The Phenomenon of “ Father Absence” Reflections on Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.

Abstract

The father-absence is a widespread phenomenon in the society nowadays. However, it is recently that people notice the psychological importance of father as a significant influence on female character development. Empirical research has demonstrated various negative outcomes for females in single-parent homes such as being overshy, self-abandoned as well as indifferent to the sorrounding, all of which influence their life-choice. This paper deals with this problem mainly from how psychologically father-absence affects the development of the female character which strongly decides their fate based on Stephan Zweig’s novel: Letter from an Unknown Woman.

Key words: father-absence， the Name-of-the-Father

1. Introduction Letter from an Unknown Woman is one of the most famous novels composed by Austrian writer Stephan Zweig. Its cyclically-told tale of romantic yearning and pining for love is embodied in the doomed, delusional relationship of the two romantic leads: a young neighbor girl's steadfast, sacrificial love for a self-absorbed, dilettante writer. Zweig uses the form of the woman’s monologue as a letter to show us a tragic story of her whole life: how she falls in love with her neighbor, keeps faith for him through her whole life while the man has never recognized or remembered her. Many critics believe that the root-cause of this love-tragedy lies in the indifference roused by materialism during people’s relationship. However apart from this, there is a psychological barrier in the character of this heroin, which should also pay the price. We can deduce from the novel that she is shy, sensitive, self-enclosed and holdfast to the people she loves. To some extent, her struggle with the fate seems to be pale for it is through this character that her own tragic fate has already been destined: falling love with a dude so deeply while never having told him the truth of her endless waiting. Nevertheless her complicated character proves a deep connection with the special family background that she is from a single family whose father has died long before. Here I will take a psychoanalytical point of view trying to analyze how this father-absence influences her character, which severely affects her behavior and leads to the final tragedy.

2. Analysis on how father-absence affects her character Zweig writes in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, that “my main interest in writing has always been the psychological representation of persons and their lives”, so is in the Letter from an Unknown Women. The heroin is from a broken family in which she never enjoys the love and care given by her father in the childhood. At the first glance, it seems has little to cope with the forming of her character, let along the final fate several years from then. But if we peer deeper into her hidden mind, we can find that the experience of father-absence in her growing procession has already fixed a trauma in the unconsciousness, which greatly influences her way of cognition and behavior. Actually, her character of shy, timid, fixative and self-enclosed reveals the symptoms of paranoia and compulsory enforcement from the psychoanalytical perspective because of the “syndrome of father-absence”. In order to achieve the core of this problem better, I will mainly focus on the two questions as follows: what is the function of the father on female personality development? And how father-absence leads to the symptoms in her character, which leads to the final tragedy? 2.1 The function of the father 2.1.1 General introduction to the function of the father Father has a significant influence on the children’s personality development. In china, there is an old saying that: it is father’s responsibility to educate children. In fact, the function of the father is to impose a image for the children to learn, during which interaction, the child’s super-ego is constructed on the mode of its father’s super-ego; the contents that fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value, which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation. In this way the children obtain the ability to judge the world and deal with various problems in daily life. Empirical research comparing single-parent, usually mother-headed families, with two-parent families has demonstrated various negative outcomes for children in single-parent homes. Many of these symptoms, such as deficits in cognitive and social competence, as well as internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems, have underlying psychodynamic bases in disturbances in object relations, separation-individuation, aggression, and sexual identity, all of which influence personal identity and self cohesion. To some extent,these disturbances stem from the lack of certain functions performed by a dependable, nurturing father-figure. These experiences result in shame and suffering for the child, prompting resentment and anger, in having been deprived of father support. In some individuals this may lead to a sense of entitlement, that is, the attitude of having unjustly endured special suffering and thus deserving special consideration. 2.1.2 Analyzing father’s function on the female perspective However, the function of the father should be distinguished between the boys and girls dring their processions to form the personalities. The case of the girls is somewhat more complicated at Oedipus complex in which father plays a fundamental part in the structuring of the personality, and in the orientation of human desire. In terms of grils, Odeipus complex changes its form into Electra complex, which means a desire for the death of the mother while a sexual desire for the father, to be more precise, a desire for father’s phallus which they do not have. Before the Electra complex, girls could not recognize the differences between two genders and they believe the anatomical construction of their fathers is just the same as themselves so in this period they intend to cast their love on the mother. According to Jacques Lacan, the famous french psychoanalyst, with the interference of the father, girls discover the distinctions between the sexes and may feel themselves to have been deprived of a penis by the mother rather than actually by the father. Thus they enter the most important stage in Electra phase: castration complex which initiates the research that leads her to desire the paternal penis. In this way, they transfer their love-object from the mother to the father and gain the capability to choose the right love-object. Lacan believes that it is the function of the father that breaks this chaos in the Electra phase or Oedipal phase. For Lacan, father, rather than being a person, becomes a signifier or a structuring principle of the Symbolic order, which is the so-called Name-of-the-Father, or the Law-of-the-Father, or sometimes just the Law. Submission to the Law of the Father is required in order to enter into the Symbolic order. Only when girls are fully aware of the Name-of-the-father can they identify their ego to establish a symbolic order using language to express themselves well and will they no longer addict to the Imaginary order as they usually do in the Electra phase. Otherwise, they will retreat from the battle to overcome the influence of the Castration threaten and the Electra complex from where her deformity of the character originate. What is worth? Some girls will stay in the imaginary realm always perusing the phallus which may lead to great suffer of neurosis like paranoia and some kinds of compulsory enforcement. With the presence of the father, girls obtain an invisible power from the super-ego of the father to break through the incestuous relationship with the mother which help them to accomplish this Electra phase more successfully and to develop a fully personality or their super-ego, as Freud would say “the voice of the conscious” (Breger, 1989, 113), more easily. Sigmund Freud writes in his book “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” that “Every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life.” (Freud, 1911, 213) The father-absence do cause great damage to the development of character on female, sometimes may even lead to neurosis. Lacan has pointed out that in the psychological mechanics of the patients bothered by the neurosis, the Law -of -the- Father has not been constructed. For those girls whose fathers are absent in the daily life, they are likely to have the difficulties in establishing the conception of the Law –of- the- father in the psychological system to break the disturbance caused by the Electra complex. More than often, they stay in the Imaginary level holding a strong desire for father, particularly his phallus, to make compensation for her castration anxiety which inaugurates the period of latency and precipitates the formation of the super-ego. Usually, their Electra complex culminates in a desire, which is long retained, to receive a baby from their fathers as a gift to bear him a child especially at the puberty when the complex is surmounted with a varying degree of success by means of a particular sort of object-choice, mainly revealed as the choice of the love-object. The common feature of these father-absent girls is that they intend to fell in love with the man who is much older than them and who can give them the sensation of mature and security as the substitute of their father. Obviously now, the father-absence has formed a trauma in the unconsciousness which throw many negative impacts on the character of the girls. Generally, these girls are over-shy, depressed, inferior, self-enclosed and indifferent to the outside world. Consider the case of Laura; she is from a broken family who has been deserted by her father at a very small age. At first, Laura just seems to her fellow students to be absent-minded and nerdish because she would walk by them without noticing them, usually hurrying back to her room after classes. She stays in her room most of the time, and appears completely indifferent in socializing with anyone in the dorm. Eventually, it becomes clear that she wasn’t shy or awkward with social skills. She just doesn’t have any interest to the outside world. Study made by Fleck JR, Fuller CC, Malin SZ, Miller DH and Acheson KR also demonstrates that the father psychologically absent girls are related to a greater frequency and extent of heterosexual behaviors, early pregnancy, increased anxiety as a personality trait and increased anxiety in a dating situation. So we can see how fatal father’s function for the girls to form a sound personality, which directly link with their fate in the future. 2.2 The influence of father-absence on the character of the herion in Letter from an Unknown Women The heroin in the Letter from an Unknown Women is such a sucessful character for it is so truthful to the social prototype. The great impact of father-absence makes her such a paradoxical character that on one hand, she swallows all the bitterness in the fate willingly believing it is the only way out, on the other hand, she curses this fate and tries, though in vain, to change it. Her character reflects the common features of the grils whose fathers are absent in the Electra complex to be overshy, inferior, self-enclosed and somewhat stubborn showing the symptoms of the combination of paranoia and compulsory enforcement which are deep concerned with the father-absence. To some extent, it is because of her character of paranoia and compolsion rather than the fate that the final damagy has been distained for fate is profoundly determined by the character of the subjuct. 2.2.1 Analyzing on how compulsory enforcement originating from the father-absence affects her fate. Compulsory enforcement contributes a huge effect to the the character of the protagonist in Letter from an Unknown Women, it is the emphasizer of her rough fate. In psychoanalysis, compulsory enforcement implies a from of behaviour to which the subject is obliged by an internal constraint whearas the subject in this case dose not have any feeling of conscious dissent from his action, which are nonetheless carried out in accordance with unconscious prototypes. As Freud once said that the conpulsory enforcement is “the product of an interplay between opposing forces in the mind.” (Breger, 1989, 142) The compulsory enforcement may specialize in various forms, and on the protagonist in Letter from an Unknown Woman, it mainly expresses in character to be the compulsion of self-enclosed which also has deep connection with the father-absence.. When she has moved away with her mother and stepfather to Innsbruck, in almost two years, she encloses herself, leading a life as “a prisoner and an outcast”. (Zweig, 1922,11) Everyone treats her well, she could have a happy life if she accept their love and care. However, instead, she rejects all the benevolence and chooses to lock herself, according to her own words: “I did not wish to be happy, I did not wish to live content away from you; so I buried myself in a gloomy world of self torment and solitude. I would not wear the new and gay dresses they bought for me. I refused to go to concerts or to the theatre, and I would not take part in cheerful excursions. I rarely left the house.” (Zwei, 1922, 11) Through cautious analysis, we can find that her behavior to lock herself is not a haphazard but a compromize between the desire for the man—the replacement of her father and the temptation from outside world. To some extent, this compulsion of self-enclosed also deep relates to the sorriness of the father-absence. In order to fulfill the loss of father-absence, she focuses all the attension on the neighbor man who is her substitute for the real father. Once she has to leave him, self-enclosement becomes the only weapon to safeguard her love in which way she can always think of him, hold his images. Somehow, the compulsory enforcement of self-enclosement is merging with the paranoia to determine her fate, for it is in the self-enclosement that she tramps deeper into the imaginary world and holds more firmly to love her neighbor. 2.2.2 Analyzing on how paranoia originating from the father-absence affects her character to make life-choice Paranoia has cast magnifisent influence on the her character to make life-decisions witnessing the beginning, prolongation and the destruction of her tragic fate. Generally speaking, paranoia can be subdivided into two branches. One is paranoid state which means a chronic psychosis characterised by more or less systematised delusion, with a predominace of ideas of reference but with no weakening of the intellect. And the character of people suffering this externalizes to be shy, timid, indifferent and centred on the phantasy. The other one is extremeness, holding too fast to the belifs, especially the love-object. To some extent, paranoia is the sequela of the Oedipus complex or Electra complex which father plays a fundemental role, for paranoia mainly happens at the level of Imaginary realm. As for those father-absent females, according to Lacan’ theory, they do not have the conception of the Name-of-the-Father, let along use it to break the bondage of Imaginary level to enter the Symbolic world then get into the Real. And we can also clearly perceive the traits of these two branches in the character of the protagnist in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Paranoia proves to be very dengerious which may lead to delusion of persecusion and threaten one’s life. Even Zweig himself sufferes badly from this paranoia, disillusioned and isolated, he committed suicide with his second wife near Rio de Janeiro on February 23, 1942. Self-indulgence in the phantasy may be the most fundmental feature shown in the character of the herion in Letter from an Unknown Woman. It is in her own phantasy that she falls in love with her neighbour which begins her endless waiting as she admits in the letter: “Everything that stirred in me, all that happened to me, seemed to be centred upon you, upon my imaginings of you.”. (Zweig, 1922, 7) Even before she has actually seen him, there was a halo round his head: he was enveloped in an atmosphere of wealth, marvel, and mystery. In the letter, she addresses: I tried to picture you in my mind. You must be an old man with spectacles and a long, white beard, like our geography master, but much kinder, nicer-looking, and gentler. I don't know why I was sure that you must be handsome, for I fancied you to be an elderly man. That very night, I dreamed of you for the first time. (Zweig, 1922, 5) We notice here it is a bespectacled, good-natured old fellow that she has expected to see. But why she automatically imagines him to be an old man? Somehow the image of old man is the compensation for her resentment of losing father at a very early age. Psychoanalysists now have already noticed a tendency that the father-absent females intend to find a husband who possesses of the qunlities of maturity and sureness just like a father. And on this girl, the traits of Electra complex can be clearly observed. Because of the father-absence, she always has a strong desire in the unconsciousness to grasp anything that can be used to substitute the father and his phallus. Thus from the very beginning, the position she sets for her neighbour is the substitution of her father whom she fixes as the love-object. Though things turn out to be totally opposite that this man is a young fellow at the age of twenty-five, this phantasy has already fulfilled her satisfaction of purchasing a love-object just like her father. Naturally, she transfers her love on the neighbour hoping that she can find back the sorriness of losing father. If we say that the self-indulgence in the phantasy marks the beginning of her rough fate, her characters of shy, timid and indifferent to the outside world are the great impetus to prolong her tragic fate.All through her life, the man dosen’t recognize her, which she resorts to the fate, something beyond her control, as she laments in her letter to the man: “You did not recognize me, either then or later. How can I describe my disappointment? However that was my fate in life, and it shall be my fate in death likewise. ” (Zweig, 1922, 27) We may suppose that if she has told him the whole story, things may change into be another way around. However she dosen’t speak to the man how much she loves him, though at last she writtes a letter as the struggle against the fate to tell him the truth, she dosen’t speak, face to face, to him about her feeling. To some extent, it isn’t that she doesn’t want to speak, but she can’t because in her subconscious mechanism, she dosen’t set up the conception of the-Name-of-the-Father to break the confinement of the Imaginary realm which means that she can not construct the Symbolic order using language to express her feeling freely. And coincidently, in this letter, we can not find the her name nor has she ever mentioned it. Name in psychoanlaysis has a special meaning that it stands for the heritagy children suceed from their fathers which help to establish the idea of the-Name-of-Father. According to Lacan, name is a signifier(word) to overcome the signified(subject) representing the ability to use words to indentify oneself without which the children can’t have the courage to face the changes in life. Thus, father-absence for her is a trauma so deep rooted from the childhood experience that it has a powerful restriction on her behaviour to pour our the emotion for she fears that the catharsis of feeling may damage the substitution she used to compensate for the desire of the absent father. From this aspect, it is understandable that her character truns out to be shy, timid and indifferent to the outside which can guarantee her inner satisfaction and in return suppress the words to tell the truth. We can sense this suppression especially in her last confrontation with the man when she finds out what is waiting for her is another time of oblivion. She sobs in the letter: “I longed to throw myself at your feet, crying: "Take me with you, that you may at length came to know me, at length after all these years!" But I was timid, cowardly, slavish and weak. All I could say was: "What a pity." ” (Zweig, 1922, 24) Actually, rather than fate, it is this shy, timid and indifferent character that make her suffer a lot in the perchase of love. Somehow, we could not neglect the danger of these symptoms for it is now a widespread phenomenon on the girls who have the same experence of father-absent in the society . If we do not take it seriously, the consequence will be serious. Let us look into the case of Lily whose father has died when she was five. Like the protagnist in the novel, she posessed a character of shy and indifference, keeping silent to everyting happened on her. She bore all the bad things in life alone, even the long-term abuse from her boyfriend. At last, without telling anyone, she committed suiside by jumping out of the window from her house on the 11th floor. She was the typical victim of a character of shy and indifferent to outside world. Holding fast to the love must be the most prominent hallmark shown in her character, which penetrates her whole life. However, it is through this character that the final fate has been destined—destruction. Someone may feel strange that in all her life, how can she have just fallen in love with one man: her neighbor. Though she has parted from his for several years, though he has never recognized her, she still keep faithful to him from the age of thirteen, as she puts in the letter: “The upshot was that everything which surged up in me, all which in other girls of my age is usually scattered, was focused upon you.” (Zweig, 1922, 8), to the end of her life. For him, she refuses the proposal of a gentlemen who loves her like his own daughter, refuses the chance to be a countess, simply because of her explanation that: “In my innermost self, in the unconscious, I continued to dream the dream of my childhood that some day, perhaps, you would call me to your side, were it only for an hour. For the possibility of this one hour I rejected everything else, simply that I might be free to answer your call. Since my first awakening to womanhood, what had my life been but waiting, a waiting upon your will!” (Zweig, 1922, 22) Now the question lies in what support her mind to love him all through her life? As I have mentioned her family background above, she has lost her father early in the childhood, which implants in the subconscious mind a strong desire for her father. Finally, she finds a man who can make up the loss originated from the father-absence, she just can not let it go so easily. Only when she fulfills this desire can she transfer love on other men. Otherwise the trauma of father-absence will become obstacles to interfere the transition of feeling just like what this girl has done in the novel to focus all her attention only on the one she loves while drop out other choices she can choose to find happiness. Her tragedy also subjects to the belief that her violent pain of loving him can be relieved if she bear a baby of his which is another form she uses to hold her love. Lacan, however, attributes the cause of this belief to the unfinished Electra stage. Because of the father-absence, the strong desire for father cannot be satisfied, let along his phallus. Thus girls intend to bear a baby as the replacement of the phallus of father. For the heroin in the novel, the same things happen. Everyday she is tortured by the helpless enthusiasm to the man she can’t get, it is not her fate but her desire to be seduced by this man and bear him a baby for the compensation. In her monologue, we can perceive this desire clearly: “it was you reborn-not the happy and care-free you, whom I could never hope to keep; but you, given to me for my very own, flesh of my flesh, intimately intertwined with my own life. At length I held you fast; I could feel your life-blood flowing through my veins; I could nourish you, caress you, kiss you, as often as my soul yearned. That was why I was so happy when I knew that I was with child by you, and that is why I kept the secret from you. Henceforward you could not escape me; you were mine. ” (Zweig, 1922, 19) However, she dosen’t realize that it is her attitude of treating the baby as the compensation for her lover that her tragedy has been destined. As the vanish of the child, her heart breaks which also means that she has lost the symbol of father’ phallus. To some extent, it is her character of holding too fast to her love-object that kills herself after the death of her son for she has lost the dream which supports her to endure the bitterness of life.

3. Current situation of father-absence and its improvement. The current situation of father-absence is somewhat urgent. As the rising of the devorce rate, millions of the single-parent families appear, most of which are under the custody of the mother. In America, the number of the single-parent family has exceeded ten million taking the proportion of one third over the total family while in China, this number has achieved four to five million.（source?）Because of this single-family, obstacles will be made to stop father from seeing their children, let along taking care of them. Statistics in 2002（sourse?）show that, in America, forty-two percent of the children whose parents have devorced haven’t seen their father for more than a year. And in Russia, things are much worse, fifty percent of the children from the mother-dominate famliy can only see their father once in a way while thirty-five percent of them never meet their fathers. Even in the full family, the phenomenon of father-absence still exists. According to an investigation made in German and Japan, the average time father spend with the their children are 11 minutes and 9 minutes respectively. Now the fatalness of this father-absence has already shown in the psycho-mechanism to interfere the character development of the children, especially girls. They are likely to be over-shy, depressed, self-abandoned, indifferent to the outside world and keep distance from the surrounding. In an earlier study by Kalter and Rembar at Children's Psychiatric Hospital, University of Michigan, a sample of 144 adolescent patients, whose parents had divorced, presented with three most commonly occurring problems: • 63% Subjective psychological problem (defined as anxiety, sadness, pronounced moodiness, phobias, and depression) • 56% Poor grades or grades substantially below ability and/or recent past performance • 43% Aggression toward parents
In the study, they also surprisingly found out that these famales who share the same experence of father-absence suffer from various compulsory enforcements which greatly inflence the choice and quality of their lives. One of the most prominent feature is that they all have difficulty in dealing with their personal relationship with males, either too cautious or too self-indulgent. As a girl who has the trauma of father-absence, I have also experienced the compulsion of objecting hunter for males. Each time when I find I may fall in love with certain man, I will try my best to cease this feeling, which makes me almost lose the ablity to love someone. So we can see how terrible the phnomenon of father-absence will lead to if we keep on neglecting this problem. It is, then, cheerful to find that fathers' contribution to family and how their presence affects children have been reexamined in recent years. The increasing recognition that father absence has led to a variety of crippling social illnesses seems to be leading to a renewed appreciation of fathers' contributions to the emotional and developmental well being of their children. The growing awareness that father has the responsibility to be involved in the raising of their children has led to a reconfiguration of family law such that now many Western countries require the father should stay at home for one month after the baby is born helping his wife to look after the child. Meanwhile fathers has now also realized his responsibility in family, thus, they pay more attention to their children and participate much more actively in educating the children. Newly-formed fathers’ movements, particularly separated fathers wishing to maintain contact with their children after divorce, have during the 1990s attempted to force judges and policy-makers to change assumptions on policy and law that the mother is always the primary carer. In England, in the past three years, the number of the full-time father has increased from forty-four thousand to eighty-nine thousand, which is still enlarging. Almost ninety percent of fathers are now present at childbirth, compared to ten percent a generation ago. It has become common for fathers to worry that they won’t bond with their children if they are not in the delivery room. We are happy to find that because of the endeavor made by both the state and the father, the syndrome of father-absence is now much moderate.

4. Conclusion The phenomenon of father-absence will numerously influence the development of female character. The heroin in Letter from an Unknown Woman can be taken as a victim of this father-absence, from which her character has formed to be shy, sensitive, self-enclosed and holdfast to the people she loves revealing the symptoms of combination of so-called paranoia and compulsory enforcement in psychoanalysis. To some extent, it is because of her character like this that her fate has been destined: falling love with her neighbor so deeply while never having told him the truth of her endless waiting. What is at stake here is that there are many females in reality who has the experience of father-absence suffer form the syndrome of lacking father which in return push them to a dilemma. Researchers claim that father absence is the most significant risk factor for teen pregnancy. Father psychologically absent girls also exhibited greater manifest anxiety as a personality trait and in a dating situation. Fortunately, more and more people notice the importance of the father’ function and devote themselves to improve the current situation. And with this tendency, we may bear the hope that females from broken family can develop a healthy character and the fate of the heroin in Letter from an Unknown Woman can be rewritten in reality.

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