Desdemona and her father’s relationship
Comments(1) Desdemona and her father’s relationship don’t seem to be the only complicated relationship in Shakespeare’s plays. I feel that in most of his plays, father-daughter relationship was anything but normal or usual. For example in Tempest, it was rather strange that Miranda stays with her father on an island for twelve years and her father deprives her of social company of anyone other than himself. One theme that seems to mark most of his plays is the selfish motives of the father who wishes to get something through his daughter but does that mean they don’t love their daughters. I doubt that. We cannot make that claim or can we? It appears that in all plays, the fathers did care as much about their daughters as fathers of that time would allow themselves to. We shouldn’t compare them with fathers of today because now due to increased knowledge fathers tend to be far more gentle and demonstrative than they were before. But the feeling of deep love and care was always there. Othello where Brabantino’s relationship with her daughter is often discussed. Brabantino wants Desdemona to marry someone of their own status. So what’s really wrong with this? Most fathers even today would want their daughters to choose a man who is financially and socially their equal. So I feel that we cannot consider Brabantino anything out of the ordinary because he loved Desdemona with all his heart and it is her elopement that eventually leads to his death due to a broken heart.
I agree that the father-daughter relationships in the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are unique and extremely complicated. One of my favorite examples is King Lear’s relationship with his daughters, specifically the youngest Cordelia. I actually saw their relationship as having been reversed. Lear had reached his dotage and he wanted to be taken care of by his loving daughters. When asks his daughters to express their love for him in words it was a form of reaffirming their motherly affection. When he banished Cordelia he was throwing a temper tantrum. It was almost as if he had reverted back to childhood and saw Cordelia as a mother figure. What is even more interesting is the conundrum of the absent mother. Was Shakespeare just not interested in motherhood as he was in fatherhood? I personally do not know why Shakespeare chose not to include mothers in his works, but I do know that the presence of a mother would greatly alter a play. A mother would be able to speak-out for her daughter, when her daughter cannot, as with Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. A mother could also protect her children from harm and prevent disasters from occurring, such as Cordelia’s banishment.