There's a story by Muriel Spark - called "Twins" - that I reread today and am coming to a new understanding of.
A woman stays with an old friend and her husband. This couple has two children, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. The narrator is initially charmed by the children, but gradually picks up on things she doesn't like: deceptiveness, pettiness, passive-aggressive needling. As time wears on she notices similar things about the parents, although she'd thought very highly of them before.
The implication, made explicit near the end, is that the children have reshaped the parents in their own image, a dark interpretation of Wordsworth's "the child is father to the man." But might she be an unreliable narrator? It seems to me that she may have seen her friend and the friend's husband through rose-colored glasses before, and is now seeing in their kids what never made an impression on her before.
I like to think that in my own case, I've taken my friends' darker sides into account and more or less forgiven them for it. So while I may or may not get along with their kids, I'm not shocked or disappointed.
A woman stays with an old friend and her husband. This couple has two children, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. The narrator is initially charmed by the children, but gradually picks up on things she doesn't like: deceptiveness, pettiness, passive-aggressive needling. As time wears on she notices similar things about the parents, although she'd thought very highly of them before.
The implication, made explicit near the end, is that the children have reshaped the parents in their own image, a dark interpretation of Wordsworth's "the child is father to the man." But might she be an unreliable narrator? It seems to me that she may have seen her friend and the friend's husband through rose-colored glasses before, and is now seeing in their kids what never made an impression on her before.
I like to think that in my own case, I've taken my friends' darker sides into account and more or less forgiven them for it. So while I may or may not get along with their kids, I'm not shocked or disappointed.
2 comments:
There have been a number of books and movies made about children who aren't nearly so sweet and innocent as we prefer to imagine them being. The Bad Seed comes to mind as being the scariest of them (even after all this time Patti McCormack's smile can still give me the shivers. Then there was The Children's Hour that I remember as being creepy because of how easy it was for a naughty child to destroy the reputation of her teachers (yes, so long ago people were shocked by homosexuality). Just a couple of years ago we saw The Good Son starring a very young Elijah Wood who goes to spend a seaside summer with his aunt and uncle and their increasingly scary son, his cousin McCauley Culkin.
These things do happen but so far the case for 'nature or nurture' hasn't been settled. I think it's always best to see the best in one's friends and hope for the best for their children.
I've also noticed that rereading books can provide some very profound insights into aspects of their plots and characters I hadn't noticed before. No reading time is ever wasted.
One theatre in Pawtucket, the Feinstein-Gamm, did a production of The Children's Hour not too long ago. It looked interesting, and modernized to the point where the print ad they ran showed a bunch of menacing little girls brandishing cell phones. Unfortunately the run was pretty much over by the time I took notice so I didn't see it myself. Yeah, that and The Bad Seed as well as a few other things. There's a lot of anxiety, I'm sure, in first becoming a parent. And one fear is the kind of person you're putting out into the world, and what who they are says about you. There's no simple answer for that, but it's good that this anxiety can at least be expressed in a creative manner.
There's never a shortage of theorists who - for various reasons - want to put everything down to genetics. Nature and nurture both play a part, but nurture is the one you can control. But by definition you can't control everything and you don't know the future. Yes, tolerance and acceptance are the best way.
Sometimes you're just in a different state the second or third time you read something.
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