When my group did our panel presentation on Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox by Christopher Herbert on Monday, I had a lot of fun and got to say a lot that I wanted to say, but there just wasn't enough time to get to everything that I wanted to talk about. One thing that I really wanted to bring up is the character of Miss Kilman, and what she represents in a relativist interpretation of the book.
Basically, in relativism, the main enemy is the absolutist dictator -- someone who has a flawed, absolutist way of thinking, meaning that they believe in a uniformity of moral, religious, or philosophical truths, and is therefore able to justify pushing their beliefs on others. In relativism, even if everything in a person's life leads them to believe that something must be true, they can't ever assume that they know enough to make a definitive decision. Even if they somehow do, they can't assume that what is fact for them is also fact for someone who perceives the world differently and has different experiences. Someone who does make these assumptions can easily make the mental leap to calcifying in their views. When their views are challenged, they react to the disruption in their mental peace by inflicting counter-pain to punish others. Most relativists view any form of nonessential counter-pain -- that is, punishment that is meant to seek revenge and reform behavior but does not solve any actual problems -- as oppression.
If we look at Miss Kilman, we see a woman who is very much calcified in her worldview. We see from her scene in the church that her Catholic faith genuinely brings her meaning and importance. That's important to a relativist - that she is able to be so faithful and that she is able to get so much joy out of her religion is a beautiful thing, and certainly not a problem in and of itself. The issue comes when she butts heads with Mrs. Dalloway. The short time she actually spends with Clarissa in the novel is enough to completely throw Miss Kilman off. She absolutely hates her, seemingly more than is at all reasonable. The obvious reason is that Mrs. Dalloway makes her feel inferior, but it's more complicated than that; it's about the specific way in which she makes her feel inferior.
After Kilman leaves Clarissa's house, she starts to worry about all kinds of things she normally doesn't worry about. Her money, her clothes, her house, her appearance. The same problems, she says, she worried about before she found Catholicism. But now, she's supposed to have rejected all of these worldly desires. She draws her self-confidence from the fact that she's above all of this. So for Mrs. Dalloway to bring her crashing back down to where she used to be is a serious ideological threat.
All of that fits with the classic absolutist. But for Kilman to be an actual "Dictator", she has to inflict counter-pain. But what does she actually do to punish Clarissa? After all, Clarissa doesn't care about Kilman's personal thoughts, and it's not like she physically hurts Clarissa, or even says anything particularly rude to her. What she does do, is put up enough of a veneer of cold, judgmental confidence that it makes Clarissa hate her almost as much as she hates Clarissa. But worse than just making her hate her personally, she makes her hate the person her daughter is spending all her time with. She makes Clarissa worry constantly (as we see in the book) about the company Elizabeth is keeping. In that way, Kilman is able to hit back (probably unintentionally or subconsciously) at the way Clarissa digs at her own self-hatred by digging at Clarissa's maternal fear for her daughter.
But the worst part is, hurting Clarissa the way she does doesn't even make Miss Kilman happy! She hates Clarissa just as much as she would anyways! She still worries about her appearance and her wealth, still compares herself to someone who's more socially accepted. She continues to be miserable, and all she accomplishes is to drag someone else part of the way down with her. That's the real problem relativists have with the character of the Dictator - by stepping on others, they don't actually make themselves much happier, if at all. All they do is make the world a worse place for the rest of us.
There's irony in seeing Kilman as a "dictator," since, despite her reticence about blaming the Germans for World War I, her politics seem generally progressive, even socialist, and her resentment of Mrs. Dalloway stems as much from her social class as it does religion. (She seems to use religion primarily to try and talk herself down from her extreme hatred of and prejudice against Clarissa--reminding herself to be charitable, etc.)
ReplyDeleteBut you're right that, in both politics and religion (and she's a minority in England in both categories, as well as being an "outsider" of German descent), she embodies absolutist/nonrelativist views. It's this view of her religion that seems to especially scare Clarissa, who is a relativist in her own way, never wanting to say that a person is "this or that."
We didn't talk about Kilman enough in class. This would have been a great topic to explore further in the panel presentation, had time permitted.