ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JOHN CARRITHERS
LACY M. JOHNSON is the author of the memoir The Other Side, which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.
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ALSO BY LACY M. JOHNSON
The Other Side: A Memoir
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NOTES
THE RECKONINGS
a local man has been convicted: During the trial, a jury of seven women and five men heard testimony that the local man (in addition to raping the boy and burning him alive) had molested a six-year-old girl and had stomped a kitten to death. His defense argued that the local man had been a troubled boy, whose mother had died when he was eight and whose father had been absent; his guardians almost never interacted with him. It took the jury only three and a half hours of deliberation to return a guilty verdict on the four charges of capital murder. Months later, during his sentencing hearing, the jury deliberated only an hour and fifteen minutes before giving the local man the maximum sentence of forty years in prison for a crime committed when he was thirteen. The mother of the murdered boy told reporters, “I’m happy. I’m just going to enjoy this day and not worry about anything else.”
a retrieval of all I had lost: I have come to dislike the term recovery for precisely this reason. There is no going back for me, and there’s no re-becoming the person I once was. I will never again be a woman who has not been kidnapped and raped by a man I once loved. That woman is gone. Writing that book, my previous one, helped me to grieve that loss maybe, if only because it forced me to fully acknowledge the ways that recovery was not possible. Discovery, on the other hand . . . well, that is always possible.
Now that would be justice, they think: Alec Walen writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that retributive justice can be best understood as a form of justice committed to the following three principles: “(1) that those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts . . . morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment; (2) that it is intrinsically morally good—good without reference to any other goods that might arise—if some legitimate punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and (3) that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.”
“one mina of silver”: Despite this seeming endorsement of barbarism, the most common form of criminal punishment was actually a fine, which varied according to a person’s gender, status, and rank. Only equals had rights to retaliation; serfs did not have the right to break the bones of a magistrate or snatch out one of his eyes. That would be preposterous, since inequalities of status and power are so assumed throughout ancient Babylonian society that they are written into the law. Not surprisingly, there’s nothing in the code that suggests this unequal social order was considered unjust or that anyone thought to question it. In fact, the fine of one mina of silver for a crime against a serf was imposed in order to protect the serf’s rights, even if those rights were not equal to those of a “free man.” When a serf made a claim to justice, he did so as an assertion of his rights, not as a plea for charity.
In ancient Greece, the laws reflect a similar hierarchy of justice. The crime of rape, for example, incurred a fine of a hundred drachmas, payable to the woman’s father or head of household. The crimes of adultery and battery also carried standardized fines, though a fine might be raised or lowered depending on a variety of factors: the time of day, the place the crime was committed, whether a weapon had been used, the social class of the victim, the severity of injury, and whether the victim could be expected to recover. The standard fine was tripled if the victim was a magistrate.
In ancient Germanic societies, every person had an agreed-on monetary value, known as a wergild—wer meaning “man” and gild here meaning “price,” but like the much later word shuld, also meaning both “guilt” and “debt.” The value of a wergild was different for different people depending on the specific culture and on norms associated with gender and age and social rank. In some cultures, a noble was worth twice what a free man was worth, in some cases as much as six times the value. A woman’s wergild was worth twice a man’s, or in some places, only half. Codes of law in these societies, such as the Frankish Salic Code, compiled in the first decade of the sixth century, established fixed monetary penalties for a wide variety of alarmingly specific violent or otherwise damaging acts, such as “striking a man on the head so the brain shows” or “skinning a dead horse without consent of the owner.” Regardless of the amount and form of the wergild or, for that matter, the nature of the crime, any time a crime was committed, the criminal would be required to pay wergild to the victim or to the family of the victim as restitution. The only exception was for slaves, who could not pay a monetary wergild and could therefore instead expect to pay the wergild through lashings and even sometimes castration. In any case, only after the wergild had been paid would the criminal be redeemed.
We see in these ancient laws something that is still true today: that any person who commits a crime against someone higher in the social order is punished more severely than a person who commits a crime against his social equal, and that anyone who commits a crime against someone who is lower in the social order is punished less severely. Low-status criminals tend to suffer physical punishments: lashings, imprisonment, castration, beheadings. High-status criminals suffer a punishment against their status or wealth: they offer land, or titles, or some token of their wealth.
David Graeber points out in Debt: The First 5,000 Years that money evolved in order to transform the abstract concept of a debt into a concrete form through the use of a common currency. But others, such as David Johnston, have argued that this evolution is inseparable from how money has always been used as an expression of injustice among unequals.
See in particular Johnston’s A Brief History of Justice for a thorough discussion of how social hierarchy was written into ancient law. See also Women, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society, Vol. 2: Ancient Greece by Elisabeth Meier Tetlow; and Mitchel P. Roth’s An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment.
what humans understood to be our baser instincts: In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon suggests to Socrates that humans generally want to outdo others by getting and having as much as possible. “Uncurbed, this attribute would undermine cooperation and lead to perpetual conflict,” David Johnston writes in A Brief History of Justice. “Justice, then, is a human invention designed to curb the natural inclinations of human beings, which would have radically unsociable consequences if left unchecked.”
every injury has some equivalent of pain or sacrifice: It is worth quoting from The Genealogy of Morals (Second Essay) at length here:
Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, the major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]? Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack
of freedom of the will?—and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more primitive distinctions between “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth, “The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise,” this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished:—it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator—but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator.
“We must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale”: See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
he threw Christians to the beasts in the Colosseum: Tacitus writes in his Annals, Book XV, Chapter 44:
Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
justice, like language, is a “special characteristic” of humans: Aristotle writes (translated by Welldon):
Nature, as we are fond of asserting, creates nothing without a purpose and man is the only animal endowed with speech. . . . The object of speech . . . is to indicate advantage and disadvantage and therefore also justice and injustice. For it is a special characteristic which distinguishes man from all other animals that he alone enjoys perception of good and evil, justice and injustice and the like.
Plato suggested that justice is “an inward grace”: Sir Ernest Barker writes in Greek Political Theory of how the concept of justice evolved from previous conceptions into the version we see in Plato’s Republic: “Whereas it had been regarded . . . as something outward—a body of material precepts confronting the soul, and claiming to control it in virtue of a power external to it—it is now regarded as an inward grace, and its understanding is shown to involve a study of the inner man.”
GIRLHOOD IN A SEMIBARBAROUS AGE
the black triangle of the Venus: A few years ago, a team of German archaeologists found a Venus figurine in the bottom of a vaulted cave in a low mountain range bounded by the Danube and Neckar rivers in the German Alps. This figurine, like the Chauvet Cave Venus and the well-known Venus of Willendorf, is undoubtedly meant to signify a female body: a pair of giant breasts balloon above a round belly; the elaborately carved labia gape open; there is a small ring in the place of a head, a void in the place of feet. The discovery of the figurine created quite a splash, with magazines announcing proof of Upper Paleolithic pornography. “You couldn’t get more female than this,” Nicholas Conard (the archaeologist whose team found the figurine) tells Smithsonian Magazine. “Head and legs don’t matter,” he said. “This is about sex, reproduction.” At the time, they thought the figurine was maybe as much as forty thousand years old, and named it the Venus of Hohle Fels, after the cave where it was discovered, and in the tradition of calling all such “fertility” totems “Venus.”
There are something like 149 so-called Venus figurines from the Upper Paleolithic that have been discovered, dating from thirty-five thousand years ago to nine thousand years ago, ranging from Europe to Siberia and elsewhere. The first of these was found in the mid-1860s in the Abri of Laugerie-Basse by Paul Hurault, an amateur archaeologist and the eighth marquis of Vibraye, who called his discovery of the nude figurine Venus Impudique (or “Immodest Venus”), in contrast to Venus Pudica (“Modest Venus”), a fourth-century BC sculpture of Aphrodite of Knidos by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles of Athens. The “Modest Venus” was also a nude sculpture but is depicted covering herself with her hand in the proper Hellenistic tradition. The uncovered Upper Paleolithic nude, in contrast, was considered obscene, pornographic even.
And yet unlike the Venus of Hohle Fels, or the Venus of Willendorf, or the Chauvet Cave Venus, this “Immodest Venus” did not have ballooning breasts or a round abdomen—what Conard now calls “the essence of being female”—but rather is slender, elongated, perhaps even juvenile. What about a juvenile female body is less “essentially” female than a pregnant woman’s?
In fact, many of the lesser-known Venuses do not fit the “Venus” type at all: the Venus of Galgenberg is a slender Venus, one leg extended, one arm raised: dancing; the Venus of Buret’ wears heavy fur from head to foot and is also slender, like most of the other Venus figurines found at Malta. The Venus of Willendorf—often considered the quintessential Venus—was only one of two figurines discovered at that archaeological site in Austria. The other figurine was also female, but tall and slender, more roughly made, and many archaeologists have dismissed it from consideration as being “unfinished” in some way.
By singling out the Venuses with exaggerated sexual features as if they were the only type, the only message, the only idea of what has been and will always be “sacred” throughout the ages, we are saying more about what women’s bodies mean to us in the present than anything about what they might have meant in the past.
For a more thorough discussion, see Andrew Curry’s “The Cave Art Debate” in Smithsonian, as well as April Nowell and Melanie L. Chang’s “Science, the Media, and Interpretations of Upper Paleolithic Figurines,” in American Anthropologist.
“the myth that has endured until our days”: There are so many myths to choose from! But here I’ll focus on the Greek one in which the young goddess Persephone was picking wildflowers in a field when Hades, Lord of the Underworld, burst through a cleft in the earth and carried her off. After searching desperately for months, her mother, Demeter, goddess of fertility and harvest, learned what had happened and convinced Zeus to persuade Hades to release the girl. Before doing so, Hades tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, which doomed her to return to the underworld for a portion of each year. This, the myth tells us, is why we have seasons.
But it’s not why the myth fascinates us. For millennia, artists and writers working in nearly every form, genre, and media have appropriated and claimed this myth as their own, reenacting the mythological violence over and over again.
In a fourth-century BC fresco, Hades abducts Persephone. His expression, despite the degradation of the image over time, shows clear purpose and intent. He carries the screaming woman off in his chariot; her pink robes shred and trail behind her while the Fates and Demeter cower nearby. The fresco, or The Rape of Persephone as it is now called, was discovered on the front of a tomb in 1977 when a Greek archaeologist became convinced that a hill called the Great Tumulus concealed the burial site of the great Macedonian kings. He uncovered the tombs, including the so-called Tomb of Persephone, which may have belonged to Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, at the end of a six-week dig.
In a fresco titled The Rape of Proserpine, commissioned in the early 1680s, Luca Giordano, a late baroque painter, depicts the Roman version of
the abduction myth in a series of interlocking visual narratives. On one side of the fresco, Ceres sows seeds in a field while other gods plow the soil, water it, prune branches in a nearby tree, ride across the sky in a chariot, or look up in fear at the other side of the painting, where Pluto carries off Proserpine, daughter of Ceres. His three-headed dog, Cerberus, guards the entrance to the underworld, while Charon’s boat waits to ferry them across the River Styx. Giordano completed the series in 1683, in plenty of time to celebrate the arranged marriage of Ferdinand de Medici (who preferred men) to the dull daughter of a politician.
Earlier that same century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini completed a nearly ten-foot-tall marble sculpture depicting the abduction scene. Proserpina’s hand creases Pluto’s skin, where it pushes back against his face, while his fingers sink into the flesh of her thigh and hip. Proserpina’s lips open in a near-scream, and delicately crafted marble tears drip down her face. This sculpture, which is also called The Rape of Persephone, has, more than the other works discussed above, been especially lauded for its realism.
Recently Jeff Koons unveiled a sculpture at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Pluto and Proserpina it is called, standing nearly ten feet tall, cast in his signature mirror-polished stainless steel, a poor imitation of the much earlier Bernini from which it has unabashedly copied. In Koons’s imitation, the god of the underworld is not nearly as imposing as Bernini’s: he doesn’t seem to abduct the girl so much as carry her. That is, she isn’t struggling but appears to go along willingly: her hand is behind her head in a classic pin-up pose, her breasts perky and pointed upward, her eyes closed and mouth slightly open. Her expression conveys not terror but ecstasy.
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