helps the parent think of the child’s path productively, rather than focus-
ing on useless thoughts of payback. And the sense of humor and play
mentioned by both Aristotle and Dr. Thorne is also a great help. Relaxed
interaction with children often cuts off anger before it can fester, and
helps even the well- grounded sort of anger reach a reciprocally produc-
tive resolution.
The Transition, however, is not always easy to access, and anger
here is very human. Indeed we might be tempted to think a parent who
never got angry was weird, and not fully involved in the relationship.
When a child’s bad act is very serious, harming self or others in a way
difficult to repair, parents who deeply love the child and who feel pro-
foundly vulnerable in the light of the centrality of the child in their whole scheme of goals and plans will be strongly inclined to anger. The question
is whether this anger can ever be fully justified— including its wish for
some type of payback or suffering, however subtle.
It is difficult, but essential, to separate grief and disappointment
from anger. When one wishes a child well there are many occasions for
a sense of loss and sadness, but loss and sadness are not anger. They
lead to thoughts of helping or restoration, or, if these are not possible,
to mourning. Anger, I’ve argued, is inseparable from some retributive
wish, however refined. I’ve said that anger, like grief, is sometimes well-
grounded, but that its wish for payback makes no sense and does no
good, and a reasonable person will see this pretty quickly. But we need
to test this on a difficult case, in which an adult child’s bad acts produce
well- grounded anger in the parent, anger that might initially seem ratio-
nal and appropriate, and in which some sort of grief is surely appropri-
ate. So: The Prodigal Daughter.
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral portrays a gifted, successful, and
decent man who is hit by terrible bad luck. Seymour “Swede” Levov,
star athlete, successful businessman, married happily to a beautiful
and decent woman (a former Miss New Jersey), delights in his gifted,
albeit eccentric and emotionally complicated, daughter Merry. At first
the trouble seems nothing more than familiar adolescent rebellion,
angry protests against the Vietnam War and the system that created
it. Then one day Merry bombs the local post office, killing an innocent
bystander. After years on the run, and after killing three more people,
she is rediscovered by her father, hiding in a squalid room, living a life
of self- inflicted penance as a Jain ascetic. (As her father soon grasps, the asceticism is self- destruction rather than any positive religious commitment, since she interprets the Jain idea of ahimsa in an absurd manner, refusing to wash for fear of “harming the water,” etc. “The words sickened him, the flagrant childishness, the sentimental grandiosity of the
self- deception” [250].)
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How could anger not be well- grounded in such a case, anger of
so many kinds? The Swede is angry at her murders, angry at her self-
destruction, angry at the way she inflicted so much pain on her family,
both by her actions then and by not getting in touch with them for so
many years. And he asks himself, as he always would, this reasonable
man, “What does a reasonable man say next? … What does a reasonable,
responsible father say if he is able still to feel intact as a father?” (249).
The Swede does indeed feel anger, and he does denounce Merry, “as
angry as the angriest father ever betrayed by a daughter or son, so angry
he feared his head was about to spew out his brains just as Kennedy’s
did when he was shot” (256). He even briefly violates his own “injunction
against violence,” which he has “never before overstepped” (265)—
tearing her Jain veil from her face and commanding her to speak, and
then, when she won’t, prying her mouth open by force. It is clear that
he does in that moment want her to feel the pain that her actions have
inflicted on others. His lifelong commitment to reasonableness briefly
goes by the boards. And the reader certainly feels, initially, that his anger is appropriate.
But then, something interesting happens. Love, grief, and helpless-
ness take over from anger. First, he acknowledges that he is in fact help-
less: “You protect her and protect her— and she is unprotectable. If you
don’t protect her it’s unendurable, if you do protect her it’s unendurable.
It’s all unendurable. The awfulness of her terrible autonomy” (272). And
then, telling his brother Jerry about the meeting, he simply breaks down
in an unprecedented outpouring of grief:
And now he is crying easily, there is no line between him and
his crying, and an amazing new experience it is— he is crying
as though crying like this has been the great aim of his life,
as though all along crying like this was his most deeply held
ambition, and now he has achieved it, now that he remembers
everything he gave and everything she took, all the spontaneous
giving and taking that had filled their lives. (279)
Describing his brother to the writer Nathan Zuckerman (whose
imagination gives us most of the narrative), Jerry Levov says that the
Swede’s problem was that he did not stay angry: anger would have given
him distance and control. “ ‘If he had had half a brain, he would have
been enraged by this kid and estranged from this kid long ago. Long ago
he would have torn her out of his guts and let her go.’ ” It is Jerry’s theory that the Swede “ ‘will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn’t get it as an asset either’ ” (71– 72). Anger is a way of not being helpless,
seizing control, and in this case anger would have given him the banish-
ment of a source of unendurable pain. Without anger, he’s stuck with
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unconditional love. (He keeps visiting Merry in secret until she dies.)
And love is both helpless and intensely painful. (Jerry, by contrast, has
“a special talent for rage and another special talent for not looking back”
[72].)22 Jerry’s proposal is, in effect, that the Swede should form a payback wish that consists basically in saying “good riddance”: if you behave this
way, I’ll withdraw my support and love.
In the Swede, by contrast, the payback fantasy of anger fades rapidly
in the face of the overwhelming love and grief that assail him. It just
seems to have nothing to say to the love, makes no sense in connection
with it. Indeed. So, we have the Transition, in this case in a terribly pain-
ful form in which there is little to be done. He can only visit her and go on expressing love. There’s no apology, and there’s really no question about
forgiveness on the agenda, whether conditional or unconditional. There’s
just painful unconditional love.
The novel’s stance (or Zuckerman’s) toward the Swede is profoundly
ambivalent. His unwavering commitment to reasonableness, generosity,
and love strikes Zuckerman as both tragic and comic. These don’t do
him any good, the suggestion is; they are even ridicul
ous, since this is
not a reasonable or loving or generous universe. My own stance is not
ambivalent.23 He is a generous and admirable father, in the worst of cir-
cumstances, and his story is rather like a Greek tragedy, in which the pro-
tagonist’s virtues still “shine through,” despite the blows of fortune that
assail him. Reasonableness and generosity do not remake an intrinsically
meaningless universe, but they have their own dignity.
It seems clear in this case that the parent’s own self- respect does not
require anger. Even Jerry doesn’t say that: he just says that comfort and
sanity require anger. But our other question seems more pressing: doesn’t
the non- angry parent insult the child by refusing to take her seriously?
I think the point is mistaken, but it needs to be answered. The Swede
would surely be condescending if he treated Merry’s actions as the
actions of a baby or a person of diminished capacity. Crediting the child
with full agency is indeed necessary for respect; that, in turn, requires
acknowledging the serious wrongfulness of her acts, and this entails at
least Transition- Anger. The question is whether full- fledged anger, along
with its wish for pain, is also entailed by respect. What’s wrong with
a set of emotions whose content is “You did something very seriously
wrong; I am upset about it because I love you and want you to flourish
and do good things. I see you as someone who is capable of much better
than that act, and I hope you will put that act behind you and do better
in the future”? I think this set of emotions, which is the Swede’s (though
with little hope) surely takes the (adult) child seriously, but it isn’t suf-
ficient for garden- variety anger. If some individual child thinks that he
or she is being condescended to by being approached non- angrily in this
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spirit, that is a misunderstanding, though hardly an uncommon one, and
it must be dealt with as such. Children often think that they have estab-
lished an equal footing by making the parent (or other adult) lose control
and behave badly; but who wants, really, that type of equality?
To summarize: parental anger at adult children often goes wrong
by taking what we have called the road of status. When it does not
make that error, or some other cultural error, it more rarely falls into
the other trap, of focusing on payback, where payback would be utterly
useless and unproductive. The reason parental anger is prone to these
errors is the profound helplessness the relationship with an adult child
involves: anger is a vain attempt at seizing control.
Roth’s Swede, however, still poses unsettling questions for me. As
readers we certainly sympathize with his anger, and I would say that
we like him better because he becomes briefly angry. Had he preserved
his cool, we might have thought the less of him. Mightn’t a totally non-
angry response have been not quite fully human— as if the pose of being
a WASP, penetrating to his very core at last, had deprived him of some
part of his humanity? So is it better, given that we are all human, that
we do become briefly angry, when seriously provoked, before heading
for the Transition? The payback wish is futile and senseless, and isn’t
there something weird and not quite human about rising entirely above
it, in intimate relationships? I find this question troubling. On the whole,
I think the answer is “no.” Grief and love are enough vulnerability to
establish one’s full human credentials.
Another question left on the table concerns forgiveness. The Swede’s
case was pretty hopeless, and some unconditional attitude was his only
possibility, whether of love or unconditional forgiveness. But is trans-
actional forgiveness of an erring adult child a good thing, and, if so,
forgiveness of what sort? Certainly we do not want forgiveness of the
Murdstone variety, where angry emotions are waived after rituals of
atonement that are themselves retributive and sadistic. Unfortunately,
Murdstone forgiveness is all too common. In the best case, though, where
there is a demand for contrition in connection with a really wrongful act,
uncontaminated by status- hierarchy or undue desire for control, of what
use are the apology and the ensuing forgiveness? Certainly they are not
useful, or morally valuable, if they serve to abase or humble the adult
child before the parent’s anger. On the other hand, an apology can be
useful evidence that the adult child understands the wrongfulness of his
or her action, and asking for it can be a way of reinforcing attention to
such matters in the future. So apology can aid the Transition. The parent’s
“forgiveness” is also useful if it is a way of reestablishing trust: you dis-
appointed my expectations, but I will hope again, because I love you and
you’ve given me evidence that there is reason for hope. We’ll start afresh,
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and I won’t hold this over your head. But this is forgiveness in quotes,
because there is no reason to connect this sensible parental attitude with
the waiving of angry emotion. Indeed, such a parent might well not be
angry at all, just disappointed or sad.
Let us now return to the Swede. Was his attitude unconditional
forgiveness, or unconditional love? And what difference does this dis-
tinction make? He was briefly angry. But in unconditional forgiveness
we would have had a decision to waive angry feelings, and the attitude
would be primarily backward- looking, not necessarily accompanied by
positive love and concern going forward. Furthermore, the stance of the
forgiver, as I have argued, is often tinged with a hierarchical assumption
of moral superiority. In the Swede, instead, we see unconditional love
welling up and displacing all thought of anger; it’s the Transition, albeit
in a tragic mode. There is no decision, and no sense of superiority, so
immersed is he in the (hopeless) love that he feels.
In general, the whole ritual of apology and forgiveness is a bit grim
and labored, and very likely hierarchical, in a relationship where love
and generosity can and should dominate. If parents are forgiving all the
time, even unconditionally, it is likely that something has gone wrong,
some failure to delight in the child’s positive achievements, some reten-
tive insistence on score- keeping, and rituals of authority. When a parent
actually says the words, “I forgive you,” what is going on? It’s here that
I feel that the Bernard Williams idea of “one thought too many” is use-
ful. The words “I forgive you” seem pretty overelaborate, by contrast to
“Don’t worry about it,” or “Forget about it.” They also seem pretty self-
focused, expressing the parent’s own emotional state, rather than useful
sentiments on behalf of the child.
V. Children’s Anger at Parents
Adult children also get angry at their parents. They resent parental
authority, they feel the need to seize autonomy by emotional confron-
tation. Anger, indee
d, is woven into the relationship, because the child,
trying to be independent, naturally resents the very existence and com-
petence of the parent, and good parents are almost more intolerable than
bad parents (a point beautifully made in Roth’s novel). In adolescence
this anger is typically strategic: children do what Jerry Levov has done
all his life, they use anger as a tool to effect separation, even if they are not aware that this is what they are doing. In the case of children, this
is usually a benign strategy, and temporary. Still, its effects linger. The
power imbalance is hard to shake off, and there is anger inherent in that,
which can persist all through life. The very existence of the parent can
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seem like a wrongful act, a denial of equal status. It is never easy to relate to the parent as a whole person, rather than a total context for life and a
looming threat to autonomy.
This anger is at bottom status anger. And often it takes the zero- sum
form that Aristotle depicts: the one who feels inferior reacts to slights by
imagining a payback that makes her superior and the (formerly superior)
parent inferior. Whenever parents do something that is thoughtless, or
rude, or disrespectful, a well- grounded anger at the wrongful act tends
to get hugely inflated by this lingering status- anxiety. It is thus an occa-
sion for comedy (but also much real suffering) that parents often perceive
themselves as doing only good, while children perceive them as con-
stantly aggressing against their autonomy— and the truth is often some-
where in between. (Think of the comic mother Marie in the TV comedy
Everybody Loves Raymond— played with wonderfully egregious zest by
Doris Roberts— who simply cannot understand why her efforts to help
and advise are greeted with such hostility by her two sons and, espe-
cially, her daughter- in- law.)
What is really at stake is respect for separateness and autonomy.
This is what children imagine is being withheld, and what parents either
deliberately or unconsciously withhold— or just fail to see that they are
perceived as withholding it. Withholding it is indeed wrong, and in that
sense anger can be well- grounded. Still, anger, particularly with its likely admixture of status- anxiety, often makes things worse. What would be
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