Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (23 page)

And more explosions occur. Mme. de Tourvel, having yielded to Valmont out of passionate love, realizes with horror that she is sport for him and goes mad out of self-hatred and pain; in a scene of surreal beauty, she hallucinates Valmont’s ghostly penetration everywhere as he crashes through walls, fiendishly bent on finding her, both desiring and hating her, torturing her right up to the end. Valmont himself, vain though he is, dimly understands that in losing Tourvel, he, not unlike Othello, has sacrificed (to Merteuil) what was most dear to him and therefore allows himself to be vanquished by the young Danceny in a duel, the young man having been told, as well, of the horrors that took place in the country house. The corpses are piling up. For his closing shot, the author Laclos endows the most demonic but fascinating figure of the book, Mme. de Merteuil, with smallpox, as if it were the only resource he had left to bring this Nietzschean character back under control.

But what I’d like to close with is the image of the ruined Cécile Volanges in a convent, permanently lost to her mother, to the world, and to herself (she has no religious calling whatsoever). Some editors take the view that Laclos envisioned a Cécile sequel that would get her out of the convent and back into action; for me this is a nonstarter, since her ruin has been so utterly imagined and executed. Earlier in the story, Merteuil and Valmont banter about the malleable young girl at their disposition, terming her “
une machine à plaisir,
” “a pleasure machine,” at which point Merteuil points out that sooner or later everyone learns how to operate such a machine, so the best course for them is to use her, break her, and discard the pieces. Which is what they do. This elegant if cruel novel has a lesson to teach us, and it is embodied in its title,
Les liaisons dangereuses
. All liaisons are dangerous. Cécile Volanges is a prime exhibit of children being abused and undone through the will to power of adults, a hunger that is gratified only by the manipulation of others. Cécile, the novel’s innocent virgin, has zero status in its scheme of things; she is straightaway reified (“
une machine à plaisir”
), and her body serves as a currency for the grown-up fun and games at hand.

Protecting anyone against predators is hard. “Safe sex” has a meaning; “safe love,” “safe desire,” have none. But seeing children exposed to such designs as these is rough indeed. Tadzio, Miles, now Cécile Volanges: targets of appetite with nowhere to hide. Is there a lesson for us? I wonder if we might not consult the very form of this fiction for some reply. The epistolary convention itself—the entire book is a series of exchanged letters; even the innocent Cécile is “spread out” letterwise—has stunning parallels with today’s culture not only of e-mail but of its more advanced and troubling progeny, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Craigslist, and the like: arenas where the young enter into a circulation they cannot always measure and achieve a visibility and vulnerability whose consequences are not easily charted. It seems to me that Laclos, the grand strategist of military and amorous relations, tried to chart them more than two centuries ago.
Les liaisons dangereuses
is one of our greatest “ecological” fictions, and it calls the bluff on the muscular, even deified individual—which is what Valmont and Merteuil think they are: gods taking others apart—by meshing all its players together, by highlighting the very traffic of human relations. What are Facebook and MySpace if not traffic systems, sites of exposure, settings where “I” enters a web not of its making, on show, readable, and even reachable. Look at the fate of Cécile Volanges, and you will see a child caught in—then undone from—a mesh it could not see.

I have wanted to reference Cécile Volanges’s story in order to make us better readers, to sensitize us to the nasty events unfurling often enough in the dark corners of our canonical literature. Laclos is, of course, the contemporary of the Marquis de Sade, and many scholars of the period have pointed to the parallels between their respective works, seeing in them a cult of cruelty and principled exploitation that is almost Luciferian in character. After all, Sade’s admirers argue, his stature derives from the incessant warfare he posits between human desire and all forms of morality and constraint. Is that not what “love gone wrong” means, appetite liberated from all constraints? From our vantage point in this book, however, or from our vantage point perhaps as parents, it is hard to look past the horrendous price that is paid for such a cult of freedom at all costs, especially if our children are instrumentalized in the venture, as objects to be toyed with, perhaps abused, perhaps destroyed.

For the most part, enduring literature rarely paints pictures of quite the victimization we see in Cécile Volanges. But a number of our most revered love stories are remarkably hard going, once our eyes are focused on the amount of abuse that either fuels them or is carried in their wake. I can think of no better way to measure what happens when love goes wrong than to return to the Brontë sisters and take a second look at their remarkable narratives in order to get a better fix on the abusive violence they contain concerning injured children. Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
ushers its readers from the get-go into the realm of tortured children: the initial narrator, the overcivilized fop, Lockwood, has a visionary encounter with a ghostly child who wants in. A guest at Wuthering Heights, hearing a rapping on the window in the middle of the night and seeing a spectral child figure, Lockwood, terrified, pulls the child’s wrist onto the broken windowpane, and “rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes; still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.” Mind you, “to and fro,” not just a single swipe. One has trouble keeping this moment in focus, it is simply too sadistic. Brontë is showing her cards (as well as her teeth), setting the stage for a host of horrors meted out to children, as if to say that not only is growing up a time of punishment but the tortured child remains forever there, frozen in time, seeking entry, subject to endless laceration.

The book’s unforgettable male protagonist, the Byronic Heathcliff, provides the fullest portrait of what abuse is and does. Routinely mistreated by Hindley, Catherine’s brother, after old Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff would be the tortured/torturing
thing
of the novel, if it weren’t for his extraordinary love for/kinship with Catherine. As we’ve noted, that Edenic bond, unseverable, spells fate for both of them. But he misconstrues her love, he leaves, she marries the genteel Edgar, he returns: the
machine infernale
goes into gear. Deprived of Catherine (while bound to her, soulwise, for eternity), wounded at the core, doomed to live after she dies, Heathcliff can respond only by abuse and revenge. And we will see that abuse and revenge are self-nourishing passions, unstillable, unquenchable, prior even to volition or design; one feels that Heathcliff is himself the victim of his rage, for that is what love’s residue has become.

Arguably the most shocking feature of this savage novel is its unremitting general violence—hanging dogs is routine, beating and kicking and slapping and gouging are par for the course, and the sadistic treatment of those who are weaker (of whatever age or gender, but especially children) seems present on every page—and therefore Heathcliff’s nonstop brutality toward everyone once he is in power appears horribly natural. It is especially the vicious circle that matters: treat someone like a dog, and they will do it in kind when they have a chance. Perhaps violence refashions our appetites, as when Heathcliff observes that the more brutally he humiliates the genteel Isabella, the more she comes back for more. As for the torturer, he is following a program: “I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase in pain.”

Heathcliff disturbs most via his torture of the novel’s children, those who represent perhaps a chance for redressing things. We see him repeatedly thrashing Hindley (who’d abused him as a child), but also, as tit for tat, Hindley’s son, Hareton, kept wild and unschooled, replaying Heathcliff’s history; more unnerving are the scenes where he physically assaults and beats Catherine’s daughter, little Cathy, and imprisons her in his house while Edgar, the child’s father, is dying. (At one point she tries to embrace Heathcliff, but he throws her down, saying he’d rather be hugged by a snake.) But perhaps the nadir of his behavior is seen in his Machiavellian treatment of his own son, the sickly Linton, whom he uses as bait to ensnare young Cathy, arranging their marriage while knowing the boy is soon to die. Much has been made of the economic motive in play here: Heathcliff, spurned and brutalized as a poor orphan, is set upon gaining control of the Earnshaw and Linton properties, which he effectively does. But in my view the financial rationale is dwarfed by the sheer elemental rage that this man feels toward the children put into his care or within his reach. Hurt as a child, he is at war with children. I see no vice, no pineapple compote here, just a sullen to-the-death tyranny over the young, meted out as punishment for what he himself has had to endure.

Many of us will want to remember Heathcliff as the star-crossed lover, as the young boy whom Catherine loved so utterly that she could tell her housekeeper, “Nelly, I
am
Heathcliff.” But to see Heathcliff’s program of torture for all who go on living after Catherine dies as the response of a jilted lover is only to add to the horror. Loss of love is an abuse as deep as inflicted blows, for at bottom they are alike. Yet even if we assent to this quid-pro-quo model of love/loss/rage, we are accustomed to psychologizing such matters, assuming they apply to feelings only. But the behavior in
Wuthering Heights
is shockingly uncensored and unrestrained, and therefore feelings are immediately and explosively acted upon, conferring on this dark book an aura of affect run wild, of a scheme entirely without discipline or control.

Brontë’s abuse-filled novel can be read as a dark version of growing up, if indeed growing up ever occurs. Most of its key figures—Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Hareton—are twisted creatures, driven by fierce pulsions of rage and want, falling repeatedly into veritable tantrums of violence and fury, as if they were condemned to remain infantile all their lives. There is something shocking about these fully grown folks continuing to kick, bite, and hit, to trade blow for blow, right on past the gates of death. Brontë brings a second generation of children into the mix—they too are hounded and persecuted by Heathcliff—as the only way of calming the storm and yielding a semblance of peace. At book’s end, we see, in the coming union of the daughter Cathy with the Caliban-like Hareton, an old comic rhythm of marriage and regeneration, yet the final image of the book is of the two tormented souls of Heathcliff and Catherine, seeking each other
d’outre-tombe
, in the entrails of the earth. The very concept of maturation is alien, more than a little quaint, in this tempestuous scheme where time does not leaven and injury is not forgotten.

A disturbing notion, this: time does not leaven, and injury is not forgotten. Look around and ask yourself how many of the grown-ups you know have remained angry, unforgiving, still hurting children. Emily Brontë’s nineteenth-century Yorkshire wilds is a place for literalizing these matters, but modern life is no less violent toward its young even if the appearances are more seemly. We possess no affective MRIs, no magic scans that can display the scars and lesions on the soul, make visible to us the hurt that was done and that will not die. A dose of
Wuthering Heights
strikes me as tonic, as a reminder that bodies and hearts hurt and bleed for a long, long time when they are injured. Remember the ghostlike wraith with the bleeding wrists, begging (forever) to come in: it would be hard to find a better emblem of abuse.

Emily’s sister Charlotte seems to be a far more civilized type, and
Jane Eyre
has none of the outright hangings and beatings of
Wuthering Heights
. It stays in the minds of many of us as a moving tribute to pluck and character, as Jane arduously makes her way through thick and thin. But its story of abuse is no less horrid for all that. I have already mentioned Rochester’s own sadistic toying with Jane, but she is bullied well before that. Young Jane is systematically injured and damaged while living with the Reeds at the book’s beginning, and one is free to read the entire novel in the light of the abuse she receives as a child. The pièce de résistance of such an interpretation is of course the scene in the Red Room, where little Jane is imprisoned (after being battered by John Reed and chastised by her aunt) with no company but ghosts: the ghost of the dead patriarch whose body lay in state there and the still more frightening winged creatures that seem to arise to invade her (for good), yielding a shriek that knocks her insensible.

Brontë writes this spirit attack in virtually clinical fashion: “My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down.” There is a good bit of traffic registered here, and the child’s psyche cannot hold its own in this affective storm, indeed storming. “Abuse” is a familiar term, yet who among us would know how to chart or graph its actual impact, the actual dynamics of injury? Most insidious, I think, is the intimation that something
living
is bearing down on Jane, violating, forcing its entry. Moreover, this scene has been cunningly arranged with a mirror (rightly termed a “visionary hollow”) as its central furnishing, enabling us to construe all the Gothic traffic and wailing spirits as elements of the injured Jane’s psyche, as “fellow-travelers” on the itinerary she is embarked on.

That itinerary and the wonderfully reasoning voice of Jane that accompanies it confer on this novel a pattern of rational deliberation and upward march toward ever-fuller self-possession, against all obstacles: the initial bullying at Lowood; further bullying by the handsome, rugged Rochester; a major setback in the form of an earlier Mrs. Rochester in the person of the ghoulish Bertha as madwoman in the attic; the final testing at the hands of the cold and compelling St. John Rivers, who (lovelessly) wants her to accompany him as helpmeet in his missionary efforts in India. Jane emerges triumphant from each of these contests and ends the novel with the trophy she deserves: the compliant Rochester, softened by blindness and maiming, readied at last for the novel’s preening victory announcement: “Reader, I married him.”