In my Humanities class entitled "The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition", I use the marvelous work of John Bradshaw as a lens through which to interpret four masterworks of Western literature: the book of Genesis, Euripides' Medea, Ibsen's Doll's House, and Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. We're just finishing up Ibsen this week.
I first read A Doll's House in a comparative literature course in college. It was a class taught from an explicitly feminist perspective, and nothing else we read that semester lingered with me as long. (Interestingly enough, it was the only thing we read written by a man.) For those who don't know Ibsen's famous play, it's the story of a married couple, Nora and Torvald Helmer, trapped in a profoundly dysfunctional marriage built on an unhealthy patriarchal model. We meet Nora as a featherweight of a woman, giggly and flirtatious and manipulative, seemingly addicted to shopping and candy. But through a series of stunning revelations, she is transformed. At the end of the play, she leaves her husband -- and her two young children -- to go off and "find herself." Written in 1879 in Scandinavia, it remains a stunningly modern work; it is very useful both in teaching a course on family systems and on feminism.
The famous exchange between Nora and Torvald at the end of the play is much on my mind:
NORA: What do you consider my most sacred duties?
TORVALD: Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?
NORA: I have other duties just as sacred.... Duties to myself.
TORVALD: Before all else you are a wife and mother.
NORA: I don’t believe that any longer, I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quiet well, Torvald, that most people would think you right and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them.
This week, the students are writing papers analysing this exchange. From a family systems perspective, at least that articulated by Bradshaw, it's Nora who is clearly in the right. Nora's duty to self-actualize did not cease at the moment she married or became a mother. She married and reproduced too young, and now must do later what she ought to have done earlier, but she still must do it.
My students, of course, are conflicted. Having taught this course many times, I know why. All of them agree that if Torvald and Nora had no children, she'd be right as rain to leave him. But she's the mother to two little boys and a girl, and clearly, she's walking out on them as well. My students -- few of whom are parents, but many of whom were children of divorce themselves -- are usually angry at Nora. Most young people, I've found as a teacher, are a charming mixture of cynicism and idealism: while they tend to doubt their own chances of ever finding true and enduring love, they have an almost child-like faith in marriage itself. And they have, not surprisingly, a very elevated sense of what a parent's duties are. They are much closer to the rigid Torvald Helmer than to his suddenly liberated wife.
In what I regard as one of my best posts this year, I wrote a tribute to my mother in March: "My life doesn't just revolve around you": a note of gratitude for a feminist mom. I wrote:
But my mother's greatest feminist lesson was this: she made it clear that we could not expect women to drop everything for us. Relationships mattered, families mattered, love mattered -- but personal happiness mattered too! My mother knew that someday her sons would be in relationships with women, and she knew enough to know that how she met our needs as small boys would be reflected in many of our choices when we became boyfriends, lovers, and husbands. So she showed us two things:
1. She loved us very, very much and always would
2. Her happiness was not solely contingent upon us
I grew up with absolute certainty about both of these things, and it was and is one of the greatest gifts my mother could have given me...my adult feminism is linked in no small way to the lessons she taught me. Motherhood, I learned, is a role -- but it need not be an all-consuming identity. The fact that my mother had a life outside of her children gave me the confidence to live out my life without fear that I would destroy her if I made mistakes or deviated from a planned path. Her commitment to her own happiness allowed me to make a similar commitment to my own -- and for that, I will forever be tremendously grateful.
My parents had a very different marriage from the Helmers. They lived in Santa Barbara in the 1960s and early 70s, not fin-de-siecle Northern Europe. But for feminists, the notion of the "sacred duty to the self" is one that transcends culture, time and place. Then, as now, most people think the Torvalds of the world are right; while the books to which Nora refers demanded women's obedience, the popular literature produced today by pro-family advocates stresses the destructive nature of divorce and the duty of parents to sublimate their own needs for those of their children. We live in an era of reactionary social views, where an increasingly vocal element (the Wade Horns and Maggie Gallaghers of the world) seeks to bolster not only heterosexual marriage, but the notion that divorce is almost always fundamentally bad for all involved.
As someone who was raised by a single mom and has himself been thrice divorced, I realize I could be accused of constructing an interdisciplinary humanities course that justifies both my own world view and my life experience. My fellow Christians, who are often raised with an idolatrous perspective on the family, push me to reconsider whether my own views owe more to my own sinful nature and the secular culture than to an authentically God-centered outlook. But to me, the most important thing Jesus ever said about the family comes in Matthew 10:35-37, a passage on which most pastors ought to preach regularly, but hardly ever do:
For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— a man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
When was the last time you heard a really good sermon on that?
At the core of my being as a Christian, as a feminist, as an armchair psychologist, as a professor, as a youth worker, as a husband and, someday, a father, I believe that putting Christ before family means more than rebelling against a non-believing parent. It means more than being willing to be as Abraham was with Isaac. To be in relationship with Christ is to be on a unique and special journey, a journey of transformation, of change, of redemption. It is a journey that can often be walked with a parent, a child, a spouse, a sibling, a friend. But when husbands or wives or children stand in the way of continued growth, then the duty to the self (in relationship with Christ) trumps any other obligation.
Ibsen, the master psychologist, was hardly a Christian. Nora Helmer's famous decision to leave her husband is rarely seen as a choice compatible with the Gospel. And of course, in my classes, I don't introduce an explicitly Christian perspective on her choice. But here on this blog, where I try (with varying degrees of success) to tie together the various strands of my life, I can make the case that self-actualization and personal discovery are not at odds with the call to follow Jesus. Divorce, especially when children are involved, will be agonizing. But when we leave marriages that can't be saved, when we choose to believe that parenthood and husband-hood and wife-hood do not mean an end to one's obligation to oneself -- these are not inherently selfish choices. Sometimes, following the cross means walking away from everyone who loves you. Sometimes, following the cross means choosing the obligation to transform over the obligation of the marriage vow.
I suspect few who read this will agree with me. My secular friends see no need for me to drag in Scripture; my conservative friends may be angered at what they see as a serious misreading of Matthew 10. But while I may indeed be mistaken, cloaking selfish self-justification in the rhetoric of personal growth and the language of the Gospel, I remain convinced that the "duty to the self" and the "call to the cross" are more compatible than most of us ever imagine.
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