My only major influence was my father. He had power.  Everything was done around his presence....I became my father's 'son,' a tomboy.  I was going ...to make him love me....he can say things that are extremely warm and intimate to the press about me but he won't say them to me directly.

      Henry Fonda died in 1982, and for years there had been a painful war and distance between them.  In recent interviews she’s said “there should be a statute of limitations on blaming one’s parents” and that she’s forgiven him.  But she also says, and writes in her book, that it was his coldness, his making her feel unworthy, that caused her to make the same mistakes in her three marriages: submerge herself, silence her voice, betray herself by going along with things that demeaned her. She writes with some scorn: “Dad had been an Eagle Scout, and the commitment to doing one’s duty was embedded in his DNA.  I wish the Scouts had taught him how to make it seem less like a duty.”

      In an Aesthetic Realism class when I said that my father, who had died some years earlier, was "my idol" but that he was remote and we couldn't communicate, Mr. Siegel surprised me by asking if I felt I hadn’t had enough power over him.  Yes, and while my life is different from hers, I think Jane Fonda, too, felt her powerful father wasn't enough in her power.

      The picture Jane Fonda conveys of herself in her marriages is of a passive “victim,” not going after power herself.  A theme in her book is why an otherwise strong woman, fearing she will lose a man’s love, goes along with him in ways that betray her real self.  The answer she gives is that early there’s been some abuse from a man, mental or physical, often a father.  While not making less of this possibility, a woman needs to ask: is there some purpose I have had that is not good for myself or a man? I know that asking this has been invaluable to me and women my colleagues and I teach.

      As a girl she was clearly mixed up about being for and against young men.  And she was quite their match when it came to abuse, too.  For example, she writes:

      When she was 13 her parents divorced, and her mother Francis Seymour Fonda, while in an institution, committed suicide. There was an intense mix-up in both her and her father of guilt and anger.  A regret she has is that over the years when she got letters from a friend of her mother’s—“I’d toss the letter way.  Mother, as far as I was concerned, had no place in my life”; that the “sad, nervous” mother she remembers is someone she “desperately did not want to be like.” But as she describes how, after her mother’s death, Henry Fonda “didn’t miss a beat” in returning to his role in Mister Roberts on Broadway, she does not see him with enough compassion or depth.  As she is against what she still sees as his coldness, she doesn’t see that she herself may have been cold to the anguish he must have had all those years.

      She does say that Henry Fonda encouraged good in her, and one time when she was perhaps 10 or 11 he was intensely against something ugly in her—a pleasure in lessening people who looked different from the white Anglo-Saxon Fonda’s:

…while riding in the back seat of the car, which Dad was driving, I said the [word “nigger.”] Dad stopped the car, turned around, and smacked me (lightly) across my face, saying, “Don’t you ever, ever use that word again!” You better believe I never did. It was the only time Dad ever hit me.

She respects him for this very much. She continues:

But Ms. Fonda doesn’t relate these admirable qualities to things she still has against him. She would have to see she has had a hope be against him, and the whole world through him.

       If Jane Fonda were to have an Aesthetic Realism consultation, she could be asked:

Consultants: Do you think you know your father wholly?

Jane Fonda:  I’ve tried to. 

Consultants:   Did he have a right to have questions he himself didn’t understand, just as you do? Could he have been confused by your mother, and hurt by her? Do you think he was against himself for how he saw women?   

Jane Fonda:  He wouldn’t talk to anyone about that, about himself.  

Consultants:    Was he that way in order to hurt you—or did he have a whole life and way of being before you came along? He may have mistrusted people too much and in a way that wasn’t good for him.  But did he feel anyone wanted really to understand him, and not use things against him?  Was he a complex relation of hidden and shown, for and against?