In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature,
Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers--William Faulkner, Richard
Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison--to examine the father's function as a "border
figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces
opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead
support the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions.
Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusion
and offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries are
mysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makes
differentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce a
separate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene in
the mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child.
This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to join
with others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and gender
differences. Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender,
race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpret
fiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshape
theory.