While tidying my desk, I came across a terrific essay written by my elder son as part of his master’s degree in English at University College London. In it, he discusses critical reaction to the work of Katherine Mansfield. New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson described Mansfield’s writing as “feminine” and labelled as “minor” her concentration on isolated details and moments of life. TS Eliot called Mansfield’s story Bliss “negligible” in its moral implication and regretted a fashion for the “aggrandisement of personality”.
The essay sums up – before forensically taking apart – the critics’ attitude: A feminine story can be a nice thing, but it cannot mean anything much. One should not expect any interesting social or moral ramifications from it.
This notion of “major and minor” is still about in many forms. There is great respect for the big swinging novel, the macho 800-pager, the grand, sweeping history. There’s still a sense that larger truths can’t be drawn from the small things in life: the psychology of mundane encounters, the day-to-day behaviour of the human animal.
“Feminine” writing may have been historically viewed as minor, but women are particularly well-equipped to know that the personal is political. Everyday interactions are not trivial; they are micro versions of world events. Mothers, especially, are on the front line of brutal truths about human behaviour. Any mother with a personality sufficiently robust to withstand the introspection will realise the degree to which life is a cycle.
Everything we’ve experienced, we will be hardwired to act out. Every trauma has a trace in our own behaviour. If we’ve been hurt or abused, unless we stop ourselves, we will potentially inflict the same damage (minor or major) on our children. Another cruel truth from the front line: those who make a stand against abusive patterns in a family may be attacked by others who feel their identity threatened by criticism or change.
I can recall interactions with a distant relative who is rightly, as many of us are, horrified and appalled by the slaughter being perpetrated in Gaza by the Israeli government. More than 50,000 deaths and enforced starvation is not a sane or proportionate response to the October 7 terrorist attacks. Currently, the Israeli government appears to be guilty of atrocities and war crimes.
My distant relative notes this but scorns the idea of addressing problems in his own family. One matter – Gaza – is history-making and important; the other he deems personal, trivial, beneath his grand consideration. But it’s all part of the same fundamental problem of the cycle of violence.
A victim easily becomes a perpetrator unless there’s reflection, insight and a willingness to confront home truths. No person, group or government is immune to cause and effect, and the uncomfortable truth is that a cruel history makes the cycle harder to break. The remedy is not defensiveness and aggressive denial. The solution is to face up to the violence as a perfectly explicable human problem, and work to confront and deal with it.
Experiences in the “feminine” world demonstrate that violence in all forms is pervasive. It takes resolve to stand up to the belligerence, distraction tactics and noise of perpetrators, whether they’re part of major events or the interior world of a family. Women may be the more minor offenders (with less of a tendency to go nuclear) but no one is exempt from potential culpability, not even victims and historical victims.
If you can foresee that the traumatised children of Gaza, should they survive, may feel the impulse to take revenge, you’ve got to acknowledge the whole picture.
All those to whom evil was done need to break the cycle themselves.
