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Sunday, May 04, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: A Place To Stand
I never know what I'm going to write about on a Sunday morning until my fingers land on the keys. Truly, I never do.
Yesterday evening, the C.S.O. and I enjoyed an old favorite movie: Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, C. Aubrey Smith, and Leo G. Carroll, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's classic novel, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was a rare pleasure, being among Hitchcock's early triumphs, and superbly faithful to the story and tone of Miss du Maurier's book. Many a viewer is wholly captivated by the suspense elements of the story: Why did young widower Maxim de Winter marry "beneath him?" Why, given his great wealth, his social position, and his beautiful young wife, was he so perpetually grim? Why was his mercurial mood so often exercised at her expense?
Of course, the story ultimately reveals all the answers. But one who concentrates solely on these things is in danger of missing the larger, enveloping theme in which Miss du Maurier wrapped her story: the supreme importance of class divisions and distinctions to the English people in the period of which she wrote.
The evil Mrs. Danvers, longtime housemistress of Manderly utterly devoted to the memory of the late Rebecca de Winter, first shows her colors by maintaining a frigid distance from the new lady of the house, though the new Mrs. de Winter is from the same class as she. After all, one who has married an aristocrat -- in England, persons of great wealth and property have been deemed aristocrats even if they have no "official" title -- is expected to behave like one, most particularly by maintaining her reserve around the servants. Still, the new Mrs. de Winter persists in trying to befriend Mrs. Danvers and the rest of the staff; some of them show her a degree of polite reciprocation, but ultimately we are shown that the "belowstairs" folks will not have it. It endangers their place in society, a place guaranteed to them by birth and station, just as the de Winters' place is guaranteed to them by their fortune.
Americans struggle to understand the attachment of the "lower classes" to a class system such as that depicted in Rebecca. Why on Earth, we ask, would anyone cherish a social arrangement that locks him into a fixed position for his whole life, and inexorably predestines his children, and theirs, to occupy the very same rung on the ladder? The answer is embedded in one of the deepest of all human needs: our need for a place to stand which can never, ever be taken away.
A class system does limit the heights to which one can aspire, but it also guarantees a place to stand to each of its subjects. Though one's place might be the lowest of the low, it is nonetheless one's own: one's property, protected by social conventions more trustworthy than any legislated law. From that guaranteed station flow innumerable other certainties, most particularly a sure knowledge of what is expected of oneself, and what conduct will and won't be tolerated, by oneself toward others and by others toward oneself.
The rigidity of the arrangement allows its subjects a degree of relaxation, even of serenity, that Americans can barely comprehend. Through her depiction of Mrs. Danvers, who had become devoted to the late, gloriously beautiful, quintessentially aristocratic Rebecca de Winter despite Rebecca's thoroughgoing corruption and cruelty, Daphne du Maurier shows us how jealously some will defend it.
This is not a brief for a class system. It's an elucidation of something deeper. Read on!
There's no class system here in the United States, we tell one another. Americans rise or fall on the basis of merit, not birth or inherited property. Here in the Land of the Free, an individual is infinitely mobile, his place never fixed until the day he dies. Something like the story of Rebecca isn't possible here.
Yeah, right.
We have several sorts of classes here. Some are more penetrable than others, and of course some individuals resist being bound to any class regardless of what the rest of our society might think. All the same, at any given instant, each of us occupies a rung on the social ladder which defines what we may and must not do, and what we may and must not expect from the occupants of other rungs. We "learn our place," however persistent or ephemeral it might be, by adapting to our rungs. We learn our limitations by attempting to move from rung to rung. Socially, not occupationally or economically.
After the movie, one of the C.S.O.'s observations about the English class system struck me with particular force: Among the things the lower classes hated most, she said, was when a member of the upper classes departed from the behavioral envelope expected of him. It disturbed their certainties and undermined their unarticulated faith in the proposition that the privileged belonged in their positions. Thus, we have the phenomenon of servants rejecting companionable overtures from their masters, out of fear of the implication that neither one's place was firm or trustworthy. We have the matched phenomenon of servants collaborating with their masters in concealing egregious behavior that might bring shame upon their masters' class -- not for the masters' benefit, but for the servants' peace of mind.
An interesting inversion of this phenomenon applies to one of our American classes: the class we call "celebrities."
The word "celebrity" has acquired all sorts of connotations. I've often cracked wise, here and elsewhere, about "people who are famous for being famous," as any longtime Eternity Road reader will know. One of the most pungent of those connotations is that a celebrity is deemed guilty of dissolution and shameful self-indulgence, including disdain for the law, until proven innocent. The Paris Hiltons, Lindsay Lohans, and Brittney Spearses; the telephone-hurling Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe; the drunken Mickey Rourke; the loudmouthed pugnacity of Sean Penn -- these and others have given "celebrity" its most recent coloration. Our Old Media strives to perpetuate and saturate that coloration with every word and picture it publishes.
Now let's consider the exceptions, and the way the Old Media, most powerful of all the forces that defend American class distinctions, treats those exceptions, both in their habitual behavior and when they depart from it.
Few actors, directors, or producers can equal the achievements of Mel Gibson. This superb actor and filmmaker is very nearly a pariah in Hollywood, because he defies the conventions of his class. He's a devout Catholic, unabashed about his faith and his fidelity to it, has been married to the same woman for many years and has apparently never strayed, dared to make a beautiful and deeply religious movie about the climax of Christ's life, and cares not one whit what anyone thinks about any of it. The Old Media, being deeply indebted to the entertainment world's power structure, has hardly had a word to say about him these past fifteen years, except for one event: his drunken-driving arrest, in the course of which he uttered a handful of slurs about Jews. That episode was trumpeted to the skies: See? They're all like this. Even the holier-than-thou specimens, when they think no one is watching.
The point of that burst of seedy publicity was twofold: first and less important, to run Gibson's image down; second and by far the more important, to preserve the iconic image of the American celebrity class as a hotbed of dissolution and self-indulgence. That image sells a lot of newspapers and gossip rags.
Another superb, under-publicized actor, Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Gibson's movie The Passion, should take note: Even the smallest slip and this could happen to you.
The current flap over Miley Cyrus's rather innocent photo spread in Vanity Fair is on all fours with this. Miss Cyrus -- "Hannah Montana" -- has achieved greatly. Given her fresh beauty, her talent, and her charm, the Old Media might have taken her up as a successor to the previous generation of pop princesses, endlessly detailing her doings to a mesmerized world. It hasn't, for one giant reason: Miss Cyrus is a publicly professing Christian who takes it seriously.
But those photos in Vanity Fair! Well, what about them? Suddenly, the Old Media are agog about Miss Cyrus's "shamelessness." Unfortunately, she and her father (country & western star Billy Ray Cyrus) have issued all sorts of obsequious apologies about them, even though there wasn't one single indecent thing about them. The suggestion that there might be a naked body under those sheets was enough to trigger the mantra once more: See? They're all like this. In five years she'll be partying without panties. The "Christians" are all hypocrites, no better than any of the others, and don't let anyone tell you differently.
The iconic image of female-celebrity-as-shameless-slut must be defended at all costs. Advertising revenues are at stake, yes, but there's more: celebrity journalism's place in the world, which depends critically on the maintenance of the celebrity class's image.
Class is about hierarchy; hierarchy is about having a place to stand. The message of Christ was explicitly anti-hierarchical, in which regard it cuts deeply into the worldview of our species. Surely some of us are better than others? Surely a hierarchy among men, sorting us into higher and lower on the basis of objective criteria, must exist? How can it not, when we are so plainly different from one another? If there is no valid hierarchy, how, then, does one locate one's proper place?
But there is a hierarchy: a true, firm, and supportive hierarchy, that cannot be overturned by the efforts or missteps of men. The problem lies in accepting it, for it allows no distinctions among men as men. Yet it is as important to our health as anything disconnected from physical sustenance could possibly be.
I wrote some time ago about the metaphysical junction at the core of the human animal: the fusion of our nature -- what we are -- to our individuation -- who we are. This might be the most important subject in all of Man's study of himself. It postulates that we have both mutable and immutable parts. It suggests that there exists a way to determine what we can change -- where we can improve ourselves -- how high we can hope to rise -- and which of our limitations are permanent and must not be tampered with.
Our limitations are what assign us to our place in any hierarchy. Whether intrinsic or imposed, they are what bounds our mobility, by definition. When we ponder temporal hierarchies such as the English classes, we soon realize that there's nothing absolutely immutable about any man's position. Any commoner can be knighted; any nobleman can be disgraced; any underclass can pull off a revolution. The hierarchy is only firm under existing conditions...if it's firm at all.
A genuinely firm hierarchy, trustworthy regardless of time, space, or circumstance, must be invulnerable to changes in any of those three things. That is, its roots must lie outside our temporal realm. If we can muster the courage to admit to our limitations, we can find our place in it quite easily:
- We are mortal;
- We are fallible;
- Our powers are limited.
The angels are not mortal, though they are fallible and their powers, though greater than ours, are still quite limited. They stand above us, having been created before us and being in direct communion with God. God is neither mortal nor fallible, and His powers are unbounded as we understand such things; thus, He stands above the angels, and of course above all other things as well.
Dare we look downward? Why not? The beasts are mortal, fallible, and punier even than we, having been denied the gift of reason. The vegetable world is lower still. (If you have a need to feel superior to something, perhaps that will satisfy it.)
But in this eternal hierarchy, place does not equate to privilege. Just because we're capable of something doesn't mean we're morally free to do it. An English gentleman of the Edwardian and earlier eras was, de facto, free to thrash a surly servant or molest a servant girl. Technically, it was assault; in practice, the law would not act against him. But we are not authorized to torment the beasts or wantonly despoil the forests. Similarly, the angels are not authorized to rampage freely among us, reaping lives and sowing suffering however they may. The eternal hierarchy grants us the security of a place to stand and the guarantee that it will be guarded for all time by One Whom nothing can overthrow.
Without that guarantee that our place is secure, we could conclude that God is merely the supreme Oppressor, rather than the Fount of all that is good. But the Creator loves us; were it otherwise, He would not have created the world, placed us in it, and given us the run of it.
At the time of Christ's Ministry, the Judaic religious authorities, with the connivance and support of the Roman occupying power, had made their religion a source of temporal power and class distinction. The resulting hierarchy featured a moneyed, privileged class, a lower one of traders, artisans, and shopkeepers, and a still lower one of peasants who could scarcely afford to feed their families, much less make the donations and sacrifices demanded as the price of entry to the Temple. Christ dismissed the entire structure; He went directly to the lowest of the low and taught among them without regard for property or stature. That, plus the extreme simplicity and lightness of His New Covenant, were what made him a deadly threat to the religious powers of His day.
But His message of liberation was simultaneously an earthquake under the feet. The Jews of Judea, for all their chafing under the rule of the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees, knew their place; it was theirs, and seemingly could not be taken away. How dare this itinerant preacher, dispossessed of the world and everything in it, followed by an equally ragtag band of former fishermen who depended for their lives upon the charity of strangers, tell the Chosen People of God that their hierarchy must give way to His newfangled egalitarianism, His Covenant of rules so few that one could count them on one's fingers? That sort of thing can get you executed for preaching without a permit.
Christ told them to judge the tree by the fruit it bears. We have two thousand years' fruit of the Christian hierarchy before us. Compare it to all the temporal hierarchies and codes that have infested the world, before Him or since. How stands His structure in your eyes? And how comfortable do you find your place in it?
May God bless and keep you all.
