The combination of a predator's cave with jutting stalactites, stalagmites and half-eaten prey, and a Grand Guignol puppet theater stage, Destruction of the father (1974) is the scene of a crime. In Bourgeois's version of the events whose aftermath is depicted, the father, accustomed to sitting at the head of the table and talking while all around him listened in silence, finally drives his captive audience to such a state of distraction that his children, rising up in revolt, kill and eat him.

On one level, the tale fits the artist's description of the anger she felt towards her own father, who liked nothing better than to entertain his family and guests for hours on end with anecdotes and jokes, often at the expense of his children. On another level, this time psychoanalytic, we are dealing with a parable of Oedipal revenge, and more precisely of castration. For it is hard not to see the wall-mounted chamber of Destruction of the father, with its opposing tiers of rounded shapes as a huge vagina-dentata. But the source of the image that emerges in Bourgeois's early drawing is neither strictly autobiographical nor narrowly Freudian, it is in fact Greco-Roman. Fearful that his children would usurp his power or outshine him in posterity, Cronus, or Saturn as he was later known, devoured his children, one by one. His cruelty is the subject of countless works of art, including great paintings by Rubens and Goya. (In the Renaissance, Saturn's name came to epitomize artistic melancholy.) Destruction of the father, shows the consequences of the children having turned the tables on their progenitor and murderer.

Thus motifs found in the artist's early work regularly crop up in her later pieces. Like the ubiquitous "knife", each is a symbol in its own right, while collectively they underscore the constancy of her obsessions as well as the odd efficiency of the apparently haphazard gestation of her oeuvre. Climax of a life-long filial grudge, cauterization of the deep wound caused by her husband's death and the radical reworking of a modernist paradigm Destruction of the father exemplifies this confluence of old intuitions with present needs and circumstances.

Initially titled Le repas du soir [The evening meal] the piece made its public debut in 1974 at the experimental space at 112 Greene Street, the artist's first solo show since her 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery. Wrapped in a makeshift tarpaulin curtain in a manner quite different from its final puppet-theater presentation, the installation was the centerpiece of large selection of work that also included bronzes and marbles executed in Italy during intermittent visits to Pietrasanta over the previous four years. Among these more traditional sculptures were Hommage to Bernini (1967) several versions of the Janus image from 1968 as well as a Baroque, Eye to eye, and Rabbit, (all circa 1970), a number of carved as well as assembled "cumuls", and a small cast portrait head of her brother Pierre, which-though it has since been edited out-occupied a position at the base of Destruction of the father, making this original version of the work explicitly autobiographical.

Recounted many times over with slightly varying emphasis or detail the scenario of the Destruction of the father is at once completely anecdotal and deliberately mythic. A comprehensive version, pieced together from several retellings follows.

"There is a dinner table and you can see all kinds of things are happening. The father is sounding, telling the captive audience how great he is, all wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. There is tragedy in the air. Once too often he has said his piece. He is unbearably dominating although probably he does not realize it himself. A kind of resentment grows and one day my brother and I decided, 'the time has come!' We grabbed him, laid him on the table and with our knives dissected him . We took him apart and dismembered him, we cut off his penis. And he became food. We ate him up. It is, you see, an oral drama. The irritation was his continual verbal offense. So he was liquidated the same way he liquidated the children. The sculpture represents both a table and a bed. When you come into [the] room you see the table but also, upstairs in the parent's room, is a bed. Those two things count in one's erotic life: dinner table and bed. The table where your parents made you suffer. The bed where you lie with your husband, where your children are born and you will die. Essentially since they are about the same size they are the same object."

Centering on an image of the father as autocrat of the "word", Bourgeois's compressed explanation can be interpreted in many ways, but a drawing from the late 1930s anticipates the theme of familial mayhem in a straight-forward manner. At one end of a curved table sits a woman circumscribed by the outline of a house, opposite her, stretched out on the floor, is a man with a carving knife buried in his back. Framed by the oval between them are the faces of children whose unevenly rounded contours are similar to the crimped mounds that cover the "table" Bourgeois sets for her sacrificial "evening meal." Whereas Saturn ate his offspring as punishment for his incestuous love for them-this is the subject of several other pre-war drawings-in Destruction of the father the children strike first.

For the first time since the late early twenty years, Bourgeois had conceived of a work as a total environment. In this case, however, she enclosed the space giving visual access to it only through a proscenium arch rather than staging her drama "in the round" as she had in Peridot Gallery shows in 1949-50 and would do in future installations. Destruction of the father was also the first instance of her employing the soft materials she had used in her early 1960s work on a large scale, even as the bulbous latex nodules that pack the roof of the niche quote Duchamp's previously noted coal-sack-hung ceiling in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Gallery des Beaux-Arts in 1938, or recall the undulating walls of the Lascaux caves which Bourgeois had visited during the 1960s. So too the animal scraps collected from local markets, cast in plaster and scattered over the grotto floor of the piece evoke both a primitive hunter's ghastly left-overs and the raw, meat-market quality of The quartered one (1964-65).

No sharp implements are to be found, however, nor is the father anywhere present in whole or in part. Although claustrophobic, the site is virtually empty, as if the ritual slaughter had been completed with the guest of honor duly and entirely consumed. Absent any evidence of the perpetrators, the gender of the one primarily responsible is nevertheless apparent. A yawning maw with massive sets of opposing "molars", the simultaneously womb-like Destruction of the father is itself a carnivorous creature and the ultimate vagina dentata. Despite the care taken to implicate her brother in the crime, in fact, the daughter alone has feasted upon the father, and so usurped the son's role in the struggle against his dominance.

In order that the bloodthirsty triumph of one generation over another occur and recur to the benefit of the once-dependent now murderously independent child, the father must be kept alive or somehow resurrected. If his death comes prematurely, before the envious child can survive without him and take pride in the power to do so, the effects can be devastating. That problem is central to the life and work of Sylvia Plath, and her plight compares instructively with Bourgeois's. "Daddy I have had to kill you./You died before I had time," Plath wrote with thwarted enmity.