Illus. from “Little Dorrit”
I sometimes think that if I really understood how resentment works, I would understand American politics. It seems to drive a lot of what we do, especially when times are hard.
For example, the Tea Party movement was triggered by Rick Santelli’s resentful rant against proposals to help homeowners who had purchased homes they could no longer afford and who were facing foreclosure. Often the real culprits were banks making irresponsible loans but put that aside for a moment. Even if the defaulting owners had indeed been irresponsible, supporting them could have saved the housing values of “deserving” homeowners. That’s because propping up one house on a block can protect the others from also losing value.
Instead, people preferred to vent their spleen on the unfortunates and everyone lost billions in home equity. I suppose it was a version of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which has all my admiration at the moment, provides us with vivid images of resentment. It also offers us an old-fashioned alternative.
The former governess Miss Wade functions as the spirit of resentment in the novel. We watch as this angry woman virtually possesses Tattycoram, an orphan who has been adopted by the well-meaning Mr. and Mrs. Meagles to be a companion to their daughter. At times Tattycoram is grateful to them but at others she burns with resentment. It is at those moments that Miss Wade wades in, as in their first encounter. Tattycoram first:
I am afraid of you.’
‘Afraid of me?’
‘Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my own—whatever it is—I don’t know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am ill-used, I am ill-used!’ Here the sobs and the tears, and the tearing hand, which had all been suspended together since the first surprise, went on together anew.
The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile. It was wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.
‘I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it’s me that looks after her, as if I was old, and it’s she that’s always petted and called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a fool of her, they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she thinks no more of me than if I was a stock and a stone!’ So the girl went on.
Tattycoram’s mood is only temporary, however, and eventually she works her way back to gratitude:
‘Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me, I am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough, and sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don’t and won’t. What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies. They think I am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want. They are nothing but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could ever be kinder to a thankless creature than they always are to me. Do, do go away, for I am afraid of you. I am afraid of myself when I feel my temper coming, and I am as much afraid of you. Go away from me, and let me pray and cry myself better!’
Wade is persistent, however, and eventually pulls Tattycoram away from her home. When Mr. Meagles tries to retrieve his adopted daughter, Wade stokes Tattycoram’s sense of ill-treatment:
‘See here,’ she said, in the same level way as before. ‘Here is your patron, your master. He is willing to take you back, my dear, if you are sensible of the favor and choose to go. You can be, again, a foil to his pretty daughter, a slave to her pleasant willfulness, and a toy in the house showing the goodness of the family. You can have your droll name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is right that you should be pointed out and set apart. (Your birth, you know; you must not forget your birth.) You can again be shown to this gentleman’s daughter, Harriet, and kept before her, as a living reminder of her own superiority and her gracious condescension. You can recover all these advantages and many more of the same kind which I dare say start up in your memory while I speak, and which you lose in taking refuge with me—you can recover them all by telling these gentlemen how humbled and penitent you are, and by going back to them to be forgiven. What do you say, Harriet? Will you go?’
The girl who, under the influence of these words, had gradually risen in anger and heightened in color, answered, raising her lustrous black eyes for the moment, and clenching her hand upon the folds it had been puckering up, ‘I’d die sooner!’
Wade isn’t entirely wrong and Mr. Meagles acknowledges that he has made mistakes, starting with the name. All of us, I dare say, have both slighted others and been the targets of slights. But a life filled with resentment is a miserable life, as Tattycoram learns from her time spent with Wade. She describes it when she returns to the Meagles family at the end of the novel:
Oh! I have been so wretched,’ cried Tattycoram, weeping much more, ‘always so unhappy, and so repentant! I was afraid of her from the first time I saw her. I knew she had got a power over me through understanding what was bad in me so well. It was a madness in me, and she could raise it whenever she liked. I used to think, when I got into that state, that people were all against me because of my first beginning; and the kinder they were to me, the worse fault I found in them. I made it out that they triumphed above me, and that they wanted to make me envy them, when I know—when I even knew then—that they never thought of such a thing.
And further on:
I have had Miss Wade before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe—turning everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil. I have had her before me all this time, finding no pleasure in anything but keeping me as miserable, suspicious, and tormenting as herself. Not that she had much to do, to do that,’ cried Tattycoram, in a closing great burst of distress, ‘for I was as bad as bad could be. I only mean to say, that, after what I have gone through, I hope I shall never be quite so bad again, and that I shall get better by very slow degrees.
Mr. Meagles’ reply is very Victorian but still useful for us today. First, he points out someone else who had even more reason to resent the world—Little Dorrit—but who has taken a very different approach. He concludes by advocating a life of duty:
I have heard tell, Tatty, that [Amy Dorrit] was once regularly called the child of this place [Marshalsea Prison]. She was born here, and lived here many years. I can’t breathe here. A doleful place to be born and bred in, Tattycoram?’
‘Yes indeed, sir!’
‘If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself that everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and cast it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably an useless existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I tell you what I consider those eyes of hers, that were here just now, to have always looked at, to get that expression?’
‘Yes, if you please, sir.’
‘Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the Almighty, or with ourselves.’
The advice sounds almost quaint in this day and age where we are focused on our individual happiness, but maybe we should root for a sense of duty make a comeback. Instead of being caught up in a sense of our own victimization, maybe we should stop focusing so much on ourselves and ask what good we can do in the world. We can approach life with a sense of gratitude and ask what we can do with the gifts we have been granted.
Now, this good might involve protecting the oppressed, as Dickens sought to do. I’m not saying that we should just turn a blind eye to injustice. But there’s a difference is dwelling upon the wrongs that have been done to us individually and focusing on lifting the burdens on others. The second is a healthier and a happier way to live.
So watch out for those political Miss Wades as they seek to intrude themselves into your life. When you feel the temper coming upon you, when you feel that madness threatening to engulf you, don’t turn to Ted Cruz or Fox News but push them away. They claim to understand you and sympathize with you but their influence is toxic.