"Christina's World"

Andrew Wyeth died last week. He has been criticized as being merely an “illustrator,” perhaps because he was popular and people who did not “know” art had emotional responses to his work. A sign of a poor painter, we all know.

Perhaps his most famous work is 1948’s Christina’s World. The painting was inspired by his neighbor, Christina Olson, who was disabled by polio (though the body in the painting is a composite of women—we will not get into the meta-qualities of the painting here, though).

If Wyeth is to be taken at his word, he certainly intended to show Olson as a sympathetic and inspiring subject. He described her as someone who "was limited physically but by no means spiritually." He said of the artistic process, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless." [1]

Admirable sentiments, perhaps, but there has always been something troubling about the painting for me. When I saw it for the first time as a child, I immediately felt an aversion to it. There was something about it that I responded negatively to. I believe it was the voyeuristic sensibility that saw in the piece (though I did not know to apply that label to it at the time). It felt to me as though we, the viewers, were watching the woman in a private moment, and that somehow felt wrong because she was disabled. At that time, I did not like people to watch me struggle with various simple tasks, like tying my shoelaces, and I perhaps projected my own dread onto her.

Perhaps I was also frightened by the bleakness of the landscape. The field is barren, the grass seems hard and dry (at least in the tiny reproductions, which were all I’d seen of the painting until three years ago), the sky seems to harboring a storm, and the buildings seem deserted. In this landscape I sensed a barrenness of life, of the life of the disabled woman, and of myself. She seemed alone to me, and I knew myself to be so.

Finally, and to my shame, I think I was a little afraid of her. People with disabilities are not immune to normate sensibilities, and it is often easier to fear what one is than to fear what one is not. The woman in the painting seems alien, Other. We do not see her face, and her frail arms and grasping hand suggest a terrible longing that will never be fulfilled. The figure is reaching away from us, but she is somehow reaching toward us as well, and that is what is frightening.

Now that I am older, I see the painting in a different light. I had always remembered the figure being further away and therefore more alien, but in reality she appears only a few feet ahead of us. If she were far away, we might feel we were watching the freak from the tree line, but her proximity to us suggests instead that we are with her; perhaps she is leading us to her home, where she will offer us tea and cookies. The landscape is still foreboding, but there is light on her body—perhaps too much light. It contrasts with her dark surroundings; it imbues her with vitality. Her arms appear wiry now, rather than frail; there is an energy in her reaching arm; the wisps of hair that fly about her head are not blown by the wind of an impending storm, but rather from her forward motion.

The beauty of the painting is not that it is “inspiring”; it is that it can cause feelings of peace and of dread, sometimes at the same time. One would think that a painting with so much richness, so much depth, and such that can inspire such dichotomous readings could only be painted by a real artist. Rest in peace, Andrew Wyeth.

The implications of genetic screening

An interesting article recently appeared on Slate. It relates a news story of genetic screening. The article is certainly on the right track with its appeal to call genetic screening what it is: eugenics. But it does not go quite far enough.

If we start screening embryos for cancer genes and start destroying the ones that have them, what are we really doing? We are sparing those who are born the disease, yes. But we are also saying that those creatures who could develop cancer are undesirable. We are saying, essentially, "We don't want you polluting our gene pool!" This is undeniable:

The embryos were not selected according to gender, so it is a coincidence the baby was a girl, doctors said. Even if they had tried to choose a male embryo, this would not have eradicated the cancer gene because a boy could still carry it and pass it on to future generations. (Mail Online)

Think for a moment of any person you know, or know of, who has, or has had, cancer. Think about what they mean to you. Think about what life means to them. If they had been screened as an embryo, they would have been destroyed. They never would have been born. Does genetic screening still seem like a good idea?

It is only a small step to carry this screening over to other areas. And what will be the first of those areas? Teratism. If the norms can screen out those who would be born with flippers or dwarfism or other deformites and disabilities, they will.

Let's be clear before we go on, people with disabilities are not necessarily a burden on society. Even those who might not be able to support themselves are no more a burden than the millions of able-bodied people the world over who refuse to get a job or who commit crimes or who are just, simply, jerks.

This may not seem like a problem to some people, and that is precisely the problem. Disability will never be entirely wiped out, as accidents will always have the potential of creating new members. These people will suffer even more from society's prejudices, though, if they live in a world where their kind is virtually nonexistent and largely regarded as undesirable. In a world that destroys the disabled before they are born, will they destroy them after they are made?

All genetic screening does is allow society to eliminate the disabled before they become big enough to make the norms feel guilty about getting rid of them.

Why can't monsters find love?

I recently finished reading the anthology, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and was quite enjoying it right up until the last story, “You were Neither Hot nor Cold, but Lukewarm, and so I Spit You Out,” by Cara Spindler and David Erik Nelson. First, it was only a mediocre story, competently, but not excitingly written, less than gripping, with its mock-allegorical style—hardly the strong finish an anthology should have. The real disappointment came, however, on the penultimate page:

Maybe Cain rose up because he’d found himself a girlfriend and there was no room in that tiny half-past-Eden world for a warped stray, not in the land of pairs two-by-two. Maybe Abel wasn’t so much favored by God as he was an aberrant freak, a half that could never find its better half because it had been born malformed, half-formed, quasi-modo, twisted and stunted at birth. (p. 371)

I rankle at so many things in that paragraph: the lazy biblical revision (it’s just so easy to adapt biblical stories to your agenda; at least put some effort into it; this revision takes into account none of the details of the story and could therefore be applied to almost anything), the grating language (the juxtaposition of modern colloquialism [“he’d found himself”] with an attempt at something poetic [“born malformed, half-formed, quasi-modo, twisted and stunted at birth”], the awkward-sounding repetition of the word “half”), the fact that this “profound” conclusion doesn’t mesh well with the premise previously laid out in the story (that the protagonist’s wife turns into a monster every night—I guess it’s okay because she’s a really hot monster?).

What’s really upsetting about it, though, is the fact that few people would find it upsetting. This “epiphany” comes at the expense of a club-footed character (who inexplicably develops a bad arm at the climax of the story—perhaps to make him even less sympathetic?). The idea is that the deformed brother wants to kill the protagonist’s wife, not because the protagonist himself was afraid for his life and wanted to kill her only a few pages earlier, but because he, the Club-Footed Janitor, can’t understand love, you know, on account of being so … deformed and all.

This idea is extended beyond just the one character: by using the archetypal Cain and Abel, the authors implicitly include all deformed people in their conclusion. To sum up: deformed people—freaks—can’t get girlfriends, don’t understand love, and should be eliminated. Imagine any other minority in there—Black, Jewish, homosexual—and the insult becomes clear. The fact that I have to explain to norms why this passage is so offensive is what makes me sad.

New Year's 2009

A new year, a new start. Why does New Year’s always make one feel so hopeful, as though one can wipe everything clean, as though that can ever happen? It’s very religious thing, like the Jewish Day of Atonement, or a Christian baptism. In fact, many religions throughout history have had some sort of ceremony that involved atonement and a clearing away of past wrongs. It must be a very basic human need to feel that there don’t have to be consequences to one’s mistakes, to believe that one can change and avoid the same mistakes, to believe that perfection awaits them.

It is helpful. If a person gets a shiny new car or MP3 player or game system, they are bound to take very good care of it for a while. It’s only after that first mistake—that first little ding or scratch, the first time dropped or jolted or smacked because of skipping—that one’s care for that item diminishes. Before you know it, you’ve got a junker of a car, you don’t even bother to put a skin on your MP3 player, and you put your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on top of your game system while you play. Once things reach that point, you’re not going to go back to caring for those things the way you did at the beginning.

If we didn’t believe in forgiveness, then relationships would fall apart after a few small mistakes. Forgiveness is so important, and not just in a spiritual way, but in a very practical way. If you harbor resentment over the wrong somebody has done you, you make it that much harder for them to treat you with the care they would exhibit for an undamaged item: in essence, you keep yourself a junker rather than allowing yourself to become a shiny convertible right off the showroom floor.

All of us in the secular world should have a Day of Atonement, a day when we remember to apologize for the wrongs we have done to others, and just as important, a day when we remember to forgive the wrongs others have done to us. I guess in some ways, New Year’s serves as that day.