The Use of Violence: Pilate vs. Macon Dead (the Elder)

Today in class, we were comparing the differences between Milkman's father and Pilate.  An idea, which was difficult to express in chalkboard-worthy shorthand occurred to me, and we expanded upon the idea in class.  I am writing ideas about how both Macon Dead and Pilate are violent, but their violence is somehow different.

Macon Dead is portrayed as slapping his wife before he even drops his fork, because he is so angry in the moment.  Macon is not controlled at all in his action.  He is trying to communicate with his violence, but since he is communicating an emotion for his own good (instead of common sense for someone else's good like Pilate is doing), his violence does not have any sort of good effect.  His communication effort is aiming toward opinionated disapproval, and comes off as seeming abusive to Milkman.  (As a side note, when Milkman retaliates, his efforts are also unsuccessful at changing the situation because he is also trying to communicate opinionated disapproval, which in turn simply appears to his father as "abusive").

However, when Pilate uses violence (the knife incident), she is very calculated in her actions, and acts not in the moment of her rage, but as a method of controlled rage in place of her daughter's potential momentary anger that could backfire (like it does for Macon).  She acts violently to try and protect her family to try and make her family safer and happier.  She uses violence because she knows that potentially lethal actions will really make the threatening man listen to her.  Unlike Macon, when she wields the knife, she seems totally in charge of her actions.

The family dynamics of Pilate's household and Macon's  household tie into the way their violence manifests.  Since Pilate is all about equality and representation for her daughter and granddaughter (both of whom she treats relatively the same way in terms of importance: no hierarchy), she can act for their own benefit, but would never do anything to be violent to her own family members.  Yet if Pilate is the protector, then Macon is the dictator: he acts as if all of his family are subordinates, with his wife at the bottom of the ranking.  Thus, he can punish her for her actions, since she is so subordinate and she is not fitting his definition of how she should be thinking and talking.

Societal Perceptions - Antoinette vs. Meursault

Yesterday during the panel presentation, the idea arose that Antoinette was not fully mad by the end of the book.  Several students were saying that of course Antoinette is mad, that you cannot argue otherwise, because obviously society claims that she does not act normally, and therefore she could not be sane.  It does not matter how she became mad or why, but simply that she is mad.
I would like to dispute this argument by drawing a connection between societal perceptions of Antoinette and Meursault.  Society writes off Antoinette as mad because she tries to kill her uncle and because she says weird things and acts oddly; society writes off Meursault as guilty because he killed a man, and therefore must be guilty.  Society cannot understand either of their actions, and it decides that the character is guilty or mad by default.  But society only tries to figure out why, and to what extent, in Meursault's case.  Unfortunately, in Antoinette's case, they feel secure in simply writing her off as mad, and not trying to legitimize or figure out why: they think of it as a hereditary issue.  She has no trial, no defensive attorney, just a world of prosecutors to face.  This in itself could drive her mad: in fact, I think it does.
Anyways, I think it is difficult for society to believe, to conceive, or to explain Antoinette's saneness for the same reason it is difficult to accept Meursault's innocence.  Yet this does not mean that Antoinette is in no way sane, that Meursault is in no way innocent.  Yet because we occupy Meursault's consciousness as he becomes guilty (during the murder scene), we can become easily frustrated by his prosecuting attorney.  I see that Antoinette is in a similar situation as Meursault, but it is more difficult for the class to become frustrated with the society labeling her solely insane because we did not inhabit her consciousness during the transformation and thus do not have her perspective

The Relative Inevitability of Relationship Breakdown in The Wide Sargasso Sea

Today in class, we discussed the possibility that Rochester has an inferiority complex.  This is definitely a possibility, because he often longs to write a searing letter to his father, whom he partially blames for this mess.  He has spent his whole life feeling wronged an inferior.  He is thus very compassionate to anyone who sympathizes with him, and indulges this feeling in him.  He likes to hear that people feel bad for him.  This is why he is immediately taken by Cosway's letter: he loves Antoinette very much, but as soon as he reads the letter, he stops physically loving her (which seems to be the only love he has with her, except maybe a small flame of "mental" love in danger of burning out).
He is pretty compassionate with Antoinette when she begins to tell him her story, but he does not feel very connected with her, still.  It is almost as if they are struggling to give life to the flame of "mental" that has been almost stamped out.  And then, the next morning, he realizes immediately that he has been wronged, again, from his point of view, because Antoinette has put a love potion in his drink.  He is addicted to this feeling, and immediately relapses, because it is difficult to shake this off after his whole life of this worldview.  In light of this, to get back at Antoinette, he goes to the girl who has always sympathized with him...does he feel that she understands him better than Antoinette does?  In any case, she sympathizes with him, and he is attracted to this sympathy, as one of the few people who expresses sympathy for him in his entire life.  His act with Amelie also makes him feel superior, something that he has long wanted.
And yet, in this act, he has spurned Antoinette, who wanted to love-potion him simply to improve their relationship.  She has been struggling her whole life to have someone love her, truly, and hsi subsequent act with Amelie makes her madly angry.

Thus, both Antoinette and Rochester are, in a sense, looking toward similar goals, but in ways that are not compatible.  Rochester is trying to stop feeling wronged and start being told truths; Antoinette is trying to stop feeling wronged and start being loved.  Yet their thoughts about the way they are being treated are based on their perceptions.  Since both tend to percieve themselves as statically deceived/unloved, and it would be difficult for anyone to change their perceptions about the way they are being treated, their happiness and fulfillment of their wishes is neigh impossible.  When one perceives the relationship to be on the upward slope in terms of their personal goals about how they are treated as an individual, the other is usually questioning.  Neither has enough faith in the relationship to make it work.  Neither one knows or understands the other, so neither can believe that the other could fulfill their wishes about how they should be treated.

When the steps relationship finally does inevitably fail, it could (theoretically) have had a chance for recovery.  Yet the relationship does not recover, because of the extreme one-sidedness of the blame that is placed on the mishap.  In the end, Rochester places none of the blame on himself, and Antoinette places all of the blame on herself.

The reason for this difference is derived from their childhood situations.  Both Antoinette and Rochester grow up feeling that they should be considered innocent, but only Rochester is able to fully legitimize this feeling of innocence in his childhood mind.
Antoinette is constantly being told that she is somehow direly guilty, even though she could not possibly be guilty of her parents’ deeds.  She cannot simply brush these people off in a racist manner, since she loves Christophine and Tia.  Yet she also cannot blame her parents for what they did, because she loves her mother.  She therefore internalizes the guilt partially, but gets a mixed message about her innocence.
Thus in the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester, Antoinette is constantly wavering between feeling and acting innocent in the relationship problems, and taking full self-blame, that she was not good enough for him.  She never blames her historical setting for anything that happens, and she never blames Rochester, or her family, or Christophine for the failure of the potion.  Even at the end of the book, when she is mad, she refers to Rochester as “the man who hated me” (189), which shows a frightening spectrum of the depth of her self-blame and her lack of feeling loved by anyone, even to the end.
Rochester, on the other hand, is able to place blame on his father, his family, and on the fact that he was born the younger brother.  Since he was not alone in this feeling (he almost without doubt shared them with other younger brothers his age), placing the blame on others became part of his nature.  Thus, even when he is going to Jamaica to achieve monetary success as a younger brother, he is quick to remove the blame from himself when the situation does not work out.  He is quick to blame his family as soon as Cosway writes him.  Later, he also blames Christophine.  Interestingly, he also blames Antoinette, but not as harshly because he does not understand her situation fully.
Thus, when Antoinette calls him a wide variety of names, it is really injurious, because she is essentially calling him inferior.  This is as close as she comes to placing the blame on him; and it seems to be a last-straw moment for Rochester.  Yet Rochester still cares about Antoinette’s well-being and is mad at Christophine for making her a drunk even after their whole fight.  He tries to stamp out the flame of love from their relationship but at this point he still wants to stay friends, in a sense.  He visualizes them living in the same house.
So why does Antoinette end up by herself in an attic, saying that Rochester never came back?

Reacting, Thinking, and Paraphrasing Parts of “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka,” and Determining Some of Camus’s Views on Tragedy

Camus begins by discussing how “nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work,”  (92) because it is difficult to know exactly how a symbol essentially maps onto a story or vice versa.  He then discusses how Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial  is a symbol for “naturalness” or “the human condition,” (93) which is difficult to define or wrap one’s mind around.  This symbolism is similar to the idea that Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger represents Christ.  The representation on the surface seems ridiculously far-fetched, but without reading too far into it, the symbolism is highly apparent (especially after reading the article my group presented on in the panel presentation).  Looking at symbolism is like looking through a far-off galaxy: you can see it through your peripherals, but its image weakens and melts into blackness if you look directly at it.

Camus argues that in all of Kafka’s works, there are many paradoxes in the characters’ situations.  All of the works are absurdist, which is why the paradoxes exist.  Absurdism also means, according to Camus, that “the mind projects into the concrete its spiritual tragedy” (93).  Therefore, to the absurdist, it makes sense to say that each person has some difficulties in life, and their mind is focused on these difficulties such that they appear to the person as having some negative effect on the rest of their lives.  In other words, discussing this in terms of tragedy, each character would have a struggle, and this struggle would permeate throughout their entire life and become a tragic struggle.

Kafka goes on to say that tragedies are more effective if the characters’ actions are logical and natural: then fate will have played a greater role.  This comment is interesting to consider in the light of The Stranger, when Meursault actually committed murder.  Meursault’s actions are not logical, especially because he never makes a conscious effort to keep from getting the death sentence, or to escape arrest in the first place.  Thus, wouldn’t one expect Camus’s tragedy not to be very effective, by his own definition?  However, on a closer look, is Meursault made to kill the Arab (by the sun, in my view, or by fate…from any perspective except the jury’s, Meursault’s actions in this scene are influenced by something).  He is persuaded into all his decisions simply because of a lack of want or ability to refuse to do anything.  If Camus intended Meursault’s actions to have been fated, then we see that by his own definition, his tragedy could have been effective.  If, on the other hand, Camus intended Meursault to be Christlike, then does Camus believe in predestination for Christ?  Or does he intend for his tragedy to not be as effective?  Or does he even remember that he wrote this about Kafka?