Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Fairy Tales]] ==

* 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.

 

 

== Literature ==

* In ''[[Jane Eyre]]'', Mr. Rochester's ward is the daughter of his one-time mistress, who sent him the baby after he had dismissed her when he learned she was unfaithful to him. She said the child was his; he assures Jane he has his doubts.

* In [[Madeleine L'Engle]]'s ''The Love Letters'', Charlotte fled to Portugal because when she told her husband she was pregnant, he had asked her who the father was when he was.

* ''[[The Jungle]]'' has, as part of Jurgis's [[Trauma Conga Line]], his wife Ona tell him that she was raped by a businessman and she's been going to him for conjugal visits to ensure financial security for the family and also that she is pregnant. From what is narrated of their miserable bedtime experiences, they are most likely not having sex and if they are, then it is not very often. Therefore, there is the chance that Ona got pregnant from her visits with Connor. However, Jurgis never makes any comment on the paternity of the child.

* Becomes an issue for two characters in Larry Niven's ''The Integral Trees'' and ''The Smoke Ring''. After one female character is used as a [[Sex Slave]], her husband can't accept her child as his {{spoiler|until learning that the child inherited a respiratory problem from Mom's husband/his true father}}.

* In [[Andre Norton]]'s ''[[Witch World|The Jargoon Pard]]'', Kethan is his uncle's heir because as his sister's son, he is his most reliable kin.

{{quote|''It appears that the line of descent is through the women. A man is merely head of his wife's family--that is all. If she chances to be the oldest female member of the "royal" house, he is king. Very naively the girl explained that there was seldom any doubt as to whom a child's mother was.''}}

* Inverted in ''[[Wicked (novel)|Wicked]]'', in which Elphaba isn't sure if Liir is her son or not, because she'd been unconscious at the time he was born and no one would tell her if she'd given birth during that time or not.

* From the start there is speculation as to whether the father of Isabelle's children is Charlie or her husband in ''[[The Thirteenth Tale]]''.

* This is the backstory of one of the characters in [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|Magic's Promise]]''; when the kid was born early and looked like neither his mother nor his father but exactly like his maternal uncle, his father assumed [[Brother-Sister Incest|the very worst]], and took it out on both mother and child. Particularly awful because there ''was'' a way to check; the father just didn't want his suspicions confirmed. {{spoiler|The boy was simply born prematurely, and wasn't the uncle's.}}

* This could be said for George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire". {{spoiler|Cersei goes out of her way to not have Robert's children, instead getting pregnant by her brother Jaime and claiming that all three of her children are her husband's.}} This brings about a struggle for succession after Robert's death.

* 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.

{{quote|'''Propsero''': ''Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and

She said thou wast my daughter;'' }}

** 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 ==

** 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.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** 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.

* 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.

** The practice in Egypt of the Pharaoh marrying his own sister was taken to be evidence of this, but since the Pharaoh's heir would be his own son even if he was not born to the sister, it appears to be a matter of regarding only his own sister as his social equal and so an appropriate wife.

*** This factored into the inheritance snarl around Hatshepsut and the Thutmoses. (Thutmose III was her nephew, and her husband's son, but not her child; her only offspring was a daughter. Thutmose II was her sickly half-brother, to whom she was queen, and who left her regent to his heir when he died young. Thutmose III's reasons for attempting to write her out of history have lately been suspected to be as much about downplaying the fact that he was only royalty on his father's side for his son's benefit as about resentment for the semi-usurpation thing, considering his timing.)

*** Thutmose III was six foot two and has been called the Napoleon of Egypt for his conquests. Hybrid vigor oi!