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Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{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]]''', ''[[
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 [[Chocolate Baby]] or other forms of [[Uncanny Family Resemblance]], whether to the putative father or the other man. A piece of knowledge embedded in such proverbs as, "It's a wise child who knows his own father," and "[[Trope Namer|Mama's baby, Papa's maybe]]."
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== Film ==
* ''[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
== Literature ==
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* 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 [[Sharon Shinn]]'s ''Jenna Starborn'', a [[Twice-Told Tale|retelling]] of ''Jane Eyre'', Everett Ravenbeck also has a ward of unknown paternity born to an erstwhile mistress -- he tells the title character that he never had the child DNA-tested, much to her surprise.
* In [[Madeleine L
* ''[[
* 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.
* In [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]'s ''Beyond Thirty'', the British Isles have "retrogressed" -- there are tribes that did not have a word for father, and other tribes where they are aware of fatherhood, but practice matrilineality because of this trope. The heroine tells the hero not who her father is, but whom her mother once told her was her father.
{{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 (
** Although [[Played Straight]] with her sister Nessarose, who her father suspects is not his. {{spoiler|Turns out it's true about Elphaba, too, with a different father than her sister, though}}.
*** the issue of both claims is resolved by sequel books, where {{spoiler|Liir's daughter turns up green, confirming Liir's parentage at last}} and {{spoiler|the family tree confrims that Nessarose is indeed Frexspar's child}}
* In L. Jagi Lamplighter's ''[[
* In Angie Sage's ''[[
* In the [[Chivalric Romance]] ''Octavian'', the emperor's wicked mother accuses his wife of infidelity and claims her twin children are not his.
* In some forms of the [[Chivalric Romance]] ''The Swan Children'', a woman taunts another woman with infidelity because she had given birth to twins; later, she gives birth to seven children at once, and her mother-in-law taunts her with the same "proof" and exposes the children, although she has not been unfaithful.
* In Marie de France's ''Le Fresne'', a woman taunts another woman with infidelity after she bears twins; then she bears twins herself, and unable to prove her innocence, exposes one daughter.
* In [[
* In Ovid's ''Elegy XIII'', he invokes Isis and Lucina to save his mistress, Corinna, after an attempted abortion; during the course of it, he admits that the child may not be his.
* Jacky invokes this trope in ''[[Bloody Jack|Under The Jolly Roger]]''. She knows she's shortly to be deflowered by Captain Scrogg, so she decides to sleep with Robin. Her reasoning is that if she becomes pregnant, whoever the father is, she'll be able to tell herself it's Robin's baby and be able to love it the way it deserves. {{spoiler|It doesn't work, but neither does Captain Scrogg's [[Attempted Rape]], so it all works out.}}
* From the start there is speculation as to whether the father of Isabelle's children is Charlie or her husband in ''[[
* 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.}}
* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''The Song of the Cardinal'', with some [[Fridge Logic]]. The father cardinal suspects an egg was laid by an interloper and the mother knows it for her own. Except, of course, her actual egg ''could'' have been tipped out of the nest by a brood parasite -- avian mothers would not have the certainty of a mammalian one.
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* 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 [[Chocolate Baby|the truth comes out 9 months later]]. It comes up again with her first child, Dodge. In what turned out to be the final episode, Earl learns that Joy has never told Dodge that Earl is not his biological father, prompting Earl to seek him out on Dodge's behalf. After discovering a likely candidate (a man whose wealth and connections could improve Dodge's life if they were to develop a relationship) , Earl has Dodge's DNA tested and finds out that {{spoiler|he himself ''is'' Dodge's biological father. He just didn't remember Joy, whom he had casual sex with at a costume party when she assumed he was the other man.}} Earl also finds out that {{spoiler|Earl Jr. isn't really Darnell's, as was previously thought.}}
* 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 ''[[
** The answer: {{spoiler|it IS her husband Rory's, but because the baby was conceived in the TARDIS, she is also a Time Lord.}}
* In season 9 of ''[[
== Theater ==
* [[William Shakespeare]]
** In ''[[The Winter's Tale
** In ''[[The Tempest]]'', Prospero tweaks the edge of this trope, explaining the past to Miranda:
{{quote| '''Propsero''': ''Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and<br />
She said thou wast my daughter;'' }}
** In ''[[Titus Andronicus (
** In ''[[
* 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 ''[[
** 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.
** Another episode involved a former lover of John Redcorn's (a single mother with a darker-skinned daughter about Joseph's age) moving into the neighborhood and beginning to date resident loser, Bill. While Joseph and the daughter [[Squick|develop crushes on each other]], Dale discovers via covert DNA testing that they are half-siblings. After convincing himself this means he is the father (via alien abduction and impregnation once again), he reveals the test and results to his wife, who confronts John Redcorn over this infidelity during their affair. Fortunately, Redcorn ends up taking some responsibility [[Discontinuity|and the mother and daughter end up moving in with him]], separating the girl and Joseph (without alerting them to their blood relation) before anything actually incestuous occurs.
* In ''[[
** On multiple occasions throughout the episode, when asked by Francine if he can forgive her infidelity, Stan holds her tenderly in contemplative silence before [[Defiled Forever|calling her a slut]] and then remarking off-handedly in bewilderment on his body language, and the mixed signals it must be giving her.
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