sovereignty

Thursday in Jackson’s class--the ENG-310 with the horrendously long name: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval British Literature--Dr. Jackson told us something about wills and submission:

1. In order to have submit your will to someone else, you must have a will. (This is a tautology.)

2. Submitting your will to someone else is the greatest expression of sovereignty.

I don't know if he's right or not, but I've been thinking. (For a shorter version, skip to "what I learned.")

examples from literature

Last year in another English class with a horrendously long name--Freshman Rhetoric and Great Books II--we read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The book is full of suffering, and toward the end, Svidrigailov attempts to rape Dunya. Sparknotes summarizes the scene (part V chapter V) like this:

Svidrigailov lures Dunya to his room...While Dunya becomes faint with anger and confusion, Svidrigailov offers to help Raskolnikov [her brother] avoid punishment if she will marry him. In horror, she runs to the door, only to discover that Svidrigailov has locked it. He threatens to rape her, warning that he can report her brother if she reports him. She pulls out a revolver, threatens him with it, and accuses him of poisoning his late wife. He dares her to fire, and she does, twice, but manages only to graze his temple. Svidrigailov moves to embrace her but, realizing that she will never love him, lets her go. Putting the revolver in his pocket, he goes out shortly thereafter.

Sparknotes doesn't do the scene justice, and I would quote from the book but it's elsewhere, probably Louisville. Sparknotes misses something key: Dunya drops the revolver. We discussed this in class. Dunya drops the revolver, making herself completely vulnerable to Svidrigailov. A moment passes where nothing happens. Svidrigailov stares at the revolver on the ground, one shot left in it. Silence. Svidrigailov runs out of the room.

Something about Dunya's voluntary, willful vulnerability scared the [feces] out of Svidrigailov, and he ran away.

He threatened to rape her--what better way to assert your will, violently, on someone else? The door was locked and, once she dropped the revolver, there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop him. But she was in control of the situation. She submitted her will, and, inasmuch as these things are won and lost, Dunya won.

Something similar happens in the Beowulf movie, and I will tell you and spoil it in order to prevent you from watching the movie. A warrior is about to kill Beowulf (the hero), so Beowulf rips off his armor, piece by piece, walks over and says go ahead, kill me. And the warrior can't do it.

In Jackson's class, we're reading the Canterbury Tales, and today we discussed the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Clerk's Tale.

A superficial reading of the Wife of Bath's Tale says the tale is about what women want most. The Wife of Bath has had an unfortunate number of husbands and--well, she's very beautiful--she uses sex to get what she wants from her current husband. Meta touta, a knight rapes a maiden and the queen's council sentences him to death unless he can figure out what women want most. He eventually finds the Wife of Bath, who by this time is old and ugly. She tells him that she'll answer his question if he promises to comply with her first request. The knight agrees, the Wife whispers in his ear, the knight tells the queen that women's greatest desire is sovereignty, and the Wife requests that the knight marry her. He does so, reluctantly, and in bed that night she gives him two options: she can be ugly and faithful or beautiful with no guarantees about who she's sleeping with. He lets her decide (giving her sovereignty) and she becomes beautiful and faithful (exactly what he wants).

The Clerk's Tale also deals with the issue of sovereignty. The Marquis chooses the daughter of the poorest man in the poorest village to be his wife. She agrees to obey his every wish (whether he makes her laugh or suffer) and to be always happy and never grumble. They have a daughter and he decides to tempt her: he takes away her daughter and leads her to believe her daughter is dead; she bears him a son and he does the same; he sends her back to her father with nothing; he announces that he's to remarry and asks her to plan the wedding. She doesn't bat an eye, doesn't weep, just lets him do what he wants. In the end he marries her again.

what i knew and what i learned

Marriages work best when the husband and wife both submit their wills to each other.

If both parties go into a marriage selfishly, she she will be either manipulative and controlling or passive and clingy; he will be either abusive or a pushover.

There's a difference between being passive and submitting your will. I can't explain it (I tried and failed), but anyone can tell the difference between a man who is genuinely courteous and a man who is genuinely a pushover. A courteous man will do what the woman asks because he wants to please her; a pushover will do what the woman asks because he's afraid of not pleasing her. Or because he wants something.

Courteous men are wonderful, and the mark of a courteous man is that he submits his will without being passive (I think).

I've been topsy-turvy for at least a year trying to figure out how to be a good woman. Ask me how to be a good man, and I would tell you to go read "If" by Rudyard Kipling and the Boy Scout Law. But nobody writes those sorts of things for women.

But the answer is simple. To be a good man, what you have to do is submit your will. To be a good woman, what you have to do is submit your will.

Submit your will. That's all. It's simply a matter of pride.

Simple, but not easy.

I complain that I can't be "helpful" at Hillsdale but I think I'm really complaining that I can't show off how physically strong I am (not that it's much).

I get really offended at woman jokes, but honestly? that's a matter of pride, too.

I get upset when they need volunteers and they have men move tables and women bring food out. That's completely pride.

Submit your will.

First to God.

Second to other people.

But submit it. Humble yourself.