In Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 18th-century French novel of cynicism by Choderlos De Laclos, the seductress goads her partner in erotic predation to break off his affair with the lady whose virtue had been surrendered to him. His break is effected in a letter that his female co-predator dictates. When, later, the seducer realizes that he did love his victim, he confides to his co-conspirator his hopes of winning her back. However, his confederate informs him that the case is quite hopeless since his letter breaking it off was composed by a woman and …
women know
how to strike at another woman
irreparably.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about sisterhood and its potentially destructive power. With regard to illustrative incidents in my own life, I’ve been wondering, what was really going on? Since women are subtle, rarely putting all their cards face up on the table, the answers aren’t obvious.
Take my own case, in the aftermath of the death of my parents. They’d been unusually good and interesting people. Around them a circle of friends had gathered who, so far as I could tell, loved and enjoyed their originality and moral authority. I took for granted that these relationships, most especially the friendships with the colleagues, would continue on the same firm footing after my parents were gone.
My closest inherited woman friend, also a philosopher, was single by choice, of Viking descent, and could spend entire summers alone among her ancestral Nordic fjords. She was not interested in ethical judgments, living in a space that was, as she saw it, beyond good and evil. Whereas I loved cafes and museums. We never tried to change each other but enjoyed what she called our “oppositeness” – in a candid, intuitive closeness that it would never have occurred to me to question.
I noted one change after my parents’ death: a relative of mine – not a philosopher – had taken to attacking me behind my back in some of the venues we had shared during the lifetime of my parents.
It had been the custom of my Viking friend to host a party every year whose main guests were other philosophers. As a matter of course, I’d be invited too. This year, knowing of my problem with the relative, my Viking friend checked with me as to whether she should invite her to that annual party. I did not think it fair to exclude my relative from the party merely because she was at war with me. So I said yes.
That turned out to be a mistake. My warring relative entered the party scene with an escort, not with any air of pleasure at being invited, but with a look of theatrical outrage – as if she were the victimized party.
My Viking hostess appeared to miss the aggressive intent of such a display. Instead, she appeared to take it at face value, remarking to me afterward that, so far as she could see, my relative believed herself to have been the wronged party. Subsequently, taking her “misreading” further than I would have thought possible, my Viking friend persuaded a different hostess – whose husband was also a philosopher – not to invite me – but to invite my aggressive relative instead – to their philosophers’ party. The evening after that party, I happened to walk into a neighborhood restaurant where I found the non-inviting hostess dining with my relative-on-the-war-path, now joined by my Viking colleague – all looking like a conspiratorial threesome caught in the act.
There is a lot more to that story, but by now the plotline must be clear. Wherever the relative-on-the-war-path went, she carried fictional tales discreditable to me, that to my amazement were credited by people who knew no evil of me!
The same sort of defamatory gossip eventually separated me from the circle of my parents’ New York friends. While this multi-tiered episode was going on, I was not surprisingly diagnosed with cancer. After the rigors of treatment, the threatening illness did not recur. That may have been because I took the precaution of ending every last one of these betrayed friendships.
It’s been many years since the events occurred that I’m retelling and they are now – along with the hurt of them – safely in the past. But in another sense, the past is present because remembered, and still holds its opacities.
What do I think really happened? First of all, the world’s contents do include intelligent malice. Such malice has influence not merely because its fictions can sound credible but because the capacity to generate defamations registers as power. Those who come in contact with felt power don’t necessarily ask after its pedigree – whether its claims are true and authentic as opposed to barbarously false.
They ask … who is stronger?
When, in a gracious spirit, I gave my Viking friend the go-ahead to invite my antagonistic relative to her party – gave it on the grounds of fairness – and then did not forcefully and persistently fight her “misreading” of my relative’s pretended victimhood – my Viking friend read the performance of social aggressiveness as strength. Which (in a way stupefying to me) it was.
Whatever took shape later, when the consequences had gathered momentum, it was likely that my Viking friend had not initially meant to do me harm. She knew many varieties of discernment, but moral discriminations had never been among them. She could no more wield those than I could spend a summer alone by a fjord.
