Stories of Strong Women Despite Missing Fathers

Karren Alenier

What do Gertrude Stein’s life story, the novel House of Spirits by Isabel Allende, the action thriller film One Battle after Another, and the animated urban fantasy movie KPop Demon Hunters have in common? These stories that scale reality from real life  to magic realism and urban fantasy all feature girls or young women with missing fathers. Interestingly, none of them miss their fathers, either these men are bad actors or the father’s parental care has been replaced sufficiently by others.

Gertrude Stein, the baby of her family, lost her father in 1891 when she was 17 years old. Daniel Stein’s death made her an orphan (her mother died when she was 14), but she had plenty of family to care for her. While Stein did not hate her father, her biographies paint him as an annoying authority who fed his children castor oil and interfered with their education and intellectual pursuits. Initially, her 26-year-old brother Michael took charge of the family but soon sent Gertrude and their sister Bertha from San Francisco to a maternal aunt in Baltimore.

Always close to her brother Leo who had matriculated to Harvard, she eventually followed him to Boston where they shared living quarters, enrolled in the Harvard Annex which became Radcliff, earned her undergraduate degree there, and then returned to Baltimore for four years of medical school at Johns Hopkins. By 1903, Gertrude moved to Paris into her brother’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. In 1907, Gertrude met Alice Toklas. In 1910, Alice moved in with Gertrude and Leo. In 1914, Leo moved out. He didn’t approve of Alice, and Gertrude didn’t approve of Leo’s lover who eked out a living by serving as a model, often naked, for various painters.

Steiny has been binging on novels by Isabel Allende, including House of Spirits, a multi-generational tale that ends with a young woman named Alba caught in the cross hairs of right and left politics, presumably in Chile, the country in which Allende grew up. Close to her ultra-right grandfather Esteban Trueba but marginally influenced by her leftist uncle, Alba doesn’t learn the truth of her paternity until she is an adult with a revolutionary boyfriend. When a junta supported by her grandfather, who is a senator, arrests and tortures Alba for information about her boyfriend Miguel, we witness Alba’s remarkable fortitude.

Alba overcomes the trauma of torture and rape to redeem her life for herself and her unborn child by writing the story of her extended family. In an unexpected revelation at the end of the novel, the reader learns that the omniscient author of House of Spirits is Alba. She does not know the paternity of her child. Was it her lover Miguel or her rapist? With a rare equanimity of strength, Alba decides she wants this child, and she will receive her offspring with love.

Reflecting on the real life history of Gertrude Stein and the fictional story of Alba in House of Spirits, Steiny noted similar themes in two American box office film hits: One Battle After Another and KPop Demon Hunters.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another features a 16 -year-old biracial girl, Willa, whose custodial parent Bob Ferguson has built an off-the-grid life for the two of them. Bob, a .k.a. Pat Calhoun, was a demolition expert working with a far-left terrorist group known as the French 75. Now, he is just a stoner always one step behind his daughter as he tries to keep her safe.

The film, based loosely on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, opens in a prolonged flashback during an ambiguous time frame that might be the 1960s. The flashback shows the group freeing detained immigrants in California along the U.S. -Mexico border. Willa (a.k.a Charlene) was born to Perfidia Beverly Hills, a Black woman who abandons both her child and white paramour in the addictive desire to attack politicians’ offices, banks, and power grids.

While doing terrorist work, Perfidia encounters Steven Lockjaw, a government officer who falls under her spell, and whom she sexually humiliates (he’s a sadomasochist). They have an affair and when she gets caught robbing a bank, he arranges for her to avoid prison and go into witness protection by ratting out members of the French 75.

Through his ruthless anti-immigration activities, Lockjaw rises to Colonel in the U.S. security force. Because of his work, he is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a white supremacist secret society of the far right. This group vehemently forbids interracial relationships, and Lockjaw suspects that he is the father of Perfidia’s child. The plot follows Lockjaw as he hunts down Willa to see if she is genetically related to him. If she is, he will need to kill her.

KPop Demon Hunters by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans is an animated musical with an urban fantasy story. Urban fantasies place supernatural characters in current day city landscapes. KPop Demon Hunters is partly influenced by music videos, Japanese anime, and Korean dramas. The story focuses on Rumi, a girl with hidden marks on her body that indicate she was sired by a demon. Her mother died shortly after Rumi was born. Her aunt Celine raised Rumi, saying that she is good like her mother who was a demon hunter. Rumi’s destiny is to eradicate demons and to embrace her role as the lead singer of a girl band called Huntr/x. For centuries, the singing of these successive girl trios created a magical barrier against demons called the Honmoon. As is the tradition, the trio that forms Huntr/x  are all demon hunters. All three of the Huntr/x girls were trained by Celine who was formerly a demon hunter in the same girl band as Rumi’s mother. Celine tells Rumi that when her group creates the Golden Honmoon, all demons will vanish and so will the demon patterns on her body.

However, Gwi-Ma, the raging fire god of the demons has recruited Jinu, a human boy, and lifted him out of poverty. He’s smart and shockingly handsome. He becomes the lead singer of the demon band Saja Boys. Jinu and his band try to steal the fans of Huntr/x  with their effervescent song “Soda Pop.” This incites a fight between the two singing groups and leads Jinu to discover Rumi’s demonic patterns. Jinu hasn’t quite lost his human soul, and he has piqued Rumi’s interest.

Another aspect of what these stories have in common, possibly enhanced by the context of their unusual realities, is that all these young women become stronger in an almost a super-human fashion. Even Gertrude Stein, the high maintenance baby of her family, becomes interested in building a larger-than-life mythos about herself. Certainly, her faux memoire The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas adds to her literary cachet as a strong woman.

In House of Spirits, where does Alba draw her power from? Not from Count Jean de Satigny, the man whose sur name she bears. To head off a scandal, Esteban Trueba convinced his pregnant -out-of-wedlock daughter Blanca to marry a politically conservative count who turned out to be a sexual deviant. In keeping with magic realism, a hallmark of Latin American literature of the late twentieth century, Allende presents female characters with mermaid green hair and clairvoyant powers.
Alba, who has green tinged hair like her long deceased great aunt Rosa, relies on her maternal grandmother Clara for inner strength. Both Rosa and Clara were clairvoyants. The irony is that Alba’s biological father has never been far from her. He is a national icon as a leftist singer, who continues to be her mother’s lover and is a man Alba knows and admires for his songs.

In One Battle After Another, Willa demonstrates the wherewithal to escape and defend herself from the death her biological father Steven Lockjaw orders for her after he determines that she is genetically his daughter. Her escape involves a high speed car chase and the shooting of her would-be assailant.  In the end, Willa reaffirms the connection to Bob, the dad who raised her. This means that because Bob is inept from smoking weed, that Willa must take care of herself. Her impetus is to follow in her mother’s activist footsteps to ensure that justice prevails.

Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters already is a supernatural being who can fly and slay demons. The challenge that transforms her and makes her stronger is that she must prove to her singing partners that she is not a demon, that she can help them achieve the Golden Honmoon that will rid the world of demons, and that maybe she can save Jinu by restoring  his human soul. 

All of the women in these stories get their boost of strength from another woman: Gertrude Stein in her clandestine marriage to Alice Toklas, Alba in House of Spirits from her psychic connection to her clairvoyant grandmother Clara, Willa in One Battle After Another from her errant revolutionary mother Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters from her Aunt Celine who makes her niece believe she can overcome her demon genes. In this political climate of misogyny in the United States, we need these stories of women overcoming men who do not want them to succeed and prosper.