Against Forgiveness – by R Meager

“What I wanted was some record of the truth, in a context that asserted I had not deserved it. I needed that. But victories such as these still hurt; they just hurt less than doing nothing.” —Andrea Skinner  

***

It is hard to make people care about abuse that is not outlandish, or excessively violent. Mary Gaitskill noted as such in her extraordinary 1994 essay for Harper’s in which she described experiencing two events, one we might call violent rape by a stranger, and one we might call date rape. The date rape affected her far worse, but she struggled to convince people of that. She even found herself exaggerating details of the date rape to people in order to try to get them to understand the depths of her psychological suffering. (To say that such an observation and admission makes her, at least in text, a master of narrative self-awareness and humility would be, of course, an understatement. But I am, for reasons that will become relevant in a minute, wary of declaring this an insight into Gaitskill as a person.)

I noticed this tendency in myself when I read Alaa Abd El-Fatteh’s excellent book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Alaa is imprisoned in Egypt for political activity. He describes being arrested and beaten by the police. To my horror, I found that as I read this my mind waited, and expected — and, at a certain point, I would say, even thirsted — for the beating to have been even worse. It felt to me as if this would prove the moral horror of the situation or provoke me to feel the appropriate exorbitant grief. My mind wanted the transgression against Alaa to be so overwhelmingly horrifying that I would not have to think for myself about what it meant, nor interrogate my own reaction, nor ask myself why I think a little light police beating is normal, no thank you, not even for a moment.

One reason for this tendency is that we do not want the consequences of finally accepting that most acts of abuse feel quite mundane, and that this mundanity might not be coincidental. If abuse is not always evident on the surface, then we will not always know what is actually going on. And some things, which we might think or wish to say are not that deep, are in fact that deep, after all.

The truth is that most abuses of power, domestic and (inter)national, are mundane and barely noticed as they go. And they are so by intention, and moreover, by design, though this design may be itself subconscious. The abusive person or system first creates the situation in which harm comes to feel obvious and natural: then it happens, just as we expected. Now we may not say we are surprised, nor can be shocked. As such it more often looks like a slow death by suffocation, much in the same way that smoking kills you — it puts a thing inside you that then strangles you to death. The experience you have of the thing getting put inside you may be non-obvious, unobjectionable, normal, or can indeed even be pleasurable. This does not make it any less abusive. 

Alaa’s experience actually is extreme, brazen and outlandish. The fact that some people get beaten fully to death in prison doesn’t make non-fatal police beatings mundane, doesn’t make a lack of broken bones from being beaten up mundane. It doesn’t make being hit once mundane. It doesn’t make being insulted and verbally abused mundane. Harm is not mundane, harm to ourselves is not mundane. Actually at the level of reality nothing is mundane. Part of how something comes to feel or seem mundane is that it has left the plane of the truth. 

People say that they care about what the truth is. Perhaps sometimes they even mean it. But what people do not want is for the truth to be ambiguous, and yet to have to make some decisions about what it means. This by the way is what drives the hundreds of thousands of clicks on relationship subreddits and our ongoing efforts and re-efforts in the discourse to make and re-make ironclad social rules and mores. We want the truth to feel clear and definitive. We do not want the burden of interpretation.

Unless you are completely addicted to inaction, most things are easier when the things are clear. But all clarity is in some way constructed. We would like to be tuned out and to have the facts arranged up for us, and better yet if they could arrange themselves; O let the data speak. In the realm of harm we thirst for there to be some unmistakable mark that renders an experience inarguably mistreatment. But there is nothing you can point to, usually, that is in and of itself beyond forgiveness. There is no single act committed, usually, that in and of itself totally disqualifies the abusive party from defending both their actions and themselves. Wrongdoing is usually murky. Abuse often trades on that uncertainty. It is for this reason that gaslighting is such a common and pervasive element of it. And the more we ask for certainty before action, or demand that human emotion and behaviour conform to defendable rules as if our personal lives were some kind of demented Sylvanian village social policy experiment, the more susceptible to this play we become. 

So let’s admit it: We do not have a working definition of abuse, exploitation or even harm in our culture. We think that we know it when we see it, but this is only partially true. We recognise the most egregious cases, but no thing in this world appears solely in extremes. 

***

To say all this might seem at odds with the case of Andrea Skinner, who was sexually abused by her step-father, Gerry Fremlin, and later essentially blamed for it by her mother, Alice Munro.

In fact the extremity of Skinner’s experience — child sex abuse, repeatedly, by Fremlin — and the lack of ambiguity — he admitted it in writing! — is part of what seems to make Munro’s acceptance of the situation and denial of Skinner’s experience so baffling. But if you actually read Skinner’s essay, the behaviour is not baffling at all. The behaviour of the mother portrayed in the essay is coherent, predictable and even, to some extent, premeditated. It is simply that it falls under the category of harms we are unable to recognise, and of moral transgressions we are expected to forgive. 

I, like you, have only Skinner’s essays — yes, in fact, there are two essays, an important fact that I will get to — and the surrounding reporting to guide me. Wading into this water, even carefully, carries risks. But it is Skinner’s explicitly expressed wish that we grapple with what happened. In fact Skinner hopes that we will never again speak of Munro without speaking of what she did to her, and of the abuse she abetted. The least we could do, as the reading public, is try hard to honour that wish. 

I think we should acknowledge that it’s difficult to grapple with. From all sides, the reaction is confused. There seems to be an attempt to characterise Munro’s behaviour as a kind of ordinary or normal moral failing. A proper reading of Skinner’s words and the surrounding factual reporting in my view reveals that it was not.

Okay, so now here’s what’s going to happen. I am going to teach you how to read the essay by Andrea Skinner. In the course of this literary action we will have to confront and do away with a core tenant of liberal interpersonal ideology: the mandate of forgiveness for all wrongdoing, even up to and including abuse. In our Christian-and-post-Christian wooly milieu, forgiveness has been elevated to the level of salvation — indeed, it is synonymous with it, not just for the perpetrator but even or especially for the victim. The idea that forgiveness is necessary for the victim to heal is repeated so often that it now sounds like commonplace. But that is because, as John Quiggin has put it, ideology always looks like common sense from the inside.

The first thing to realise is that there are actually two Skinner essays, and they are intended for two different audiences. The essay published in the Toronto Star is what will be remembered as Skinner’s essay, and is the one making the rounds. There is also another, a more starkly emotional essay published on the website of Gatehouse, which is more aimed at fellow survivors. These essays should be read together and neither is a strict subset of the other. I will focus on the first one, the more famous, but at times the second essay will be useful in interpreting the first, and in understanding still how public-facing narratives ask for certain edges to be tidily shorn off. 

The Toronto Star essay starts like this:

“In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me.”

Here is the start of the Gatehouse essay: 

“The sexual abuse of a child is a rape of the mind, in which any fledgling tools for healing are stolen.”

So now you might get some sense of how survivors talk to each other, versus how survivors talk to the rest of the community. Survivors of abuse are always asked to sanitise what they have experienced when they speak about it. This is to protect the feelings of the people who still cherish these illusions about life. 

I think, however, that this much is or should be clear. The behaviour of Fremlin is straightforwardly evil. It is not difficult for most people to parse: to sexually assault a nine year old, to lie about it, to blame the child and threaten to “expose” sexual pictures of her if there are attempts to hold him accountable, to threaten to kill her, to threaten to kill himself — these are the behaviours of unmitigated evil. 

The behaviour of Munro is what is difficult to parse. But I think all the evidence we need to parse it, to first order, is present in Skinner’s essays. 

The first insight we get into what must have happened, and what Munro had done, comes in paragraph five of the Star essay. Here we get a window into the maternal emotional environment that sets the stage for all that follows. Skinner says that at nine years of age she wanted to shield her mother from the knowledge of what Fremlin had done because: “She had told me that Fremlin liked me better than her”.

I understand this may seem innocuous if you are not versed in these kinds of situations, so let me explain it to you: Munro had burdened her child with information she should never have had, adult information, about insecurities within her marriage. It is harmful to do this to a vulnerable nine year old child who relies on you to hold firm the boundaries between who is in the marriage bed and who should never be in it. Munro also cast Skinner as comparatively favoured — thus casts her in a stronger position, making Munro herself out to be in need of emotional care from her child. 

The reason this is harmful is twofold: first it inverts the role of parent child and draws the child into the marriage bed. Second, Munro casts her child as in a more secure or better position than she is, effectively gaslighting the child about who has the power. And here, from Skinner’s child mind, is all the proof you could need that it was effective (italics mine):

“I thought she would blame me if she ever found out. I thought she might die.”

With this sentence alone we can infer that Munro has abdicated her station as mother. She expects nine year old Skinner to be her mother instead. The very real survival risk for the infant has been transmuted, projected onto the mother, owned by her. The child has been literally dispossessed of her reality, the reality of her vulnerability and dependence. If at this point you are thinking c’mon man it’s not that deep, I can assure you that it is. 

So far in this story the only person in Skinner’s life who has remotely fulfilled their duty to her is her brother, who urged her to tell their father. Their father does nothing to protect her. He, too, believes and colludes throughout with the idea that the adult Munro is the more fragile and vulnerable party, not the nine year old Skinner. (Here I am lapsing into the present sense that all academics are taught to refer to with sources.) On to paragraph 6: 

“When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type.”

So other adults, outside the family, have tried to intervene to protect Skinner. The adults within the family focus mainly — well, entirely — on themselves. Even Fremlin seems to know his beats: what he needs to do to remove the heat from himself is reassure fragile, wilting Munro, that she has no competition in the house, not disavow child rape (which he then tells her tacitly he does not think is wrong). 

Notice that Munro suspected enough to ask after abuse of Skinner. This makes it even more creepy that, when Skinner was in her 20s, Munro wrote a story in which a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. Sharing the story with Skinner, expressing sympathy for this imaginary girl, Munro asks her daughter:

“Why didn’t she tell her mother?”

This behaviour from Munro sounds outright bizarre, almost surreal, I think, unless you know something of the emotional subconscious, and its tendency towards deep convolution as it tries to process what it perceives and feels. Here is my interpretation: Some part of Munro knows that Fremlin has abused her daughter. She knows that her daughter has not told her. This suppressed knowledge creates internal tension. But because of the attitude she evidently takes towards her daughter, instead of looking inwards at herself to resolve this tension or ask why this might be, she once again places the burden on Skinner to bring her the answers she seeks. 

When Skinner courageously admits to her mother that Fremlin indeed abused her:

“As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me. She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.”

Skinner’s nine year old child brain was right. Her mother had indeed abandoned her. 

Skinner then uses a very precise and deft prose construction: she describes herself as “overwhelmed by her (Munro’s) sense of injury to herself.” Overwhelmed is the accurate term. By my reading, it seems as if Munro has managed to force the suppression of the 20-something year old Skinner’s real and correct feelings of grief, betrayal and injury, and supplant them with her own false and incorrect feelings of grief, betrayal and injury. What Munro should have been feeling in this moment was guilt. I will return to this later.

Let’s examine the next two sentences together, though I am bridging a paragraph break: 

“She then told me about other children Fremlin had “friendships” with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.” 

“Did she realize she was speaking to a victim, and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it.”

These passages suggest a split between what is evident or in plain sight, and what is acknowledged as real and true; a split that is common to almost all abuse and abusers. Of course in some way Munro could not have failed to realised she was speaking to a victim, her child. She was telling of other children who have also been sexually assaulted by Fremlin. But this was never to be acknowledged as real. In my experience, in the mind of women who behave like Munro, there is only ever one victim on the planet: themselves. Therefore, child sex abuse is not a problem, as long as it is done to others — and if it is a problem, it is because it makes the wife of the child sexual abuser feel upset and insecure. 

In this instance, in practice, by her choices and her actions, Munro essentially denies the humanity of others. Only Munro is allowed to have emotions. Others’ emotions are not real to her. Only Munro feels pain. Others do not feel pain, not even the little children, not even the children it is her job to protect. (How could she write those stories then? Easy: those people were all her.) This mental posture is essentially narcissistic. And now we will see how it goes: 

“When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous. “But you were such a happy child,” she said.”

A textbook case of gaslighting, which, like all gaslighting, is a denial of personhood executed via the complete delegitimation of a person’s interior perspective. Skinner says she has been hurt by Fremlin; Munro feels empowered to correct her.  

“Meanwhile, Fremlin acted quickly. He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse. He described my nine-year-old self as a “homewrecker,” and said my family’s failure to intervene suggested they agreed with him. He also threatened retribution.” 

You’ll notice at this point nobody holds Fremlin accountable for having lied earlier, when Munro asked, and he said that he didn’t do it. The adults also do not consider it strange, apparently, for him to threaten to kill Skinner. This is shocking, it feels shocking, and yet should we be shocked by it? Munro had already conceived of the abuse Fremlin meted out to her nine year old daughter as infidelity! She had already argued with her daughter about whether that abuse did her harm! A mind, an adult mind, that can conceive of child sex abuse as infidelity, is profoundly diseased, and moreso, it is evil. This is simply that evil, on display yet again. 

And there were excuses, for there will always be excuses. For example, women like Munro will use feminism to excuse their despicable actions: 

“She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.”

That’s right ladies. Worry not! If you think you have a duty to protect your children from child sexual offenders, or hold those offenders accountable, or find that offence repugnant in any way, that’s actually just the patriarchy making you feel bad! Feminism means no responsibility for mothers!! Feminism means no accountability for even the most sordid of emotional crimes! You are never anything but a victim! Even your girl children are simply none of your concern, and you are absolved of all your basic duties to humanity! And nobody will want to look too closely especially when you paint such drab, compelling pictures of human relational life in your fiction! 

Meanwhile Skinner was left to pick up the pieces of the play Munro had made: 

“I believe my mother answered her own question about the girl in the story. She didn’t tell her mother because she would rather die than risk her mother’s rejection.

(…) I tried to forgive my mother and Fremlin and continued to visit them and the rest of my family. We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. It was what we did.”

Let me try to explain this strategy. I am going to do so in general, and I am going to speak more broadly now. I do not assume that Skinner herself would frame it this way — but, in my view — this strategy amounts to trying to psychologically kill the part of the victim that understands and knows that the abuse that was committed against them was wrong. Even the victim is gaslit into signing onto this. But it is, at this point, an easy sell; just think about the situation. Skinner had at this point no attractive choices. Her family was committed to maintaining omertà. They had rallied around the child sexual offender, despite the fact that he had admitted what he did, and then later on threatened to kill her. 

Skinner had two choices: rupture the family, or try to suffocate the part of herself that knew she had been violated and that everything and everyone in the family had been profoundly and completely corrupted by it. Everyone in life and culture wants you to choose the second option. They call this “forgiveness” and “love”. You are expected to forgive even when there has been no accountability, no amends. You are expected to forgive things for which no amends could be made.

The above is untenable. It does not work, such forgiveness is not possible. The mandate towards it only succeeds in creating silence, the kind of silence that people who do not care about other people can easily mistake for peace.  

“Years passed. My father continued to have lunches with my mother, never mentioning me. I asked him about these lunches before he died. He told me I just never came up in their conversations.” 

This is almost always how it happens. This is the dominant strategy if the family seeks to maintain the status quo. And so what happened eventually is what almost always must: Skinner had to cut contact with Munro. But Skinner tried to do this in a considerate and moderate way: “At first, I told her only that I could never see Fremlin again, never have him near my children.”

Munro’s response: “She explained how inconvenient it would be for her to visit me on her own, since she didn’t drive. I exploded, and told her our relationship was over.”

According to the Toronto Star, in fact the next day Munro phoned Skinner up to tell her she, Munro, forgave her, Skinner, for yelling at her. This is another almost exquisitely masterful example of gaslighting from Munro. To say to someone “I forgive you” is to directly imply that they wronged you. In the Gatehouse essay, Skinner says that after she revealed the abuse in her 20s she sensed Munro was “working hard to forgive me” — to forgive her, Skinner, for what happened to her when she was nine. And here now Munro, incapable of feeling anything other than victimhood during this saga in which she aids and abets the sexual abuse of her own child, now feels herself to be in the position of victim yet again, this time for being yelled at in response to these crimes.

There are no depths of moral depravity deeper than this, I think — or I thought that until I got to the next paragraph of the Star essay, when — 

“Two years later, when I was 38, I read an interview in the New York Times with my mother, in which she described Gerald Fremlin in very loving terms. She said she was lucky to have him in her life, and declared that she had a “close relationship” with all three of her daughters, including me. For three weeks I was too sick to move, and hardly left my bed. I had long felt inconsequential to my mother, but now she was erasing me.”

Imagine for one moment what this must feel like. Most of us would have to spend more than three weeks in bed to process this extraordinary brutality. The extent of the gaslighting here is actually beyond extraordinary: to me, of all things in the essay, knowing the psychology of people like Munro, even so, this still to me defies belief. This is pure evil. There is no other way to frame it. Not only did Munro emotionally abandon her child to torment at the hands of Fremlin, torment she knew point blank was real, that he admitted it, now she lies unchecked about him and Skinner and everything, not just to friends, but in the national news.

If you have never been substantially gaslit I am not sure entirely that I can explain how damaging it is to you. (Ha ha! Ironic!) You can get some insight into it reading Brandon Taylor’s essay here, not that you need me to recommend you Brandon Taylor. But still. In some sense the gaslighting here is the ultimate mutilation, for it assaults the central sensory organ: the mind. For it to be done socially is the ultimate erasure of the person, the denial of any remnant of the truth. All of us can come to accept that bad things have and will continue to happen to us; what we need and expect is acknowledgement of these deep and demonstrable harms, ideally from the people who claim that they love us. If not they, then fine — someone else. But we need to share reality with someone. It is almost impossible to explain, if you have not had it taken from you, how profound and deep is this need. 

And so then, and only then, Skinner went to the police. 

Fremlin, having previously admitted everything, was charged and convicted. Still Munro stayed. At this point I notice how easily we let “old people” off the hook for moral choices. How natural it feels to us to be disrespected by our seniors, older relatives, and parents. “They’re trying their best”— are they? Is that an empirical claim? Do we believe Munro was too old to do better than this? Let me put it to you point blank: if you are too old to divorce a child abuser, you are not old, you are already dead. 

This happens, by the way, outside of this horrendous example. One of the hardest things about getting older is you see other people peel off into this stance. “I’m too old to change” — this starts at 35 with some of you, I see it happen. You brick yourselves up in the tomb. I understand why you do it: change is the hardest thing most of us do, especially this kind of change, that radically rearranges our emotional realities. But the alternative is death, only death, you must know that. Life is the pain and horror of emerging into the new. There really is nothing else. 

I want at this point to also remind you that Munro did not merely stay with Fremlin. She actively supported and defended him in the international news. She had also been gaslighting and denying the reality of her daughter’s experience of childhood since long before Fremlin’s abuse took place. Munro’s crime is not merely standing by her man. She and Fremlin built a nest of abuse for those children, in the house where they should have built a family. 

And yet, in one of the most heartbreaking passages of the Gatehouse essay, Skinner agonised over whether turning Fremlin in constituted unfair harm to him. I almost cannot bear to paste in these passages, but I had to read them, and I think, so should you:

“I wanted to speak out for the truth. I went to the police and told them of my “historical” abuse, and showed them my stepfather’s letters. They pressed charges. I’d had to confront my shame (and other people’s), which was telling me I was being vindictive, destructive, cruel. For so long I’d been telling myself that holding my pain alone had at least helped other family members in important ways, and that the greatest good for the greatest number was, after all, the greatest good. Now, I was claiming my right to a full life, taking the burden of abuse and handing it back to my stepfather. Was I worth it? Was I even capable of a “full life”? How could I knowingly make any other human suffer only to maybe feel better?”

The resolution for Skinner — you will see so, read the essays — came for the same reason that many people only realise their own childhood was abusive in midlife: you now look at your own, or other, little children, and realise there is no way you could ever subject them to the things that had been done to you. 

So she did report him, and he was given 2 years probation and told to stay away from kids, and she says, in the Star essay:

“I was satisfied. I hadn’t wanted to punish him. I believed he was too old to hurt anyone else. What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me.

I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser. 

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. My mother’s fame meant the silence continued.”

And indeed, in her fame, or armed with some other excuse, how resistant we all are to this information. Most of us would like to pretend that this whole thing could not and does not exist. But at this point, I think Skinner asks something of us, and I think we are duty-bound to honour it. We cannot talk about Munro, or her work, without talking about what happened to Skinner. To avoid this subject is to compound it. To avoid is to remake the omertà. From this day forwards if you speak of Munro without this then you are corrupted by Fremlin’s crime. 

Here’s what that corruption looks like, what she says about it in her Gatehouse essay: 

“Again, there was no evidence of outrage from my family, no gathering around me to help or heal me. My mother stayed with my stepfather, and my father continued to have lunches with her, never mentioning me (I asked my father about these lunches before he died. With regret, he told me I just didn’t “come up” in conversation.)  My siblings and parents carried on with their busy lives. I was left alone with this thing, this ugliness. Me.” 

This continued until Skinner’s sister Jenny reached out to her, having made initial contact with Gatehouse. It’s astounding to me how often this happens: the children, the other children, the least culpable agents, are the first to feel the sting of guilt, and to wonder at their lack of understanding. 

Guilt is a cleansing emotion. It often points the way to the truth. From the portrait we have of them, combined with my experience, I think people like Munro and Fremlin do not feel guilt. They are too obsessed with their own tragedy and splendour, too easily able to summon an excuse. And could one more fawning New York Times piece fill the hole where a person should be? Why not — well, what more could you want? 

“As for my relationship with my mother, I never reconciled with her. I made no demands on myself to mend things, or forgive her. I grieved the loss of her, and that was an important part of my healing.”

At the very end of the Toronto Star essay, the two essays intersect. Skinner links to her Gatehouse essay here, with the text: 

“Children are still silenced far too often. In my case, my mother’s fame meant that the secrecy spread far beyond the family. Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false. It seemed as if no one believed the truth should ever be told, that it never would be told, certainly not on a scale that matched the lie. Until now.”

I think what is most awful about this point, at the end of the essay, is that Andrea Skinner’s experience with this aspect of the family is not rare. 

Parents often use the power they have over their children — material, but first and foremost psychological — to insist on their version of events.

The war Skinner describes inside herself is between the part of herself that knows what her mother and step-father did to her is wrong, and the part of her that psychologically depends on the construct of the family for a meaningful sense of belonging. It is upon that construct that the harm Munro does — sorry, academic present tense — did — to Skinner rests. 

There is a reason we don’t understand this, in fact at least two or three good reasons. First, the fact that Munro had so profoundly inverted the parent-child relationship that she not only didn’t give a fuck about her own daughter being sexually abused but saw herself as the only victim in the situation for the rest of her natural life puts the lie to our cultural stories about motherhood, as well as our understanding of what if anything exactly is natural or inevitable about parental or motherly love. 

Second, the fact that this was covered up by the whole community puts the lie to our stories about the meaning of community, too — bad luck for those of us who think flight back to community or family values can save us from the ennui of production. 

Third, and perhaps most relevant to literary, liberal, or so-called cultured people, the fact that people find and found Munro admirable and her stories emotionally insightful means that if we accept she too is or was a harmful and abusive person this challenges our understanding of who abusers are and how expertly they operate. We cherish that wrong understanding very deeply. Many of our lives are built around it. We want to believe that all things are as they appear. You saw me grapple with it briefly in the opening paragraph: I want to attribute what appears to be courageous honesty on the part of Mary Gaitskill in her Harper’s essay to a certain magnitude of spirit. But to know if she is in fact being honest, one would have to, at a minimum, actually know Mary Gaitskill. The rest of us can only know her prose. 

***

I seek a rehabilitation of guilt as a concept. Guilt is the natural result of responsibility, especially when there are structural power dynamics involved; think of teacher student, here, not only parent child.  If we wish to have power, as parents do over children, or agency, or any kind of sense of self, in general, then we will have to contend with guilt. We will err, at times. When we err, redemption may be possible. But only under certain circumstances. From what I observe, in our culture, these typically aren’t insisted on when the mandate of forgiveness comes down on the victim’s neck. 

Long ago on twitter (last year) during one of these interminable debates about harm and rehabilitation, Protik Islam-Jacobsson said something that always stuck with me: “You don’t have to think a man is irredeemable to be able to see that he hasn’t redeemed himself.” 

This echoes something laid out well in Hamlet, via Claudius, Shakespeare’s most lucid emissary of guilt, in a set of passages which even now are surprisingly direct and interpretable: 

My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer

Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murther’?

That cannot be; since I am still possess’d

Of those effects for which I did the murther-

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?

He concludes that on earth, through sham courts and bribes, this is possible. But it is not possible in heaven, which in early modern England means in the domain of the truth. Men can be fooled, but ’tis not so above. Above, there is no shuffling. 

Our own cultural mandate of forgiveness — and the quasi-religious threat of suffering and punishment if the forgiveness is “withheld” — shows that our communal psychological architecture is built around the idea that some people have a duty to stoically ie quietly absorb the harms and misdeeds of others, and then to absolve them of that harm. It is the comfort and emotional world of the status quo that is sacrosanct. The reason we mandate forgiveness is because it maintains the omertà, and we do not wish to reckon with the prevalence of mistreatment in our lives. Concerns about the younger generation being “soft” or “oversensitive” — “ungrateful,” “entitled” — as well as to keep in narrow bands the definition of “trauma”, is one plank in this strategic effort.

Protecting the sanctity of the word “trauma” is an effort to protect the belief that it is rare. Yet who could deny that what Munro inflicted on her daughter was a trauma in and of itself, that simply stands alongside the trauma inflicted by Fremlin, two halves of one matched set? And further, who can deny that many mothers treat their children — especially their daughters, but not only — in this way? “I had long felt inconsequential to my mother”: A person is not born with that. That feeling is implanted, nurtured. That feeling is not natural. That feeling is made. 

And so forgiveness as it is currently practiced in our culture is essentially avoidant. By encouraging spiritual bypassing of hurt and pain — and accountability, and redemption, and repair, and healing — it promises rewards to those victims who keep the omertà alive in spirit if not in law. How much distance is there between “I did not abuse you” and “Yes I abused you, but it is obviously okay (perhaps because I’ve suffered too) and so really, you have to forgive me”? A little, but in fact, not a lot. 

I wrote this guidebook entry to Skinner’s essay because many of the other responses I have seen to it are essentially confused. Most are too terrible to link to, but even those which are close to the mark, like this essay , still substantially miss it. To fawningly ask, of Munro, “If she couldn’t overcome the silences, who could?” is to fail to have read Skinner’s essays. Though at least this author can use the word evil. This is the word Munro deserves. Still, what a weak conclusion: “Alice Munro described the labyrinths of Canadian lives better than any other writer of her generation, but she could not find her way out any better than the rest of us.”

This is nonsense. Read again the Skinner essays. Does Munro’s behaviour strike you as morally normal? Average? Forget it. I realise I am not supposed to say this, but at this point in time it’s hard for me to escape the feeling that it’s not just some behaviour that is better than other behaviour but some people are indeed morally better than other people, and that in fact Munro is worse than you and I. (About myself I can speak with confidence, about you I speak only in terms of probability.) In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about how there are some truly evil people in this world, and they do not belong to any group. Evil is not concentrated only in nazis, or only in bigots, or only in our enemies, or only in men. Women, too, are capable of evil. Mothers can and do harm their kids. They sometimes do this on purpose, or with such dogged consistency that it no longer means anything to speak about intent.

Forgiveness is a good thing for an honest mistake. If there is anything in this world that abuse does not resemble, it is the honest mistake. Abuse is a pattern of control and disregard, much more akin to exploitation and subjugation than to healthy relational conflict. Abuse is a pattern by which one person or group’s full humanity is steadily eroded and subordinated. This may be obvious from the outset (and yet unavoidable — or not, at times) and yet more often it is not obvious at all. There may then be a single instigating event through which the pattern erupts into consciousness, but the pattern is already there. 

Forgiveness is good for when people are trying their best to love you and they come up short. However, not everyone is trying their best to love you. Not everyone who says they love you is telling you the truth. 

One might fear that the only alternative to forgiveness is to be angry forever. This is certainly what abusers and their apologists would like you to think, because they want the path to your salvation to go through them. They would love it if you have to forgive them to heal. Then they can hold the reins of power to the last. “Absolve my sins, or you will never be free”: not so. In fact you will never be free of someone while you still subscribe to their ideology. The mandate of forgiveness is the ideology of abuse. The power of Skinner’s essay is that she presents another way. 

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