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Three Great Fictional Fathers for Father’s Day
You want to be like them, but you can’t
It’s Father’s Day Weekend in the United States (I don’t know about holidays beyond my own nation’s shores, except for maybe Guy Fawkes Day and Día de los Muertos, but I digress) which makes it the perfect time to talk about fictional dads. There is no shortage of dads in literary works, unlike the surprising shortage of literary moms (an issue which needs correcting), and as in life, some of these fathers are amazing and some should be incarcerated. To keep things uncharacteristically positive this holiday, below I give you three of the coolest dads in literary history.
Mr. Bennett (Pride and Prejudice). I have two daughters, and the idea of raising five as Mr. Bennett does in Jane Austen’s novel makes my eye twitch just thinking about it. Yet he pulls it off, and not in some cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all way. For the daughters that simply crave marriage, he finds ways to arrange marriages. For Elizabeth, whose desire is for independence, he encourages her free spirit, her intelligence, and her desire to make her own way in the world. He doesn’t do things in a conventional way, which is quite unusual even for a fictional character in that time period. He is a fine example to dads everywhere.
