husband. His extended death scene in the second volume, The Wife, is one of the most affecting sequences in the entire work, as Lavrans gently takes leave of his servants, his daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren, and last of all his wife (their marriage has not been the happiest one). It is fair to say that in the entire work, “what would Lavrans do?” is the moral yardstick all the characters measure themselves against, even long after he is gone. He is a father for all seasons. 

Nathaniel Peters, Contributing Editor 

Over the past few months, I’ve been reading Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Like Matt, I’ve observed that Kristin’s father, Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn, is one of the great fathers in literature. A man of deep faith, he serves his king in battle and builds a flourishing estate for his family. His strength is manifest not just in physical feats but in acts of love and service. He defies custom to allow his daughter to marry the potentially unworthy man of her choosing and supports her despite the suffering it causes him. He dies well, surrounded by neighbors who respect him and a family that loves him, satisfied that he has discharged his duties as guardian of the estate. 

Micah Watson, Contributing Editor

My favorite literary father does not have much going for him. His earthly possessions are scant. His wife has abandoned him. He is fighting a terminal disease, has trouble sleeping, and he has no food, no friends and no future. His author didn’t even bother to give him a name, or even punctuation in the story in which he appears. With one exception, the narration simply refers to him as “the man.” That exception, however, outweighs every other detail about the man. He is called “Papa” by his son, and in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road that man with his son has (almost) everything despite having next to nothing. For the sake of that son the man endures a world in which any decent person seeing the horrors, starvation, violence, cannibalism, and unspeakable abuse would be tempted to throw up his hands and curse God and die. The man does not do this. He is angry with God, and his faith seems broken. But he endures because he loves his son, and despite the book’s bleak world acting as an incarnation of the problem of evil, the man passes on the fire to his son because that is his job given by God. That he does not entirely know what it means to pass on the fire does not lessen the import of his doing so. Sometimes fathering means doing more than perfectly understanding.   

The Road is not exactly a father’s manual on how to raise a son. There’s so much more I’d want a father to say to his son, more to teach, more to show. But the father in The Road gives his life for his son, even as his son acts as a sort of mediator between the father and God himself. The goodness in his son keeps the man tethered somehow to God. And by the end the man is the mediator between the son and God. The son tries to pray to God but that doesn’t really work, so he talks to his papa, and somehow through that can talk to God. 

I love this because I think this is how many of us relate to God, most of the time. We are God’s presence to other people, and God presents himself to us through other people. This “presenting” is not unique to fathers of course, but fathers nevertheless present God the Father in a way that only fathers can. The Road is not for everyone. But for those who can read it, “the man” may bring to mind one’s own earthly father, and hopefully will spur those of us who are fathers to do our utmost to better re-present God the Father to our own children. 

Marc DeGirolami, Contributing Writer  

My three favorite fathers are from Victorian literature. I’m choosing this particular era because these fathers tend to get a bad rap: some say they’re overbearing, prejudiced, chauvinist, closed-minded, and so on. That’s what gets associated with the masculinity of Victorian England. But these are really quite excellent fathers, and they deserve some affection. 

• Mr. Harding, father of Eleanor Harding and the hero of Trollope’s The Warden: a dutiful (single) father and a dignified, tragic figure who does not compromise himself for “the cause” of the day. 

• Mr. Garth, father of Mary Garth in Eliot’s Middlemarch: a decent, kind-hearted, honest sort, simultaneously an abject failure in business and a devoted family man. As Eliot puts it: “He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.”  

• Mr. Peggotty: my favorite of all Victorian fathers, even though not a biological father. He is the true father in Dickens’s David Copperfield, a great-hearted man, and the de facto father that the many orphans of the story need and come to love (as did I).  

Michael Fragoso, Contributing Writer 

Perhaps not the most admirable literary father, my favorite has long been Edward “Ned” Ryder, father of Charles Ryder, the narrator in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He was played magnificently by Sir John Gielgud in the Granada miniseries and at some level is a source of comic relief. (“‘Oh dear,’ said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, ‘how delightful to see you again so soon.’ (I had been abroad fifteen months.)”) 

In the book there’s rather more menace in him than in the miniseries—or at least in how he’s perceived by Charles. There’s the story of how he relished driving out Charles’s Aunt Philippa. There’s the joy he seemed to take at his son’s financial improvidence. 

“‘Your cousin Melchior was imprudent with his investments and got into a very queer street. He went to Australia.’ 

“I had not seen my father so gleeful since he found two pages of second-century papyrus between the leaves of a Lombardic breviary.” 

But Charles’s lingering resentment overlooks his father’s paternal loyalty. He has no objection to Charles’s returning home and maintaining some level of hospitality. (“You must tell Hayter what you would like and he will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one comes to see me. But while you are here, you must have what you like.”) He provides a generous allowance to his son—if not so generous that it covers both Charles’s toffish lifestyle and that of his lordling especial friend. 

And early in the book he provides great advice about advice: 

Do you know in the summer before I was going up, your cousin Alfred rode over to Boughton especially to give me a piece of advice? And do you know what that advice was? ‘Ned, he said, ‘there’s one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.’ And do you know,” continued my father, snuffling deeply, “I always did? Some men did, some didn’t. I never saw any difference between them or heard it commented on, but I always wore mine. It only shows what effect judicious advice can have, properly delivered at the right moment. I wish I had some for you, but I haven’t.” 

Advice matters because authority matters. And if you don’t have something productive to say, perhaps don’t say anything at all. Ned Ryder knew his own limits and enforced them with ironic mirth. 

Devorah Goldman, Contributing Editor 

A friend recently shared with me a poem by Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays, which ends with these lines:  

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

The full poem is a tribute to a good and hardworking, austere and lonely father. Matthew Cuthbert, the adoptive father of Anne Shirley in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, might have been destined to be this sort of man: silent, stoic, and rather neglected. Matthew and his sister, Marilla, planned to provide a home for a boy who would become a farmhand. Instead, they became parents to an impractical young girl. Matthew barely speaks, but he understands Anne in ways Marilla cannot; he enjoys Anne’s patter in part because it is a kindness to let her talk. “We might be of some good to her,” Matthew insisted when deciding to keep Anne rather than send her back to the orphanage in exchange for the would-be farmhand. That was all that he, and many good dads, sought. 

Elizabeth Kirk, Contributing Writer 

This past year, my mother, my sisters, and I have been immersed in exploring fatherhood, through our participation in the national book club, Well-Read Mom. The mission of WRM is to accompany women “in the reading of great books and spiritual classics . . . to explore the human condition and reorient ourselves to what is good, beautiful, and true.” Founded in 2012, WRM dedicates each year to a unique theme, providing a curated book list and supplementary audios, author or critic interviews, and discussion questions. During this Year of the Father, we encountered an array of portrayals of fatherhood, from noble to deeply flawed, through characters such as the father in Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” whose quiet labor revealed unspoken love; the grace-filled, healing touch of Jeremiah Land in Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River; the pious and courageous Aeneas, founder-father of the Roman people, in Virgil’s Aeneid; the ambitious, tragic Kino in John Steinbeck’s The Pearl; and the two grieving fathers in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, who must confront their shortcomings to understand their sons, one another, and their fractured fatherland. 

Through literary fathers such as these we reflect on the fathers in our own lives, whose imperfect efforts and quiet sacrifices of love shape us. Inspired by WRM, I find myself drawn to revisit my own favorite fictional father, Lavrans Bjørgulfsson from Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Lavrans is a tender father who, with his wife, pours himself out for their young daughters, forming them with love through his own example of faith, steadfastness, and hard work. When faced with his daughter Kristin’s willfulness, Lavrans suffers the heart-rending pain recognized by every bitterly disappointed parent who must witness a beloved child suffer consequences, trusting that experience will guide her beyond the bounds of his protective care. The story reveals that the just and merciful love of the Father respects human freedom and yet provides a tether we may grasp to return home. 

John Doherty, Contributing Writer

Like Matt Franck, I too have difficulty recalling admirable father figures from great literature. But there one noteworthy, albeit flawed, father figure did come to my mind: Sir Thomas Bertram, foster father to Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Fanny’s biological father, as Matt mentions, is not to be recommended. In the first page or two of the book we are told he is a soldier, “without education, fortune, or connections,” now “disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor, and [having] a very small income to supply [the] wants” of his “still increasing family” of eight (soon to be nine) children. In desperation his wife, Mrs. Price, reaches out to her sisters for help, and in time Fanny is adopted into the wealthy, aristocratic family of her aunt Lady Bertram, who lives with Sir Thomas Bertram in their country manor, called Mansfield Park. We hear nothing more of Mr. Price until Fanny visits home years later, closer to the novel’s end, after she has grown into a refined young woman in the Bertram household. When Fanny first meets him after so many years of separation, he hardly notices her, coming into his home in high spirits, swearing like a sailor (as he is), talking endlessly of his day idling by the docks of Portsmouth, and then sitting down to read the paper in silence. Fanny is left “sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits” and his disinterest in her or in the relatives who had raised her, who had done him such a favor. Soon into her stay, she discovers her father’s home to be chaotic:

Here, everybody was noisy, every voice was loud. . . . Whatever was wanted, was halloo’d for, and the servants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.

Sir Thomas, master of the home to which she had grown accustomed, was no ideal man himself.  Like Mr. Price, he seems to have chosen his wife (of “easy and indolent” temper) not from admiration of any virtues but from youthful infatuation with her beauty—a flaw that reappears in one of his sons. Although he is concerned for the well-being of those under his charge, Sir Thomas, like Mr. Price, shows a lack of emotional depth that negatively affects his family. He speaks much of duty, but he inspires a fearful awe in his children that suppresses their natural spirits, many of which are quite lively. In consequence they fail to be frank with him about their emotions, even in the very grave matter of the decision of whom to marry (with moral consequences more disastrous than anything at the Price home). And when Fanny makes a sound judgment about her marriage that he disapproves of, his severity is almost unbearable to her.

And yet, if at first impression Sir Thomas seems cold and cerebral, over time we come to realize that, beneath the surface, lies a good, highly conscientious man, genuinely trying to do right, and often successfully. We see hints of this in the beginning, when he balks at the idea of bringing Fanny into his family, not from miserliness or indifference, but because he rightly recognized “it was a serious charge.” Taking a girl from her natural family, he reflected, could “be cruelty instead of kindness.” What if she and his own children did not get along well? What if, because of her parents’ humbler class, she could not marry into wealth after having gotten used to it living with the Bertrams? But Sir Thomas’s goodness becomes most obvious when Fanny realizes what a happy home he had, in contrast to her parents’ house:

At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted. If tenderness could be ever supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place; and as to the little irritations, . . . they were short, they were trifling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared with the ceaseless tumult of her present abode.

Jane Austen was disappointed that Mansfield Park did not succeed as she had hoped. To this day, Pride and Prejudice remains her most popular work; and its heroine, the confident, energetic Elizabeth Bennet, going from one ball and house to the next, is much better known and loved than the self-doubting and retiring Fanny Price, who spends her whole adolescence on the quiet estate of her uncle and aunt. And yet, I suggest, Mansfield Park presents the best home, and the best father, of all Austen’s novels. The imperfect Sir Thomas did nothing that would catch headlines, but he did his duty, day by day, according to his best lights, as the best real fathers do.

Why are there so few good fathers in literature and film? Perhaps because art works on the senses and emotions, which delight most easily in what dazzles. But if a father does his job well, his home will be like Sir Thomas’s—uninteresting in its “regular course of cheerful orderliness,” which one can easily take for granted, as Fanny did, until one leaves it.

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.