Examples of a Different Subjectivity

Yesterday I finished reading Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? and I want to use it to give some examples of how our subjectivity transformed in the historically short period of time since Trollope wrote.

In the novel, a young wife tells her husband that she never loved him. She loves somebody else, she says, and wants to run away with him. The reaction of the husband – a Duke and a Lord of Parliament – is unlike anything we can comprehend. Without a word of reproach, he abandons a political appointment that was the dream of his life and with infinite patience and gentleness starts nursing the marriage back into good health. The leader of his party is angry that the young lord can’t fulfill his political duty but when he understands what happened, he removes all objections.

The way this young man takes on his shoulders the responsibility for the emotional state of the family is not something we see today. The Duke’s complete lack of woundedness when his wife tells him she’s passionately in love with another man is incomprehensible to us. If our wife or husband publicly becomes silly with somebody else and declares their love for another person, we can claw our way to forgiveness and peace with the help of a priest or a therapist maybe by the end of next year. Unlike the Duke in Trollope’s novel, we have very large egos. They are so large, they are poking out of us and anything can would them.

Another big difference is that in today’s world, if anybody is going to make these enormous efforts to save a marriage and moderate everybody’s emotional responses, it will be a woman. In Trollope’s world, that role fell to men. Only yesterday, I saw a story that went viral on Twitter. A young woman got hysterical and screamed at her husband of 4 years that she despises his hobbies and she thinks they are stupid. Now, she says, the husband withdrew, won’t accept her apologies, and is talking about divorce. She’s trying to remedy the situation but he’s completely checked out. We hear such a story and we think, “yeah, obvs. She insulted him and of course he wants nothing to do with her.” Our subjectivity is that of neoliberal consumers. The wife turned out to be a faulty product, so the husband is justified in returning her to the store and getting himself a new one. He is a man in a completely different way that Trollope’s Duke was a man. We believe deep inside that it’s the wife’s role to emotionally regulate the relationship. It doesn’t occur to us that, like happens in Trollope’s novel, a husband can help his wife manage her emotions, that he can see himself as responsible for her emotional states.

What women do has expanded enormously since Trollope’s times and what men do has shrunk. And I don’t mean professions or making money or anything like that. Men have ceded a lot of ground to women on emotions. It’s not good or bad, it’s simply a different subjectivity.

Now, Trollope lived at a tail end of another massive change of human subjectivity that occurred in the West in the latter half of the 18th century. A human being that was possessed of a range of emotions that had to be minutely traced and moderated came into existence then. The genre of the novel became massively popular because that was the arena where people could immerse themselves into thinking about emotions and try out different scenarios of dealing with them. Religion – which was everything to humans before then – was replaced with our feelings. The external authority was substituted with the internal one. We don’t worship God. We worship minute shades of our emotional life.

I don’t like historical fiction precisely because of this. Its authors populate the past with versions of their 21st-century selves and we end up with medieval girl-bosses and such instead of people who actually existed back then.

I gave a single small example here but subjectivity is much bigger than what I described. The concept of children meant something completely different. Parents, family, love, duty – everything meant not what it does today. God meant something completely different. Even the most religious people today can’t begin to perceive God like those who lived 500 years ago. Look at Michaelangelo’s frescoes or the Canterbury Cathedral. If you stay with it for a while, you can maybe glimpse a tiny shade of the feeling that animated their creators.

I’m sorry this is long but this is a big issue that can’t be explained in a couple of sentences.

P.S. There’s also a novel about the Duke’s later life and it shows what he is like as a father to his adult children. The novel is a paean to fatherhood and I wrote about it here. We see a man who, by measure of his times, is almost elderly but he still grows as a person and tries to figure things out. Trollope has an amazing cast of male characters and I recommend him most sincerely.