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Churchill's Black Dog

Page 13

by Anthony Storr


  Trollope’s delineation of jealousy has something to teach us about that disturbing emotion which is relevant and which closely matches what Freud wrote over fifty years later. Louis Trevelyan, recently married, objects to the attentions paid to his wife by Colonel Osborne, a man of over fifty, who has been an intimate friend of his wife’s father, who had known her in early childhood, and who might therefore be thought to be above suspicion. Nevertheless, Colonel Osborne is in fact something of a philanderer: a bachelor who enjoys the company of young, attractive married women. With delicate skill, Trollope makes it plain that, although Emily Trevelyan is undoubtedly faithful to her husband, there is an undercurrent of sexuality between herself and Colonel Osborne; the sort of licensed, mild flirtation to which Freud refers as a safety valve for extramarital desires which we all have, but which are in no way threatening to those to whom we are committed. Trevelyan’s perception that there is something between the two is, therefore, correct.

  But Trevelyan is rigid, threatened, and intolerant. He forbids his wife to see Colonel Osborne again. She feels insulted, and their relationship goes from bad to worse. Trevelyan gradually becomes more and more disturbed in mind. His friends desert him because they feel that he is treating his wife unfairly. His feeling that he is being disregarded and despised becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as often happens with such people. Throughout his gradual decline into near-madness, physical illness, and final death, Trollope makes it clear that he does not really believe that his wife has been unfaithful, but that he cannot tolerate her refusal to obey him, to submit herself utterly to his unreasonable demands. Trollope writes, “He was jealous of authority, fearful of slights, self-conscious, afraid of the world, and utterly ignorant of the nature of a woman’s mind.”8 The weakness of the petty tyrant who cannot afford to yield or to admit error has seldom been better portrayed.

  Trollope accurately pinpoints the relation between weakness, rigidity, and jealousy. Trevelyan is unable to recognize his own fallibility, his own hostility, or, presumably, his own impulses toward infidelity. Like many weak people, he is hypersensitive to anything which might be construed as an attack upon him or a threat to his absolute authority. When such attacks or such threats appear, he takes them as alone constituting reality and disregards the love and the esteem which, much more importantly, surround him. People of this kind live in a black-and-white world in which others are either totally hostile or totally on their side.

  Freud’s third grade of jealousy is “delusional.” Freud states that this type of jealousy also

  has its origin in repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness; but the object in these cases is of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy is what is left of a homosexuality that has run its course, and it rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula: “I do not love him, she loves him!” In a delusional case one will be prepared to find jealousy belonging to all three layers, never to the third alone.9

  Whether or not one accepts Freud’s psychopathological formulation, the fact is that delusions of infidelity occur in a variety of mental illnesses. When men accuse their wives of infidelity, it is often because they themselves are wholly or partially impotent. Diabetes sometimes causes impotence; and so do various diseases of the spinal cord. Partial impotence is sometimes found together with brain damage. This occurs in chronic alcoholism and also in punch-drunk boxers. Delusions of infidelity also occur in cases of the psychosis known as paranoia, in which there is no brain damage and no physical illness. A few cases of severe depression also exhibit paranoid delusions. There is no doubt that latent homosexuality plays a part, as Freud supposed. Enoch and Trethowan report two cases of women who accused their husbands of taking more interest in erotic magazines than they did in marital relations. It turned out that both women had lesbian inclinations and themselves wanted to make sexual contact with the pinups who were depicted.10

  It is interesting that Freud’s supposition that paranoid delusions arise from the denial and projection of homosexual desires is better supported by research than are many of his theories. Fisher and Greenberg, in their book The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy, write, “It is a fact that the majority of the experimental studies have demonstrated that the paranoid has a unique pattern of reaction to anything that has the potential for conjuring up homosexual images.”11

  Delusions of a partner’s infidelity not infrequently lead to murder. In Britain, one third of those who commit murder are found, on examination, to be insane. In addition, one third of all suspects in cases finally recorded as murder commit suicide. If one assumes that those who commit suicide are mentally abnormal, it follows that about 70 percent of all murderers in England and Wales are mentally abnormal.

  Jealousy is a common motive for murder, both in murderers who are rated sane and in those who are found to be mentally ill. Norwood East, examining the records of two hundred sane murderers, found jealousy to be the main motive in forty-six.12 Abrahamsen said of murder because of jealousy: “The psychological mechanism behind such an act is that the person’s self-esteem and prestige is injured. The individual believes he not only possesses the partner, but also that he has the right to possess and this makes him jealous. By killing the partner his self-esteem is restored.”13

  Mowat made a careful study of murderers whose crimes had been directly related to delusions of infidelity. Of male insane murderers admitted to Broadmoor over a period of twenty years, 12 percent committed their crime because of morbid jealousy. Female insane murderers exhibited delusions of infidelity in only 3.3 percent of cases. This difference does not mean that women are less prone to jealousy than men, but that the buildup of aggression to the pitch required to commit murder happens less frequently. In fact, this percentage is a serious underestimate of how often morbid jealousy is a motive in murder. It is obviously impossible to examine the motives of the third of murderers who commit suicide immediately after their crime. But one can be sure that jealousy played an important part in a number of such cases. Attempts at suicide had been made by nearly 10 percent of the murderers in which jealousy was the main motive.14

  As I pointed out earlier, murder is predominantly a domestic crime in which men kill their wives or mistresses and women kill their children. In 80 percent of murders, the murderer and the victim are either related or previously acquainted. As Norval Morris writes: “You are safer on the streets than at home; safer with a stranger than with a friend or relative.”15 In murders provoked by jealousy, it is very rare for the rival to be the victim. It is the supposedly unfaithful person who inflicts the greater injury to self-esteem.

  How does one distinguish between delusional jealousy and normal jealousy? By the presence or absence of other evidence of insanity than that provided by ideas of infidelity alone. Delusions rarely exist singly. The person with delusions of infidelity in the partner commonly shows evidence of disordered judgment in other areas. For example, ideas that the spouse is damaging potency by administering poison are not uncommon. The pathologically suspicious person usually feels that his spouse has become cold toward him. He seizes on details which seem to him to confirm his suspicions. The fact that a piece of furniture has been moved indicates that another man has been in the house. So does a cigarette end in the fireplace, a stain on underwear, the fact that she has changed her clothes. Advertisements put through the letter box are a way of communicating through a code. A light left on by accident is a signal to the lover.

  Such delusions usually arise on the basis of a change in the subject himself which is then attributed falsely to the spouse. As I suggested above, the morbidly jealous man is not infrequently impotent himself, or sexually abnormal. Whether or not delusions of infidelity have any actual justification plays little part in making the diagnosis. The types of mental illness in which delusions of infidelity flourish usually take some ti
me to develop; and it would not be surprising if, during the course of a gradual deterioration in the marital relationship, a wife occasionally looked elsewhere for comfort. As William Burroughs says, “A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what is going on.”16 The point I want to make is that, even if there is some actual basis for suspicion, the difference between the sane and insane person is usually obvious because of other considerations.

  Let us turn to examine Othello in the light of what is known about jealous murders. In Cinthio’s original story, from which Shakespeare took his plot, it is jealousy, rather than envy, which inspires Iago’s campaign of poisonous suggestion. For Iago is depicted as himself being in love with Desdemona, rather than merely being envious of Cassio’s promotion. Which is the more powerful motive for Iago’s evil behavior? Boito, Verdi’s librettist, clearly thought that envy was not a sufficient motive. In his skillfully compressed libretto, he actually feels it necessary to add something to underline Iago’s wickedness: the famous “Credo,” in which Iago states his belief in a cruel God who has created him in his image. Iago claims that whatever evil he thinks or does was decreed for him by fate, and that fate is essentially unjust. Life is a mockery which ends in death; Heaven is an illusion; and Death is therefore nothingness.

  I can understand why Boito felt it necessary to add Iago’s “Credo,” but I must confess that I have found it an unconvincing excuse. Human beings who perform evil acts do so for a variety of reasons, of which envy and jealousy are two. They do not commit crimes because God or fate has made them essentially evil. In Rossini’s opera Otello, which Byron saw in Venice in February 1818, Iago is depicted as both being envious of the Moor’s success as a military leader, and also as having at one time wished to marry Desdemona. Byron wrote to John Murray before he saw the opera that it was reputed to be one of Rossini’s best. After seeing it, he wrote to Samuel Rogers that the music was “good but lugubrious,” and complained, “But as for the words! All the real scenes with Iago cut out—and the greatest nonsense instead.”17 Rossini’s librettist was Francesco Berio, Marchese di Salsa. His plot is no nearer to Cinthio’s, and much further removed from Shakespeare’s, than Boito’s version. Did Byron know that Berio, enthused by reading Childe Harold, had written an ode to him?

  Stendhal, who saw the opera in Naples, wrote: “Nothing colder. It must have taken a lot of savoir-faire on the part of the writer of the libretto to render insipid to this degree the most impassioned of all dramas.”18 However, if one puts Shakespeare out of mind altogether, it is possible to enjoy Rossini’s Otello for the sake of the music, some of which is beautiful.

  Returning to Shakespeare, I must first affirm that discussing the motives of invented characters as if they were real people is a dubious exercise. We cannot know what Iago or Othello “really” felt, because neither “really” existed. Ernest Jones, in his essay on Hamlet and Oedipus, says that he proposes to pretend that Hamlet was a living person. In the latter part of the essay, he goes on to consider Shakespeare’s own presumed psychopathology in some detail. Jones writes, “It is noteworthy that Shakespeare’s famous victims of jealousy, Othello, Leontes, Posthumus, all display extraordinary credulousness, which at times makes the audience impatient with them, and have perfectly innocent wives.”19

  Was Othello’s credulousness really so extraordinary? As Shakespeare depicts him, Othello certainly does not belong to that group of murderers who are obviously insane. There is no evidence of madness other than his mistaken belief that Desdemona was unfaithful. And had he not a variety of reasons for believing what Iago told him? In the first act (dropped by both Berio and Boito), Othello is warned by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio. Brabantio at first believes that Desdemona must have been seduced by witchcraft:

  O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter?

  Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her,

  For I’ll refer me to all things of sense,

  (If she in chains of magic were not bound)

  Whether a maid, so tender, fair, and happy,

  So opposite to marriage that she shunn’d

  The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,

  Would ever have (to incur a general mock)

  Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom

  Of such a thing as thou?20

  When Brabantio has been convinced, in front of the Duke, that magic has not been used, he has to accept the validity of the clandestine marriage he so much deplores. But in spite of the Duke’s assurance—“Your son-in-law is far more fair than black”—Brabantio’s parting shot to Othello is “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: She has deceiv’d her father, may do thee.”21

  Iago reverts to this when, in Act III, Scene 3, he says to Othello: “She did deceive her father, marrying you.”22 Immediately prior to this remark, Iago has said:

  I know our country disposition well;

  In Venice they do let God see the pranks

  They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience

  Is not to leave undone, but keep unknown.23

  Although Othello is a general, who must, one presumes, have resided in Venice for some considerable period to attain such eminence, Iago is playing on the fact that he is a foreigner who is not so familiar with the ways of Venetian women as he is with those of women in his own country. Venice enjoyed a reputation for sexual license over several centuries. At the end of the sixteenth century, there are said to have been 2,889 patrician ladies in Venice, 2,508 nuns, and 1,936 burgher women; but there were 11,654 courtesans!24 In the Fitzwilliam Museum, you can see Guardi’s portrait A Woman of Venice. Bejeweled, elaborately coiffed, painted, and elegantly dressed, she is clearly designed both for ostentation and for enjoyment. It is said that a Venetian husband pointed out to a friend a stone figure carved on a wall above a bridge. “There is the only honest woman in Venice,” he remarked. The bridge is known as the Bridge of the Honest Woman to this day.25

  In fact, being in a foreign country does tend to increase any tendency toward suspiciousness which an individual may possess. I well recall seeing a patient who was a Government employee concerned with energy policy. He was quite high in the hierarchy, and his position demanded that he travel abroad from time to time. On two occasions when he did so, he suffered a breakdown in which paranoid suspicions were the main feature. As long as he stayed at home, he remained stable; but when he was in a country in which the language was unfamiliar to him, he began to feel uneasy because he felt that people were making disparaging remarks about him which he could not understand.

  Although Othello’s case is different, in that we may assume that he spoke Italian sufficiently well to command an army, it is reasonable to assume that his foreignness might make him more gullible.

  Iago goes on to suggest that Desdemona is less to be trusted because she has chosen a black husband:

  Not to affect proposed matches,

  Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,

  Whereto we see in all things nature tends;

  Fie, we may smell in such a will most rank,

  Foul disproportion; thoughts unnatural.26

  Othello takes this insult lying down, as if, like so many subjects of color prejudice, he himself acquiesces to some extent in the notion that black is inferior or even evil. Anthony Burgess, in his coffee-table book on Shakespeare, writes, “The status of Othello shows, incidentally, that there was no colour-prejudice in those days, however much anti-semitism was rife.”27 This seems to me nonsense. We have to remember that blacks were supposed to be descended from Noah’s son Ham. Because Ham had seen his father’s nakedness when Noah was drunk, his descendants were condemned to serve the other brothers, Shem and Japheth, and the black color assigned to them was a mark of divine disfavor.

  Then, as now, prejudice was apt to see sexual union between black and white as repellent, although other emotions may have entered in as well. During World War II, I happened to be a patient in a hospital ward full of soldiers.
The conversation turned to the relations between black men and white women: “Once a woman has had a black man, she’s never going to be satisfied with a white again. You see, they’re bigger made than we are.” Whether this superstitious mixture of envy and jealousy was current in Shakespeare’s day, I do not know. If it was, it may well have increased the repugnance to the union between Othello and Desdemona which both Iago and Brabantio display. Iago, telling Desdemona’s father of her marriage, refers to “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.”28 I have already quoted Brabantio’s own remark about Othello’s “sooty bosom.” Iago suggests to Roderigo that Desdemona is bound to tire of Othello because of his appearance:

  Her eye must be fed, and what delight shall she have to look on the devil? When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be again to inflame it, and give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favour, sympathy in years, manners and beauties; all which the Moor is defective in: now, for want of these requir’d conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abus’d, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor, very nature will instruct her to it, and compel her to some second choice.29

  Othello, however well endowed physically he may have been, is inevitably more prone to suspect his wife’s fidelity than if he had been white. Although he had “done the state some service,” and taken the Christian side against the Turks, it was nevertheless a state in which his black color labeled him as an inferior and a probable infidel.

 

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