FROM OTHER HALVES TO HAREMS: SOME CONCEPTS OF MARRIAGE

Modern Western culture has a peculiar horror of the arranged marriage.  Historically, however, it was the norm.   For the gentry, that is to say; given the difficulties of travel, for the peasantry the choice was determined by who else happened to be in your village.  But for upper-class parents, parental choice seemed the obvious way of deciding who their offspring married.
     We see this principle at work in Romeo and Juliet.  Juliet’s mother was married and gave birth to Juliet when she was fourteen.  Juliet has reached puberty, and is fourteen herself.  Time to marry in turn and give birth; for mortality is high and life may be short.  Juliet’s father is “old”; although he is probably not yet fifty.

     If the parents decide when she should marry, they also decide to whom.  Old Capulet has found the eligible Count Paris for her.   Animal impulse will take care of procreation.  Similarity of background -  class and income - will encourage friction-free cohabitation which might in time grow into affection, and even love.  If not, there is at least the prospect of reasonably-compatible co-existence: for there is no divorce. 

     That parental choice, however, may have its limitations is seen in the literary tradition of Courtly Love.  Parental decision may determine whom you marry, but not  to whom you give your affections.  Arthur may have Guinevere’s hand, for dynastic reasons, but Launcelot has her heart. 

     And that goes, of course, for Romeo and Juliet.  As a dutiful daughter, Juliet might have married Paris if she had not encountered Romeo.  Despite parental disapproval, including a threat of disinheritance, and all the distancing power of the family feud, the attraction is immediate, and lasting, and defeated only by death unless renewed in the afterlife. 

     What we have here is the concept of the soul mate:  the one person right for you in every respect, provided that person can be found.

     Where does the idea come from?  Probably it is an intensification of the idea of the other half that we find expounded by Aristophanes in Plato’ Symposium.  Aristophanes suggests that there were originally three types of being:  male/male, female/female, female/male. 

      When they rebelled against the gods, Zeus had Apollo cut them in two.  They then sort reunion with the missing halves of themselves.  If one half died, the survivor would seek union with another of the same type.

     If you’re a hermaphrodite male and female, therefore, in Aristophanes’ terms, any member of the opposite sex will do.  In practice this is not the case.  An individual man, for instance, is not generally attracted to each and every woman, but to a certain type, or types, of woman.  A more accurate representation than that of Aristophanes is given in Jane Eyre, and the compatibility or otherwise of the elements. Jane (air) is compatible with Rochester (earth) but not with St John Rivers (water).  Rochester is not compatible with Bertha Mason (fire): a spectacular example of when an arranged marriage does not work.   I do not suggest for a moment that Charlotte Bronte took the idea literally, but as a metaphor for why a woman will be attracted by one type of man rather than another, and vice versa, the concept is interesting.  

     There is a superficial similarity between the concept of the other half with the Genesis idea of woman having been drawn from man, and the two becoming one flesh, but there are significant differences.   In the Symposium myth, if you were originally part of a same-sex unit, you will seek a same sex union. Aristophanes thus gives parity to heterosexual and homosexual parings, which the Bible does not countenance.  His myth also suggests that everyone is incomplete and seeks another half. The New Testament, by contrast, says that some people are self-contained and have no need of marriage.  Singleness, indeed, may give the opportunity for better service to God.

.  The concept of the other half, and its development the soul mate, therefore, is not biblical.  At most, if you give your life to God, God will guide you to someone compatible with whom you will become one flesh.  Your partner will become your soul mate through the process of co-existence, but not come pre-prepared.   And even then it is a temporary arrangement.  There will be on marriage in Heaven.  Your ultimate soul mate, so to speak, is God not another human.

The biblical concept of one flesh is not an easy one.  If your partner dies, are you still one flesh with him/her while you are alive?  Clearly not; for the Church allows re-marriage for widows and widowers.  But what if you divorce?  Are you still one flesh while your former partner is alive?  Again, clearly not.  Christ allowed for divorce on grounds of unchastity.  (Matt 19:9).  Paul says that if one of a couple becomes a Christian, the unbelieving partner may wish to divorce, and that is allowable.  (1 Cor 7:15).  

     If you’ve been one flesh, can you, then, cease to be; or can you be one flesh with more than one person simultaneously?  What about polygamy?

     Interestingly, although adultery is unequivocally condemned in the Old Testament, polygamy is not.   There is nothing to say that you may not have more than one wife.  Solomon had seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines. 

     The toleration of polygamy in the Old Testament may have had a humane purpose: to safeguard the financial status of women who might have no other opportunity of marriage, and who might otherwise have been financially destitute. 

In the New Testament, however, there are to be new ways of caring for widows, orphans and the poor.  The Genesis ideal of one flesh and lifelong monogamy between a man and a woman is re-iterated by Christ.    Paul points out that to have intercourse with a prostitute is to become one flesh with her (1 Cor 6:16): emphasising the desirability of married monogamy. Perhaps what most knocks polygamy on the head in the New Testament is the requirement that a bishop shall be the husband of one wife.  (1 Tim 3:2).   There can be debate from this about whether a bishop may be single, but what is clear is that a bishop may not have more than one partner at a time. 

Taking its lead from Christianity, the West adopted a pattern of lifelong monogamous marriage that served it reasonably well for centuries.  True, there was the odd bohemian challenge.   Shelley liked to surround himself with a harem.  Wilkie Collins, who disapproved of marriage, cohabited with two women.   But things rubbed along more or less and finally collapsed only in the 1960’s when cohabitation as a serious alternative began to take off.

     Cohabitation can take many forms.  It can be marriage in everything but name.  It can be serial monogamy.  It can be relationships with more than one partner simultaneously.  This last opens the way to acceptance of polygamy for Muslims as they become a greater presence in the West.

     The standard argument against polygamy is that marriage must be between one man and one women.  But who now says it must be?  That mould has been broken with same-sex marriage, and if a man may marry a man, why should a man not marry more than one woman?  (Polyandry, where one woman has more than one husband, might take off in China as a result of the one-child policy, but is unlikely to take off in the West because it not an issue within Islam in the way that polygamy is.)

     Are we going forwards or backwards?   Back to the Old Testament, or back even further to Aristophanes and the Symposium?   Traditional marriage, same-sex-marriage, polygamy and cohabitation (or various combinations of all four) are competing with one another to be the future model for the West.  It will be interesting to see which model will prevail

    

    

WALLS

Those who hate the Israeli Wall and the proposed Mexican Wall also hate the idea of the Calais Wall. People should be free to live where they choose. Actually, those who say this don't have that freedom themselves. True, they are free to live in Britain, but where in Britain they can live is constrained by where they can find employment and, if they are home owners, by the kind of property they can afford.

Following Rousseau (whether consciously or otherwise), they see walls as something unnatural. But all those with whom I have argued find nothing strange about sleeping within walls at night, or about creating a protective wall for their possessions by closing and locking the front door when they go out. They have a mental wall, to protect themselves from unwelcome ideas, and consider it evidence of intellectual virtue.

Through history, people have found it an entirely natural impulse to live behind protective walls. Castles, fortified farms and manor houses, walled cities (at one time, all cities were walled), Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China...

I suppose those troubled by the Calais Wall are social evolutionists. Protective walls belonged to the bad medieval past. We should have evolved beyond the need for them. But mass invasion is not merely a phenomenon of the past. It is happening now: by land and by sea. If the barbarians (metaphorically speaking) are at the gates, you do not remove the problem of the barbarians by removing the gates.

BERTHA MASON RECONSIDERED

Modern readers (or increasingly, modern viewers) of Jane Eyre whether they know it or not, have had their impressions filtered (via editors, directors etc) by two immensely influential works.  Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, retold the novel from the perspective of Bertha Mason.  Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s the Madwoman in the Attic, in framing a theory of Victorian fiction, took a feminist perspective of Bertha as the victim of male oppression. 

     A quick survey of recent online essays on Jane Eyre shows three main lines of development from these two seminal books of the 60’s and 70’s.    Jean Rhys saw her protagonist as Caucasian, but some of the postcolonial theory her work has generated sees Bertha as part black, and Charlotte Brontë as guilty of racism.  From Attic have developed the views that either Bertha is not mad at all, or that she is mad and the cause of her madness is syphilis.   These are all interesting perspectives that have come on stream since I first encountered Jane Eyre as a child and formed my own impressions, and all worthy of consideration. 

What is the postcolonial case for seeing Bertha Mason as partly non-white?  She is described by Jane as having a discoloured, savage face, “fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments”, the lips swelled and dark.  (Ch 25).  In the statement of impediment to the marriage there is reference to her mother Antoinetta, a Creole (Ch 26).  Rochester refers to his “Indian Messalina” (Ch 27), and describes himself as having come from “a good race” (Ch 27). So, by implication, his wife didn’t?   A case can, it seems, be made for clear-cut racism.

     Actually, it isn’t that clear cut at all.  Bertha Mason is also described as having had good looks when Rochester married her – she is, in fact, specifically compared to Blanche Ingram: “tall, dark and majestic”.  (Ch 27) –   in which case the “purple face and bloated features” (Ch 26) of her later self would be the result of subsequent insanity rather than ethnicity.   

    It should be noted that some others of those who are a threat to Jane are described as dark: her cruel aunt Mrs Reed and bullying cousin John, for example, who “sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own”. (Ch 2).   The stress here seems thematic (dark personalities) rather than racial.  Mr Rochester – in his untamed state a threat to Jane – is also dark.  And the beautiful Blanche Ingram, whom Jane fears will marry Mr Rochester, is, despite her first name, “as dark as a Spaniard”.   (Ch 17).

     That simile, I think, is key; for it leads us into the meaning of ‘Creole’ in the novel: about which there is some postcolonial critical confusion.  Understandably.  The term ‘Creole’ is as confusing as the term Anglo-Indian: which can mean either those of mixed race, or those of British stock in India.   In the British-influenced Caribbean, ‘Creole’, certainly nowadays, tends to mean those of mixed black/white race.  But in Louisiana, ‘Creole’ was the word used to describe French settlers.  And Creole was also the term for a Spaniard born outside Spain in the Spanish Empire.  It is stressed (Ch 18, 19, 20) that Mason comes from Spanish Town in Jamaica.  Jamaica was Spanish before it was British, and some Spanish terms lingered.  So “her mother the Creole” might mean simply that Bertha Mason had an English-origin father and a Spanish-origin mother.  “Indian Messalina”, rather than having any ethnic connotation, might simply mean that she behaved like Messalina and came from the West Indies. 

     Mr Rochester’s good race.  Does it mean white (in which case, a slur on blacks) or English (in which case a slur on Spaniards)?  Or does it mean neither?  There might be a case if Mason Senior had been a Creole like his wife; but he is English, like Rochester.  We might consider here the reason for Mr Rochester’s marriage.  As Mrs Fairfax explains to Jane (Ch13), Rochester’s elder brother inherited all the estate because Rochester Senior wished to keep it intact.   However, he wished the younger brother to marry money and so preserve the prestige of the family name.  So then the reference to Mr Rochester’s good race might be no more significant than the reference to his good family in determining his marital eligibility. He might not have the money, but he’s still a good catch.  He comes of good stock.  If so, a sense of offence is being generated by some postcolonialist readers where none would have been intended. 

Those influenced by The Madwoman in the Attic tend also to be influenced by Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation.  Drawing on his own social experiences as a homosexual sado-masochist, Foucault’s general argument is about society’s dread of difference.  Historically, many of those merely different were seen as a threat and designated mad by society as a means of social control.  Homosexual sado-masochists, for example.   Or a girl confined to an asylum merely for having an illegitimate child.  

     Is Bertha Mason, then, not mad at all, but simply perceived as a threat by a patriarchal society?   Rochester describes her as “intemperate and unchaste”.  (Ch 27).  For that read sexually liberated and unsubmissive?   Too independent to be easily controlled; so lock her up?  The Soviets dealt with their dissidents by interning them as insane. Same sort of thing?

     This sort of reading seems to me to run against the grain of the novel.  It has got things the wrong way around.  Bertha is not declared insane because she is intemperate; her intemperance is a symptom of her insanity. 

     Some feminist criticism has seen Bertha as the victim of Rochester’s oppression.  There is something in it (Jane is also a victim of his attitudes).   But if Bertha’s madness is a general symbol of a male-dominated society’s oppression, then it seems to me to be a failure.   The novel’s attitude towards madness reflects bewilderment with how to deal with it; that, and pity. Mason implores, “Let her be treated tenderly”, to which Rochester replies that he does his best.  (Ch 20).   When grappling with Bertha, Rochester could have felled her with a blow, “but he would not strike” (Ch 26).  When Rochester elects to make a fresh start by quitting Jamaica for England, he could have settled Bertha in the dampness of his other property Ferndean Manor where the atmosphere would have finished her off (we should remember that that Mason  (Ch 18) finds even Thornfield too cold and asks for the fire to be replenished) but his conscience recoils.  (Ch 27) His solution is to “place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation”.  (Ch 27).  Rochester tries to rescue Bertha from the fire, and calls to her by name.  (Ch 36). 

     Far guiltier than Rochester in their treatment of Bertha are the respective male parents.  Mason Senior conducts the marital negotiations with Rochester Senior behind the son’s back, with a settlement of £30 000 as the price for getting shot of her, and with the mad mother carefully concealed in an asylum.  (Ch 27).   Rochester the younger son is quite as much a victim as any of the female characters.

       Yes, there is oppression in the novel, but rather than primarily male over female it seems to me to be primarily that of the old over the young.  The tyranny is not confined to elderly males.  Mrs Reid, for pure spite, tells Jane’s wealthy uncle Mr Eyre that Jane is dead, thus hindering her life chances, when he is trying to find Jane in order to adopt her (and subsequently leave her his fortune). Overwhelmingly, the law forbidding divorce is the most crushing tyranny of all.  Hardy arraigned against it too, and so did Dickens in Hard Times. Stephen Blackpool must remain wedded to a drunkard, and unable to marry the woman whom he loves. 

     Whatever take modern readers might want to put on the novel, there seems no doubt that Charlotte Brontë intended Bertha to be mad.  One of the great houses near Haworth had had a mad woman in it for several years: a story that the Brontë sisters discussed with one another.  Charlotte consulted the section on madness in the family medical dictionary to acquaint herself with the symptoms.  Jane Eyre is at least as much Gothic as it is realistic.  There are frequent references to elves and fairy tales, and Bessie’s songs and folk tales, and one senses the story of Bluebeard hovering somewhere in the background.  Of course there’s room in such a work for a literal mad woman.

     Why, then, is Bertha mad?   We are told that there has been insanity in the family for three generations, and the mother is in an asylum. (Ch 26). The younger brother is a congenital idiot.  (Ch 27). Observing Richard Mason before she knows who he is, Jane is struck by an impression of vacancy (Ch 18) and Rochester says that Richard, too, is likely to go the way of his sister.  (Ch 27).

     It is possible to inherit the consequences of syphilis – a point made forcibly in Ibsen’s Ghosts – but there many more obvious causes than syphilis for hereditary insanity. 

     Why then, the idea of syphilis: when there is nothing in the text to suggest it?  Power.   To inherit madness is passive; to acquire it as a result of your own actions is active.  And it involves a fight back against male dominance.  Rochester’s bitterness arises from his knowledge that his infected wife has infected him. 

     This theory, it seems to me, in either of its manifestations, is not supported by the text.  It isn’t Bertha’s fault if her madness is inherited.  But If she had acquired her madness as the result of her sexual actions, then it would be.  Charlotte Brontë could have indicated culpability had she wanted to.  Instead, Jane says, “she cannot help being mad”.  (Ch 27) And Rochester’s personality, like Heathcliff’s, has its origins in Byronism rather than sexual disease. 

   Even wider of the mark, it seems to me, are those who – insisting on the awfulness of male dominance, and unable to leave the syphilis theory alone – see Rochester as guilty of infecting Bertha, rather than the other way around.  But, allowing for a moment the validity of the concept, Bertha is five years his senior (Ch 27) and would have had a five-year head start in getting herself infected.  She would not have needed any help from Rochester.  And there is no suggestion in the text that Rochester is initially promiscuous; although he is later driven to three different women – French, Italian and German (Ch 27) – by the circumstances of his marriage.  We can say that Rochester is lying, or telling less than the whole truth, but we are then moving into the argument from silence and away from the realms of literary criticism which – for me, anyway –  is about what the text actually says. 

The words may remain constant, but the significance attributed to them will change as new readers bring new suppositions to the text.  Jane Eyre’s popularity seems destined to last for a long time; and for as long as it does, Bertha Mason will continue to invite controversy. 

THE WAGES OF SIN?

“God is not mocked.  As a man sows, so shall he reap.”  Galatians 6:7.  Sceptics, and even believers, might well contest the accuracy of Paul’s contention.  God, it would seem, is often successfully mocked.  The makers of The Life of Brian did not suffer the consequences of divine displeasure.  Some Nazis were executed, true; but others escaped justice in South America. 

     Paul does not, of course, say that mockers will necessarily face the consequences in this life.  Sceptics will see that as a cop out; for it is thereby unprovable that those who mock will be punished.  And yet, in some instances at least, the consequences are not confined to the hereafter…

    In Gorky Park, an atheist enters a church and invites God to strike him down.  Nothing happens.  Proof positive: God doesn’t exist.  Shortly afterwards, however, this modern Prometheus dies when hit by a car.  Coincidence?  

     Gorky Park, granted, is only a novel.  The author is teasing us.  But there have been some strange real-life equivalents…

 In 1968, Ramon Polanski made Rosemary’s Baby.  In 1969 came the visit to the Polanski home by the Manson clan, and the murder of Sharon Tate.  Willy Rey, the beautiful Playboy centrefold, died of a drug overdose after becoming embroiled in black magic.  Coincidences, both.  Or two instances of who sups with the Devil should use a long spoon.

     Given their gifts of physical beauty, a surprising number of playmates have taken the suicide route by overdose: enough to raise a query about the unqualified benefits of the hedonistic lifestyle.  And then, of course, there was Dorothy Stratten: murdered by her jealous estranged husband for the centrefold appearance that he himself had suggested. 

     Pasolini’s final fling in 1975 was 120 Days of Sodom.  He died hideously in the same year:  run over seven times with his own car in an attack that crushed his bones and his testicles.  De Sade would have approved.  Responsible for such gems as Behind the Green Door and Debbie Does Dallas, the Mitchell brothers fell out with one another about Artie’s drug addiction, and Artie was shot fatally by Jim.  Mary Ann Leneghan, playing off rival drug dealers against one another, was raped, tortured and hideously murdered in a Reading car park. 

     But maybe one does not need to bring God into all this at all.  Maybe certain lifestyles simply generate their own sad outcomes. 

    

FIFTY SHADES OF CONFUSION

When I last looked at the approval rating for Fifty Shades of Grey on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes, it was running at around 26%: astonishingly low for a new release that is pulling ‘em in at the box office.  Perhaps I should say the disapproval rating: even the horrible Hobbit managed around 58%.  Critics are queueing up to find new ways to denounce the film: as if in apology for having seen it.

     The reasons for the dislike are interesting; for prudery does not seem to be among them.  When Napoleon read Justine, he ordered the arrest of the author:  for “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination”.  We do not find that spirit reflected in the responses of twenty-first-century sensibilities to Fifty Shades; unless we see it in those protesting outside cinemas on behalf of the female victims of male violence.  

     But no review I read is following Napoleon’s lead and saying, “I don’t like this film because it is immoral.”  Understandably, of course, if they want to continue as film critics; and even if some of them may secretly think it, although they can’t say it.  So they complain, instead, that the sex is so boring, and only takes up twenty minutes of the film.   It must be boring, if you can look at your watch instead of what’s happening on screen.   
  Boring, of course, is relative.  It depends on what is being compared with what.  By 50’s standards the sex in there is electric.  But think what murky water has flowed under the cinematic bridge since the 50’s.  Sure, the heroine of Fifty Shades is suspended by her arms; but if you’re going to think sex while suspended then you’re in competition with something like Behind the Green Door, and Marilyn Chambers, in unfaked reality, servicing four partners at the same time.  And with the hard-core genie now well and truly out of the bottle, and when you consider what’s available by way of internet porn, then simulated sex between just two people is on a hiding to nothing.

     Probably the next most frequent complaint is the portrayal of Christian Grey for being too…  well, grey.   (Nobody, incidentally, has queried the choice of the name ‘Christian’ for a sadist.)  For those who think there’s a link between a film and its source, the portrayal is   bad because it reflects the one-dimensional character in the book; or it’s bad because it doesn’t reflect the character in the book.  He’s not creepy enough.  Certainly he’s nothing like as creepy as the leather-clad obsessive with metal teeth in Belle du Jour.  But that particular character seems pretty settled in his depravity; whereas Grey has the potential to change. 

     These criticisms seem to me to be evasions of the real issues.  For one of the real, and therefore unspoken, problems is that commentators are caught between two modern commandments.  On the one hand, courtesy of feminism, you mustn’t hurt women.  (That idea, incidentally – though you’d never know it from modern education – was around in the days of King Arthur.)  On the other hand, you must respect the sexual orientations/tastes or whatever of others.  (If that was around in King Arthur’s day, I missed finding it in the Morte D’Arthur.)  So when another’s sexual proclivity is inflicting pain on women then these two principles are in conflict, and how to resolve them is a real conundrum.  Because once you concede that sado-masochism is wrong, just think where that could lead in the equality stakes.  What else might be wrong?  People see the implication, and it makes them uneasy.  So they take it out on the film.

     The other problem, I think is exactly what view to take of sado-masochism.  If we  have committed ourselves to the principle that the primary function of the sex act is new experience – and it would seem that a lot of us have – then  why not extend the boundaries a little?  Some reviewers have complained that sado-masochism is degrading to women and reduces them to the status of sex objects.  That may be true of this particular film, but exactly the same about men could be said of Personal Services, the biopic about Cynthia Payne.  Men in bras being whipped, or walked on by women in high heels?  So SM is degrading to both men and women alike.  But why is that wrong, if we own our own bodies, or lend them to someone else to degrade?  It would take a modern Napoleon to say something like, “It’s wrong because the body is the temple of the Spirit. And to wilfully inflict pain and degradation on it is to dishonour its Creator.”  But modern people aren’t going to say anything like that if they want to hang on to their jobs. 

     Another problem with the film, from our modern perspective,  is that it’s about bonding as much as about bondage. In that it is like many others of its type.  Although the contemporary world has committed itself (assuming commitment as a possibility) to sex without commitment, bonding still crops up in the most unexpected places dedicated to its denial.  The protagonist in Last Tango in Paris, hurt beyond measure by the death of his wife, wants emotion-free sex.  He becomes involved despite himself, though the girl is stronger willed.  You wanted just sex, you got it.  She may keep to the integrity of the agreement, but the desire for commitment still sneaks into  Tango  despite itself.  The sinister gangster with the dodgy teeth becomes obsessive about Belle du Jour.  I seem to recall – it’s years since I saw the film – that he wants her for himself.  But doesn’t that rather undermine the function of a prostitute, who should be spreading her favours as well as her legs?  In Eyes Wide Shut, after an odyssey – imagined or real, who knows? – of infidelity, the protagonist  ends up back with his wife.  Hell, even the code word for the orgy is ‘Fidelio’. 

     Fifty Shades of  Grey is cut from the same cloth.  At the end of the day, this is an old-fashioned love story.  I say old-fashioned because the characters are a man and a woman, rather than the same sex, and neither is transgendered.  I say a love story because thematically it reminds me of nothing so much as the Clerk’s story of patient Griselda in The Canterbury Tales.  Griselda, too, attracts the attentions of a mean rich guy who decides to punish her (emotionally, it has to be said, rather than physically) for no crime other than existing and being sweet.  Rather than his unpleasantness changing her, her goodness finally changes him.  The couple find reconciliation.  Grey moves in the same direction as Chaucer’s Marquis: from bondage to bonding, to marriage and a baby.  True the first film of the projected trilogy doesn’t get there yet, ending as it does with a closing elevator door, but you can see (even if you haven’t read the other books in the sequence), where all this is heading.  
     The overtness of the view that commitment-free sex doesn’t work may have a bearing on the film’s unpopularity with those at the cutting edge of opinion formation.  A more valid complaint might be that it is unrealistic  that someone like Grey would actually be changed.  What is more likely is that the girl would be.  Stockholm Syndrome and all that.  That, after all, is what happens in Justine. The heroine hopes that she will change her tormentor.  Instead, she ends up liking what he’s doing to her.

     But that is even more smacking of fantasy than the Fifty Shades alternative if we look at the reality of de Sade’s life.  True, de Sade’s frozen heart was not melted, but he did not bring his victims round to his point of view.  A string of female servants resigned, complaining of ill treatment.  The one on whom he really got going  – cutting her, and pouring hot wax into the wounds –  escaped  the torture chamber, fled and reported him.  In this instance, authority and public opinion were on her side.  They arrested de Sade again, and locked him up as a lunatic. 

     They could be uncompromising about it: without agonising about whether or not he, too, was a victim, and what childhood trauma might have been the cause.  They just saw what he was, and what else he might do unless prevented.

  Maybe they knew something back in those days that we since have lost.

    

AMBIGUITY, LITERATURE AND LIFE

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire is among the last of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

            A British widower has remarried, this time a Peruvian woman.  He has a fifteen-year old son – crippled with a spinal problem – from the first marriage, and a new son from the second.

            He has no reason to see the new wife as anything other than a devoted mother until he discovers her bending over the cot and sucking blood from the baby’s neck.  She has also attacked her step-son.  At his wit’s end, the husband confines the wife to her room, and consults Holmes.

            At the scene of the mystery, Holmes notes three things:  a lame dog, a display of South-American weapons, and the crippled son’s adoration for his father.

            Putting these clues together, Holmes quickly finds the solution.  Furiously jealous of the baby, the boy has attempted to kill him with a poisoned dart, after first experimenting on the dog.  Realising the situation, the wife has sucked out the poison, but has not wanted to tell her husband about the problem, knowing his love for his son.

            The way in which the wife is perceived in the story thus passes through three phases: from loving mother to child abuser and back to faithful protectress.   Things are not quite back to what they were at the start, however, since there is still the problem of what to do about the older boy. 

 

This progress in perception echoes the real-life progress of how the Governess in James’ The Turn of the Screw has been perceived.

            Initially she was taken at face value by readers as protecting the children against the ghosts of depraved servants.  (That is to say – since this is a ghost story – readers could accept that there are ghosts in the story, whether or not there are ghosts in real life).

            Edmund Wilson changed all that with his essay ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’.  Applying a Freudian reading to the text, the Governess became an unreliable narrator and a victim of sexual frustration, As such, the children needed protection not from ghosts, but from her; the ghosts, in any case, being a symptom of her own neurosis.  Apart from the reduction of morality to psychology, you now couldn’t have ghosts even in a ghost story. And the Governess had regressed from brave defender to child abuser.

            Not all readers agreed.  Leading the counterblast was Robert Heilman’s 1948 essay ‘The Turn of the Screw as Poem’.  This revived the reality of the ghosts within the story, and also pointed out the religious imagery used by James and ignored by Wilson.  Clearly, with the intensity of the debate, we have moved here beyond the realms of literary criticism into something deeper.  What is at stake is not just rival ways of reading a text, but rival world views with which to read reality. 

            Post Wilson and Heilman, where are we?  Is the Governess exonerated?  Well, yes and no. As with The Sussex Vampire, Situation Three is not the same as Situation One.  And here the problem of authorial intention really manifests itself.  Conan Doyle provides a way out, and Henry James doesn’t. 

            The Sussex Vampire, of course, is a much lesser work in every way than The Turn of the Screw.  Some equivalent of Holmes’ simple remedy – “A year at sea for Master Jacky” – would be quite out of place in the complexity of James’ narrative.

For Wilson is quite right, the text is fraught with ambiguity.  Heilman is also quite right: the text is suffused with religious imagery.  Thus we cannot say that the Governess is neurotic; only that she might be.  Equally, we cannot say that the Governess is protective; only that she might be.   Is Miles killed by the Governess, or by the ghost of Peter Quint?  When Miles says, ‘“Peter Quint – you devil!”’ who is he talking to: ghost or governess?

We cannot know because James has withheld that possibility from us by the nature of his narrative choices, and here we have another clash of world views: in this case, not between the two critics but between the two authors about how much direction to give to the reader[1].   

 

When it comes to it, the best comparison to The Turn of the Screw is not The Sussex Vampire at all.  Rather, it is one of those ingenious pictures that change even as you look at them.    A vase, or two faces?   An old woman, or a young one?  Either.  Both.

            Take your pick.

 

 

Why use ambiguity at all?  Five reasons, I think.

One, inadvertency/incompetence.   Because you cannot express your intended meaning clearly.  Prior to Derrida and deconstruction, that was the French explanation.

Two, code.  In Revelation, for example, ‘Babylon’ partly stands for ‘Rome’.  Why not just say ‘Rome’?  Do so, and the work would be banned, and you would be put to death.  But this is not ambiguity as such; it’s just survival.  If you have the code, the intended meaning is clear enough. 

Three, cowardice.  Because to say what you really think might make you unpopular; so you hide behind double meanings.

Four, uncertainty.  Because you really don’t know what you believe.  You are asserting the mystery of life.  This seems to me a perfectly responsible intellectual stance to take; provided no one is looking for guidance from you as an intellectual in sorting out life’s confusions.

Five, intellectual stimulation.  You are catering to the sort of mind that enjoys cryptic crosswords.  The difference is, after a cryptic crossword has teased your mind for a while, you can get a result.  With the likes of Henry James, you can’t.

 

However excellent ambiguity may be for those with time on their hands, in real life it can be a disaster. .

            “Charge at that hill!”

            “Right men! Charge at that hill!”

            Where the hell’s he going?     

    “No, you fool!  Not that hill.  That hill!”

            Too late.

            Result: all the dead men and horses of The Light Brigade. 

 

That’s why, if I were forced to choose, I would go with Doyle’s approach rather than with James’.   When the chips are down, the concerns of real life are rather more pressing than the concerns of art.

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[1]  Conan Doyle even tells us about the recovery of the dog.