Questioning the Father: From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy.(Review) (book review)

Journal of European Studies, December, 2000 by WHITE, NICHOLAS

Questioning the Father: From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy. By Ross Shideler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 226.

Professor Shideler draws in his opening lines the historical map over which his lucid literary analyses are traced:

From Adam to Oedipus, from Moses to Lear, patriarchy and authority in Western culture have been synonymous. Kings, popes, heads of state, and male heads of families have been invested with authority based on either a divine premise or a natural one (...) Authority passed from one king, pope, or father to the next, sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently, but the enshrined legitimacy of the patriarchy as the foundation of authority remained intact until the late eighteenth or...