elieve part of what her problem entailed was the fact that, because of his early death, her father did not fully intervene in her mother/daughter relationship. Sylvia was left to imagine what her relationship to her father would have been had he lived:
I thought that if my father hadn't died, he
would have taught me all about insects, which was
his specialty at the university. He would also
have taught me German and Greek and Latin, which
Whether Sylvia's father would have had such an intellectual relationship with his daughter, with no emotional/sexual overtones, is irrelevant. What matters is that after his death this is the way Sylvia visualized how the relationship would have been. Sylvia's ambitions in school - her push towards grades, education, writing, etc. can be seen as a direct result of trying to be worthy of her father - trying to be the person she felt her father would have wanted her to be.
If this was the only influence on Sylvia - she probably would not have grown up destined to attempt (and eventually succeed in) suicide; she would have rather been a career woman who enjoyed her teaching and writing. But there were other forces within this disturbed Electra's complex. It seems that her mother reinforced the intellectualism - but in a negative
way - as a way to escape the problems of being female:
My own mother wasn't much help. My mother
had taught shorthand and typing to support us
ever since my father died, and secretly she
hated it and hated him for dying and leaving
And a quote from Nancy Hunter Steiner's book, A Closer Look at Ariel, tends to reinforce this notion:
No doubt this inexorable academic success
was encouraged by a mother who had become a
school teacher, who had wanted to be a pro-
fessor, and who was making many sacrifices to
ensure that her daughter's life would be less
restricted than her own, less dep...