many apologies, and these were part of the “circular dance.” They didn’t
serve a constructive function. If forgiveness means just not wallowing in
anger, they do extricate themselves from that swamp— but not by any-
thing that seems to be sensibly called “forgiving,” since forgiving looks
backward and not forward. Is going to a yoga class forgiving? Is forgiv-
ing having a calm discussion of how they will handle the in- laws’ next
visit? It seems not, unless one is determined to call everything good by
that name.
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We often hear that women, in particular, need to connect with their
anger. Hieronymi urges us all to be “uncompromising,” meaning that
we should continue to maintain three things: that the wrongful act was
wrong, that the wrongdoer is a member of the moral community, and
that one is oneself a person who ought not to be wronged.38 She seems
to think that these three propositions entail anger. But who is more self-
respecting? The Sandra who keeps dredging up every wrong, trying to
pin blame on Larry (however justifiably, in a way), or the Sandra who
simply gets on with her life and invites him calmly to go along? Anger
looks like a childish and weak response, not an expression of self- respect.
We may preserve Hieronymi’s three claims, minus anger’s payback wish.
But we need to add to them a focus on constructing the future, rather
than continuing to wallow in the wrongfulness of the past.
Larry and Sandra were guilty of no major wrongs, and that is one rea-
son why their relationship, deeply unhappy at the start, was reparable.
Sometimes, however, although the relationship continues, a terrible dis-
covery comes to light that undermines the edifice of trust on which the
relationship is built. We’ll talk about erotic betrayals and breakup in the
next section: but not all betrayals of trust are of this sort. When people
marry, they trust one another not only to stick to the sexual terms they
have agreed on, but also to be decent honest people playing a certain sort
of role in the community. In the nineteenth century, a woman in particu-
lar, entrusting her entire livelihood and status to her husband, trusted
him to be the person she believes him to be, and not a criminal. When a
sordid past comes to light, betrayal and pain are the inevitable result— as
in George Eliot’s account of the marriage of the Bulstrodes in Middlemarch.
This case will show us a lot about forgiveness by understanding what is
achieved by its absence.39
Harriet Vincy has married the wealthy banker Nicholas Bulstrode,
thinking him to be what he appears to be, a pious and honorable man.
Bulstrode, however, built his fortune on shady financial dealings; when
Raffles threatens to expose him, Bulstrode connives in Raffles’s death.
All of this is finally revealed to Harriet, and it becomes clear to her that
Bulstrode will lose all his fortune and position. What we might expect
from her is terrible and fully well- grounded anger, followed either by for-
giveness or not. Retribution, indeed, is what Bulstrode himself expects—
both from his wife and from God. What he actually finds is very different:
It was eight o’clock in the evening before the door opened and
his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his
eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he
looked smaller— he seemed so withered and shrunken. A move-
ment of new compassion and old tenderness went through her
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like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested
on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said,
solemnly but kindly—
“Look up, Nicholas.”
He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half
amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning
dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said: “I know,” and
her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying
and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not
yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with
him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His con-
fession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.
(ch. 74)
Like the father of the prodigal son, Harriet does not appear to feel anger
at all. Instead, she sees her husband’s enormous vulnerability, and she
feels a compassion that is related to the tenderness she has felt for him
all along. (Perhaps tenderness has blossomed into compassion precisely
because of his new vulnerability. The earlier Bulstrode didn’t give her
much room to care for him.) When he looks up, he does not see the puni-
tive angry face he has expected. Nor, indeed, does he see the face of
someone who assumes moral superiority in order to forgive. Instead, he
sees that she has put on a garment indicative of mourning: she regards
this as a great, and shared, sorrow, not as occasion for blame. Her dress
announces that she is with him in sorrow, and that sorrow and shame
are fully shared. She even sees shame as having been brought down “on
them.” Bulstrode does “confess,” but Harriet, instead of forgiving, sim-
ply promises “faithfulness.” She doesn’t even want to hear him say what
he has done.
Is there forgiveness in this scene? I can’t find it. We are given no idea
what Harriet’s view of his crime is, except that she is prepared to con-
tinue loving him and to share his lot. It is like the story of the Prodigal
Son: love and generosity get ahead of the angry response, and thus there
is no struggle with angry emotion. It seems that it is only by a strained
extension that one would call this “forgiveness,” perhaps in the grip
of the idea that any gentle and non- resentful response to a loved one’s
wrongful act deserves that name. But really, it is just unconditional love.
VIII. Lovers and Spouses: Betrayal, Breakup
A large share of the popular literature on forgiveness focuses on marital
breakup, and, in particular, breakup occasioned by erotic betrayal. Not all
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betrayals lead to breakup; we are greeted every day, it seems, by erring
politicians whose partners announce that they have forgiven and who
then stand loyally and/ or stupidly by their mate. But often breakup is the
consequence. Whether or not the relationship ends, these violations of
trust go deep and create great pain. Anger is often well- grounded— and
yet it also damages all parties (the angry person, the target, and children
or others who absorb collateral damage). Anger is such a large and cor-
rosive problem that much of the literature focuses on how to manage
it so that it does not destroy one’s entire life. And it is especially here
that there’s a widespread feeling that, bad though anger is, people (and
women especially) owe it to their self- respect to own, nourish, and pub-
licly proclaim their anger. If a particular woman doesn’t, she is accused
of
being weak, or lacking self- respect. Generosity and acceptance are
regarded as major failings. The erring partner, meanwhile, has to estab-
lish standing in the community by proclaiming that he is seeking forgive-
ness, has confessed and expressed contrition, etc. The betrayed spouse is
expected to demand no less.
Once again, anger at marital betrayal has a bad cultural history,
which punishes the straying person excessively, particularly if female.
The Scarlet Letter shows us society’s anger bearing down upon Hester
from all sides— and there seems to be nothing to mitigate its assault.
Theodor Fontane’s heroine Effi Briest, like Hester, is excluded from soci-
ety for a marital lapse (at age sixteen!) that would be venial in a male, and is not even received with love by her own parents. If this is anger without
forgiveness, we certainly feel that anger with forgiveness would be a lot
better. (Indeed, Effi’s husband Instetten, discovering the lapse years after
it occurred, is immediately inclined to unconditional forgiveness, before
cultural values interfere, blocking this path.)
Sometimes social punishment crashes down heavily on a person
who has only thought of doing something bad. In Anthony Trollope’s
Can You Forgive Her? , Lady Glencora is unhappily married to the rigid politician Plantagenet Palliser, who blames her for their infertility and
cannot relate well to her witty fun- loving personality. She contemplates
eloping with her earlier fiancé Burgo Fitzgerald, and goes so far as to
dance with him at a ball. This is the crime to which the forgiveness in
the title (ironically) alludes, and once again, although there is really no
wrongful act at all, the answer seems to be that if the only other option
to forgiveness is obdurate anger and social exclusion, then forgiveness is
surely a lot better than that. (However, Trollope is one step ahead of the
forgiveness game. Palliser, who, it emerges, really loves his wife and is
not as stupid as one might have supposed, does not ask Glencora for an
apology or offer her forgiveness, conditional or unconditional— both of
which she would surely have found fatally insulting. Instead, he simply
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takes her off on a continental vacation, lovingly— and because she finds
herself pregnant shortly thereafter, the marriage endures.) So: false social
values are everywhere, when we consider the errors for which spouses
are thought to require forgiveness. And let’s also note, here too, that
Plantagenet’s non- anger does not fail to take Glencora seriously. Indeed,
his love takes her far more seriously than anger would have, since the
anger he was culturally expected to feel was about hierarchy and control
of property, not about her at all.
The punitive and asymmetrical history of the marital breakup is not
our theme. But it reminds us that, as in the case of children and par-
ents, there is a deep need for status hierarchy in many if not most human
beings; given the social power to do so, they treat an intimate as an infe-
rior, a wayward child, a piece of property. Anxieties about power, status,
and helplessness are endemic to human life, and certainly to marriages
nearing dissolution. Often it is the more socially and economically pow-
erless partner, likely to be the female, whom betrayal sends into a tailspin
of grief and anger. Since such women are often at risk of losing not only
love but also money and status, a tidal wave of helplessness makes them
seize any chance to reestablish lost control. Anger and blaming look like
appealing ways of achieving that aim. And because the betrayed spouse
feels not only loss, but also humiliation, she feels a need to restore lost
status as well. Thus the road of status and the road of payback are com-
plexly intertwined and difficult to distinguish.
The story of Medea is a myth, and yet it resonates through the ages,
because of its indelible portrayal of the depredations of marital anger.
(In July 2013, a modern Hispanic retelling opened to a rave review in
Chicago, later winning a major award for “best new work.”)40 Medea’s
story has some unusual features: she is an alien in Corinth (which the
contemporary version renders using the issue of illegal immigration). She
has left behind all her family and friends. And as an alien there is nothing
she can do once Jason abandons her. Moreover, because he is marrying
a wealthy member of the ruling elite, he will acquire custody of the chil-
dren. So her helplessness is extreme. Nonetheless, the story is in a sense
a very common one, since it revolves around the fact that Medea has
lost the man she deeply loves, who has betrayed her for another woman.
And many such women have abandoned their career plans, leaving them
vulnerable in related ways.
There is no doubt that her deep grief is justified and that Medea’s
anger is well- grounded. Jason has behaved very badly, harming her
with full knowledge of what his betrayal will do to her. He has in effect
destroyed a large part of her self. Her repeated insistence that only anger
restores her full sense of being herself, of being Medea again, makes a
lot of sense— in a way. She feels the need to extrude him from her whole
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being, to create a self that does not contain him at all: hence her fantasy of restored virginity. And she goes further:
If even now in my uterus there lies concealed some safety
deposit from you, I shall examine the inside of my abdomen with
a sword and draw it out on the iron. (1012– 13)
In this fantasy of abortion, Medea expresses the thought that everything
his and him must be forced out of her body. It must be sealed against his
aggression.
Medea’s anger would not be anger, it would just be grief, if it didn’t
contain some wish for Jason to suffer. As we can see, her thoughts about
how to rid herself of him all involve violence and the infliction of pain.
Grief- fantasies are not like this. What Medea would like is to be invulner-
able (a virgin), and since he is inside of her, invulnerability for her means for him to be cut into ribbons. To be Medea herself, powerful, and for
him to be helpless. The project of murdering the children has nothing
to do with anger against the children: repeatedly she says that they are
innocent and that she loves them. She just can’t think of any other way
to make him suffer. He does not love her any longer, so what she does by
and to herself is a matter of indifference. But he loves them: they are his
“reason for living” (547); hence, as she notes, “there is a space wide open
for a wound” (550).
But the payback thought still doesn’t make sense. She can’t get back
what she really wants and has lost. All she can achieve by payback is
more pain for all. Medea’s path is extreme. Often the retributive wish
inherent in anger is more civilized, just a wish that the new relationship
will fall apart, or the new partner will come to grief in some way. All
too often, however, the children suffer, because they are indeed spaces of
vulnerab
ility in the betraying spouse’s heart. None of this does anything
at all to restore what was lost, and it usually makes life go worse for the
betrayed.
Is Medea’s problem simply that she goes too far? According to my
analysis of anger, the problem lies deeper: it is inherent in the very idea
that Jason’s suffering can ameliorate or counterbalance her pain. One
way or another, she can certainly arrange to make him suffer. But what
good, actually, does this do? It does no good if she is focused on love.
Not only does payback not give her love, it also makes her less capable of
love and less likely to find love. So, insofar as her anger is well- grounded anger, she should reject the payback wish pretty quickly as a bad way of
dealing with her predicament. At the play’s end, she gets into a chariot
drawn by scaly snakes and flies off into the sky. “This is the way I make
my escape,” she calls. But of course it is escape up into the sky only in the sense suggested by the road of status: she’s put him down (temporarily)
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and herself relatively up. It is not escape from the actual predicament of
having no spouse, no love, no conversation, no money, and no children.
So anger, while understandable and well- grounded, does no good
and may do great harm. What about forgiveness? When people are feel-
ing helpless and need to reestablish control, they can all too easily use the forgiveness idea to control the other person. It is horrible to think of the
inside of those political marriages, where the politician has to grovel to
the end of his days in order to secure a “forgiveness” that makes his con-
tinued public career possible. Sometimes transactional forgiveness does
not have that taint. But it is so difficult to know oneself in such tumul-
tuous circumstances, and it would be difficult to be sure that one was
putting the other party through a ritual of apology for loving and pure
reasons. I find myself hoping that the forgiveness stuff, in at least some
cases, is just a charade for the American public, so hooked on Christian
penance, and that something more constructive is actually happening on
the inside. Even unconditional forgiveness seems too asymmetrical and
past- focused: Mrs. Bulstrode did better with generosity.
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