A New and Better Daddy

Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

Peninsula Press, 128pp, £6.00, ISBN 9781999922399

reviewed by Laura Hackett

‘There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy,’ wrote Gillian Rose in Love’s Work. There is no justice to be found; no rulebook with consequences for illicit behaviour. This is a terrifying truth even when relationships take place on a level playing field – you cannot sue a friend for betraying you – but when combined with structural inequalities of race, class and gender, it is deeply, unfathomably unfair. It is not fair, for example, that Asian men and black women receive disproportionate amounts of abuse on dating apps. And when we consider financial and professional power, there is a question over whether structural inequalities rule out the possibility of freely given love – can a teenage girl really love a much older male teacher? Can a young female actor really consent to sex with a powerful male director? #MeToo has forced us all to reconsider the power dynamics at play in our relationships.

Katherine Angel’s Daddy Issues takes this maelstrom of love, power, and justice, and drags it into the family home. I say ‘drags’ not because Angel’s execution is stilted (rather, her essay flows beautifully despite its often disparate subject matter), but because looking, really looking, at our fathers and their flaws is a thoroughly unpalatable task.

Nevertheless, the love relation between fathers and daughters intersects not only the male/female power dynamic, but also parent/child. Fathers enter their role with the power of life and death in their hands: as provider, disciplinarian, carer; supplying emotional and financial support. In psychoanalysis, the cornerstone of Angel’s work, the father also plays a huge role in the child’s development of a self, or, in Freud’s terminology, an ego. These complex power relations make deep, critical thinking about fatherhood essential for any form of feminism; but they also make that thinking almost impossible. For, if we need our fathers to be good, loving, impeachable, in order to maintain our sense of self, how can we question them and survive the journey?

Most precarious in this respect are the forgotten daughters of #MeToo. Angel asks us to think about Harvey Weinstein’s daughters. ‘You can,’ she says, ‘leave a husband, but you can’t leave a father.’ She quotes Ivanka Trump, who, in the wake of the exposure of her father’s ‘grab them by the pussy’ comments, simply said, ‘The greatest comfort I have is the fact that I know my father.’ That Trump might be both a loving father and a sexual predator is, for Ivanka at least, unthinkable.

Where does responsibility lie, then, in a reckoning of fatherhood? Speaking at the Freud Museum about the book, Angel delved into the phrase ‘daddy issues’ and its rhetorical heavy-lifting in managing both to remove agency from the woman to which it is prescribed (she had no control over the actions of her father), and to place the blame upon her (it is she, and not her father, who has the ‘issues’). The phrase is a marker of shame, humiliating women who might seek out relationships with older men, or with men who resemble their father in some other way. Why do we never label fathers, she asked, as having the issues? Daddy Issues would benefit from including this exploration of its provocative title in print.

Still, we are treated to cutting analysis of daddies’ issues as Angel moves flawlessly from lucid exposition of psychoanalytic thought, covering Freud, Lacan and Winnicott, to insightful analysis of popular culture, from The Archers and Ghost Wall, to Meghan Markle and Michael Jackson. Paternal protectiveness, for example, is often indistinguishable from sexual jealousy, yet it is not only normalised but lauded as good parenting. Unwarranted aggression towards potential suitors forms the basis of Meet the Parents (out of which its comic moments are born) but it is accepted by the daughter with little more than an eye-roll. Angel asks us to re-evaluate protectiveness as not only sexual jealousy, but as a hangover from the days of daughters being property, only to be passed onto a worthy replacement owner. ‘The question of ownership,’ Angel argues, ‘is now overwhelmingly cast in the rosy light of love.” Fathers are no longer at risk of losing money, but of losing a first-place position in their daughters’ hearts.

What’s more, the trope of the protective father is founded in hypocrisy, in our knowledge that they were once the suitors. Angel quotes Steve Martin’s soliloquy at the opening of Father of the Bride, in which he recounts worrying about his daughter meeting men who only want one thing: ‘And you know exactly what that one thing is, because it’s the same thing you wanted when you were their age.’ Upon the birth of a baby girl, fathers are expected to perform an extraordinary act of role-reversal and pretend that the self that wooed the mother is dead and buried. Of course, though, life is never so cut-and-dry, and the behaviour of protective fathers is inextricably tied to the desire to possess a woman, a desire normally associated with erotic love. What is needed here is recognition. Daughters would suffer less, Angel argues, ‘if fathers could acknowledge their jealousy, and their projection – their annexing of their daughters’ erotic life to their own vanity’.

Angel does not attempt to write the rulebook for love we might crave; she does not outline what a good father is, or tell readers how to rehabilitate a father who is not good enough, or even how to recover from one. What she does is provide us with frames of reference through which we can look more critically at both fatherhood as an abstract phenomenon and at our own fathers. Perhaps most importantly, she posits the act of writing as a new and better Daddy. Rather than seeking for the self in the gaze of the father, she advocates the creation of a persona through writing.

I think this is what Angel really wanted to write about – not fathers, but how writing can create a self outside the destructive impulses of the family. The most moving section of the book is perhaps her description of visiting Anthea Hamilton’s Squash at Tate Britain. Angel gazes at this being, a human-made non-human, with a face devoid of eyes, and feels enormous relief ‘to hold and be held by a gaze I could not really see; to experience an exchange of gazes free of anxiety, desire, investment, demand.’ The Squash refuses gender, race and class (although the latter two categories play little role in Daddy Issues; perhaps pushed out by the constrictions of the essay form, but still a noticeable gap), and interactions thus take place on a level playing field, without the burden of structural inequalities which so complicate our relationships with our fathers. But, more than that, the Squash exists outside the framework of love; it neither gives nor implores the mercy of another. Unlike parents, whose gazes are filled with their own desires, the Squash is empty, a mirror in which the gazer can formulate a self. It is the perfect version of Winnicott’s theory of the ‘good enough mother’, one who mirrors back the feelings of the infant without them being contaminated by her own.

The Squash, then, contained all the properties of Angel’s writing persona. ‘Through writing,’ she concludes, ‘I create a parent, an other, whose face remains impassive, who doesn’t demand my false self.’ Writing becomes this little book’s protagonist; it comes to replace both our Mummies and our Daddies, and marks out a healthy path towards self-knowledge.
Laura Hackett is studying a Masters in Renaissance literature at Oxford. She is the Today Programme’s Student Critic of the Year.