Shakespeare uses the relationship of love and money throughout his plays as a subtle device that raises questions about reality. Upon deeper analysis of the relationships between characters in The Merchant of Venice, there is a distinct and recurrent theme of appearances versus reality. After delving deeper into the reality of the matter, a different perspective on characters within the play may be adopted, one that dispels stereotypes and initial conclusions about love in Shakespeare’s comedy. The characters in the drama approach relationships with overwhelming self-interest and, upon closer observation, allow economic determinism to slyly undercut their apparent motives.
First of all, under scrutiny, the supposed love of Portia and Bassanio indubitably leads one to believe that he has ulterior motives in his design to woo Portia that do not merely include the desire to be married to a respectable, intelligent and beautiful heiress. In the initial scene of the play, the audience learns that Bassanio already owes Antonio “the most in money and in love” (1.1.131). However, he has devised a plan to repay him by means of an additional loan. “‘Tis not unknown to you,” Bassanio tells Antonio, “how much I have disabled mine estate…and from your love I have a warranty to unburthen all of my plots and purposes how to get clear of all the debts I owe” (1.1.122-134). Basically, prevailing upon the generosity of his friend, and under the pretense of repaying his debts, Bassanio obtains a colossal sum of money in order to monetarily have a chance at wooing his way into even greater personal wealth and prosperity. In order for Antonio to forward his beloved friend the proposed sum of money, he must obtain a bond from the most notoriously vicious loan shark and usurer in Venice- the Jew, Shylock. The reprehensible Jew allows Antonio the desired sum free of interest; however, he stipulates that, if he does not repay him on time, then “the forfeit be nominated for an equal pound of [Antonio’s] fair flesh, to be cut off and taken in what part of the body pleaseth [Shylock],” to which Antonio willingly agrees(1.3.148-151)!
Although, upon this realization, one may decry the surreptitious method by which Bassanio scams Antonio into placing his life on the line for the sake of his personal comfort, it is judicious to take into account Portia’s role in Bassanio’s actions. First of all, solely based on the identities of her first two suitors, the Princes of Morocco and Arragon, it is apparent that, without some form of substantial monetary holdings, the casket test would not be an option for any man. As a result, in order for the messenger to even announce that “there is alighted at [her] gate a young Venetian, one that comes before to signify th’ approach of his lord,” Bassanio must procure a significant sum of money (2.9.86-88). At first notice, Portia is skeptical about Bassanio and his alleged wealth, responding to the messenger’s news, “No more, I pray thee. I am half afeard thou wilt say anon he is some kin to thee” (2.9.96-97)! Once Bassanio comes before her and she sees for herself his conspicuous wealth, the fickle Portia is quickly smitten before he even has the opportunity to choose, exclaiming, “Beshrow you eyes, they have o’erlooked and divided me: One half of me is yours, the other half yours—mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, and so all yours” (3.2.14-18).
Ironically, Bassanio’s reasoning during the casket test reveals to the audience some of the false pretenses under which both Portia and Bassanio operate. Bassanio’s over eagerness to undergo the test causes Portia to doubt him for but a mere moment, asking him to “confess what treason there is mingled with [his] love” (3.2.26-27). However, not willing to admit the truth that he lives on borrowed funds and thereby forfeit personal gain, Bassanio quickly assuages her with his reply, “None but that ugly treason of mistrust,” causing her to feel bad for her unbelief rather than to pursue reality. His actions thus far lead the audience to believe that Bassanio, although perhaps attracted to Portia and maybe even “in love” with her, is primarily concerned with his initial objective of accumulating great personal wealth. After contemplating the riddle Portia’s father has left to determine her husband, Bassanio ironically muses that “the world is deciev’d with ornament” (3.2.74). Although Portia does not immediately realize it, he is admitting his own deceit toward her and pointing out her enamor with wealth. Their respective love for money allows them each to be deceived by the appearance of love rather than penetrating to the reality of the matter. The unfortunate reality is they both succumb to“the seeming truth which cunning times put on to entrap the wisest,” allowing love of money to blind them towards pretentious love (3.2.100-101).
Next, upon closer observation, although apparently the most faithful and affectionate of friends, the friendship of Bassanio and Antonio is notably based also on a mutual love of money. From the beginning, it is evident that Bassanio continually borrows money from Antonio for personal profit and comfort; yet, for some unknown reason, Antonio is blinded by love for his friend, allowing him whatever he wishes, saying, “My purse, my person, my extremest means, lie all unlock’d to your occasions” (1.1.138-139). Later, in Act IV, Shylock calls in the bond, which Antonio has agreed to in order to advance Bassanio the funds he needs to woo Portia, so placing his life in jeopardy because of his friend’s love of money. At this point, Bassanio interjects before the court on Antonio’s behalf, event telling him, “Antonio, I am married to a wife which is as dear to me as life itself, but life itself, my wife, and all the world, are not with me esteem’d above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all here to this devil, to deliver you” (4.1.282-287).One must, however, question the sincerity of these words. Does Bassanio truly love Antonio more than even his wife (whom he has obtained under false pretense for the sake of monetary gain), or is he simply putting on a show for the sake of those observing, who undoubtedly condemn him for placing his friend in such a position? Is Bassanio truly distressed at his friend’s fate as it appears, or is he simply either distraught at the prospect of losing such a magnificent source of income or relieved that he will escape repaying the debt he owes? Although he appears to be a good friend, really he himself is as greedy of a villain as Shylock.
Another consequential relationship that may, indeed, be viewed as based on money rather than love is that of Shylock and his daughter Jessica. Shylock is a wealthy Jew, continually lending money and charging exorbitant rates of interest. As his daughter, Jessica undoubtedly receives the benefit of this wealth, although he does shut her away from the rest of the world, as denoted by his words, “Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum and the vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife, clamber not you up to the casements then, nor thrust your head in to the public street to gaze on Christian fools with varnishe’d faces” (2.5.29-38). Despite his warning, Jessica flees her father’s house to elope with the Christian, Lorenzo, one evening in his absence, taking with her the majority of his wealth. When Lorenzo arrives under the shroud of darkness to retrieve Jessica, revealing himself as her love, Jessica curiously responds, “my love indeed, for who love I so much? And now who knows but you, Lorenzo, whether I am yours” (2.5.29-31)? This rhetorical question leads one to consider the intentions of Lorenzo’s affection toward Jessica. Does he merely love her for her ducats? If his love is real, then perhaps her ensuing statement, “love is blind” holds some credence (2.5.36). However, if his motivation lies in obtaining her wealth, the statement further displays the overarching role of appearance as it disguises reality. Jessica thoroughly espouses her above statement, overlooking Lorenzo’s Christian faith, and perhaps even an economic disadvantage, truly loving him regardless.
When Shylock discovers that Jessica has eloped with Lorenzo and stolen a large portion of her inheritance, his response is far from passive. According to Solanio, he was heard in the street vehemently expressing his distress, saying, “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats! Justice! The law! My ducat, and my daughter...Justice! Find the girl, she hath the stones upon her, and the ducats” (2.8.12-22)! Solanio’s response toward Shylock is not that of merely a casual observer, rather that of a less than objective onlooker who embellishes the downfall of his enemy; however, one must wonder whether Shylock’s repeated words do not contain a hint of misplaced sorrow. It appears that, although Shylock shows remorse for the loss of his daughter, he harps even more upon the loss of his “Christian ducats” (Ibid).
Lastly, one must discern the significance of money in relation to what Shylock considers important in life. Even though Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice portrays a greedy Jew in the first few acts, in reality, Shylock is a man who loves revenge more than money. When Antonio and Shylock bring their case before the court, Shylock vehemently demands that he be repaid every ounce of flesh entitled to him according to their bond agreement. Surprisingly, instead of accepting double-recompense from Bassanio for the loaned sum, Shylock refuses this appeasement, saying, “If every ducat in six thousand ducats were in six parts, and every part a ducat, I would not draw them, I would have my bond” (4.1.85-88). If, indeed, Shylock’s sole aim were to accumulate even greater wealth by scamming Christians, he would accept the deal of ducats and forfeit the flesh. However, Shylock pursues revenge rather than money, breaking the hitherto apparent stereotype of Jews avaricious usurers. Although everyone expects him to cave in to the offer of money, Shylock surprises everyone when he proves that, in reality, money comes second, even if only to revenge. “I crave the law,” Shylock proclaims to the court, in other words desiring what he sees as the just demise of his adversary, Antonio. After all, his cause is just, as “he hath disgrace’d [him], and hind’red me half a million, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorn’d my nation, thwarted my bargains, cool’d my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew”(3.1.54-58). Unfortunately for Shylock, Portia, disguised as a law clerk, changes the scales on his justice, telling him, “As thou urgest justice, be assur’d thou shalt have justice more than thou desir’st. He shall have merely justice and his bond” (4.1.321-322,339). Shylock’s pound of flesh is deemed to be unlawfully taken, yet required by the law, so that he faces death in exchange for vengeance. Only when he realizes that his life is in jeopardy does he endeavor to take the proffered sum of money, saying, “I take this offer then; pay the bond thrice and let the Christian go… Give me my principal and let me go” (4.1.318-319, 336). Sadly, not only is he no longer allowed to accept repayment, but he is also required to relinquish what is left of his fortune to the state, as well as to give up his faith and convert to Christianity on penalty of death. While one might believe that such a formerly penurious and avaricious man would rather forfeit his life than life in poverty, Shylock even further dispels such misconceptions about himself, proving that, despite his eminent appearance of greed, in reality, money his true priority.
The overarching theme of appearance versus reality unfolds throughout Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as evidenced through the various relationships represented above. Love and money recurrently correlate as they motivate the appearances that are so skillfully woven throughout the play, surreptitiously concealing reality, and only later much later exposed after careful observation. Relationships that appear to be based on love are, in reality, the products of self-interest, often spurred on by economic determinism.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. "The Merchant of Venice." The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1997. 288-317. Print.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Ophelia's Death and Madness
Reflecting his society’s widely differing views, Shakespeare, in his play Hamlet, confronts madness and suicide without making any moral judgment. Ophelia’s madness and subsequent death are illustrative of this analysis. To fully appreciate Shakespeare’s approach, one must consider the varying views of madness embraced during the Shakespearean period, which are reflected in the burial rites assigned to alleged suicidal victims. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia leads to the conclusion that her tragic death was the unfortunate result of her madness.
In order to fully understand how Shakespeare confronts madness and suicide in Hamlet, it is necessary to review Ophelia’s life and death. As her brother Laertes departs for France in Hamlet I.iii, he warns Ophelia not to love Hamlet. Shortly thereafter, Polonius also upbraids Ophelia for falling in love with Hamlet and commands her to refuse any further attentions from him. A faithful daughter, Ophelia pledges to obey her father without realizing the effect it will have on her life later. In Hamlet III.i, immediately after Hamlet soliloquizes his famous “To be or not to be” speech, Ophelia enters the room to return to Hamlet some trifles he had given her while he was trying to woo her. Soon, Hamlet realizes that they are being watched, and proceeds to abuse his love for Ophelia with his renowned “get thee to a nunnery” speech. Not long afterwards, Ophelia’s madness is realized in Act IV scene v, shortly after her beloved Hamlet accidentally murders her father Polonius. Two scenes later, Gertrude relays the tragic news that Ophelia drowned when a branch of the willow tree she was sitting in broke off and she fell into the water.
In Shakespeare’s era, madness was frequently referred to as hysteria, the equivalent of modern-day dementia. Madness in women was commonly associated with sexual repression. According to Carol Thomas Neely, “Hysteria was caused, traditional medicine believed, by the pathology of the diseased and wandering womb, hence it was primarily although not exclusively a disease of women” (320). As noted by Elaine Showalter, “A deranged beloved embodies ‘the representational bonds between female insanity and female sexuality’”(Owen 1). It also was generally believed that if sexual desires or menstrual periods were suppressed for extended periods of time without fruition, women would slowly begin to go mad, as sanity and sexuality were considered closely tied in Shakespeare’s age (Neely 320). As a result, marriage was frequently proposed as the antidote for such madness, as it allowed women to have frequent sexual relations in a socially and morally acceptable setting (321). Furthermore, it is critical to note that, due to idleness and general passivity, such hysterical madness was generally more common among “women of the upper classes” and was “linked with marital, sexual, and class status, associated with sexual frustration, and cured by sexual satisfaction” (320).
In some cases, marriage was not an option. Campbell notes that “Neither marriage nor its sexual by-product is an option for Ophelia because her father deems her only suitor unsuitable; thus she resorts to a violent and permanent cure for her suffering of the mother” (2). “Suffering of the mother” is a medical term that describes the suffering state of a girl whose need for sexual activity and child production is suppressed, causing her to experience erotic melancholy known as erotomania (Camden 254). According to Showalter, “Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania” (3). Neely continues this argument that Ophelia’s madness was due to forsaken love when she contends that, “[t]he context of [Ophelia’s] disease, like that of hysteria later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control of women’s bodies (Campbell 1-2). Consideration of such factors is important when interpreting and critiquing Ophelia’s madness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Shortly after the scene where Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” and then foully abuses her innocence with excessive sexual language in public during the play enacted to prick Claudius’ guilty mind, the audience learns that Ophelia goes mad in Act III scene i. The cause of her madness, however, is highly debated among literary critics, as some believe that it was the result of grief over the unnatural death of her father Polonius and others attribute it to the volatile and then abandoned love of Hamlet. As noted by Robert Burton in his work, The Anatomy of the Melancholy, “Ophelia suffers from hysteria, a malady often ascribed to upper class women who bide their time in their fathers’ homes while awaiting fulfillment of their culturally mandated roles as wives and mothers” (Campbell 1). In other words, Ophelia’s hysterical symptoms mirror those considered in Shakespeare’s time to be the result of suppressed sexual desire.
Ophelia grows mad out of a need to free herself from the rule of “patriarchal cultural institutions,” which tried to “contain women’s natural passions” (Campbell 2). The audience learns of this when, “by publically alluding to sexual experience, Ophelia reveals a deeper understanding of worldly issues than an aristocratic virgin should even admit, rejecting the essentialized female codes her father dictated to her and blurring the demarcations between innocence and subversion” (Ibid). Furthermore, Ophelia’s symptoms are those of hysterics and erotomania as,
She is mad, cries ‘hem’ to clear her throat because of choking or suffocation, beats her heart to relieve the sensation of oppression around it, weeps, prattles constantly, sings snatches of old songs, is distracted and has a depraved imagination, and ends her life by drowning (Camden 254).
Such speech and actions show that the untimely death of Polonius is not what drove Ophelia to madness, but rather the forsaken love of Hamlet.
The words of mad individuals in Shakespeare’s plays continually play a significant role in the interpretation of the events that take place in the play. Ophelia’s insane musings take the form of an odd jumble of lauds and “bawdy songs” that give the audience insight into the reality of her fate. These“bawdy songs,” which she pronounces during her madness, further supports this idea, as “Ophelia becomes exactly what her father, brother, and Renaissance society fear she will be after breaking the shackles of control over feminine overflow: blatantly sexual, excessively noisy, and socially subversive” (Campbell 3-4). As part of these songs, “Ophelia recites formulas, tales, and songs that ritualize passages of transformation and loss—lost love, lost chastity, and death” (Neely 324). In addition, many of the nearly incoherent lauds she sings shortly before her death are church songs sung during monastic services as praises to God, recalling in the audience’s mind III.i.121 when Hamlet tells her to “get thee to a nunnery” (Chapman 1). In her article, “Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture”, Neely contended that Ophelia’s madness was “her liberation from silence, obedience, and constraint or her absolute victimization by patriarchal oppression” (332). As a result, contrary to many popular beliefs, rather than out of grief over the murder of her beloved father on the part of her lover, it is appropriate to deem Ophelia’s madness as a result of the need for liberation from masculine rule, as well as the need for fulfillment of her sexual needs and desires coupled with the apparent loss of Hamlet’s love.
Were it to have occurred today, Ophelia’s death would have been considered a tragic accident; however, according to the views of Shakespeare’s era, her accidental death was viewed as a self-destructive suicide. Many apparent suicides were not clear-cut and easily provable. “Drowning was one of the most frequent causes of accidental death in Tudor and Stuart England, and it was obviously difficult in many cases to be sure that the people found drowned in a pond or river had actually committed suicide” (McDonald 311). To understand the death and burial of Ophelia, it is imperative to consider the common views and rituals of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide and burial in relation to madness.
When dead bodies were discovered, it was almost automatically assumed that they were suicide victims, and therefore were treated accordingly as the laws of the Elizabethan period prescribed. According to Michael McDonald in his article “Ophelia’s Maimed Rites”, “Self-murderers were certainly among those excluded from Christian burial, and refusing rites to them was justified on the basis of their inability to publically repent before their deaths” (314). When cases of suicide or ambiguous cause of death appeared, juries of common people would convene to determine whether the deceased should be considered felo de se or non compos mentis (McDonald 310-311). A felo de se, or “felon of himself” entailed the withholding of traditional Christian burial rites and complete asset forfeiture to the state, in addition to burial of the corpse, impaled on a stake, in the middle of the road during the night. On the other hand, a sentence of non compos mentis, a decision that the deceased was mad and thereby acquitted of any felony, involved the possible allowance for some burial rituals if approved by the church, and without asset forfeiture (Ibid). When in doubt, however, instead of giving the deceased the benefit of the doubt, juries usually sentenced them as felo de se, and even “gentility…was no guarantee of mercy” (311-312). Another verdict used in cases of suicide victims and mentioned in Hamlet by the clown in V.i.10-13, se defendendo was absurdly used to declare individuals to have acted out of self-defense (312). As the views of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide burials come to light, they may be seen in Ophelia’s own death and subsequent burial.
When Gertrude reports her death, she attributes Ophelia’s fall into the water to the breaking of a limb of a willow tree upon which she is perched. Ironically, this tree is considered to be a symbol of unrequited love in both Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature (Ibid). German critic Ruth J. Owen states that “Ophelia’s waters are ‘die stummer wasser,’ representing silence. What goes unspoken here is less an individual murder than a force crumbling and eroding civilization” (5). Upon the realization that Ophelia died for love of her beloved, mad Hamlet, the audience sees the desecration of societal traditions, as she disobeys her father’s command to forsake her suitor in this final liberating act of dying on behalf of his love. This supposition is supported when Ophelia gives rosemary, an herb usually given as a wedding present, to her brother Laertes, “condemn[ing] his collusion with Polonius in preventing her marriage, which forces her into this state of overwrought emotion and socially unsanctioned sexuality”(Campbell 8).
Suicide was viewed as an odious felony in the early modern period of Shakespeare’s England. As a result, “[a]mong the coroners’ inquisitions filed in the central courts between 1487 and 1660, only 1.6% of suicides were returned non compos mentis” (Ibid). Because the laws prohibiting suicide were so strictly upheld, “[a]s a rule, they excused only raving lunatics and regarded evidence of lesser mental disorders as proof that a suicide was guilty of his own murder” (Ibid). This evidence supports the idea that the mentally ill or mad, being such, received their due punishment for their actions, though performed in altered states of mind, through the refusal of proper burial and the forfeiture of property.
The audience first learns of Ophelia’s death from Gertrude, who reveals the nature of the incident “as accidental, passive, involuntary, [and] mad” when, in IV.vii.173 she proclaims that “an envious sliver broke” when Ophelia was sitting on a branch of a willow tree singing her mad songs (Neely 326). She continues her report by describing the scene of Ophelia’s drowning, saying,
Her clothes spread wide, and mermaidlike awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. (Shakespeare IV.ii.175-80).
Through this portrayal of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude, with her words,
[N]either condemns [Ophelia’s death] on religious grounds nor explicitly condones it on medical/legal grounds. Instead she narrates it without interpretation as a beautiful, “natural,” ritual of passage and purification, the mad body’s inevitable return to nature (Neely 327).
As Joshua Cohen points out that, through her announcement of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude “describes the drowning Ophelia as ‘mermaid-like,’ she brings into focus the precise nature of her tragedy, that of a young woman turned away at the threshold of sexual fulfillment, whose maiden love is slandered, rejected, thwarted” (1).
The methods of sentencing suicide victims in Shakespeare’s day were severly flawed. Ophelia’s death presents an excellent case “illuminat[ing] the problems that identifying suicides and burying their bodies presented to the passive drowning of high birth” (McDonald 316). The clown’s mispronunciation of the legal term se defendendo presents an interesting satire of the “arbitrary and subjective methods of coroners’ juries” in such cases. Furthermore,
Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia’s death and burial sustains the meditation on the consequences of self-destruction that Hamlet begins in his famous soliloquy…[and] exploits changing attitudes about suicide [of his day] (Ibid).
Although the clown mispronounces the term se defendendo, his and the gravediggers’ reasoning was quite similar to that of the coroners’ juries of Shakespeare’s day (Ibid). The limited burial rites that Ophelia is allowed portray that, although she may have received a verdict of non compos mentis, the “popular conviction that lunacy did not entirely excuse self-destruction” permeated Shakespeare’s writing, as she was buried on the north end of the churchyard with others of questionable death (314).
Hamlet, under close scrutiny, is replete with details that reveal that Ophelia died because of lost love and the subsequent madness that this created. Perhaps Elaine Showalter states it best when she records that “Drowning…becomes the truly feminine death in the dramas and literature of life, one which is a beautiful immersion and submersion in the female element” (3). Ophelia’s death is frequently attributed to “the conjunction of female mental disorder with love for Hamlet” (Owen 1). Although some critics believe that Ophelia committed suicide out of grief over the death of her father Polonius, this seems unlikely, as Claudius suggests this idea while having “his own axe to grind since he wished to stir Laertes up to ridding him of Hamlet” (Camden 252).
In conclusion, although Shakespeare portrays the varying views of his society concerning madness, suicide, and the burial of suicide victims of his day, he easily accomplishes the “task of cultural history…to identify the colors in the spectrum, not to resolve them in a single beam of light” (McDonald 317). Despite the belief of many critics that Ophelia grew mad because of grief over the murder of her father, it is evident that, in reality, she only attained madness out of a singular and unsatisfied love for Hamlet. As a passive drowning victim, her death was misconstrued as suicide when, in reality, she died accidentally while madly pining after her unrequited love. As a result, the maimed burial rites she receives are a great travesty to her honest yet oppressed personage. As noted by Arthur Palmer Hudson, “Tragedy creates a balance of affections… [in which] Shakespear (sic) has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart” (68). Although Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, he still pays careful attention to matters of the heart, construing the tragedy of Ophelia as one of love lost.
Works Cited
Camden, Carroll. "On Ophelia's Madness." Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): 247-55. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009..
Campbell, Erin E. "Sad Generations Seeking Water: The Social Construction of Madness in Ophelia and Quentin Compson." The Faulkner Journal 20.1-2 (2004): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Chapman, Alison A. "Ophelia's 'Old Lauds': Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet." Ed. Michelle Lee. Shakespearean Criticism 120 (2007): 1-13. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Cohen, Joshua. "Mermaid-like: The Tragedy of Ophelia." Shakespearean Criticism 56.2 (2006): 1-2. Print.
Hudson, Arthur P. "Romantic Apologiae for Hamlet's Treatment of Ophelia." ELH 9.1 (1942): 59-70. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009..
MacDonald, Michael. "Ophelia's Maimed Rites." Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986): 309-17. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009..
Neely, Carol T. "Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture." Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315-38. JStor. Web. 11 Nov. 2009..
Owen, Ruth J. "Claiming the Body: The Ophelia Myth in the GDR." The Germanic Review 82.3 (2007): 1-9. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of
Feminist Criticism." Ed. Dana R. Barnes. Shakespearean Criticism 35 (1997): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
William, Shakespeare,. Hamlet. Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997. 1189-234. Print.
In order to fully understand how Shakespeare confronts madness and suicide in Hamlet, it is necessary to review Ophelia’s life and death. As her brother Laertes departs for France in Hamlet I.iii, he warns Ophelia not to love Hamlet. Shortly thereafter, Polonius also upbraids Ophelia for falling in love with Hamlet and commands her to refuse any further attentions from him. A faithful daughter, Ophelia pledges to obey her father without realizing the effect it will have on her life later. In Hamlet III.i, immediately after Hamlet soliloquizes his famous “To be or not to be” speech, Ophelia enters the room to return to Hamlet some trifles he had given her while he was trying to woo her. Soon, Hamlet realizes that they are being watched, and proceeds to abuse his love for Ophelia with his renowned “get thee to a nunnery” speech. Not long afterwards, Ophelia’s madness is realized in Act IV scene v, shortly after her beloved Hamlet accidentally murders her father Polonius. Two scenes later, Gertrude relays the tragic news that Ophelia drowned when a branch of the willow tree she was sitting in broke off and she fell into the water.
In Shakespeare’s era, madness was frequently referred to as hysteria, the equivalent of modern-day dementia. Madness in women was commonly associated with sexual repression. According to Carol Thomas Neely, “Hysteria was caused, traditional medicine believed, by the pathology of the diseased and wandering womb, hence it was primarily although not exclusively a disease of women” (320). As noted by Elaine Showalter, “A deranged beloved embodies ‘the representational bonds between female insanity and female sexuality’”(Owen 1). It also was generally believed that if sexual desires or menstrual periods were suppressed for extended periods of time without fruition, women would slowly begin to go mad, as sanity and sexuality were considered closely tied in Shakespeare’s age (Neely 320). As a result, marriage was frequently proposed as the antidote for such madness, as it allowed women to have frequent sexual relations in a socially and morally acceptable setting (321). Furthermore, it is critical to note that, due to idleness and general passivity, such hysterical madness was generally more common among “women of the upper classes” and was “linked with marital, sexual, and class status, associated with sexual frustration, and cured by sexual satisfaction” (320).
In some cases, marriage was not an option. Campbell notes that “Neither marriage nor its sexual by-product is an option for Ophelia because her father deems her only suitor unsuitable; thus she resorts to a violent and permanent cure for her suffering of the mother” (2). “Suffering of the mother” is a medical term that describes the suffering state of a girl whose need for sexual activity and child production is suppressed, causing her to experience erotic melancholy known as erotomania (Camden 254). According to Showalter, “Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania” (3). Neely continues this argument that Ophelia’s madness was due to forsaken love when she contends that, “[t]he context of [Ophelia’s] disease, like that of hysteria later, is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control of women’s bodies (Campbell 1-2). Consideration of such factors is important when interpreting and critiquing Ophelia’s madness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Shortly after the scene where Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery” and then foully abuses her innocence with excessive sexual language in public during the play enacted to prick Claudius’ guilty mind, the audience learns that Ophelia goes mad in Act III scene i. The cause of her madness, however, is highly debated among literary critics, as some believe that it was the result of grief over the unnatural death of her father Polonius and others attribute it to the volatile and then abandoned love of Hamlet. As noted by Robert Burton in his work, The Anatomy of the Melancholy, “Ophelia suffers from hysteria, a malady often ascribed to upper class women who bide their time in their fathers’ homes while awaiting fulfillment of their culturally mandated roles as wives and mothers” (Campbell 1). In other words, Ophelia’s hysterical symptoms mirror those considered in Shakespeare’s time to be the result of suppressed sexual desire.
Ophelia grows mad out of a need to free herself from the rule of “patriarchal cultural institutions,” which tried to “contain women’s natural passions” (Campbell 2). The audience learns of this when, “by publically alluding to sexual experience, Ophelia reveals a deeper understanding of worldly issues than an aristocratic virgin should even admit, rejecting the essentialized female codes her father dictated to her and blurring the demarcations between innocence and subversion” (Ibid). Furthermore, Ophelia’s symptoms are those of hysterics and erotomania as,
She is mad, cries ‘hem’ to clear her throat because of choking or suffocation, beats her heart to relieve the sensation of oppression around it, weeps, prattles constantly, sings snatches of old songs, is distracted and has a depraved imagination, and ends her life by drowning (Camden 254).
Such speech and actions show that the untimely death of Polonius is not what drove Ophelia to madness, but rather the forsaken love of Hamlet.
The words of mad individuals in Shakespeare’s plays continually play a significant role in the interpretation of the events that take place in the play. Ophelia’s insane musings take the form of an odd jumble of lauds and “bawdy songs” that give the audience insight into the reality of her fate. These“bawdy songs,” which she pronounces during her madness, further supports this idea, as “Ophelia becomes exactly what her father, brother, and Renaissance society fear she will be after breaking the shackles of control over feminine overflow: blatantly sexual, excessively noisy, and socially subversive” (Campbell 3-4). As part of these songs, “Ophelia recites formulas, tales, and songs that ritualize passages of transformation and loss—lost love, lost chastity, and death” (Neely 324). In addition, many of the nearly incoherent lauds she sings shortly before her death are church songs sung during monastic services as praises to God, recalling in the audience’s mind III.i.121 when Hamlet tells her to “get thee to a nunnery” (Chapman 1). In her article, “Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture”, Neely contended that Ophelia’s madness was “her liberation from silence, obedience, and constraint or her absolute victimization by patriarchal oppression” (332). As a result, contrary to many popular beliefs, rather than out of grief over the murder of her beloved father on the part of her lover, it is appropriate to deem Ophelia’s madness as a result of the need for liberation from masculine rule, as well as the need for fulfillment of her sexual needs and desires coupled with the apparent loss of Hamlet’s love.
Were it to have occurred today, Ophelia’s death would have been considered a tragic accident; however, according to the views of Shakespeare’s era, her accidental death was viewed as a self-destructive suicide. Many apparent suicides were not clear-cut and easily provable. “Drowning was one of the most frequent causes of accidental death in Tudor and Stuart England, and it was obviously difficult in many cases to be sure that the people found drowned in a pond or river had actually committed suicide” (McDonald 311). To understand the death and burial of Ophelia, it is imperative to consider the common views and rituals of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide and burial in relation to madness.
When dead bodies were discovered, it was almost automatically assumed that they were suicide victims, and therefore were treated accordingly as the laws of the Elizabethan period prescribed. According to Michael McDonald in his article “Ophelia’s Maimed Rites”, “Self-murderers were certainly among those excluded from Christian burial, and refusing rites to them was justified on the basis of their inability to publically repent before their deaths” (314). When cases of suicide or ambiguous cause of death appeared, juries of common people would convene to determine whether the deceased should be considered felo de se or non compos mentis (McDonald 310-311). A felo de se, or “felon of himself” entailed the withholding of traditional Christian burial rites and complete asset forfeiture to the state, in addition to burial of the corpse, impaled on a stake, in the middle of the road during the night. On the other hand, a sentence of non compos mentis, a decision that the deceased was mad and thereby acquitted of any felony, involved the possible allowance for some burial rituals if approved by the church, and without asset forfeiture (Ibid). When in doubt, however, instead of giving the deceased the benefit of the doubt, juries usually sentenced them as felo de se, and even “gentility…was no guarantee of mercy” (311-312). Another verdict used in cases of suicide victims and mentioned in Hamlet by the clown in V.i.10-13, se defendendo was absurdly used to declare individuals to have acted out of self-defense (312). As the views of Shakespeare’s day concerning suicide burials come to light, they may be seen in Ophelia’s own death and subsequent burial.
When Gertrude reports her death, she attributes Ophelia’s fall into the water to the breaking of a limb of a willow tree upon which she is perched. Ironically, this tree is considered to be a symbol of unrequited love in both Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature (Ibid). German critic Ruth J. Owen states that “Ophelia’s waters are ‘die stummer wasser,’ representing silence. What goes unspoken here is less an individual murder than a force crumbling and eroding civilization” (5). Upon the realization that Ophelia died for love of her beloved, mad Hamlet, the audience sees the desecration of societal traditions, as she disobeys her father’s command to forsake her suitor in this final liberating act of dying on behalf of his love. This supposition is supported when Ophelia gives rosemary, an herb usually given as a wedding present, to her brother Laertes, “condemn[ing] his collusion with Polonius in preventing her marriage, which forces her into this state of overwrought emotion and socially unsanctioned sexuality”(Campbell 8).
Suicide was viewed as an odious felony in the early modern period of Shakespeare’s England. As a result, “[a]mong the coroners’ inquisitions filed in the central courts between 1487 and 1660, only 1.6% of suicides were returned non compos mentis” (Ibid). Because the laws prohibiting suicide were so strictly upheld, “[a]s a rule, they excused only raving lunatics and regarded evidence of lesser mental disorders as proof that a suicide was guilty of his own murder” (Ibid). This evidence supports the idea that the mentally ill or mad, being such, received their due punishment for their actions, though performed in altered states of mind, through the refusal of proper burial and the forfeiture of property.
The audience first learns of Ophelia’s death from Gertrude, who reveals the nature of the incident “as accidental, passive, involuntary, [and] mad” when, in IV.vii.173 she proclaims that “an envious sliver broke” when Ophelia was sitting on a branch of a willow tree singing her mad songs (Neely 326). She continues her report by describing the scene of Ophelia’s drowning, saying,
Her clothes spread wide, and mermaidlike awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. (Shakespeare IV.ii.175-80).
Through this portrayal of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude, with her words,
[N]either condemns [Ophelia’s death] on religious grounds nor explicitly condones it on medical/legal grounds. Instead she narrates it without interpretation as a beautiful, “natural,” ritual of passage and purification, the mad body’s inevitable return to nature (Neely 327).
As Joshua Cohen points out that, through her announcement of Ophelia’s death, Gertrude “describes the drowning Ophelia as ‘mermaid-like,’ she brings into focus the precise nature of her tragedy, that of a young woman turned away at the threshold of sexual fulfillment, whose maiden love is slandered, rejected, thwarted” (1).
The methods of sentencing suicide victims in Shakespeare’s day were severly flawed. Ophelia’s death presents an excellent case “illuminat[ing] the problems that identifying suicides and burying their bodies presented to the passive drowning of high birth” (McDonald 316). The clown’s mispronunciation of the legal term se defendendo presents an interesting satire of the “arbitrary and subjective methods of coroners’ juries” in such cases. Furthermore,
Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia’s death and burial sustains the meditation on the consequences of self-destruction that Hamlet begins in his famous soliloquy…[and] exploits changing attitudes about suicide [of his day] (Ibid).
Although the clown mispronounces the term se defendendo, his and the gravediggers’ reasoning was quite similar to that of the coroners’ juries of Shakespeare’s day (Ibid). The limited burial rites that Ophelia is allowed portray that, although she may have received a verdict of non compos mentis, the “popular conviction that lunacy did not entirely excuse self-destruction” permeated Shakespeare’s writing, as she was buried on the north end of the churchyard with others of questionable death (314).
Hamlet, under close scrutiny, is replete with details that reveal that Ophelia died because of lost love and the subsequent madness that this created. Perhaps Elaine Showalter states it best when she records that “Drowning…becomes the truly feminine death in the dramas and literature of life, one which is a beautiful immersion and submersion in the female element” (3). Ophelia’s death is frequently attributed to “the conjunction of female mental disorder with love for Hamlet” (Owen 1). Although some critics believe that Ophelia committed suicide out of grief over the death of her father Polonius, this seems unlikely, as Claudius suggests this idea while having “his own axe to grind since he wished to stir Laertes up to ridding him of Hamlet” (Camden 252).
In conclusion, although Shakespeare portrays the varying views of his society concerning madness, suicide, and the burial of suicide victims of his day, he easily accomplishes the “task of cultural history…to identify the colors in the spectrum, not to resolve them in a single beam of light” (McDonald 317). Despite the belief of many critics that Ophelia grew mad because of grief over the murder of her father, it is evident that, in reality, she only attained madness out of a singular and unsatisfied love for Hamlet. As a passive drowning victim, her death was misconstrued as suicide when, in reality, she died accidentally while madly pining after her unrequited love. As a result, the maimed burial rites she receives are a great travesty to her honest yet oppressed personage. As noted by Arthur Palmer Hudson, “Tragedy creates a balance of affections… [in which] Shakespear (sic) has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart” (68). Although Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, he still pays careful attention to matters of the heart, construing the tragedy of Ophelia as one of love lost.
Works Cited
Camden, Carroll. "On Ophelia's Madness." Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): 247-55. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
Campbell, Erin E. "Sad Generations Seeking Water: The Social Construction of Madness in Ophelia and Quentin Compson." The Faulkner Journal 20.1-2 (2004): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Chapman, Alison A. "Ophelia's 'Old Lauds': Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet." Ed. Michelle Lee. Shakespearean Criticism 120 (2007): 1-13. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
Cohen, Joshua. "Mermaid-like: The Tragedy of Ophelia." Shakespearean Criticism 56.2 (2006): 1-2. Print.
Hudson, Arthur P. "Romantic Apologiae for Hamlet's Treatment of Ophelia." ELH 9.1 (1942): 59-70. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
MacDonald, Michael. "Ophelia's Maimed Rites." Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986): 309-17. JStor. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
Neely, Carol T. "Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture." Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 315-38. JStor. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
Owen, Ruth J. "Claiming the Body: The Ophelia Myth in the GDR." The Germanic Review 82.3 (2007): 1-9. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of
Feminist Criticism." Ed. Dana R. Barnes. Shakespearean Criticism 35 (1997): 1-9. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
William, Shakespeare,. Hamlet. Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997. 1189-234. Print.
Reflexiones: el engaño de la belleza
Al contrario del comportamiento comúnmente aceptado para la mujer, la monja Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz aprendió y alfabetizó poco clandestinamente. Escribió muchas obras de literatura, las cuales recibieron mucha fama y reflejaron muchas de las dificultades de su época. La primera feminista, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz saca a la luz los misconcepciones más comunes del siglo XVII sobre la mujer en sus poemas A su retrato y A una rosa.
Nacida en 1651, Juana Inés de la Cruz fue la hija natural criolla del español Pedro Asbaje y la mexicana Isabel Ramírez de Santillana (Gutiérrez 31). Cuando tenía tres años, ella siguió a su hermana mayor a su maestra donde le mintió que su madre la había mandado para aprender a leer. Aunque la maestra no le creyó, la enseñó a causa de su precocidad (Arenal 164). Un poco mas tarde, cuando tenía siete años, Juana le molestaba a su madre para permitirle a vestirse como un niño y asistir a una universidad o una escuela en la Ciudad de México, pero no le permitió (Gutiérrez 31). A pesar de que no pudo obtener una educación formal, Juana leyó muchos libros en la biblioteca de su abuela materna hasta que fue al corte del virreinato a los trece años de edad (Ibid). Luego, tendría su propia biblioteca de casi 4,000 libros (Barnstone 263).
En agosto de 1667 se sumó al convento de la carmelitas de San José por dos años (Kirk 15). Se enfermó y tuvo que volver a la corte y luego, en febrero de 1669, se sumó al convento de los jeronimitas de Santa Paula (Ibid). A los diecisiete años, soportó un examen dado por cuarenta de los mejores y más sabios profesores de la ciencia, la filosofía, la matemática, la literatura, la teología, y la música. Ella aprobó expertamente (Barnstone 262).
Llamada “La Décima Musa”, escribió muchas obras literarias del estilo barroco con los primordiales temas del “desengaño, la desilusión, el pesimismo, la angustia, el sentido de transitoriedad y [la] vanidad de la vida” (Gutiérrez 32-33). Como una gran dramaturga, Sor Juana escribió Los empeños de una casa, unos de sus dramas más famosos en que presenta la idea que el matrimonio es la única opción aceptable en su sociedad para la mujer (Johnson 127). Como poeta escribió Hombres necios, el cual revela el engaño de los hombres y la calidad doble que ellos imponen en las mujeres (McInnis 764). En defensa de sus derechos femeninos intelectuales, Sor Juana escribió su final y más famosa obra en su Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Kirk 107).
En A su retrato, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz crea una pintura de la falsedad de los silogismos y razones machistas de su época. Escrito en rima consonante abrazada de once sílabas, este soneto denuncia el engaño de su sociedad como “un vano artificio del cuidado”, “una flor al viento dedicada”, “un resguardo inútil para el hado”, “una necia diligencia errada” y otras cosas espurias (187). Según la crítica Lola Luna en su artículo “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poeta y filósofa,” “Muchos de sus poemas, dedicado al tema del retrato, de la copia original, muestran la preocupación filosófica de sor Juana por lo que hoy llamaríamos plano de representación y plano de contenido, por el contraste inevitable que se establece entre lo representado y lo real” (58-59). Sor Juana empieza su poema por describir el retrato como un “engaño colorido”(187).
Aunque por supuesto un retrato debe mostrar la realidad de quien es una persona, Sor Juana dice que el retrato es una reflexión inexacta de la vida que sola imita a la realidad. El crítico Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, en su artículo “Dos Sonetos del Siglo XVII: Amor-Locura en Quevedo y Sor Juana,” dice que, “Frente a la idea, repetido hasta el cansancio desde la antigüedad, de que lo pintado compite con lo vivo, que da a lo vivo presencia indestructible…lo pintado- “cauteloso engaño del sentido!”- es, desde su concepción, lo muerto; color que quiere pasar por substancia” (155). Aunque un retrato quiere representar lo real, “es un afán caduco y, bien mirado, es cadáver, es polvo, es sobra, es nada”(De la Cruz 187). Los colores del retrato traten de sangrar de verdad pero se apaguen.
En su poema A una rosa Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz continua la idea del engaño de la apariencia. En su tiempo, mujeres fueron presentadas frecuentemente como símbolos del deterioro físico y moral, muy semejante de la manera en que Sor Juana da censura moral a una rosa que representa el engaño de la belleza (Merrim 45). Durante toda su vida, Sor Juana tuvo un conflicto de sentimientos sobre su propia belleza (Kaminsky 34). Pero, en su poema, ella denuncia la belleza como un “amago de la humana arquitectura, ejemplo de la vana gentileza”. Según la autora Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez, en el libro Voces femeninas de Hispanoamérica: Antología, “pensaba que la mujer no debía lucir una hermosa cabellera en una cerebro vacío” (31). En su Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz relata un cuento de su niñez cuando se cortó su pelo por ser lenta de aprender el Latín (Kaminsky 34).
Con este ejemplo de su propia vida ella sostenga la idea del poema de que la belleza como una rosa es de un “caduco ser das mustias, señas, con que con docta muerte y necia vida, viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!”(De la Cruz 187). Carlos Blanco Aguinaga describe su poema como un soneto “en que da moral censura a una rosa, y en ella a sus semejantes” (153). Ella se dio cuenta que la sociedad centrado en la belleza fue “viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas” como “la cuna alegre y triste sepulcra:”(De la Cruz 187). Ella censuraba el mundo por ser enfocado en la belleza efímera cuando lo que queda después de se marchita la belleza es el intelecto.
En los dos poemas, Sor Juana revela el mundo en la luz de un engaño. Los dos, el retrato y la rosa, tratan de representar la realidad pero lo hacen inexactamente. Los dos son “viviendo engañas” así como son “engaño colorido”(De la Cruz 187). Al mismo tiempo que el retrato “es un vano artificio del cuidado”, la rosa es un “amago de la humana arquitectura”(Ibid). Sor Juana pretende corregir los falsos silogismos de los símbolos con sus poemas.
En conclusión, según las palabras de Lola Luna, “Sor Juana renuncia al cuerpo y sólo hereda la memoria, las impresiones de las imágenes percibidas por los sentidos” (62). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz no quería la hermosura sin la inteligencia. Por su vida clausurada, Sor Juana vivió los propósitos de sus obras. Ella no se enfoque en la belleza y entonces da censura al mundo por representar ideas falsas.
Obras Citadas
Aguinaga, Carlos B. "Dos Sonetos del Siglo XVII: Amor-Locura en Quevedo y Sor Juana." MLN 2nd ser. 77.Spanish (1962): 145-62. JStor. Web. 30 Nov. 2009.
Arenal, Electra. "The Convent as a Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century." Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Ed. Beth Miller. Berkeley: University of California, 1983. 147-83. Print.
Barnstone, Willis. A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now. Ed. Aliki Barnstone. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. Print.
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. "A su retrato." Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. Ed. Edward H. Friedman, L. T. Valdivieso, and Carmelo Virgillo. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 186-88. Print.
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. "A una rosa." Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. Ed. Edward H. Friedman, L. T. Valdivieso, and Carmelo Virgillo. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 186-88. Print.
Johnson, Julie G. Women in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Literary Images. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983. Print
Kaminsky, Amy K. "Nearly New Clarions: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Pays Homage to a Swedish Poet." In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Ed. Noel Valis and Carol Maier. Lewisburg: Associated UP, 1990. 31-53. Print.
Kirk, Pamela. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Relgion, Art, and Feminism. New York: The Continuum Company, 1998. Print.
Luna, Lola. "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poeta y filósofa." Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (1995): 55-67. Print.
Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1999. Print.
"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz." Voces femininas de Hispanoamérica: Antología. Ed. Gloria
B. Gutiérrez. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg, 1996. 31-39. Print.
Nacida en 1651, Juana Inés de la Cruz fue la hija natural criolla del español Pedro Asbaje y la mexicana Isabel Ramírez de Santillana (Gutiérrez 31). Cuando tenía tres años, ella siguió a su hermana mayor a su maestra donde le mintió que su madre la había mandado para aprender a leer. Aunque la maestra no le creyó, la enseñó a causa de su precocidad (Arenal 164). Un poco mas tarde, cuando tenía siete años, Juana le molestaba a su madre para permitirle a vestirse como un niño y asistir a una universidad o una escuela en la Ciudad de México, pero no le permitió (Gutiérrez 31). A pesar de que no pudo obtener una educación formal, Juana leyó muchos libros en la biblioteca de su abuela materna hasta que fue al corte del virreinato a los trece años de edad (Ibid). Luego, tendría su propia biblioteca de casi 4,000 libros (Barnstone 263).
En agosto de 1667 se sumó al convento de la carmelitas de San José por dos años (Kirk 15). Se enfermó y tuvo que volver a la corte y luego, en febrero de 1669, se sumó al convento de los jeronimitas de Santa Paula (Ibid). A los diecisiete años, soportó un examen dado por cuarenta de los mejores y más sabios profesores de la ciencia, la filosofía, la matemática, la literatura, la teología, y la música. Ella aprobó expertamente (Barnstone 262).
Llamada “La Décima Musa”, escribió muchas obras literarias del estilo barroco con los primordiales temas del “desengaño, la desilusión, el pesimismo, la angustia, el sentido de transitoriedad y [la] vanidad de la vida” (Gutiérrez 32-33). Como una gran dramaturga, Sor Juana escribió Los empeños de una casa, unos de sus dramas más famosos en que presenta la idea que el matrimonio es la única opción aceptable en su sociedad para la mujer (Johnson 127). Como poeta escribió Hombres necios, el cual revela el engaño de los hombres y la calidad doble que ellos imponen en las mujeres (McInnis 764). En defensa de sus derechos femeninos intelectuales, Sor Juana escribió su final y más famosa obra en su Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Kirk 107).
En A su retrato, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz crea una pintura de la falsedad de los silogismos y razones machistas de su época. Escrito en rima consonante abrazada de once sílabas, este soneto denuncia el engaño de su sociedad como “un vano artificio del cuidado”, “una flor al viento dedicada”, “un resguardo inútil para el hado”, “una necia diligencia errada” y otras cosas espurias (187). Según la crítica Lola Luna en su artículo “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poeta y filósofa,” “Muchos de sus poemas, dedicado al tema del retrato, de la copia original, muestran la preocupación filosófica de sor Juana por lo que hoy llamaríamos plano de representación y plano de contenido, por el contraste inevitable que se establece entre lo representado y lo real” (58-59). Sor Juana empieza su poema por describir el retrato como un “engaño colorido”(187).
Aunque por supuesto un retrato debe mostrar la realidad de quien es una persona, Sor Juana dice que el retrato es una reflexión inexacta de la vida que sola imita a la realidad. El crítico Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, en su artículo “Dos Sonetos del Siglo XVII: Amor-Locura en Quevedo y Sor Juana,” dice que, “Frente a la idea, repetido hasta el cansancio desde la antigüedad, de que lo pintado compite con lo vivo, que da a lo vivo presencia indestructible…lo pintado- “cauteloso engaño del sentido!”- es, desde su concepción, lo muerto; color que quiere pasar por substancia” (155). Aunque un retrato quiere representar lo real, “es un afán caduco y, bien mirado, es cadáver, es polvo, es sobra, es nada”(De la Cruz 187). Los colores del retrato traten de sangrar de verdad pero se apaguen.
En su poema A una rosa Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz continua la idea del engaño de la apariencia. En su tiempo, mujeres fueron presentadas frecuentemente como símbolos del deterioro físico y moral, muy semejante de la manera en que Sor Juana da censura moral a una rosa que representa el engaño de la belleza (Merrim 45). Durante toda su vida, Sor Juana tuvo un conflicto de sentimientos sobre su propia belleza (Kaminsky 34). Pero, en su poema, ella denuncia la belleza como un “amago de la humana arquitectura, ejemplo de la vana gentileza”. Según la autora Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez, en el libro Voces femeninas de Hispanoamérica: Antología, “pensaba que la mujer no debía lucir una hermosa cabellera en una cerebro vacío” (31). En su Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz relata un cuento de su niñez cuando se cortó su pelo por ser lenta de aprender el Latín (Kaminsky 34).
Con este ejemplo de su propia vida ella sostenga la idea del poema de que la belleza como una rosa es de un “caduco ser das mustias, señas, con que con docta muerte y necia vida, viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!”(De la Cruz 187). Carlos Blanco Aguinaga describe su poema como un soneto “en que da moral censura a una rosa, y en ella a sus semejantes” (153). Ella se dio cuenta que la sociedad centrado en la belleza fue “viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas” como “la cuna alegre y triste sepulcra:”(De la Cruz 187). Ella censuraba el mundo por ser enfocado en la belleza efímera cuando lo que queda después de se marchita la belleza es el intelecto.
En los dos poemas, Sor Juana revela el mundo en la luz de un engaño. Los dos, el retrato y la rosa, tratan de representar la realidad pero lo hacen inexactamente. Los dos son “viviendo engañas” así como son “engaño colorido”(De la Cruz 187). Al mismo tiempo que el retrato “es un vano artificio del cuidado”, la rosa es un “amago de la humana arquitectura”(Ibid). Sor Juana pretende corregir los falsos silogismos de los símbolos con sus poemas.
En conclusión, según las palabras de Lola Luna, “Sor Juana renuncia al cuerpo y sólo hereda la memoria, las impresiones de las imágenes percibidas por los sentidos” (62). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz no quería la hermosura sin la inteligencia. Por su vida clausurada, Sor Juana vivió los propósitos de sus obras. Ella no se enfoque en la belleza y entonces da censura al mundo por representar ideas falsas.
Obras Citadas
Aguinaga, Carlos B. "Dos Sonetos del Siglo XVII: Amor-Locura en Quevedo y Sor Juana." MLN 2nd ser. 77.Spanish (1962): 145-62. JStor. Web. 30 Nov. 2009.
Arenal, Electra. "The Convent as a Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century." Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Ed. Beth Miller. Berkeley: University of California, 1983. 147-83. Print.
Barnstone, Willis. A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now. Ed. Aliki Barnstone. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. Print.
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. "A su retrato." Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. Ed. Edward H. Friedman, L. T. Valdivieso, and Carmelo Virgillo. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 186-88. Print.
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. "A una rosa." Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. Ed. Edward H. Friedman, L. T. Valdivieso, and Carmelo Virgillo. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 186-88. Print.
Johnson, Julie G. Women in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Literary Images. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983. Print
Kaminsky, Amy K. "Nearly New Clarions: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Pays Homage to a Swedish Poet." In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Ed. Noel Valis and Carol Maier. Lewisburg: Associated UP, 1990. 31-53. Print.
Kirk, Pamela. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Relgion, Art, and Feminism. New York: The Continuum Company, 1998. Print.
Luna, Lola. "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poeta y filósofa." Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (1995): 55-67. Print.
Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1999. Print.
"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz." Voces femininas de Hispanoamérica: Antología. Ed. Gloria
B. Gutiérrez. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg, 1996. 31-39. Print.
The Quest for Southern Identity in American Culture
Since the Civil War, many authors and critics, such as Ulrich B. Phillips and C. Vann Woodward among others, have attempted to define and grasp what exactly is the central theme of Southern American History. While many ideas an ideologies have influenced and shaped popular views of the South, there is no single idea that encompasses the entirety of what the South is, but rather a conglomerations of many views which all mesh together, despite their diversity, to create a unified whole.
Although many wish to dodge the issue, the most undeniably significant issue throughout Southern history in one way or another is that of race relations. According to Ulrich B. Phillips in his book The Central Theme of Southern History, the identity of the South is focused around the idea that it is “a white man’s country”. While many argue that state rights or free trade or slavery or cotton or any number of other typically southern affiliations are the primary issues, Phillips believes that white supremacy overarches all of these, as it is the common theme among them. Because of this Southern sense of duty to preserve a “white man’s world” and as “white men’s ways must prevail; the Negroes must be kept innocuous”. While in the 21st century South of today such a thesis is not often blatantly held among Southerners, in ways this issue still remains in the hearts of her people. Even by the 1960’s when Flannery O’Connor wrote her short story “Revelation,” Southerners were beginning to take on a more open-minded view of race relations. Mrs. Turpin, portrayed as a typical Southern bigot continuing to hold a prejudice against African Americans as inferior, slowly comes to realize the error of her views as the story progresses, finally recognizing that, in her prejudice, she was herself becoming what she despised. She wonders, if forced to choose between being “a nigger or white-trash” which she would choose. Juxtaposing the two and hardly able to decide, she finally concludes that she would rather be the former. While the value on white supremacy is still there, there is also a sense of the Negroes as inferior and simple while those she considers “white trash” are Caucasians who choose to make themselves subordinate and like the blacks and therefore are detestable to the white sense of supremacy and superiority. Continually ruling to her husband’s Negro field hands as foolish, when she shares the story of insane girl who attacked her in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, she continues to show her prejudice, saying “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger.” Sadly, she believes herself to fulfill the duties of her class, as she states “its not trash around her, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.” Yet, in the end, she finally admits to being the wart hog her attacker defamed her as, releasing her prejudice as she realizes that she is her self the simple-minded, inferior being simply because of her white view of the world and what God considers acceptable. While U.B. Phillips viewpoint, echoed in the work of Flannery O’Connor is of crucial importance in Southern history, white supremacy alone does not comprehend the entirety of the South.
There are a copious number of stereotypes in association with Southern identity derived from several different sources, and many of which are not in the least accurate, although springing from real aspects of Southern history. When Europeans first began to arrive in the New World, they did so primarily under a head right system in which wealthier landowners paid the passage of those of the poorer classes in exchange for their work for a period of years in an arrangement known as indentured servitude. Next, as indentured servants and the generations following began to obtain their own properties, another class began to develop as people took the opportunities that the South, particularly its then frontier regions offered. W.J. Cash, in chapter five of The Mind of the South, paints the picture of an Irishman building a small log cabin and toiling over his plot of land and then, as his life progresses, also moving up in society by becoming a magistrate and buying a big house in the town. Out of these stereotypes of the poorest of the poor, on the verge of enslavement, working and striving at every opportunity to better their station in life, are derived that of the cavalier, or gentleman. These lowly indentured servants, over the course of a few generations, become wealthy landowners with pieces of property and slaves, known as plantations. Although true in some cases, most of such stories are only legends that satisfy the curious observer and, in reality, “the large majority of southern whites in 1860 did not did not own slaves.” Perhaps the most renowned among these myths is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Her novel, transformed into a timeless film, presents this idealized view of Southern cavalier society. Tara Farm, the prosperous O’Hara plantation prior to the war is utterly transformed from a land of beauty and hope into one of desolation. Scarlett O’Hara, the foolish but pretty Southern belle, plays the typical prototype caste against Southern women, focused solely on wealth and social status rather than the world around them. Large cities Southern cities, magnets for the wealthy and social elites, are utterly destroyed with the Union advance. In the wake of despondency left after the onslaught of the Northern enemy, Southerners reunite out of a sense of common loss. O’Hara even vows never to go hungry again, continuing to hold her staunch Southern pride despite their poverty. Even though, for decades, when the South is mentioned, many think of a plantation economy based on slavery, in reality, although true in some instances, this portrayal of Southern history is flawed on many levels, and its only accuracy lies in the commonality that Southerners experienced through hardship and great loss. Flannery O’Connor, in her short story entitled “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” displays many characteristics of a modern version of this Southern stereotype. Both the mother and grandmother are absorbed with making sure that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”, once again showing a Southern preoccupation with social status and appearances. Grandmother, the cliché of elderly Southerners, is eager to tell everyone in the car with her on their road trip to Florida about all the history and all the memories that the land they pass marks in her life. Just as Grandmother mistakenly leads the family down a wrong path towards and imaginary estate which is actually in another state, many typical Southern images lead people towards skewed views of what Southern identity entails.
Taking into account the theory if white supremacy and the mythology of the plantation, another concept that defined the South is its view of liberty. David Hackett Fischer, in this book Albion’s Seed defined liberty in four ways, all of which relate to properly viewing the South. First of all, ordered freedom was a puritanical type of freedom that came to the North, specifically Massachusetts, when the Puritans left the Church of England, but acted as an exclusive sort of freedom in which only those who followed the orders and dictates of Puritan theology were truly free. Secondly, hegemonic freedom, or the belief that one should have the right of freedom but also the right to rule others, is a proponent of slavery. Thirdly, reciprocal freedom was a Quaker belief that entailed “withdrawal from the world.” Lastly, commonly found among those in the backcountry, was natural freedom where culture ruled. While these varying views of freedom represent respective parts of the country they, in reality represent the struggle of the South for its own identity while being terribly misunderstood. Similarly to the exclusivity of the Puritan ordered freedom, Southerners were, and in many ways still are, closed-minded towards advancement rather than open for change and differing beliefs systems and opinions. For example, while the North industrialized rather quickly following the Enlightenment, the South did not modernize until long after Reconstruction ended. Also,” identification with place and family” is evident throughout Southern history. During the Civil War it took the forms of both state and cause loyalty, while today it is seen in a distinct Southern pride seen just driving through any southern town, sported on many truck license plates in the form of a Confederate flag or even the staunch hold of restaurants on greasy but delicious recipes in a society ever moving towards health food stores and weight-loss health-food diets. Next, clearly visible through the institution of slavery is the Southern idea of hegemonic freedom. Whites enjoyed the ability to rule other races, yet disliked the idea that anyone, especially the North, could encroach upon that right. Seen today, as throughout history, is the idea of reciprocal freedom, as many Southerners resist outsiders and would rather retreat into their own world, even if it were a world of the past, rather than face change. Finally, the backcountry idea of natural freedom is rampant in the South, as Southerners have their own culture unique from the rest of the nation. For example, according to Boles,
“High technology, interstate highways, and industrial growth may threaten one vision of the South, but recorded country music, fast food outlets for fried chicken and biscuits and sausage, C-B radios in eighteen-wheelers crackling with good-ole-boy talk from their drivers and the working poor who have moved from the fields to the factories keep alive memories of the past. Southern speech patters and that signal form of ethnic identification, gastronomic preferences, show sure signs of resisting change.
All of these views of liberty culminate in the South in an attempt to produce a Southern identity. However, these differing views depict the commonality found within such diversity of the South.
As John B. Boles wrote in his piece The Difficulty of Consensus in the South, “the southern character is too complex for easy answers, and southerners- at least the publishing kind-enjoy the perennial search for southern identity.” While many people have attempted to define the South and Southernism, in reality, there is no easy answer to this dilemma. While white supremacy, stereotypes, commonality through diversity, and the southern idea of liberty all play integral roles in formulating Southern identity, they do not even begin to summarize what really is encompassed in the idea of one Southern identity.
Works Cited
Boles, John B. "The Difficulty of Consensus on the South." Major Problems in the History of the American South. Vol. II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. 19-27.
Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A Knopf MCMXLVI, 1941.
Fischer, David H. Albion's Seed. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. 117-33.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Revelation." The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. 488-509.
Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Central Theme of Southern History." American Historical Review 34 (1928): 30-43.
Although many wish to dodge the issue, the most undeniably significant issue throughout Southern history in one way or another is that of race relations. According to Ulrich B. Phillips in his book The Central Theme of Southern History, the identity of the South is focused around the idea that it is “a white man’s country”. While many argue that state rights or free trade or slavery or cotton or any number of other typically southern affiliations are the primary issues, Phillips believes that white supremacy overarches all of these, as it is the common theme among them. Because of this Southern sense of duty to preserve a “white man’s world” and as “white men’s ways must prevail; the Negroes must be kept innocuous”. While in the 21st century South of today such a thesis is not often blatantly held among Southerners, in ways this issue still remains in the hearts of her people. Even by the 1960’s when Flannery O’Connor wrote her short story “Revelation,” Southerners were beginning to take on a more open-minded view of race relations. Mrs. Turpin, portrayed as a typical Southern bigot continuing to hold a prejudice against African Americans as inferior, slowly comes to realize the error of her views as the story progresses, finally recognizing that, in her prejudice, she was herself becoming what she despised. She wonders, if forced to choose between being “a nigger or white-trash” which she would choose. Juxtaposing the two and hardly able to decide, she finally concludes that she would rather be the former. While the value on white supremacy is still there, there is also a sense of the Negroes as inferior and simple while those she considers “white trash” are Caucasians who choose to make themselves subordinate and like the blacks and therefore are detestable to the white sense of supremacy and superiority. Continually ruling to her husband’s Negro field hands as foolish, when she shares the story of insane girl who attacked her in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, she continues to show her prejudice, saying “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger.” Sadly, she believes herself to fulfill the duties of her class, as she states “its not trash around her, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.” Yet, in the end, she finally admits to being the wart hog her attacker defamed her as, releasing her prejudice as she realizes that she is her self the simple-minded, inferior being simply because of her white view of the world and what God considers acceptable. While U.B. Phillips viewpoint, echoed in the work of Flannery O’Connor is of crucial importance in Southern history, white supremacy alone does not comprehend the entirety of the South.
There are a copious number of stereotypes in association with Southern identity derived from several different sources, and many of which are not in the least accurate, although springing from real aspects of Southern history. When Europeans first began to arrive in the New World, they did so primarily under a head right system in which wealthier landowners paid the passage of those of the poorer classes in exchange for their work for a period of years in an arrangement known as indentured servitude. Next, as indentured servants and the generations following began to obtain their own properties, another class began to develop as people took the opportunities that the South, particularly its then frontier regions offered. W.J. Cash, in chapter five of The Mind of the South, paints the picture of an Irishman building a small log cabin and toiling over his plot of land and then, as his life progresses, also moving up in society by becoming a magistrate and buying a big house in the town. Out of these stereotypes of the poorest of the poor, on the verge of enslavement, working and striving at every opportunity to better their station in life, are derived that of the cavalier, or gentleman. These lowly indentured servants, over the course of a few generations, become wealthy landowners with pieces of property and slaves, known as plantations. Although true in some cases, most of such stories are only legends that satisfy the curious observer and, in reality, “the large majority of southern whites in 1860 did not did not own slaves.” Perhaps the most renowned among these myths is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Her novel, transformed into a timeless film, presents this idealized view of Southern cavalier society. Tara Farm, the prosperous O’Hara plantation prior to the war is utterly transformed from a land of beauty and hope into one of desolation. Scarlett O’Hara, the foolish but pretty Southern belle, plays the typical prototype caste against Southern women, focused solely on wealth and social status rather than the world around them. Large cities Southern cities, magnets for the wealthy and social elites, are utterly destroyed with the Union advance. In the wake of despondency left after the onslaught of the Northern enemy, Southerners reunite out of a sense of common loss. O’Hara even vows never to go hungry again, continuing to hold her staunch Southern pride despite their poverty. Even though, for decades, when the South is mentioned, many think of a plantation economy based on slavery, in reality, although true in some instances, this portrayal of Southern history is flawed on many levels, and its only accuracy lies in the commonality that Southerners experienced through hardship and great loss. Flannery O’Connor, in her short story entitled “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” displays many characteristics of a modern version of this Southern stereotype. Both the mother and grandmother are absorbed with making sure that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”, once again showing a Southern preoccupation with social status and appearances. Grandmother, the cliché of elderly Southerners, is eager to tell everyone in the car with her on their road trip to Florida about all the history and all the memories that the land they pass marks in her life. Just as Grandmother mistakenly leads the family down a wrong path towards and imaginary estate which is actually in another state, many typical Southern images lead people towards skewed views of what Southern identity entails.
Taking into account the theory if white supremacy and the mythology of the plantation, another concept that defined the South is its view of liberty. David Hackett Fischer, in this book Albion’s Seed defined liberty in four ways, all of which relate to properly viewing the South. First of all, ordered freedom was a puritanical type of freedom that came to the North, specifically Massachusetts, when the Puritans left the Church of England, but acted as an exclusive sort of freedom in which only those who followed the orders and dictates of Puritan theology were truly free. Secondly, hegemonic freedom, or the belief that one should have the right of freedom but also the right to rule others, is a proponent of slavery. Thirdly, reciprocal freedom was a Quaker belief that entailed “withdrawal from the world.” Lastly, commonly found among those in the backcountry, was natural freedom where culture ruled. While these varying views of freedom represent respective parts of the country they, in reality represent the struggle of the South for its own identity while being terribly misunderstood. Similarly to the exclusivity of the Puritan ordered freedom, Southerners were, and in many ways still are, closed-minded towards advancement rather than open for change and differing beliefs systems and opinions. For example, while the North industrialized rather quickly following the Enlightenment, the South did not modernize until long after Reconstruction ended. Also,” identification with place and family” is evident throughout Southern history. During the Civil War it took the forms of both state and cause loyalty, while today it is seen in a distinct Southern pride seen just driving through any southern town, sported on many truck license plates in the form of a Confederate flag or even the staunch hold of restaurants on greasy but delicious recipes in a society ever moving towards health food stores and weight-loss health-food diets. Next, clearly visible through the institution of slavery is the Southern idea of hegemonic freedom. Whites enjoyed the ability to rule other races, yet disliked the idea that anyone, especially the North, could encroach upon that right. Seen today, as throughout history, is the idea of reciprocal freedom, as many Southerners resist outsiders and would rather retreat into their own world, even if it were a world of the past, rather than face change. Finally, the backcountry idea of natural freedom is rampant in the South, as Southerners have their own culture unique from the rest of the nation. For example, according to Boles,
“High technology, interstate highways, and industrial growth may threaten one vision of the South, but recorded country music, fast food outlets for fried chicken and biscuits and sausage, C-B radios in eighteen-wheelers crackling with good-ole-boy talk from their drivers and the working poor who have moved from the fields to the factories keep alive memories of the past. Southern speech patters and that signal form of ethnic identification, gastronomic preferences, show sure signs of resisting change.
All of these views of liberty culminate in the South in an attempt to produce a Southern identity. However, these differing views depict the commonality found within such diversity of the South.
As John B. Boles wrote in his piece The Difficulty of Consensus in the South, “the southern character is too complex for easy answers, and southerners- at least the publishing kind-enjoy the perennial search for southern identity.” While many people have attempted to define the South and Southernism, in reality, there is no easy answer to this dilemma. While white supremacy, stereotypes, commonality through diversity, and the southern idea of liberty all play integral roles in formulating Southern identity, they do not even begin to summarize what really is encompassed in the idea of one Southern identity.
Works Cited
Boles, John B. "The Difficulty of Consensus on the South." Major Problems in the History of the American South. Vol. II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. 19-27.
Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A Knopf MCMXLVI, 1941.
Fischer, David H. Albion's Seed. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. 117-33.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Revelation." The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. 488-509.
Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Central Theme of Southern History." American Historical Review 34 (1928): 30-43.
Perspectives: A Survey of Southern Female Experience
Many have attempted to create a universal Southern identity during the American Civil War. While the works of Southern writers during the 1860s highlight the fact that experiences and perspectives greatly differed throughout the south, many southerners were, in fact, united by general patriotism towards the Confederacy. The wartime diaries of Sarah Morgan and Cornelia Peake McDonald provide small glimpses into two uniquely different parts of the Confederacy. Though experiencing many dissimilar events, both held a staunch Confederate patriotism that lasted through varying hardships.
Cornelia Peake McDonald’s wartime diary, entitled “A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary with Reminisces of the War, from March 1862,” describes the daily life of a wife and mother of nine children struggling to provide for her family while living on the front lines in Winchester, Virginia. At times, she and her children could even watch the battle from their front porch. Although from a middle class family and the wife of an officer in the Confederate army, McDonald struggled to provide sufficiently for her large family. Throughout the war, troops moved back and forth through Winchester, with an incessant fluctuation of control by north and south. Constantly in contact with various Union officers concerning the fate of her beloved home and family, McDonald managed to keep a staunch Confederate sentiment while befriending several Union officers and managing to keep her property relatively intact for quite some time.
Shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the McDonalds decided to flee their poverty- stricken home for safety further behind the Southern lines. They were not alone; everyone realized the danger that surrounded them. McDonald records, “The whole town seemed to be trying to get away…few were willing to risk another Federal occupation.” Escaping to Amherst Courthouse, McDonald left most of her children in the care of a family friend, while taking two of her older children to Richmond to visit her husband, who was ailing, and possibly on his deathbed. Deciding to move the family to Lexington, McDonald retrieved her family and set about the difficult task of finding a home while waiting for her husband to gain enough strength to make the journey. There she stayed for the remainder of the war, fighting the desperate domestic battle that was then commonplace in the vast majority of the South- the crusade for food, for clothes, for warmth in winter, for a roof in rain: the crusade to keep a family together.
On the other hand, Sarah Morgan, only nineteen years old at the outbreak of the war, was from a wealthy, highly respected and aristocratic family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her wartime diary, consisting of five books in all, entitled “Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman,” not only holds a detailed account of her daily life throughout the war, but also a record of her feelings, her thought processes, and her philosophies of life and the world. While Morgan saw very little fighting, her family spent much of the war in fear of imminent attacks. In 1862, the northern army had arrived at Baton Rouge, and there were constant threats that the city would be shelled, as it was close to the river. Once, when a shelling commenced, men, women, and children all evacuated the city in great haste for fear of their lives, only to return a couple of days later to find their homes relatively untouched. Finally, however, after several more scares, the Morgan family decided to leave their beautiful, stately home.
First, the family stayed in Westover with Dr. Nolan. Morgan began her third diary by wondering, “Will the blank pages record the burning of Baton Rouge, and the loss of our all? Will the close of it find me running, or at last settled in what is to be our future dwelling in New Orleans?” How prophetic her words, foreshadowing much of what was to become of the Morgan family! Moving to General Carter’s plantation at Linwood to be out of the reach of the shells that bombarded Baton Rouge, Sarah and her sister Miriam remained there from August 1862 until April 1863. Then they departed for Clinton to meet their mother, and with her, to escape to the Union lines in New Orleans.
During their stay at Linwood, the Carters treated them as family. The pages of Morgan's diary record an enjoyment not to be found in those of McDonald’s journal, complete with a great multitude of soldier suitors constantly calling. Part way through their stay, in November 1862, Morgan had an accident while going to visit her brother Gibbes at a nearby Confederate camp in which the buggy they were riding in was overturned, and Sarah’s back severely injured. For about six months she was mostly confined to bed, not fully healed when they reached New Orleans at the end of April 1863. This accident colored her view of the war, being mostly confined to bed and constantly receiving the attentions of doting soldiers. She wrote almost daily of the occurrences around her, though rarely receiving accurate news about the Confederate army. Morgan herself never truly experienced the horrors or poverty of war. When those she loved, such as her mother and sister-in-law in Clinton, faced food shortages, the Morgans had the influence and resources to escape to the home of Morgan's unionist brother Judge Morgan in Union-held New Orleans. Their circumstances there were better than the troubles that were ever-increasing in the Confederacy, as neither crippled Sarah nor her weak mother could have survived.
Although McDonald and Morgan were from two very different areas of the Confederacy with vastly different positions, experiences and perspectives, there are many similarities to be found in the pages of their diaries. The primary similarity between McDonald and Morgan is their Confederate patriotism, which, despite the general loss of morale as the war progressed, remained unwavering. Both realized the treasonous natures of the books they wrote, yet continued to pick up their pens, attempting to accurately record what they faced each day. On May 15, 1863, McDonald records,
Last night I left this book in which I am writing lying on a table and went down stairs. Nell [her seven year old daughter] spied two officers approaching the house, and supposing they were coming for a search, first concealed the book and then went to see what they might want… I asked her why she did it, and she said she thought there might be something in it the Yankees ought not to see. I had not thought her knowing the character of the book.
Unable to vent her true sentiments publicly, McDonald daily recorded her staunch Confederate views, many of which would have placed her in dire trouble if read by a northern official. On many occasions, Morgan denotes the treasonous nature of her writings. “At first I avoided mention of political affairs, but now, there is nothing else to be thought of; if it is not burnt for treason, I will like to look it over one of these days- if I live.” Later, on June 29, 1862, while still in Yankee-occupied Baton Rouge, she again mentioned the treacherous nature of her book, writing, “one line of this, surrounded as we are by soldiers, and liable to have our houses searched at any instant, would be sufficient indictment for high treason.”
Another form of patriotism, thought short-lived on both accounts, was the proud public display of the Confederate flag. In July 1862, McDonald records “I am to have a small Confederate flag on the tea table tonight to celebrate our 4th of July.” And the next day she states, “We did celebrate our fourth…The little flag waved over the table.” Morgan is a bit bolder in her display in 1862, recording,
“All devices signs, and flags of the confederacy shall be suppressed.” So says Picayune Butler. Good. I devote all my red, white, and blue silk to the manufacture of Confederate flags…. Henceforth, I wear one pinned to my bosom- the man who says take it off, will have to pull it off for himself; the man who dares attempt it- well! A pistol in my pocket will fill up the gap.
In addition to their patriotism, McDonald and Morgan’s writings place a noteworthy importance on home and family. Neither relish the idea of relinquishing her home and both cling to what little hope they have until forced to flee to preserve their lives and those of their families. Next, although staunchly Confederates, both learned that the soldiers of the Union Army, though their enemies, were humans too, with home and family of their own. Once, McDonald records of a Union soldier who was punished by his commanding officer for stealing milk from her cow, “He had such a human look, so dejected and wretched, that Yankee as he was, and milk the cow as he did, I could not help feeling self reproach at being the cause of his punishment.” Morgan also ascribed to this courteous sentiment, as she wrote, “I wont be rude to any one in my own house, Yankee or Southern, say what they will.” Later, she also wrote, “I am a Southerner, and not ashamed to say I admire our foes.”
The final element of uniformity between the diaries of McDonald and Morgan is that both have family members fighting in the war and both deal with the grief of death. McDonald suffered the loss of a son in battle, while her husband became so weak and ill from starvation and lack of proper medical care that eventually he passed away as well near the end of the war. In an entry on September 26, 1862, McDonald records the events surrounding the death of her infant daughter- an occasion that deeply effects the rest of her writings, as she continues to grieve this loss, mentioning it frequently.
Morgan also faced the loss of loved ones and was most deeply affected by the loss of both her father to an asthmatic illness and her brother “Hal” in an unfair duel, both in early 1861. Throughout her five books she frequently longs for their presence. She deeply respected her brother. Likewise, she acutely grieved the passing of her father and often would write as though talking to him. At the very end of the war, she also sadly loses two of her three brothers who fought in the Confederate army- Gibbes and George.
Although there are numerous similarities in the perspectives of McDonald and Morgan, there are also several differences. The most obvious contrast between them is their respective stations in life. While McDonald is a wife and mother of nine children and works throughout the war simply to clothe and feed her children, Morgan lives a life of relative ease in which, although losing one lovely home, she moves to another equally fine setting. She continues to have additional suitors with whom she can toy and flirt. Never does Morgan seem to question the source of her next meal, while McDonald often fears that her family will die of starvation. Morgan, always knowing a life of luxury, laments the loss of several dresses, while McDonald sadly writes,
My poor little boys were still barefooted, and it made me so sorry their little red feet as they went out in the frost of November mornings. Night after night I laid awake, trying to devise plans for getting them shoes, and paying for the weaving of the cloth.
Morgan experienced mere inconveniences as compared to McDonald's fight for survival.
Next, because of their respective geographic locations in the Confederacy, each woman saw quite different sides of the war. Morgan, once outside of Baton Rouge, saw very little fighting of any kind. Once, on August 6, 1862, while still in Westover, Louisiana, she records one encounter with the Confederate ironclad Arkansas which, old and virtually unusable, was burned by her own Southern sailors, who evacuated when they realized they were no match for their Federal opponent.
McDonald, however, living directly on the front lines in Westchester, Virginia, records that skirmishes and enemy occupations were a part of daily life. One day she even found a severed foot in her garden! On June 8, 1862, she records one of many times in which various Union soldiers tried to occupy her home and destroy her property. She was forced to apply to the commanding officer for protection for her large and impoverished brood, who would surely all die if turned out of their home. She often witnessed unspeakable acts of violence committed against her neighbors and friends. For example, when a certain Mr. Wilson allowed Confederate men to stay in his home, Union soldiers rewarded him so that he “was not quite dead when found; a sabre across the head had struck him down, and after he fell a pistol had been fired at his temple, so near that his eye was shot out, and his face filled with powder.”
A final difference between the two women is their views of slavery. The McDonald’s did not own a slave; although a relative lent them a slave women to help care for the large family. The woman became a part of the family as any domestic servant and, when her master threatened to send her further south as the Union advanced toward Winchester, McDonald begged for the slave to stay with her family. Later, in her “Recollections of 1861” which she appended to her wartime diary, McDonald discussed her true beliefs about slavery.
I never in my heart thought slavery was right, and having in my childhood seen some of the worst instances of its abuse, and in my youth, when surrounded by them and daily witnessing what I considered great injustice to them, I could not think how the men I most honored and admire, my husband among the rest, could constantly justify it, and not only that, but say that it was a blessing to the slave, his master, and the country; and (even now I say it with a feeling of shame), that the renewal of the slave trade would be a blessing and benefit to all, if only the consent of the world could be obtained to its being made lawful.
Though surrounded by anti-abolitionist sentiments, McDonald appears to have independently realized the evils of slavery.
In contrast, Morgan, although speaking of her own slaves and the issue in general on several occasions, does not seem to have as maturely considered the matter to develop a decided opinion one way or the other. She shows a certain naïveté in that she appears to be generally swayed by the cultural norm of the day in Baton Rouge. On April 19, 1863, en route to New Orleans, Morgan mentions a trusted family slave, Tiche, as she writes in a paragraph describing the lack of bedding one night,
To my share fell a double blanket, which, as Tiche had not cover, I unfolded, and as she used the foot of my bed for a pillow, gave her the other end of it, thus, (tell this not in Yankee land, for it will never be credited) actually sleeping under the same bed clothes with our black, shiny negro nurse!”
With Confederate patriotism as the common thread between them, Cornelia Peake McDonald and Sarah Morgan depict two very different accounts of everyday life in the south during the Civil War. Although different in their respective stations in life as well as their resources and wartime experiences, the two are unified in their staunch Southern sentiments that drive them to remain loyal to the Confederacy throughout the trials and hardships of war.
Bibliography
McDonald, Cornelia Peake. A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862. Edited by Minrose C. Gwin. New York, New York: Gramercy Books, 2003. 3-269.
Morgan, Sarah. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. Edited by Charles East. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. 5-612.
Cornelia Peake McDonald’s wartime diary, entitled “A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary with Reminisces of the War, from March 1862,” describes the daily life of a wife and mother of nine children struggling to provide for her family while living on the front lines in Winchester, Virginia. At times, she and her children could even watch the battle from their front porch. Although from a middle class family and the wife of an officer in the Confederate army, McDonald struggled to provide sufficiently for her large family. Throughout the war, troops moved back and forth through Winchester, with an incessant fluctuation of control by north and south. Constantly in contact with various Union officers concerning the fate of her beloved home and family, McDonald managed to keep a staunch Confederate sentiment while befriending several Union officers and managing to keep her property relatively intact for quite some time.
Shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the McDonalds decided to flee their poverty- stricken home for safety further behind the Southern lines. They were not alone; everyone realized the danger that surrounded them. McDonald records, “The whole town seemed to be trying to get away…few were willing to risk another Federal occupation.” Escaping to Amherst Courthouse, McDonald left most of her children in the care of a family friend, while taking two of her older children to Richmond to visit her husband, who was ailing, and possibly on his deathbed. Deciding to move the family to Lexington, McDonald retrieved her family and set about the difficult task of finding a home while waiting for her husband to gain enough strength to make the journey. There she stayed for the remainder of the war, fighting the desperate domestic battle that was then commonplace in the vast majority of the South- the crusade for food, for clothes, for warmth in winter, for a roof in rain: the crusade to keep a family together.
On the other hand, Sarah Morgan, only nineteen years old at the outbreak of the war, was from a wealthy, highly respected and aristocratic family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her wartime diary, consisting of five books in all, entitled “Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman,” not only holds a detailed account of her daily life throughout the war, but also a record of her feelings, her thought processes, and her philosophies of life and the world. While Morgan saw very little fighting, her family spent much of the war in fear of imminent attacks. In 1862, the northern army had arrived at Baton Rouge, and there were constant threats that the city would be shelled, as it was close to the river. Once, when a shelling commenced, men, women, and children all evacuated the city in great haste for fear of their lives, only to return a couple of days later to find their homes relatively untouched. Finally, however, after several more scares, the Morgan family decided to leave their beautiful, stately home.
First, the family stayed in Westover with Dr. Nolan. Morgan began her third diary by wondering, “Will the blank pages record the burning of Baton Rouge, and the loss of our all? Will the close of it find me running, or at last settled in what is to be our future dwelling in New Orleans?” How prophetic her words, foreshadowing much of what was to become of the Morgan family! Moving to General Carter’s plantation at Linwood to be out of the reach of the shells that bombarded Baton Rouge, Sarah and her sister Miriam remained there from August 1862 until April 1863. Then they departed for Clinton to meet their mother, and with her, to escape to the Union lines in New Orleans.
During their stay at Linwood, the Carters treated them as family. The pages of Morgan's diary record an enjoyment not to be found in those of McDonald’s journal, complete with a great multitude of soldier suitors constantly calling. Part way through their stay, in November 1862, Morgan had an accident while going to visit her brother Gibbes at a nearby Confederate camp in which the buggy they were riding in was overturned, and Sarah’s back severely injured. For about six months she was mostly confined to bed, not fully healed when they reached New Orleans at the end of April 1863. This accident colored her view of the war, being mostly confined to bed and constantly receiving the attentions of doting soldiers. She wrote almost daily of the occurrences around her, though rarely receiving accurate news about the Confederate army. Morgan herself never truly experienced the horrors or poverty of war. When those she loved, such as her mother and sister-in-law in Clinton, faced food shortages, the Morgans had the influence and resources to escape to the home of Morgan's unionist brother Judge Morgan in Union-held New Orleans. Their circumstances there were better than the troubles that were ever-increasing in the Confederacy, as neither crippled Sarah nor her weak mother could have survived.
Although McDonald and Morgan were from two very different areas of the Confederacy with vastly different positions, experiences and perspectives, there are many similarities to be found in the pages of their diaries. The primary similarity between McDonald and Morgan is their Confederate patriotism, which, despite the general loss of morale as the war progressed, remained unwavering. Both realized the treasonous natures of the books they wrote, yet continued to pick up their pens, attempting to accurately record what they faced each day. On May 15, 1863, McDonald records,
Last night I left this book in which I am writing lying on a table and went down stairs. Nell [her seven year old daughter] spied two officers approaching the house, and supposing they were coming for a search, first concealed the book and then went to see what they might want… I asked her why she did it, and she said she thought there might be something in it the Yankees ought not to see. I had not thought her knowing the character of the book.
Unable to vent her true sentiments publicly, McDonald daily recorded her staunch Confederate views, many of which would have placed her in dire trouble if read by a northern official. On many occasions, Morgan denotes the treasonous nature of her writings. “At first I avoided mention of political affairs, but now, there is nothing else to be thought of; if it is not burnt for treason, I will like to look it over one of these days- if I live.” Later, on June 29, 1862, while still in Yankee-occupied Baton Rouge, she again mentioned the treacherous nature of her book, writing, “one line of this, surrounded as we are by soldiers, and liable to have our houses searched at any instant, would be sufficient indictment for high treason.”
Another form of patriotism, thought short-lived on both accounts, was the proud public display of the Confederate flag. In July 1862, McDonald records “I am to have a small Confederate flag on the tea table tonight to celebrate our 4th of July.” And the next day she states, “We did celebrate our fourth…The little flag waved over the table.” Morgan is a bit bolder in her display in 1862, recording,
“All devices signs, and flags of the confederacy shall be suppressed.” So says Picayune Butler. Good. I devote all my red, white, and blue silk to the manufacture of Confederate flags…. Henceforth, I wear one pinned to my bosom- the man who says take it off, will have to pull it off for himself; the man who dares attempt it- well! A pistol in my pocket will fill up the gap.
In addition to their patriotism, McDonald and Morgan’s writings place a noteworthy importance on home and family. Neither relish the idea of relinquishing her home and both cling to what little hope they have until forced to flee to preserve their lives and those of their families. Next, although staunchly Confederates, both learned that the soldiers of the Union Army, though their enemies, were humans too, with home and family of their own. Once, McDonald records of a Union soldier who was punished by his commanding officer for stealing milk from her cow, “He had such a human look, so dejected and wretched, that Yankee as he was, and milk the cow as he did, I could not help feeling self reproach at being the cause of his punishment.” Morgan also ascribed to this courteous sentiment, as she wrote, “I wont be rude to any one in my own house, Yankee or Southern, say what they will.” Later, she also wrote, “I am a Southerner, and not ashamed to say I admire our foes.”
The final element of uniformity between the diaries of McDonald and Morgan is that both have family members fighting in the war and both deal with the grief of death. McDonald suffered the loss of a son in battle, while her husband became so weak and ill from starvation and lack of proper medical care that eventually he passed away as well near the end of the war. In an entry on September 26, 1862, McDonald records the events surrounding the death of her infant daughter- an occasion that deeply effects the rest of her writings, as she continues to grieve this loss, mentioning it frequently.
Morgan also faced the loss of loved ones and was most deeply affected by the loss of both her father to an asthmatic illness and her brother “Hal” in an unfair duel, both in early 1861. Throughout her five books she frequently longs for their presence. She deeply respected her brother. Likewise, she acutely grieved the passing of her father and often would write as though talking to him. At the very end of the war, she also sadly loses two of her three brothers who fought in the Confederate army- Gibbes and George.
Although there are numerous similarities in the perspectives of McDonald and Morgan, there are also several differences. The most obvious contrast between them is their respective stations in life. While McDonald is a wife and mother of nine children and works throughout the war simply to clothe and feed her children, Morgan lives a life of relative ease in which, although losing one lovely home, she moves to another equally fine setting. She continues to have additional suitors with whom she can toy and flirt. Never does Morgan seem to question the source of her next meal, while McDonald often fears that her family will die of starvation. Morgan, always knowing a life of luxury, laments the loss of several dresses, while McDonald sadly writes,
My poor little boys were still barefooted, and it made me so sorry their little red feet as they went out in the frost of November mornings. Night after night I laid awake, trying to devise plans for getting them shoes, and paying for the weaving of the cloth.
Morgan experienced mere inconveniences as compared to McDonald's fight for survival.
Next, because of their respective geographic locations in the Confederacy, each woman saw quite different sides of the war. Morgan, once outside of Baton Rouge, saw very little fighting of any kind. Once, on August 6, 1862, while still in Westover, Louisiana, she records one encounter with the Confederate ironclad Arkansas which, old and virtually unusable, was burned by her own Southern sailors, who evacuated when they realized they were no match for their Federal opponent.
McDonald, however, living directly on the front lines in Westchester, Virginia, records that skirmishes and enemy occupations were a part of daily life. One day she even found a severed foot in her garden! On June 8, 1862, she records one of many times in which various Union soldiers tried to occupy her home and destroy her property. She was forced to apply to the commanding officer for protection for her large and impoverished brood, who would surely all die if turned out of their home. She often witnessed unspeakable acts of violence committed against her neighbors and friends. For example, when a certain Mr. Wilson allowed Confederate men to stay in his home, Union soldiers rewarded him so that he “was not quite dead when found; a sabre across the head had struck him down, and after he fell a pistol had been fired at his temple, so near that his eye was shot out, and his face filled with powder.”
A final difference between the two women is their views of slavery. The McDonald’s did not own a slave; although a relative lent them a slave women to help care for the large family. The woman became a part of the family as any domestic servant and, when her master threatened to send her further south as the Union advanced toward Winchester, McDonald begged for the slave to stay with her family. Later, in her “Recollections of 1861” which she appended to her wartime diary, McDonald discussed her true beliefs about slavery.
I never in my heart thought slavery was right, and having in my childhood seen some of the worst instances of its abuse, and in my youth, when surrounded by them and daily witnessing what I considered great injustice to them, I could not think how the men I most honored and admire, my husband among the rest, could constantly justify it, and not only that, but say that it was a blessing to the slave, his master, and the country; and (even now I say it with a feeling of shame), that the renewal of the slave trade would be a blessing and benefit to all, if only the consent of the world could be obtained to its being made lawful.
Though surrounded by anti-abolitionist sentiments, McDonald appears to have independently realized the evils of slavery.
In contrast, Morgan, although speaking of her own slaves and the issue in general on several occasions, does not seem to have as maturely considered the matter to develop a decided opinion one way or the other. She shows a certain naïveté in that she appears to be generally swayed by the cultural norm of the day in Baton Rouge. On April 19, 1863, en route to New Orleans, Morgan mentions a trusted family slave, Tiche, as she writes in a paragraph describing the lack of bedding one night,
To my share fell a double blanket, which, as Tiche had not cover, I unfolded, and as she used the foot of my bed for a pillow, gave her the other end of it, thus, (tell this not in Yankee land, for it will never be credited) actually sleeping under the same bed clothes with our black, shiny negro nurse!”
With Confederate patriotism as the common thread between them, Cornelia Peake McDonald and Sarah Morgan depict two very different accounts of everyday life in the south during the Civil War. Although different in their respective stations in life as well as their resources and wartime experiences, the two are unified in their staunch Southern sentiments that drive them to remain loyal to the Confederacy throughout the trials and hardships of war.
Bibliography
McDonald, Cornelia Peake. A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862. Edited by Minrose C. Gwin. New York, New York: Gramercy Books, 2003. 3-269.
Morgan, Sarah. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. Edited by Charles East. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. 5-612.
The Problem of God
Highly controversial, Holocaust literature raises many difficult questions about God’s role in evil and suffering in the world. In his world-renowned autobiography Night that describes his experiences surviving the Nazi concentration camps, Elie Wiesel presents three primary complaints that question the existence and character of the traditional God of the Jewish Scriptures: God’s unfaithfulness, injustice, and silence. Before discussing his criticisms, however, a brief background in his writings and beliefs is necessary.
The book begins with Elie Wiesel recalling the early days of his training in the Hebrew Talmud as well as that in the Kaballah under the tutelage of a Hasidic Jew named Moshe the Beadle. Born in Sighet, Transylvania, the son of well-respected, civic-minded Jews, one day Wiesel and his family were deported from their home and sent to a ghetto with other Jews. Despite the substandard living conditions imposed upon them, the Jews continued life as normal, with little protest. After several deportations to smaller ghettos, the Jews of Wiesel’s community were finally herded into overloaded cattle cars and sent to the concentration camps. At the first stop, after being separated from mother and sisters, who were promptly burned in the crematorium, Wiesel and his father learned to combine efforts as a means of survival. Possessing the courage to live despite the unprecedented suffering that surrounded them, Wiesel and his father labored gruelingly to prove themselves useful in order to escape the dreaded selection by the Nazi doctors for the crematorium. Wiesel witnessed many appalling scenes-- such as innocent children burning alive in a pit, and a young boy horrifically living for half an hour while hanging by his neck from a rope-- that colored his view of God for the remainder of his life. His father died. But Wiesel, weak from dysentery, starvation and abuse, preternaturally survived to be released from Auschwitz by the Allied Forces, living to tell the story of the untold millions who died at the hands of Nazi brutality. Through these events, Wiesel’s knowledge of the traditional God of the Hebrews was called into question. God is faithful and loving towards His people, keeping His promises throughout the ages, yet exacting strict justice and revenge on the enemies of His people--the Jews. He revealed His nature through His word. Among numerous other denotations, Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that, “[God] is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” He also promises to keep His covenant with His people if they keep His commands (Deuteronomy 7:9). Throughout the Psalms, God’s faithfulness and enduring love are affirmed.
Wiesel first disputes the faithfulness of God. Wiesel was well aware of the traditional view of the God of Israel as faithful, just, merciful, and loving; however, as he and his family were subjected to the dehumanization of the Nazi concentration camps, not surprisingly, Wiesel doubted whether his God was truly faithful. Despite the pleas of the innocent victims surrounding him, God appeared to ignore their cries for mercy (Wiesel 20). Regardless, the Jewish prisoners continued to petition God, saying, “God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more” (45). When God still did not show Himself faithful by liberating His people, they persisted in their praises, as they said, “We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we are capable of singing His praises” (69). Such a response was common among Jews in the Nazi death camps, as they believed that, by silently facing death without fear, they were accepting the sentence God had justly and lovingly prepared for them, ardently hoping for redemption and rewards in heaven for their obedience to His will (Cohn-Sherbok 125). Although initially Wiesel joined in this traditional worship, he soon began to question why he should bless God in light of all the terrible things He had allowed (67). “What are you, my God?” Wiesel angrily inquired of his Creator, “How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?” (66). Wiesel inculpated God as weaker than man because, despite incredible suffering, His people still praised Him, while God destroyed them simply for causing Him displeasure. Wiesel so discredited the faithfulness of God as to pen the horrific words: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people” (Wiesel 81).
While this statement might seem rash and insensible, in light of the acts of inhumanity Wiesel witnessed coupled with the destruction of the faith of even the most faithful Jews, his statement is justifiable. Wiesel reminisces an anecdote of how an unfortunate Polish rabbi lost his faith. After daily examining his personal knowledge of God and the Talmud, he finally gave up, telling Wiesel,
It’s over. God is no longer with us…I know. No one has the right to say things like that…Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor just a man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy? (Wiesel 76-77).
Shortly thereafter, Akiba Drumer, one of the most zealot Jews who had come with Wiesel from Sighet to the concentration camps, gave up his faith and died. Wiesel begins to surmise that life and faith are interconnected as he writes,
If only he could have kept his faith in God, if only he could have considered this suffering a divine test, he would not have been swept away by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first chinks in his faith, he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death (77).
What kind of God allows even His most ardent followers to lose their faith and die atrocious deaths? How can a faithful God even allow those faithful to Him to experience suffering at the hands of arguably the world’s worst evil?
As he considers God’s faithfulness, Wiesel takes two stances: 1) that God is both indifferent to the plight of His people and in complete contradiction to the compassionate and gracious God of the Old Testament, and 2) a Job-like perspective that indignantly censures God and sees a void in His silence (Cohn-Sherbok 101-102). For Wiesel, God cannot be placed in both of these categories—He must be either a ruthless despot or a benevolent patriarch (102-103). As Robert McAfee Brown notes, “Every religion that affirms a God either omnipotent or omniscient, or both, is perilously close to proclaiming a God who is ultimately executioner… If God is truly in control, all that happens, not only for good but also for ill, is finally traceable back to God” (156). If the events of the Holocaust are traceable back to God, it is no wonder that Wiesel had trouble considering God faithful. Were Wiesel a Christian, perhaps he would agree that in “[a] world like the present one, with a Messiah…[it appears] that the redemption efforts failed, and that rather than God conquering evil, evil appears to have conquered God” (186). The faithful God of the Old Testament is impugned in the very occurrence of the Holocaust, calling into question the efficacy of His promises. However, despite Wiesel’s apparent denial of God, he cannot altogether dismiss the existence of God, and he even intones quiet prayers to the God whom he has forsaken (38,91). Viewing the entirety of the world, the existence of God is undeniable; nevertheless, “The dilemma is created by belief, not disbelief. It would be hard to live in a world without God…but it is even harder to live in the world with God” (142). Furthermore, “man can live with a cruel God, who creates men to murder them, who chooses a people to have them slain on a sacrificial altar, but he cannot live in a world without God. Better to search for the hidden God, the eclipsed God, than to be without Him” (Greenberg 126-127). Wiesel knows that God exists, but it is his childhood knowledge of this God that creates such despair for him and for other Jews as they realize they have been forsaken by the One who claims to be faithful.
Secondly, Wiesel challenges the justice of God, virtually putting Him on trial, indicting Him for His injustice towards humanity. “Some men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sin of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come,” he writes. “As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). In the scene vaguely mentioned above, Wiesel witnesses the brutally barbaric hanging of an innocent, angelic, and beloved child who is too lightweight, due to his age and the emaciating effect of hunger, to die instantly. In a graphic yet moving scene, the prisoners of the camp are required to look the dying child in the eye to learn their lesson in the consequences of disobedience while they march to a dinner of soup that tastes like corpses (Wiesel 63-65). Many men cry out in anguish at this scene, “Where is merciful God, where is He?... For God’s sake, where is God?” (64-65). Agonizingly, Wiesel inwardly responds to these inquiries, “Where He is? There is where- hanging from this gallows…” (65). For the onlookers in the camp, the cruel death of this innocent young boy symbolized the death of the just God whom they believed should be preventing such injustices from occurring.
While the idea of the death of God presents a dire view of deity which some view as atheistic, the nature of the circumstances only allows for such a conclusion. However, “this death of God does not appear to be an acceptance of atheism on Wiesel’s part….[he] cannot get a living God out of the picture…the part of God that is dying might be designated as that which can be loved…in witnessing the death of a child, Wiesel suggests that to be with God is to be with a presence that leaves us alone” (Greenberg 61-62). Furthering Wiesel’s suit against God, to be left alone by God is in terrible contradiction to the God of the Bible who will “never leave you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5). This scene may also present a hopeless and desperate parody of the crucifixion, with “God on the gallows, God subjected to human demonry, God at the mercy of evil, God embodying death and impotence rather than life and death, God whose ‘real presence’ is such that soup transubstantiated into corpses” (Brown 56). By asking where God is and also praying to this absent God to not betray his father, Wiesel contradicts the moral order that had been accepted prior to the Holocaust while also insisting upon its assertion upon this new world of amoral atrocities. This calls for realignment in his relationship with God “in light of the devastating new evidence about the nature of the God he formerly worshipped and the universe created by that God in which there are burning pits of infants…the newly revealed God of silence” (34).
To further the picture of the death of God, Wiesel describes the Nazi selection process, which all prisoners in the death camps underwent at least once. Stripped naked to expose every inch of their wretched, emaciated, and malnourished bodies, men and women alike were quickly herded before SS doctors, who made a list of colorless, lackluster, useless individuals that would later be taken to the gas chambers prior to cremation (71). Wiesel paints a heinous picture of God when, after describing the selection process, he states, “This must be how one stands for the Last Judgment” (Ibid). Although he acknowledges the miraculous manner in which his father twice escaped selection by proving himself useful, Wiesel still indicts a God who could allow innocent people to be entitled to life or death on the basis of their utility (76). According to Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “If God were ultimately responsible for the horrors of the death camps, it seems impossible to reconcile such mass murder with the traditional concept of God’s nature. Surely if God is all-good, he would have wished to rescue innocent Jewish victims from the hands of the Nazis; if he is omnipotent, He would have the power to do so” (25). Arguably, there is evil in the world only because God allowed human beings to have free will. Logically, therefore, He should be able to fabricate a world that contains both freedom of choice and absence of suffering, being an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good God (Cohn-Sherbok 65). Although the events of the Holocaust seem to suggest that God does not fit into the aforementioned categories, Michael R. Steele quotes Wiesel as saying that, “man is not created in order to suffer. If this were so, then God could not be holy. God does not want man to suffer; man suffers against God. [Jews] believe that suffering is not the answer; suffering is only the question” (146). Wiesel struggles to come to terms with the existence of both God, like the one whom he studied in his youth, and Auschwitz, as one seems to negate the possibility for the other, leaving for the human faith and intellect a harrowing struggle with which to grapple (Brown 54). Ultimately, there seems to be a power struggle as the Nazi regime challenges the omnipotence of God, and Wiesel desires to believe in the holiness of God in the face of such evil.
As the celebrations and ceremonies of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, (in which Wiesel refused to participate) began, shortly after the tragic hanging scene and just before the selection process, so commenced Elie Wiesel’s indictment of God. “I was the accuser, God the accused,” he desolately writes.
My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in the world without God, without man…I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger (68).
Brown justifies this indictment of God, stating that in quarreling with God, Wiesel pays Him the “supreme compliment” by acknowledging that He is worthy of anger rather than insouciance (148). Eliezer Berkovits extends Wiesel’s accusations, proclaiming them to be proof of his faith, as “faith, because it is trust in God, demands justice of God. It cannot countenance that God be involved in injustice and cruelty. And yet, for faith God is involved in everything under the sun. What faith is searching for is, if not understanding fully, at least to gain a hint of the nature of God’s involvement” (68). Additionally, if God’s trials of His people are seen as a declaration of His love for them, then their indictment of Him might also serve to express their love for Him, not as an arrogant child, but as one disappointed in the morality of their parent and desirous of an explanation (van Inwagen 126).
Thirdly, Wiesel questions the silence, and therefore seeming absence of God, in the face of the Holocaust. On almost every page of Night, God’s silence is visible. In every unanswered prayer and every apparently ignored complaint against Him, God responds with silence. Finally, Wiesel admits that, “I no longer accepted God’s silence” (69). In the face of the evil he experienced, it is a wonder that, rather than simply rejecting God’s silence, he did not reject God Himself altogether. God’s silence suggests “the collapse of language” in the face of such evil (Greenberg 4-5). When Wiesel and others try to speak about the brutality of the Holocaust, “part of what we hear is the silence—the silence of God in Auschwitz, the silence of the world as it turned deaf ears on atrocity, the silence of the victims as they recognized their awful fate. But the silence does not issue from a void; it surges around the words that conceal it. One hears it because the sounds of language: if we did not speak about the Holocaust, we would not be able to hear its silences” (Greenberg 39). In other words, in studying the silence of God in the Holocaust, one learns much about who God is and how He manifests Himself to His people. A difficult struggle for reason, “God’s presence is most strongly felt through His absence” (57). His silence often is equated with absence, causing great agony for believers who wonder why God is not answering their prayers, their cries for help.
In some ways, Wiesel may be compared with Job of the Bible who endured suffering as a trial of His faith in God. The primary difference between Job and Wiesel, however, is that Job receives an answer of sorts while Wiesel only receives silence. He prays “for God and against God, as well as to Him, wrestling with His silence—a continuing source of anguish” (Greenberg 47). According to Thomas A. Indinopulos, “the sufferer raises his eyes toward Heaven, where God always sits in silence. What [Wiesel] perceive[s] in the pain and humiliation that human beings endure on earth is not the non-existence of God, but the ineffectiveness of divine will…What [he] dramatize[s]…is not the death of God, but the death of God’s creation” (52). Although he receives silence, Wiesel cannot accept the conclusion that there are no supernatural deities, and so he “instead maintains that God exists, and his protest is in essence a longing for the God of the Bible” (Cohn-Sherbok 102)
In conclusion, in Night, Wiesel arraigns God on charges of unfaithfulness, injustice, and silence in response to the evil of the Nazi regime. However, although he indicts God in the face of atrocious evil, he still concludes that there is a God and that He is worthy of worship. Wiesel seems to acknowledge the inherent problem of the fallen human race, and acknowledges that part of separation from God is “being the playthings of chance. It means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly, and it means something worse than that: it means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly for no reason at all” (van Inwagen 72). Although such an occurrence decries God’s omnipotence, perhaps He could not precipitate greater good without permitting the evil seen in the Holocaust (62). Perhaps the allure for the extermination of evil pales in comparison to whatever basis God may have for sanctioning the existence of evil in the world (60-61). Although Wiesel may desire a theodicy, or an explanation for men of God’s ways, part of the answer is the unknown. God’s ways cannot be understood by the finite human intellect, which is so limited in not only its scope of knowledge but in its perspective of the world. Wiesel, and other readers and writers of Holocaust literature, must be content to simply accept the acts of God on a faith-basis, without knowing what purpose evil may serve or how it can support the goodness of God.
Works Cited
Berkovits, Eliezer. Faith after the Holocaust. New York: Ktav House, INC, 1973. Print.
The Bible. New International Version ed. Grand Rapids. BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 100 versions and 50 languages. Nick Hengeveld, 1993. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Brown, Robert M. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983. Print.
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Holocaust Theology. London: Lamp, 1989. Print.
Ininopulos, Thomas A. "The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel, and Grunewald." Journal of American Academy of Religtion 43.1 (1975): 51-61. JStor. Web. 30 Oct. 2009.
Rosenfeld, Alvin, and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. London: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.
Steele, Michael R. Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature. London: Greenwood, 1995. Print.
Van Inwagen, Peter. Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Company, 2004. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print.
The book begins with Elie Wiesel recalling the early days of his training in the Hebrew Talmud as well as that in the Kaballah under the tutelage of a Hasidic Jew named Moshe the Beadle. Born in Sighet, Transylvania, the son of well-respected, civic-minded Jews, one day Wiesel and his family were deported from their home and sent to a ghetto with other Jews. Despite the substandard living conditions imposed upon them, the Jews continued life as normal, with little protest. After several deportations to smaller ghettos, the Jews of Wiesel’s community were finally herded into overloaded cattle cars and sent to the concentration camps. At the first stop, after being separated from mother and sisters, who were promptly burned in the crematorium, Wiesel and his father learned to combine efforts as a means of survival. Possessing the courage to live despite the unprecedented suffering that surrounded them, Wiesel and his father labored gruelingly to prove themselves useful in order to escape the dreaded selection by the Nazi doctors for the crematorium. Wiesel witnessed many appalling scenes-- such as innocent children burning alive in a pit, and a young boy horrifically living for half an hour while hanging by his neck from a rope-- that colored his view of God for the remainder of his life. His father died. But Wiesel, weak from dysentery, starvation and abuse, preternaturally survived to be released from Auschwitz by the Allied Forces, living to tell the story of the untold millions who died at the hands of Nazi brutality. Through these events, Wiesel’s knowledge of the traditional God of the Hebrews was called into question. God is faithful and loving towards His people, keeping His promises throughout the ages, yet exacting strict justice and revenge on the enemies of His people--the Jews. He revealed His nature through His word. Among numerous other denotations, Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that, “[God] is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” He also promises to keep His covenant with His people if they keep His commands (Deuteronomy 7:9). Throughout the Psalms, God’s faithfulness and enduring love are affirmed.
Wiesel first disputes the faithfulness of God. Wiesel was well aware of the traditional view of the God of Israel as faithful, just, merciful, and loving; however, as he and his family were subjected to the dehumanization of the Nazi concentration camps, not surprisingly, Wiesel doubted whether his God was truly faithful. Despite the pleas of the innocent victims surrounding him, God appeared to ignore their cries for mercy (Wiesel 20). Regardless, the Jewish prisoners continued to petition God, saying, “God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more” (45). When God still did not show Himself faithful by liberating His people, they persisted in their praises, as they said, “We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we are capable of singing His praises” (69). Such a response was common among Jews in the Nazi death camps, as they believed that, by silently facing death without fear, they were accepting the sentence God had justly and lovingly prepared for them, ardently hoping for redemption and rewards in heaven for their obedience to His will (Cohn-Sherbok 125). Although initially Wiesel joined in this traditional worship, he soon began to question why he should bless God in light of all the terrible things He had allowed (67). “What are you, my God?” Wiesel angrily inquired of his Creator, “How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?” (66). Wiesel inculpated God as weaker than man because, despite incredible suffering, His people still praised Him, while God destroyed them simply for causing Him displeasure. Wiesel so discredited the faithfulness of God as to pen the horrific words: “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people” (Wiesel 81).
While this statement might seem rash and insensible, in light of the acts of inhumanity Wiesel witnessed coupled with the destruction of the faith of even the most faithful Jews, his statement is justifiable. Wiesel reminisces an anecdote of how an unfortunate Polish rabbi lost his faith. After daily examining his personal knowledge of God and the Talmud, he finally gave up, telling Wiesel,
It’s over. God is no longer with us…I know. No one has the right to say things like that…Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor just a man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy? (Wiesel 76-77).
Shortly thereafter, Akiba Drumer, one of the most zealot Jews who had come with Wiesel from Sighet to the concentration camps, gave up his faith and died. Wiesel begins to surmise that life and faith are interconnected as he writes,
If only he could have kept his faith in God, if only he could have considered this suffering a divine test, he would not have been swept away by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first chinks in his faith, he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death (77).
What kind of God allows even His most ardent followers to lose their faith and die atrocious deaths? How can a faithful God even allow those faithful to Him to experience suffering at the hands of arguably the world’s worst evil?
As he considers God’s faithfulness, Wiesel takes two stances: 1) that God is both indifferent to the plight of His people and in complete contradiction to the compassionate and gracious God of the Old Testament, and 2) a Job-like perspective that indignantly censures God and sees a void in His silence (Cohn-Sherbok 101-102). For Wiesel, God cannot be placed in both of these categories—He must be either a ruthless despot or a benevolent patriarch (102-103). As Robert McAfee Brown notes, “Every religion that affirms a God either omnipotent or omniscient, or both, is perilously close to proclaiming a God who is ultimately executioner… If God is truly in control, all that happens, not only for good but also for ill, is finally traceable back to God” (156). If the events of the Holocaust are traceable back to God, it is no wonder that Wiesel had trouble considering God faithful. Were Wiesel a Christian, perhaps he would agree that in “[a] world like the present one, with a Messiah…[it appears] that the redemption efforts failed, and that rather than God conquering evil, evil appears to have conquered God” (186). The faithful God of the Old Testament is impugned in the very occurrence of the Holocaust, calling into question the efficacy of His promises. However, despite Wiesel’s apparent denial of God, he cannot altogether dismiss the existence of God, and he even intones quiet prayers to the God whom he has forsaken (38,91). Viewing the entirety of the world, the existence of God is undeniable; nevertheless, “The dilemma is created by belief, not disbelief. It would be hard to live in a world without God…but it is even harder to live in the world with God” (142). Furthermore, “man can live with a cruel God, who creates men to murder them, who chooses a people to have them slain on a sacrificial altar, but he cannot live in a world without God. Better to search for the hidden God, the eclipsed God, than to be without Him” (Greenberg 126-127). Wiesel knows that God exists, but it is his childhood knowledge of this God that creates such despair for him and for other Jews as they realize they have been forsaken by the One who claims to be faithful.
Secondly, Wiesel challenges the justice of God, virtually putting Him on trial, indicting Him for His injustice towards humanity. “Some men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sin of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come,” he writes. “As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). In the scene vaguely mentioned above, Wiesel witnesses the brutally barbaric hanging of an innocent, angelic, and beloved child who is too lightweight, due to his age and the emaciating effect of hunger, to die instantly. In a graphic yet moving scene, the prisoners of the camp are required to look the dying child in the eye to learn their lesson in the consequences of disobedience while they march to a dinner of soup that tastes like corpses (Wiesel 63-65). Many men cry out in anguish at this scene, “Where is merciful God, where is He?... For God’s sake, where is God?” (64-65). Agonizingly, Wiesel inwardly responds to these inquiries, “Where He is? There is where- hanging from this gallows…” (65). For the onlookers in the camp, the cruel death of this innocent young boy symbolized the death of the just God whom they believed should be preventing such injustices from occurring.
While the idea of the death of God presents a dire view of deity which some view as atheistic, the nature of the circumstances only allows for such a conclusion. However, “this death of God does not appear to be an acceptance of atheism on Wiesel’s part….[he] cannot get a living God out of the picture…the part of God that is dying might be designated as that which can be loved…in witnessing the death of a child, Wiesel suggests that to be with God is to be with a presence that leaves us alone” (Greenberg 61-62). Furthering Wiesel’s suit against God, to be left alone by God is in terrible contradiction to the God of the Bible who will “never leave you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5). This scene may also present a hopeless and desperate parody of the crucifixion, with “God on the gallows, God subjected to human demonry, God at the mercy of evil, God embodying death and impotence rather than life and death, God whose ‘real presence’ is such that soup transubstantiated into corpses” (Brown 56). By asking where God is and also praying to this absent God to not betray his father, Wiesel contradicts the moral order that had been accepted prior to the Holocaust while also insisting upon its assertion upon this new world of amoral atrocities. This calls for realignment in his relationship with God “in light of the devastating new evidence about the nature of the God he formerly worshipped and the universe created by that God in which there are burning pits of infants…the newly revealed God of silence” (34).
To further the picture of the death of God, Wiesel describes the Nazi selection process, which all prisoners in the death camps underwent at least once. Stripped naked to expose every inch of their wretched, emaciated, and malnourished bodies, men and women alike were quickly herded before SS doctors, who made a list of colorless, lackluster, useless individuals that would later be taken to the gas chambers prior to cremation (71). Wiesel paints a heinous picture of God when, after describing the selection process, he states, “This must be how one stands for the Last Judgment” (Ibid). Although he acknowledges the miraculous manner in which his father twice escaped selection by proving himself useful, Wiesel still indicts a God who could allow innocent people to be entitled to life or death on the basis of their utility (76). According to Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “If God were ultimately responsible for the horrors of the death camps, it seems impossible to reconcile such mass murder with the traditional concept of God’s nature. Surely if God is all-good, he would have wished to rescue innocent Jewish victims from the hands of the Nazis; if he is omnipotent, He would have the power to do so” (25). Arguably, there is evil in the world only because God allowed human beings to have free will. Logically, therefore, He should be able to fabricate a world that contains both freedom of choice and absence of suffering, being an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good God (Cohn-Sherbok 65). Although the events of the Holocaust seem to suggest that God does not fit into the aforementioned categories, Michael R. Steele quotes Wiesel as saying that, “man is not created in order to suffer. If this were so, then God could not be holy. God does not want man to suffer; man suffers against God. [Jews] believe that suffering is not the answer; suffering is only the question” (146). Wiesel struggles to come to terms with the existence of both God, like the one whom he studied in his youth, and Auschwitz, as one seems to negate the possibility for the other, leaving for the human faith and intellect a harrowing struggle with which to grapple (Brown 54). Ultimately, there seems to be a power struggle as the Nazi regime challenges the omnipotence of God, and Wiesel desires to believe in the holiness of God in the face of such evil.
As the celebrations and ceremonies of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, (in which Wiesel refused to participate) began, shortly after the tragic hanging scene and just before the selection process, so commenced Elie Wiesel’s indictment of God. “I was the accuser, God the accused,” he desolately writes.
My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in the world without God, without man…I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger (68).
Brown justifies this indictment of God, stating that in quarreling with God, Wiesel pays Him the “supreme compliment” by acknowledging that He is worthy of anger rather than insouciance (148). Eliezer Berkovits extends Wiesel’s accusations, proclaiming them to be proof of his faith, as “faith, because it is trust in God, demands justice of God. It cannot countenance that God be involved in injustice and cruelty. And yet, for faith God is involved in everything under the sun. What faith is searching for is, if not understanding fully, at least to gain a hint of the nature of God’s involvement” (68). Additionally, if God’s trials of His people are seen as a declaration of His love for them, then their indictment of Him might also serve to express their love for Him, not as an arrogant child, but as one disappointed in the morality of their parent and desirous of an explanation (van Inwagen 126).
Thirdly, Wiesel questions the silence, and therefore seeming absence of God, in the face of the Holocaust. On almost every page of Night, God’s silence is visible. In every unanswered prayer and every apparently ignored complaint against Him, God responds with silence. Finally, Wiesel admits that, “I no longer accepted God’s silence” (69). In the face of the evil he experienced, it is a wonder that, rather than simply rejecting God’s silence, he did not reject God Himself altogether. God’s silence suggests “the collapse of language” in the face of such evil (Greenberg 4-5). When Wiesel and others try to speak about the brutality of the Holocaust, “part of what we hear is the silence—the silence of God in Auschwitz, the silence of the world as it turned deaf ears on atrocity, the silence of the victims as they recognized their awful fate. But the silence does not issue from a void; it surges around the words that conceal it. One hears it because the sounds of language: if we did not speak about the Holocaust, we would not be able to hear its silences” (Greenberg 39). In other words, in studying the silence of God in the Holocaust, one learns much about who God is and how He manifests Himself to His people. A difficult struggle for reason, “God’s presence is most strongly felt through His absence” (57). His silence often is equated with absence, causing great agony for believers who wonder why God is not answering their prayers, their cries for help.
In some ways, Wiesel may be compared with Job of the Bible who endured suffering as a trial of His faith in God. The primary difference between Job and Wiesel, however, is that Job receives an answer of sorts while Wiesel only receives silence. He prays “for God and against God, as well as to Him, wrestling with His silence—a continuing source of anguish” (Greenberg 47). According to Thomas A. Indinopulos, “the sufferer raises his eyes toward Heaven, where God always sits in silence. What [Wiesel] perceive[s] in the pain and humiliation that human beings endure on earth is not the non-existence of God, but the ineffectiveness of divine will…What [he] dramatize[s]…is not the death of God, but the death of God’s creation” (52). Although he receives silence, Wiesel cannot accept the conclusion that there are no supernatural deities, and so he “instead maintains that God exists, and his protest is in essence a longing for the God of the Bible” (Cohn-Sherbok 102)
In conclusion, in Night, Wiesel arraigns God on charges of unfaithfulness, injustice, and silence in response to the evil of the Nazi regime. However, although he indicts God in the face of atrocious evil, he still concludes that there is a God and that He is worthy of worship. Wiesel seems to acknowledge the inherent problem of the fallen human race, and acknowledges that part of separation from God is “being the playthings of chance. It means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly, and it means something worse than that: it means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly for no reason at all” (van Inwagen 72). Although such an occurrence decries God’s omnipotence, perhaps He could not precipitate greater good without permitting the evil seen in the Holocaust (62). Perhaps the allure for the extermination of evil pales in comparison to whatever basis God may have for sanctioning the existence of evil in the world (60-61). Although Wiesel may desire a theodicy, or an explanation for men of God’s ways, part of the answer is the unknown. God’s ways cannot be understood by the finite human intellect, which is so limited in not only its scope of knowledge but in its perspective of the world. Wiesel, and other readers and writers of Holocaust literature, must be content to simply accept the acts of God on a faith-basis, without knowing what purpose evil may serve or how it can support the goodness of God.
Works Cited
Berkovits, Eliezer. Faith after the Holocaust. New York: Ktav House, INC, 1973. Print.
The Bible. New International Version ed. Grand Rapids. BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 100 versions and 50 languages. Nick Hengeveld, 1993. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Brown, Robert M. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983. Print.
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Holocaust Theology. London: Lamp, 1989. Print.
Ininopulos, Thomas A. "The Mystery of Suffering in the Art of Dostoevsky, Camus, Wiesel, and Grunewald." Journal of American Academy of Religtion 43.1 (1975): 51-61. JStor. Web. 30 Oct. 2009.
Rosenfeld, Alvin, and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. London: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.
Steele, Michael R. Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature. London: Greenwood, 1995. Print.
Van Inwagen, Peter. Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Company, 2004. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print.
Doubt
In today’s Christian culture, doubt is often repressed because it is considered to be denying your faith rather than working it out for a better understanding of Christian beliefs. In their writings, Elie Wiesel, Thomas Hardy, and Dorothy Sayers, address this issue of doubt; but perhaps Alfred Lord Tennyson best sums up the proper view of doubt with his words, “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds” (340).
In Elie Wiesel’s book “Night,” he relays how doubting led to his loss of faith in God. Yet, inexplicably, he holds a subconscious belief in God, as he later prays “a prayer to the God in Whom [he] no longer believed” (91). Wiesel also describes the loss of faith on the part of a couple of rabbis when their doubts finally overwhelm them. One man, Akiba Drumer, shown throughout the first part of the book to be one of the more faithful Jews, finally has “no more strength, no more faith” and is lost to the Nazi selection process (76). Wiesel speculates that “if only he could have kept his faith in God, if he could have considered this suffering a divine test” he would not have died. By losing his faith “he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death” (77). Ironically, Wiesel speaks about his own loss of faith, yet he never dies, causing one to wonder at his words about Drumer. Perhaps Wiesel’s doubts kept his faith alive while Drumer’s ardent grasp on a doubt-free faith in God ultimately caused his downfall when he realized he could no longer believe without exploring the why questions about God. An unnamed rabbi also lost his faith around the same time as Drumer. “He recited entire pages from the Talmud,” Wiesel records, “arguing with himself, asking and answering endless questions” (76). Sadly, one day, he gave up that faith as he told Wiesel “It’s over. God is no longer with us…Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways…I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes to see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?” (76-77). As he recited Scriptures, daily forcing himself to believe without question in the God of his ancestors, the poor rabbi finally reached the point in which he no longer had the capacity to believe, doubting too late to work through his faith by questioning it thoroughly. Unwittingly, Wiesel presents doubt as a key to survival in a world of evil and suffering. Furthermore, he proposes an idea that faith can become dormant only to later be revived. When his mind could no longer fathom the works of God, he quit trying to understand His ways, instead allowing his faith to reach a comatose state of denial until he could properly reach conclusion about the works of God in the lives of men.
Next, Hardy presents doubt through several of his characters in “Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Angel Clare, while still believing that one should live out the principles of Christianity, struggles with its doctrines, doubting many of the integral building blocks of his parents’ and brother’s faith. Unfortunately, in his case, reason undermines faith, portraying doubt in a negative light. In Clare’s day, unbelief had fast become socially acceptable among Christians, causing him to continue in his doubt rather than resolving his questions and moving into a deeper faith in God. On the other hand, Alec D’Urbervilles’ questioning led to his conversion to faith in God (301-309). Undoubtedly Tess doubted God, especially when the dashing son of a minister, Angel Clare, forsook her shortly after their marriage when he discovered that she had been raped in former years. Eventually, her doubts lead her to such a loss of faith that she returns to her former abuser Alec D’Urbervilles and later becomes so desperate that she takes his life so that she can escape him.
Dorothy Sayers, in her work “The Mind of the Maker,” addresses the need of nominal Christians to think through their beliefs. Although many feel a need to try to resolve seeming biblical “contradictions,” there is a clear difference between knowing God and exhausting all knowledge of God. Likewise, doubting can lead “man [to make] God in his own image” instead of acknowledging that he is made in His image. She uses the example that just as one cannot correlate a dog’s nature or behavior to that of a human, one cannot compare God’s actions to those of human beings on the same basis that the two are completely separate and utterly different entities. Sayers, in her writings, presents the idea that doctrine led to faith while doubt may improperly lead to unequal and inappropriate comparisons of the morality and actions of God to that of human beings.
Tennyson, on the other hand, depicts doubt as a healthy and necessary aspect of faith. In the prologue of “In Memoriam”, he portrays knowledge and faith as inseparable, introducing the concept of doubt as a means of obtaining knowledge by working out faith (285). Tennyson’s work follows the form of a typical elegy, causing doubt and inquisition to be an acceptable form of dealing with grief. He seems to juxtapose doubt and unbelief, defining the former as questioning while the latter as outright rejection of beliefs. In section XCVI of “In Memoriam” he characterizes “honest doubt” as an attempt to understand or work out faith through questioning rather than just solely for the sake of sowing seeds of unbelief (341). By doubting and wrestling with one’s beliefs, one begins to internalize the values of the creeds. Although Tennyson seems to suggest that doubt is essential to faith, he does not deny the importance of creeds. Tennyson, rather, considers questioning necessary in order for believers to thoroughly understand the reasons behind these foundational values. Wisely, Tennyson concludes that at some point doubt can lead to unanswerable questions, in which case, faith must overarch these questions rather than letting unbelief encroach, as he penned the words, “I cannot understand: I love” (341). Eventually, a decision to simply accept God must occur or else unbelief will ensue.
In conclusion, when honestly pursue, doubt can be an important aspect of the Christian faith. However, care must be taken not to doubt merely for the sake of doubting, nor to let unbelief infiltrate doubt to the point of loss of faith. Likewise, the importance of Christian doctrine and creeds should not be dismissed, but rather, sincere questioning should lead to confirm their answers.
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard Reader, An. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. 279-414. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Bantam Classic ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Print.
Sayers, Dorothy L. "Dorothy L. Sayers:The Mind of the Maker." World Invisible, The Real Invisible World behind the material world. Web. 25 Oct. 2009..
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Poetical Works Tennyson (Wordsworth Poetry Library). Boston: NTC/Contemporary Company, 1998. 285-365. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.
In Elie Wiesel’s book “Night,” he relays how doubting led to his loss of faith in God. Yet, inexplicably, he holds a subconscious belief in God, as he later prays “a prayer to the God in Whom [he] no longer believed” (91). Wiesel also describes the loss of faith on the part of a couple of rabbis when their doubts finally overwhelm them. One man, Akiba Drumer, shown throughout the first part of the book to be one of the more faithful Jews, finally has “no more strength, no more faith” and is lost to the Nazi selection process (76). Wiesel speculates that “if only he could have kept his faith in God, if he could have considered this suffering a divine test” he would not have died. By losing his faith “he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death” (77). Ironically, Wiesel speaks about his own loss of faith, yet he never dies, causing one to wonder at his words about Drumer. Perhaps Wiesel’s doubts kept his faith alive while Drumer’s ardent grasp on a doubt-free faith in God ultimately caused his downfall when he realized he could no longer believe without exploring the why questions about God. An unnamed rabbi also lost his faith around the same time as Drumer. “He recited entire pages from the Talmud,” Wiesel records, “arguing with himself, asking and answering endless questions” (76). Sadly, one day, he gave up that faith as he told Wiesel “It’s over. God is no longer with us…Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways…I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes to see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?” (76-77). As he recited Scriptures, daily forcing himself to believe without question in the God of his ancestors, the poor rabbi finally reached the point in which he no longer had the capacity to believe, doubting too late to work through his faith by questioning it thoroughly. Unwittingly, Wiesel presents doubt as a key to survival in a world of evil and suffering. Furthermore, he proposes an idea that faith can become dormant only to later be revived. When his mind could no longer fathom the works of God, he quit trying to understand His ways, instead allowing his faith to reach a comatose state of denial until he could properly reach conclusion about the works of God in the lives of men.
Next, Hardy presents doubt through several of his characters in “Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Angel Clare, while still believing that one should live out the principles of Christianity, struggles with its doctrines, doubting many of the integral building blocks of his parents’ and brother’s faith. Unfortunately, in his case, reason undermines faith, portraying doubt in a negative light. In Clare’s day, unbelief had fast become socially acceptable among Christians, causing him to continue in his doubt rather than resolving his questions and moving into a deeper faith in God. On the other hand, Alec D’Urbervilles’ questioning led to his conversion to faith in God (301-309). Undoubtedly Tess doubted God, especially when the dashing son of a minister, Angel Clare, forsook her shortly after their marriage when he discovered that she had been raped in former years. Eventually, her doubts lead her to such a loss of faith that she returns to her former abuser Alec D’Urbervilles and later becomes so desperate that she takes his life so that she can escape him.
Dorothy Sayers, in her work “The Mind of the Maker,” addresses the need of nominal Christians to think through their beliefs. Although many feel a need to try to resolve seeming biblical “contradictions,” there is a clear difference between knowing God and exhausting all knowledge of God. Likewise, doubting can lead “man [to make] God in his own image” instead of acknowledging that he is made in His image. She uses the example that just as one cannot correlate a dog’s nature or behavior to that of a human, one cannot compare God’s actions to those of human beings on the same basis that the two are completely separate and utterly different entities. Sayers, in her writings, presents the idea that doctrine led to faith while doubt may improperly lead to unequal and inappropriate comparisons of the morality and actions of God to that of human beings.
Tennyson, on the other hand, depicts doubt as a healthy and necessary aspect of faith. In the prologue of “In Memoriam”, he portrays knowledge and faith as inseparable, introducing the concept of doubt as a means of obtaining knowledge by working out faith (285). Tennyson’s work follows the form of a typical elegy, causing doubt and inquisition to be an acceptable form of dealing with grief. He seems to juxtapose doubt and unbelief, defining the former as questioning while the latter as outright rejection of beliefs. In section XCVI of “In Memoriam” he characterizes “honest doubt” as an attempt to understand or work out faith through questioning rather than just solely for the sake of sowing seeds of unbelief (341). By doubting and wrestling with one’s beliefs, one begins to internalize the values of the creeds. Although Tennyson seems to suggest that doubt is essential to faith, he does not deny the importance of creeds. Tennyson, rather, considers questioning necessary in order for believers to thoroughly understand the reasons behind these foundational values. Wisely, Tennyson concludes that at some point doubt can lead to unanswerable questions, in which case, faith must overarch these questions rather than letting unbelief encroach, as he penned the words, “I cannot understand: I love” (341). Eventually, a decision to simply accept God must occur or else unbelief will ensue.
In conclusion, when honestly pursue, doubt can be an important aspect of the Christian faith. However, care must be taken not to doubt merely for the sake of doubting, nor to let unbelief infiltrate doubt to the point of loss of faith. Likewise, the importance of Christian doctrine and creeds should not be dismissed, but rather, sincere questioning should lead to confirm their answers.
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard Reader, An. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. 279-414. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Bantam Classic ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Print.
Sayers, Dorothy L. "Dorothy L. Sayers:The Mind of the Maker." World Invisible, The Real Invisible World behind the material world. Web. 25 Oct. 2009.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Poetical Works Tennyson (Wordsworth Poetry Library). Boston: NTC/Contemporary Company, 1998. 285-365. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.
The Problem of Evil
Throughout the history of mankind, the problem of evil is a universal theme expressed in ethical, moral, and social problems, creating personal and corporate suffering. Under this expansive theme, Annie Dillard, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Elie Wiesel address different instances and forms of evil based on unique experiences in their own lives or imaginations.
Annie Dillard, in her work “The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” approaches the problem of evil in terms of the natural world. Despite its apparent beauty, the natural world is harsh and full of violence. Dillard begins by imparting a story about an old tomcat that she used to have at the creek that would come in and out of her window as he pleased. At times, in the middle of the night, he would come with blood-covered paws to awaken her with his purring caresses so that she “looked as though [she]’d been painted with roses” (281). As she cleaned the stains in the morning, she would wonder, “What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth” (Ibid). Although the cat seemed so friendly and gentle toward her, in the night he prowled as a murderer. As another example, Dillard relates an anecdote of her life as a young school girl, when she discovered that, if left together unreleased after hatching, young preying mantises will devour one another until only the strongest is left. “They ate each other until only two were left,” she records. “Tiny legs were still kicking from the mouths of both. The two survivors grappled and sawed in the Mason jar; both died of injuries” (310). Regardless of their incredible complexity, these creatures are quite amoral.
Based on these and other encounters with the vicious essence of nature, Dillard raises several thought-provoking questions as she investigates the cause or reason for this evil and suffering in the world. She conjectures as to where humans fit in the universe, wondering why “we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world” (382). “We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet”, she states, questioning where human beings have obtained their sense of morality if not from a deity (Ibid). Animals have no emotions, for “What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care” (Ibid)? Debating whether humans are the freaks of nature, she points out that humans have emotions that set them apart from the rest of the natural world. “It is our emotions that are amiss,” she writes. “We are the freaks, the world is fine” (383). The problem of evil for Dillard essentially encompasses the question of why God allows humans to have awareness and to care while the rest of the world submits to violence as part of nature without cognizance or emotional pain.
Hardy’s exploration of the problem of evil is much more on a sociological level, raising many societal issues related to evil and suffering. While Dillard feeds off of a basic assumption that there is a God, in Hardy’s novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, if there is a God, He is absent or at least uncaring and interested in the fate that befalls the characters. Near the beginning of the story, Tess and her younger brother Abraham talk about the world as a star while they travel to the market. Perhaps unwittingly, and before anything terrible befalls her, Tess already realizes the evil nature of the fallen world in which she lives, as she responds to his question “Which one do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?” by saying, “A blighted one” (25-26). Not long thereafter, Alec D’Urberville rapes Tess, raising many questions about how such bad things can happen to good, innocent people and go unpunished, as Alec escapes chastisement for his felonious deed while Tess receives harsh censure from all sides. The culture and society that surround her create a double standard, even disallowing her to baptize her infant daughter in the church. The child later dies, and the church minister tells her that, without proper baptism, the innocent child will spend eternity in hell (94-96). Again, questions arise about the evil done to innocents, in this case the undue damnation of infants. Unfortunately, in the world, Tess repeatedly encounters evil that encroaches upon her despite her innocence, without relenting, in keeping with Hardy’s anti-providential theme that events happen, not because of a benevolent order or design, but rather due to something more deterministic. Fundamentally, Hardy raises an ethical question about the problem of evil, wondering how a loving and just God can allow such misfortunes to befall innocent people.
Tennyson deals with the problem of evil on a personal level as he grieves the loss of his best friend Hallam, who died at an early age while traveling abroad. Tennyson questions why good, intelligent people die without cause, and why those left behind must so suffer because of their loss. For Tennyson, grief, encompassing also the act of doubting, is a means of working out ones faith in the face of hard times. In addition to expressing his bitterness toward nature directly, he also indirectly expresses it toward God for prematurely taking Hallam. “Man thinks he was not made to die”(285). He has “The wish, that- of the living whole/No life may fail beyond the grave,/derives it not from what we have/The likest God within the soul?” (314). Despite the inevitability of death, all men long for immortality, evidencing that they are made in the very image and likeness of God; yet, Tennyson wonders why all men must have such desire, as they cause such deep grief and anguish over loss. In contradiction to Hardy’s deterministic view of life, Tennyson trusts that nothing will happen without a purpose, saying, “We trust that somehow good/Will be the final goal of ill…That not one life shall be destroy’d,/Or cast as rubbish to the void,/When God hath made the pile complete” (313). Tennyson concludes that “no man understands” the evil in the world, but must trust Divine Providence regardless, working out ones faith through doubt and suffering.
In his autobiography “Night”, Wiesel portrays a silent God who has absented Himself from the suffering of His people. The questions he raises are more accusatory of God than an attempt to work out his faith through doubt. Witnessing and experiencing the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, Wiesel wonders how a just, merciful and loving God, such as the One in the history of the Jews, could allow such evil and inhumanity to occur to relatively innocent, good people. In a moving scene in which an innocent child is brutally hanged, a man sums up one of Wiesel’s essential questions when he asks, “Where is merciful God, where is He? For God’s sake, where is God?” (64-65). Wiesel relates his view of God based on his loss of innocence and his sufferings in the Nazi concentration camps when he replies, “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…” (65). Despite his apparent loss of faith, later, “a prayer formed inside [him], a prayer to this God in whom [he] no longer believed”, projecting a question about the nature of faith: can it go into a comatose state and them be later revived? (91). Although Wiesel later renews his faith in God, he voices very troubling questions about the silence and absence of God in the face of untold evil in the world, conjecturing about what he views as the death of God.
Although each version of the problem of evil is singularly difficult to come to terms with in individual lives and circumstances, universally, the type as discussed by Wiesel is the most difficult challenge to faith and practice, as it questions the very omnipotence of God. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could become so godless, cruel, and immoral that they would stoop to commit such horrible, dehumanizing acts towards other people as the Nazis did to the Jews. Although God allowed bad things to happen to His chosen people in the past, such as the Babylonian exile, it is hard to understand how a God, Who continually claims to be merciful, loving and just, could choose to stand silently by while such atrocious deeds were performed. Since He chose to forsake His chosen people during the Holocaust, Christians must conjecture whether their God, Who has claimed to be faithful throughout the ages, is a liar. They must ask whether He cares what happens in the lives of His creation or if, in fact, He “has the same affectionate disregard for us as we have for barnacles” (Dillard 373). As he contemplates how he will spend Yom Kippur in the concentration camp, Wiesel accuses God of allowing such evil to happen. One must wonder how God can be considered the just and righteous judge when it seems that He, Himself, is in need of a trial. Wiesel shares his frustrations with God when His people gather to praise Him in the midst of their sufferings, yet God still remains utterly silent. A difficult question arises as to whether or not this God that believers serve is worthy of praise, love or trust at all. God’s silence in the events of the Holocaust arguably undermines His omnipotence and, until one resolves the problem in one’s mind, places in question the entire foundation of Christianity.
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard Reader, An. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. 279-414. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Bantam Classic ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Print.
Sayers, Dorothy L. "Dorothy L. Sayers:The Mind of the Maker." World Invisible, The Real Invisible World behind the material world. Web. 25 Oct. 2009..
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Poetical Works Tennyson (Wordsworth Poetry Library). Boston: NTC/Contemporary Company, 1998. 285-365. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.
Annie Dillard, in her work “The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” approaches the problem of evil in terms of the natural world. Despite its apparent beauty, the natural world is harsh and full of violence. Dillard begins by imparting a story about an old tomcat that she used to have at the creek that would come in and out of her window as he pleased. At times, in the middle of the night, he would come with blood-covered paws to awaken her with his purring caresses so that she “looked as though [she]’d been painted with roses” (281). As she cleaned the stains in the morning, she would wonder, “What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth” (Ibid). Although the cat seemed so friendly and gentle toward her, in the night he prowled as a murderer. As another example, Dillard relates an anecdote of her life as a young school girl, when she discovered that, if left together unreleased after hatching, young preying mantises will devour one another until only the strongest is left. “They ate each other until only two were left,” she records. “Tiny legs were still kicking from the mouths of both. The two survivors grappled and sawed in the Mason jar; both died of injuries” (310). Regardless of their incredible complexity, these creatures are quite amoral.
Based on these and other encounters with the vicious essence of nature, Dillard raises several thought-provoking questions as she investigates the cause or reason for this evil and suffering in the world. She conjectures as to where humans fit in the universe, wondering why “we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world” (382). “We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet”, she states, questioning where human beings have obtained their sense of morality if not from a deity (Ibid). Animals have no emotions, for “What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care” (Ibid)? Debating whether humans are the freaks of nature, she points out that humans have emotions that set them apart from the rest of the natural world. “It is our emotions that are amiss,” she writes. “We are the freaks, the world is fine” (383). The problem of evil for Dillard essentially encompasses the question of why God allows humans to have awareness and to care while the rest of the world submits to violence as part of nature without cognizance or emotional pain.
Hardy’s exploration of the problem of evil is much more on a sociological level, raising many societal issues related to evil and suffering. While Dillard feeds off of a basic assumption that there is a God, in Hardy’s novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, if there is a God, He is absent or at least uncaring and interested in the fate that befalls the characters. Near the beginning of the story, Tess and her younger brother Abraham talk about the world as a star while they travel to the market. Perhaps unwittingly, and before anything terrible befalls her, Tess already realizes the evil nature of the fallen world in which she lives, as she responds to his question “Which one do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?” by saying, “A blighted one” (25-26). Not long thereafter, Alec D’Urberville rapes Tess, raising many questions about how such bad things can happen to good, innocent people and go unpunished, as Alec escapes chastisement for his felonious deed while Tess receives harsh censure from all sides. The culture and society that surround her create a double standard, even disallowing her to baptize her infant daughter in the church. The child later dies, and the church minister tells her that, without proper baptism, the innocent child will spend eternity in hell (94-96). Again, questions arise about the evil done to innocents, in this case the undue damnation of infants. Unfortunately, in the world, Tess repeatedly encounters evil that encroaches upon her despite her innocence, without relenting, in keeping with Hardy’s anti-providential theme that events happen, not because of a benevolent order or design, but rather due to something more deterministic. Fundamentally, Hardy raises an ethical question about the problem of evil, wondering how a loving and just God can allow such misfortunes to befall innocent people.
Tennyson deals with the problem of evil on a personal level as he grieves the loss of his best friend Hallam, who died at an early age while traveling abroad. Tennyson questions why good, intelligent people die without cause, and why those left behind must so suffer because of their loss. For Tennyson, grief, encompassing also the act of doubting, is a means of working out ones faith in the face of hard times. In addition to expressing his bitterness toward nature directly, he also indirectly expresses it toward God for prematurely taking Hallam. “Man thinks he was not made to die”(285). He has “The wish, that- of the living whole/No life may fail beyond the grave,/derives it not from what we have/The likest God within the soul?” (314). Despite the inevitability of death, all men long for immortality, evidencing that they are made in the very image and likeness of God; yet, Tennyson wonders why all men must have such desire, as they cause such deep grief and anguish over loss. In contradiction to Hardy’s deterministic view of life, Tennyson trusts that nothing will happen without a purpose, saying, “We trust that somehow good/Will be the final goal of ill…That not one life shall be destroy’d,/Or cast as rubbish to the void,/When God hath made the pile complete” (313). Tennyson concludes that “no man understands” the evil in the world, but must trust Divine Providence regardless, working out ones faith through doubt and suffering.
In his autobiography “Night”, Wiesel portrays a silent God who has absented Himself from the suffering of His people. The questions he raises are more accusatory of God than an attempt to work out his faith through doubt. Witnessing and experiencing the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, Wiesel wonders how a just, merciful and loving God, such as the One in the history of the Jews, could allow such evil and inhumanity to occur to relatively innocent, good people. In a moving scene in which an innocent child is brutally hanged, a man sums up one of Wiesel’s essential questions when he asks, “Where is merciful God, where is He? For God’s sake, where is God?” (64-65). Wiesel relates his view of God based on his loss of innocence and his sufferings in the Nazi concentration camps when he replies, “Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…” (65). Despite his apparent loss of faith, later, “a prayer formed inside [him], a prayer to this God in whom [he] no longer believed”, projecting a question about the nature of faith: can it go into a comatose state and them be later revived? (91). Although Wiesel later renews his faith in God, he voices very troubling questions about the silence and absence of God in the face of untold evil in the world, conjecturing about what he views as the death of God.
Although each version of the problem of evil is singularly difficult to come to terms with in individual lives and circumstances, universally, the type as discussed by Wiesel is the most difficult challenge to faith and practice, as it questions the very omnipotence of God. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could become so godless, cruel, and immoral that they would stoop to commit such horrible, dehumanizing acts towards other people as the Nazis did to the Jews. Although God allowed bad things to happen to His chosen people in the past, such as the Babylonian exile, it is hard to understand how a God, Who continually claims to be merciful, loving and just, could choose to stand silently by while such atrocious deeds were performed. Since He chose to forsake His chosen people during the Holocaust, Christians must conjecture whether their God, Who has claimed to be faithful throughout the ages, is a liar. They must ask whether He cares what happens in the lives of His creation or if, in fact, He “has the same affectionate disregard for us as we have for barnacles” (Dillard 373). As he contemplates how he will spend Yom Kippur in the concentration camp, Wiesel accuses God of allowing such evil to happen. One must wonder how God can be considered the just and righteous judge when it seems that He, Himself, is in need of a trial. Wiesel shares his frustrations with God when His people gather to praise Him in the midst of their sufferings, yet God still remains utterly silent. A difficult question arises as to whether or not this God that believers serve is worthy of praise, love or trust at all. God’s silence in the events of the Holocaust arguably undermines His omnipotence and, until one resolves the problem in one’s mind, places in question the entire foundation of Christianity.
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard Reader, An. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. 279-414. Print.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Bantam Classic ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Print.
Sayers, Dorothy L. "Dorothy L. Sayers:The Mind of the Maker." World Invisible, The Real Invisible World behind the material world. Web. 25 Oct. 2009.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Poetical Works Tennyson (Wordsworth Poetry Library). Boston: NTC/Contemporary Company, 1998. 285-365. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.
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