Fathers and Sons: Relationships and Ambivalences

The relationship of men to their children, in particular fathers with their sons, continues to be a matter of contemporary interest. However, other than through biographies and fiction, we know rather little about how ordinary father-son relationships develop in different times and social contexts and how each generation seeks to transmit its own scripts and blueprints of fatherhood and masculinity. We do know that there is an inherent potential for imbalance in the transmission process and that the ties that bind parents to their children do not necessarily bind children to their parents. E. M. Forster put this well in Where Angels Fear to Tread (Chapter 5, 1905),

A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and — by some sad irony — it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.