The Haunting Despair in Gordon’s “Can We Love Our Battering Fathers?”: How it is created by Literary Devices and Devices of Emphasis In the essay by Helen H. Gordon, Gordon illustrates that her father is the primary cause of her despair. It is a reflective essay that shows how the relationship of Gordon to her father suffers from his beating of the mother. She expresses her haunting despair through the use of diction, parallelism, and allusion. The choice of words that Gordon uses paint an image of her despair. “What my sister and I have not been able to reconcile, is Dad’s treatment of Mother—gentle, loving Mother, who lived for her family and adored her husband, the quintessential traditional woman, domestic and submissive even to the point of martyrdom” (par. 5). She describes her mother as the very essence of a traditional woman. An image of a warm, gentle loving woman is seen. In contrast, Gordon describes the last act of violence of the father against the mother: “We watched in terror as Dad pushed Mother down two flights of stairs and pummeled her crumpled body as we ran, barefooted and nightgowned, for help” (par. 9) An image of an evil, violent man is seen breaking the very being of the mother. A young girl seeing her warm, loving mother being broken mentally is traumatizing. Gordon alludes to popular literary works of fiction to express her despair. In the beginning of the essay while picking out a Father’s Day card, she thinks of what Cordelia says to King Lear, “I love you according to my bond” (par. 1). Like Cordelia, she feels obligated to love her father because it is her duty as a daughter and nothing more. She parallels this statement in the end, and personalizes it by adding the word “daddy”, which shows that her feelings remain the same after picking out a humorous card for her father. Gordon reveals that her father becomes a different person when alcohol is involved. “But when he drank so much as a glass of beer, his face would become contorted, his eyes red-rimmed, his speech slurred and snarling” (par. 6). This is a suggested literary allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Gordon suggestively compares alcohol to the potion that the composed Dr. Jekyll drinks to metamorphose into a disgusting, violent sociopath. This explains why her father was infuriated when her mother parked her car in the usual place then beat her. Gordon uses parallel structure to emphasize the weight of her father’s engulfing presence on her family. One example is “Every blow he dealt to my mother’s body was inevitably a blow to our father-daughter relationship” (par. 17). Another example is when Gordon describes how mother devised a plan to help protect her and the family from the father: “If she could get Dad to bed and let him sleep it off, the danger would pass. If Dad was not home by suppertime, we learned to clear out of the house and go to a movie. If Dad was asleep when we got home, we sneaked in and went to bed; if not, we sought friends who would keep us overnight” (par.7) The conditional clauses used here reflect the heavy impact of the father. The mother is trying her best to escape his rage and abuse while keeping the family together.
In the end, it is clear how the father-daughter bond is wrecked by the father’s abuse towards the mother. Overall, Gordon effectively uses the literary devices of diction, parallelism, and allusion to portray the haunting despair she feels that is caused by her father.