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Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Difference between revisions
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(Switched At Birth would break both maternity and paternity) |
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{{quote|''Telemachus took a deep breath and said: You want the truth, and I will give it to you. My mother says that Odysseus is my father. I don't know this myself. No one witnesses his own begetting.''|'''[[Homer]]''', ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]''}}
Prior to the days of [[Daddy DNA Test|DNA testing]], it was impossible to verify a child's paternity, and the only evidence besides the word of the mother (who might not know herself in the subtrope [[Who's Your Daddy?]]) would be [[
This can be a source of tension and drama even when the mother is honest, because neither the child nor the father can prove it. The [[Green-Eyed Monster]] is very prone to doubt. It can also complicate [[Heir Club for Men]], as the man actually wants the heir to be his child. If the mother refuses to tell, only men who have actually slept with her can even guess, and speculation tends to run wild.
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Why [[Luke, I Might Be Your Father]] is a trope.
A powerful force behind [[My Girl Is Not a Slut]] and [[Nature Adores a Virgin]] in [[Real Life]], because a man's sexual escapades cannot leave the woman wondering, nine months later, whether she really gave birth to that baby (short of invoking [[Switched At Birth]] or, for in-vitro fertilisation, Switched At Implantation). To what extent there is reason to doubt in real life is not known; numerous urban legends claim a high percentage of babies are attributed to false fathers, but the location of the studies determining this tends to migrate a lot.
A trope for historical settings, as [[Daddy DNA Test]] is the [[Trope Breaker]], unless identical twins, or clones, are the purported father, or for some reason, testing is impossible.
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== Ballads ==
* In the [[Child Ballad]] ''Gil Brenton'', the hero accepts the heroine's story of how he got her pregnant, but the ballad ends with magical writing on the baby's body affirming that he is in fact the father, to doubly avert this trope.
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== [[Fairy Tales]] ==
* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130603143049/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/facetiousnights/night3_fable1.html Peter the Fool]'', the king goes to investigate how the princess came to be pregnant. The baby recognizes the man responsible—by wishing her to be pregnant.
* In the folktale ''[http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type1362.html The Snow Child]'', the husband claims to be taken in by the fantasical story his wife tells about how the child came to be conceived without a father, always involving snow. Then, later, he [[Made a Slave|sells the boy as a slave]] and tells his mother that he melted.
== Film ==
* In ''[[The Count of Monte Cristo (film)|The Count of Monte Cristo]]'', Mercédès, the fiancée of hero Edmond Dantes, inexplicably espouses his rival Fernand Mondego soon after Dantes is imprisoned on a trumped-up charge. The paternity of {{spoiler|her only son}} eventually becomes a plot point in the film (which [[Revised Ending|isn't in the original]] [[Alexandre Dumas]] [[The Count of Monte Cristo (novel)|novel]]).
* ''[http://lonchaney.org/filmography/153.html West of Zanzibar]'': [[Lon Chaney]] plays a man whose wife was going to run away with another man and then [[Death by Childbirth|died shortly after childbirth]]. He [[Revenge by Proxy|raises his "daughter" to be an alcoholic prostitute]]. Then the other man shows up, and tells him that his wife never went away with him - [[Karmic Twist Ending|the child is his own]].
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* In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Time Enough for Love]]'', Lazarus Long time-travels to his own childhood, with a story about having been a foundling. The family resemblance, combined with the backstory Lazarus (going under the name "Ted Bronson" at that point) provides, leads his mother Maureen and her father Ira to conclude "Ted" is the illegitimate child of Ira's late brother. Later on, Maureen admits to Lazarus that her father thinks it a good deal more likely that "Ted" is Ira's own son.
== [[Live
* An episode of ''[[Sanford and Son]]'' has an old friend of Fred's claim that he had a one night stand with Elizabeth and that he's actually Lamont's father. Another friend of Fred's actually says the trope name verbatim. In the end {{spoiler|it turns out that the guy actually slept with Aunt Esther, and thought it was Elizabeth in the dark.}}
* On ''[[Two and A Half Men]]'', Alan's ex wife Judith had a daughter with her current husband Herb. Alan, however, suspects he might actually be the father, after he and Judith had a brief tryst while she and Herb were separated.
* On ''[[My Name Is Earl]]'', this comes up more than once. The first time is when Joy is pregnant (for the second time, having been visibly pregnant already the night she met and married Earl), and Earl thinks the baby is his...but she has been sleeping with Darnell, and [[
* An episode of ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' plays with and lamp-shades the gender double-standard of the trope when the title character tries to do a [[Daddy DNA Test]] on Taub's kids (from simultaneous pregnancies with the two woman he had been seeing). {{spoiler|After a moment of weakness, Taub shreds the results without looking.}}
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "A Good Man Goes to War" plays with this trope, repeatedly and rather clumsily attempting to cast doubt on the paternity of Amy's baby.
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* In season 9 of ''[[Stargate SG-1]], Vala, while trapped in the Ori galaxy, gets married to cover up the fact that she got pregnant out of wedlock. The truth does eventually come out, though: the Ori impregnated Vala with the Orici, who is basically the in-universe version of the Antichrist.
==
* [[William Shakespeare]]
** In ''[[The Winter's Tale|The Winters Tale]]'', Leontes doubts that he is the father of either Mamillus or Perdita.
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{{quote|'''Propsero''': ''Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter;'' }}
** In ''[[Titus Andronicus (theatre)|Titus Andronicus]]'', he opts for the [[
** In ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]'', Lancelot argues that Jessica should hope not be Shylock's daughter.
* In [[Euripides]]'s ''Ion'', Apollo exploits the difficulty in telling: his oracle tells Xuthus that Ion is his son when in fact, he is the son of Xuthus's wife Creusa who was raped by Apollo.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[King of the Hill]]'' everybody knows that [[Conspiracy Theorist|Dale]]'s son, [[
** Eventually John Redcorn ''wants'' to reveal the truth to Joseph, but Nancy (the boy's mother) refuses to allow it based on the strong bond Joseph and Dale share. As she puts it "Joseph already has the only father he'll ever need".
*** Indeed, Dale and Joseph even discover that Dale was out of town the night Joseph must have been conceived but convince themselves that she was simply abducted by aliens and impregnated with her husbands genetic seed (for some reason) that night.
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** Standing these statistics on their head, however, is the tidbit that in general men only have these tests done if they feel there's a strong probability that they're not the father - but even in these cases where someone's really suspicious, three-quarters of the time they're wrong.
*** Of course, a DNA test is no proof of fidelity, either. If a woman has sex with two men (whether consensually or by being raped) within her fertile period and then conceives, it's a tossup which of the men is the child's father, and the DNA test will resolve it.
* Commonplace on [[Talk Show
* Literature/real Life: In Conn Iggulden's epic stories of the Mongol Empire, a recurring plot-theme concerns Genghiz Khan's uncertainty over the paternity of his eldest son Jechi (at the time of conception, his mother Borte was a prisoner of the Tartars and was known to have been raped). Because he half-believes in the "this is a Tartar's bastard" stories, Genghiz repeatedly shuns and blanks his oldest son, or else gives him punitive or seemingly impossible tasks to complete that he would not dream of imposing on the favoured younger sons. This had consequences that stretched down the generations and caused the Mongol empire to collapse prematurely.
* At the Oneida colony, the practice of "complex marriage" caused onlookers to wonder about the children knowing their fathers. The leader retorted that the children knew their fathers the way children outside the colony did: on the word of their mothers.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Always Male]]
[[Category:Luke, I Am Your Index]]▼
[[Category:Pregnancy Tropes]]
[[Category:Parental Issues]]
▲[[Category:Truth in Television]]
[[Category:Sublime Rhyme]]
[[Category:
▲[[Category:Luke, I Am Your Index]]
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