Anger and Forgiveness

by Martha C. Nussbaum

  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