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Wandering through Guilt
 Wandering through Guilt:
The Cain Archetype
in the Twentieth-Century Novel

By

Paola Di Gennaro
 Wandering through Guilt:
The Cain Archetype in the Twentieth-Century Novel,
by Paola Di Gennaro

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Paola Di Gennaro

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-6525-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6525-8

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
—Philip Larkin, Deceptions, 1950
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Part I: Cain’s Chronotope: Guilt and Wandering

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9

The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion
1.1 Guilt and Psychology
1.2 Psyche and Myth: Patterns of Guilt
1.3 Psyche and Religion: Patterns of Faithful Guilt

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31

Wandering Cains
2.1 Paradigms of Self-Punishment, Paradigms of Atonement
2.2 Pilgrimages, Wandering Jews and Other Progresses
2.3 Cain’s Monomyth in Twentieth-Century Literature

Part II: Wastelands to Walk, Wastelands to Drink

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65

Graham Greene and the Sinner’s Glory
3.1 The Whisky Priest and the Guilt of Sin
3.2 The Sinner’s Progress
3.3 Achieving Sanctity

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 103

Hallucinating Guilt: Myth in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
4.1 The Drunkard Consul and the Paralysis of Guilt
4.2 Wandering Through Hell: The Mexican Malebolge
4.3 Out of Eden: The Guilt of Humanity
viii Table of Contents

Part III: The Ambiguity of Postwar Guilt

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 147

The Paradoxes of Guilt: Wolfgang’s Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom
5.1 Collective Guilt and the Burden of History
5.2 Guilt and Its Ambiguities
5.3 Wandering in the Underworld of Guilt: The Eternal City

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 187

East of Enoch: Guilt and Atonement in Postwar Japanese Literature
6.1 The Rhetoric of Mea Culpa: Christianity in Twentieth-Century
Japan
6.2 Japanese Postwar Guilt
6.3 ƿoka Shǀhei’s Nobi: Cannibalizing Guilt

Epilogue................................................................................................... 207

Notes........................................................................................................ 213

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 249

Index ........................................................................................................ 277

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is in the first instance the result of research, and, secondly,
the outcome of both an academic and a personal investment. It is for the
latter reason that I would like to thank the University of Salerno, without
whose precious support this work could not have been accomplished.
I would also like to thank all the people that helped me in infinite ways
in the long process of compiling this study. First of all, I want to thank
Maria Teresa Chialant, for the esteem and trust she patiently placed in me
and in my work, and who allowed me the freedom to pursue my ideas and
intuitions. I wish to express all my gratitude and affection to many other
scholars and friends: Paolo Amalfitano, for all the vivacious, stimulating,
and affectionate discussions we have had over the years; Giorgio
Amitrano, whose generous interest and kind encouragement will always be
remembered; Francesco de Cristofaro, for his precious friendship and
zealous opificium; Simonetta de Filippis, for her passionate words in
moments I will never forget; Bruna Di Sabato, for her friendly, priceless
presence and trust; Stephen Dodd, for his helpful supervision of the
Japanese part of this study, and all the other academics I had the chance to
work with in London at SOAS and UCL: Andrew Gerstle, Karima
Laachir, and Florian Mussgnug, who encouraged me when research made
a friendly and expert voice essential and much appreciated; Annamaria
Laserra, not only for her coordination with my PhD course, but also for
her assistance in my progress towards this achievement; Stefano
Manferlotti, for his kind advice and support; Giuseppe Merlino, for his
witty and stimulating presence in the last few years; Oriana Palusci, for
her warm cooperation; and Franco Moretti, for inestimable words,
thoughts, and inspiration.
Comparative literature implies the encounter and the dialogue with
different stances and the most diverse fields. I am grateful to the numerous
people who helped me with their academic knowledge or stimulated me in
friendly conversations, and enriched me in ways that only history can do;
it would be difficult to mention all of them: academic staff, colleagues,
and friends, who gave me insights into that shared aspect of life that is the
sense of guilt. Special thanks go to Emilia Di Martino, Chiara Luna
Ghidini, Patrizia Vigliotti and above all to Mark Weir, who patiently
dedicated his time to read my writings.
x Acknowledgments

I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to artist Paola Pinna for the
priceless drawing of Cain on the cover of this book.
Finally, I am profoundly grateful to the people in my life who should
never be taken for granted: Maria Rosaria and Mario, who gave life to me
and my inquisitive spirit; and my Immanuels: Emanuela, for her long-
lasting presence in my life, over time and space, her trust, esteem,
academic guidance, and caring affection; and Emanuele, for being the co-
author of my future.
 INTRODUCTION

Verses 4:1-26 of the Book of Genesis engendered the Western tradition

of a figure that would undergo, in the following millennia, the most varied
literary interpretations: Cain. Sentenced by Yahweh to be “a fugitive and a
wanderer in the earth” to atone for the murder of his brother Abel, Cain
would become, paradoxically and controversially, the founder of the first
city in the history of man. His image in the Bible – the book considered by
Auerbach, together with Homer’s epics, the model of all future literary
productions of the West 1 – is ambiguous and polysemic. Cain is the
remorseless killer of Abel, who, interrogated by God about the
disappearance of his brother, merely replies: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”.
Cain is the symbol of the division between the two main agricultural tasks
and of a father’s unjust discrimination: Abel keeps flocks while Cain tills
the earth and, for reasons that are not explained, God prefers Abel’s
offering. Cain is also the derelict wanderer in a hostile world, condemned
by Yahweh: “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its
mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand”, to which Cain
replies: “My punishment is greater than I can bear… from thy face I shall
be hidden… whoever finds me shall slay me”. Consequently, Cain is
destined to bear a mark on his forehead, a mark which should protect him
but also brands him in the eyes of the world. Finally, Cain is the founder
of the “civic” human consortium, as he goes on to found the first city,
which he calls Enoch after the name of his firstborn son.
It is a mysterious and fascinating story, which carries within it many
of our fundamental myths. In the history of literature, Cain is represented
as the fratricide, the rebel, the wanderer, and the founder of civilization.
The poetic potentialities of this character seem to be infinite, and the
themes and paradigms associated with his story are portrayed differently
according to personal and historical contingencies. A relatively short
passage in a book – albeit “the model” book – has originated, mainly
through its metaphoric and allusive concision, numerous evocative
patterns in the collective memory of many societies. When we move the
analysis of these patterns out of the Western tradition, we can find a
common set of topoi shared by cultures distant in time and space, even in
the literary productions of countries built on a non-Christian tradition. It
does not seem too far-fetched, therefore, to propose the notion that the
2 Introduction

Bible gives just one of the representations of what can be considered an

archetype: the story of a wanderer who, marked with guilt – or a sense of
guilt – makes a journey of atonement in physical or psychological
wastelands, with greater or lesser success.
This book explores how this archetypal myth – the pattern of guilt and
atonement through wandering that is embodied in the Bible by the figure
of Cain – appears also in a non-Western context such as postwar Japan and
the literature of that time. Following the critical studies of Northrop Frye
on archetypal poetics but also other critical approaches, this paradigm is
seen to recur in postwar Japan not only in a common myth already present
in the public imagination, but also in the influence of Christianity.
The starting point of this study and its prerequisite condition is that the
pattern of wandering as an expiation of a guilt must have no functional
purpose within the narrative; that is, the wandering of the characters must
be practically aimless in relation to the plot. One of the few possible ways
to carry out an analysis that overcomes the contingency of the plot in order
to retrace a transcendental paradigm, while taking into account the
historical meaning of the work and its socio-cultural background, is to
approach the text from a critical framework based on belief in common
myths and archetypes. This is the framework developed by Northrop Frye.
A comparative methodology that goes beyond the borders of countries
which share a common cultural heritage is often seen as hazardous, if not
presumptuous. Dealing with contemporary literature allows more freedom
in this respect, when we consider the more intense – or global, to use a
popular word – cultural influences that nowadays pervade most countries;
nonetheless, comparative criticism must move cautiously and adopt tools
that focus on what can be considered a common sharing of attitudes and
motives. Archetypal criticism can offer a good starting point from which
to consider how common patterns are represented in different cultures and
literary productions. Having its roots in social anthropology and depth
psychology, this approach is particularly interesting if we consider the fact
that Cain’s pattern of wandering implies elements – such as guilt – which
are evidently related to these disciplines as well.
In 1957, Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism sanctioned the emergence of
archetypal critical theory, based on an idea Frye had outlined in a previous
article, “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951). He drew on what had been
previously done on ritual by contemporary anthropology and on dreams in
psychoanalysis; 2 specifically, Frye incorporated James Frazer’s Golden
Bough (1890-1915), a study of cultural mythologies, and Jung’s theories
on the collective unconscious. According to Jung, beneath the “personal
unconscious” there is a “collective unconscious” that is universal in that it
 Wandering through Guilt 3

is inherited and not created by individual experience. As a consequence, it

is possible to assume a commonality of “stories” – the literal meaning of
the word mythos is in fact “story”, “narrative” – which are shared by
distant cultures. Myth comes to be seen as a psychological model,
something intrinsic in our brain structure but which is so bound up with
society that the limits between what is “original” and what is culturally
constructed become indistinct.
Myths are continually rethought, rewritten, revisited. It is moving from
this assumption that Frye transferred his theory of archetypes to literature.
He considered the archetypes to be centripetal structures of meaning, and
in myth he found “the structural principles of literature isolated”. Frye’s
theory is closely associated with the basic patterns of literary genres, but at
the same time it transcends them. Myth provides the basis for a typological
classification of literature which both maintains a mythical frame and
reflects the indigenous structures of literature itself.3 According to Frye,
truth and falsehood are concerns of history; the truth of poetry lies in its
structure.
The starting point of Frye’s conjectures is the idea of myths as both
culturally and psychologically inherited and socially adapted:

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a
mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from
his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means
that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art
or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we
recognize. Practically all that we can see of this body of concern is socially
conditioned and culturally inherited. Below the cultural inheritance there
must be a common psychological inheritance, otherwise forms of culture
and imagination outside our own traditions would not be intelligible to us.
But I doubt if we can reach this common inheritance directly, by-passing
the distinctive qualities in our specific culture. One of the practical
functions of criticism, by which I mean the conscious organizing of a
cultural tradition, is, I think, to make us more aware of our mythological
conditioning.4

The role of literature is to eternalize the patterns and the power of

myths in recreating the “metaphorical use of language”. Literature is not
seen by Frye as a contamination of myth; on the contrary, it is a vital and
unavoidable part of myth’s development.5 Myths are employed in art in
order to express what is “universal in the event”, to give an example of
“the kind of thing that is always happening”. A myth is a particularly
significant literary tropos, whose meaning is wider and deeper because it
4 Introduction

is “designed not to describe a specific situation but to contain it in a way

that does not restrict its significance to that one situation.”6
By basing the legitimacy of critical analysis on universal but also
contingent elements, Anatomy of Criticism laid the groundwork for
archetypal criticism. Yet Frye went on to write another work which is
essential to this study. In 1982, The Great Code linked the mythological
aspects of the Bible to the production of later literature, analyzing how
elements of the Bible had created an imaginative framework, a
“mythological universe”, from which literature has drawn its images as
water from a well. The Bible can therefore be considered as a cluster of
myths which, originating from a common understanding of the world by
men of every country, found form in the West in one major book that was
codified over a thousand years. Literature assimilates these patterns, and
creates something that is somehow more disturbing than the original in
that it has more layers of signification and less clarity of meaning:

What we usually think of as acceptance or rejection of belief does not in

either case involve any disturbance in our habitual mental processes. It
seems to me that trying to think within categories of myth, metaphor, and
typology – all of them exceedingly “primitive” categories from most points
of view – does involve a good deal of such disturbance. The result,
however, I hope and have reason to think, is an increased lucidity, an
instinct for cutting through a jungle of rationalizing verbiage to the cleared
area of insight.7

Frye’s archetypal criticism can account for structures which recur in

many different literary traditions, and, although this approach has been
seen as an outcome of an “obvious romanticism”,8 it is a good framework
within which significance can be uncovered. As William Righter points
out, though, it is not enough just to assume the existence of mythical
correspondences, ritual repetitions, and archetypal figures and
relationships. We should also move on and analyze what the existence of
the myth beneath the surface tells us, how much more we “understand of a
work through seeing the presumed skeleton beneath the skin”, and whether
mythic tales “underlying a particular fiction have a meaning that the
fiction itself does not”.9 To reduce the underlying meaning of a text to a
monomyth, as a fundamental paradigm on which infinite literary variations
can be performed,10 would imply a simplicity that modern works seldom
carry. If Cain’s story, like Ulysses’ and Faust’s, is the key to the
understanding of hidden aspects of great novels, it is because it gives them
unity in complexity, “divine quality” in historical humdrum.
 Wandering through Guilt 5

A connection is established, therefore, between the original myth and

the social conflicts under which it has developed into new forms. In this
study we do not merely propose a close reading (at least not only), because
the mythical and social substructures will also be considered, nor a distant
reading, as Franco Moretti suggests, 11 although we do draw on his
methodology in order to find a pattern that can acquire a deeper meaning
only involving a wider perspective. I intend to pursue a kind of “middle-
distance reading”, following Frye in rejecting barriers between different
methods of analysis and fostering the cooperation of meticulous
examination and reminiscent comparison.
In the novels analyzed, the social conflicts that feed into the structural
and archetypal principles are those of the years of the Second World War
and its aftermath, from 1940 to 1960. In England, and to some extent in
Europe as a whole, these conflicts tended to be more personal than social,
although mixed with the attempt to universalize guilt. In this sense, guilt
becomes existential, and adds intensity and tragedy to individual lives.
Germany had different conflicts: in fact, in addition to archetypal guilt, it
had to deal with the postwar guilt related to Nazism and war horror. In
postwar Japan, there are two further conflicts, both particularly important
in relation to the legacy of Cain: Christianity and survivor guilt.
This book is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to a
socio-cultural, religious, mythical, and psychoanalytical survey of the
main elements of the pattern under scrutiny: guilt and wandering. The
second part forms the core of the study, with the analysis of two English
novels published between 1940 and 1950: The Power and the Glory
(1940) by Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
(1947). Both are characterized by the incarnation of historical but also
universal guilt in the protagonists, both of whom are drunkards, outcasts,
burdened by metaphysical and existential guilt, and destined for tragedy.
The third and last part is centred on novels produced in the two countries
that were perhaps most “marked” by the war: Der Tod in Rom (Death in
Rome, 1954) by the German Wolfgang Koeppen, and Nobi (Fires on the
Plain, 1951) by the Japanese ƿoka Shǀhei.
These novels were chosen because each portrays some of the most
relevant aspects of the paradigm I aim analyzing as it appeared in the years
under examination. All the works that in one way or another could fall
under the generalizing definition of “Holocaust literature”, “Atomic Bomb
literature”, or literature about the Returning Soldier, have been excluded;
firstly, because it would have implied a different kind of approach;
secondly, and more importantly, because in those cases the theme of
wandering follows different patterns and is more concretely related to
6 Introduction

more specific historical contingencies. The novels analyzed here represent

history in its archetypical expressions, its fundamental dynamics: they
often claim to grasp it through reference to mythologies and the use of
mythic methods. In these works guilt is taken for granted and amplified by
the horror of the Second World War and the uncertainties of the postwar
period; wandering is one of its consequences, atonements, and perditions.
 PART I

CAIN’S CHRONOTOPE:
GUILT AND WANDERING
 CHAPTER ONE

THE ANALYSIS OF GUILT:

PSYCHOLOGY, MYTH, RELIGION

In depth we feel guilty, not of sin but of “dust”.

This is the unconditional “badness”,
ontological, not moral, of the afflicted ego.
—Malcolm France, The Paradox of Guilt

1.1 Guilt and Psychology

The symbiotic relation between literature and life has always been
controversial: biography and literary production, socio-historical context
and text, geopolitical background and reception are some of the polyvalent
interactions which criticism has bravely – although sometimes diffidently
– pursued in its investigations. As stated in the introduction to this work,
the examination of this relationship is not the main aim of this study;
rather, all these elements are the fibres of its plot. However, we now have
to pay some attention to one of these elements and the role it bears in this
textual analysis: we are referring to the specific domain of psychoanalysis.
Although it is not my intention to pursue an exclusively psychoanalytic
critical approach, it is necessary to clarify what we are dealing with when
we talk about “guilt”, and how it relates to our being human, our social
behaviour, and our position in history.
We shall examine the idea of guilt starting from the most influential
psychoanalytical theories to have developed over the last century –
Freud’s, Jung’s, Klein’s. This rapid preliminary overview simply aims to
outline the phenomenon of guilt from a psychological perspective, with an
awareness of the cultural implications that defined it while being defined
by it. Subsequently, guilt is presented in its relationship with myths and
religions, in order to see how mankind has faced up to the inescapable
guilt feelings creating placebo structures or self-punishing devices –
providing literature with rich materials for its models. In the next chapter
of this first part we will concentrate on mankind’s need to annihilate or at
least cope with these guilt feelings, and the means it has developed to do
10 Chapter One

so. The next step will be a survey of some of the mythical and literary
images which reproduce atoning patterns, wandering in particular, and the
figures that embody its essence: pilgrims, scapegoats and the Wandering
Jew.
Other important aspects of guilt in relation to our recent history will be
examined in the following chapters: war guilt, collective guilt, and also
survivor guilt provide the background for the novels we will be dealing
with especially in the third part of this study, in which we analyze the
literary production of those countries which most were “marked” by war-
related traumas. This is one of the main points to consider when
investigating literature produced in the aftermath of the Second World
War, in particular works which overtly anatomize the burden of
responsibility or historical oppression lurking inside the individual. We
attempt to link psychoanalysis, history and literature to uncover the
underlying systems of literary works which share and reproduce general
patterns in a particular historical moment.
According to the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, edited by
James M. Baldwin and published in 1925, “Guilt is the state of having
committed a crime, or consciously offended against moral law”. Here the
more modern meaning of guilt, as it was to be developed later by
psychoanalytical studies and as it is often perceived in our time, is
completely absent. Guilt is the infraction of a law, the breaking of a rule,
something visible and objectively provable. But this is just one of the
possible senses of guilt, known as “objective guilt”; “subjective guilt” had
in fact already been referred to (although only in a draft) by Sigmund
Freud in 1895, as a “pure sense of guilt without content”.1
Freud used the term “sense of guilt” (Schuldgefühl) for the first time in
1906 in Psychoanalysis and the Establishment of Facts in Legal
Proceedings. When considering the methods to be used to determine the
guilt of the accused, he wrote: “In your investigation you could be led
astray by the neurotic, who reacts as if he were guilty, although he is
innocent, because a sense of guilt which already existed and lay hidden in
him takes over the specific accusation made against him”.2
Freud never dedicated a systematic work to guilt, but often mentioned
the topic. 3 It is in 1907 that the modern concept of guilt first appears
significantly in his work. In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices he
writes about a “sense of guilt about which we know nothing”:

an awareness of guilt […] which we must define as unconscious, although

this is an apparent contradiction in terms. It has its source in certain remote
psychic processes, but is constantly revived in the temptation that is
renewed at every relevant occasion, and on the other hand gives rise to a
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 11

lurking, waiting anxiety, an expectation of disaster, connected through the

idea of punishment to the internal perception of temptation.4

The use of the word “lurking” makes it evident that guilt is originally
considered as something hidden, ready to burst out, probably caused by a
“temptation”, and somehow related to an undisclosed desire to be
punished.
In 1913, in Totem and Taboo, Freud connected guilt to a primeval
family situation, and to the notorious Oedipus complex, the incestuous
desire of the band of brothers that triggers the murder of the father.5 A
primeval tribal situation related to this complex is at the origin of guilt: a
violent and strong male individual, father of the offspring, has banished all
adult males, challengers to his monopoly on sexual relations with the
horde’s females. As a consequence, the young males grow up loving and
admiring the ruler, their father, but hating and fearing him as well. Having
reached adulthood away from the horde, the offspring share a wish to get
rid of their father: they band together, return to their original home, kill
him and eat him. After the murder, their love for the man resurfaces, and
they start experiencing guilt and remorse, both individually and
collectively. It is in expiation of this act that they later establish their father,
in the guise of a totem, as a deity and institute prohibitions – taboos –
against killing and incest, in order to avoid the repetition of a similar
action. According to Freud, it is from this act that evil entered humanity,
together with religion and morality, based partly on the needs of society
and partly on the expiation that this sense of guilt requires.6 Guilt becomes
an inherited baggage, an experience through which every child has to pass;
any fixation during this period leads to a sense of guilt which can become
unconscious guilt when repressed.
However, it was with the advent of World War I that the psychoanalyst
elaborated his first full theory about guilt. In Mourning and Melancholia
(1915), melancholia – today we would call it depression – is characterized,
together with a physical dejection, by the reduction of interest in the
outside world, in a loss of the capacity to love and a general apathy, and,
finally, by a “feeling of despondency about self which expressed itself in
self-reproach and self-berating, culminating in the delusional expectation
of punishment”.7 The depressed person moves against himself or herself
the self-reproaches that were once destined to a love object (both Freud
and Klein agree that guilt is unavoidable once an individual realizes that
the object of love is also object of anger). This theory was later abandoned
in psychoanalysis, but it was nonetheless very important in its
development with regard to guilt, in introducing the idea that guilt feelings
originate from an inner conflict.
12 Chapter One

The following stage was the essay Some Character-Types Met with in
Psycho-Analytic Work, published in 1916, in which Freud identified
“criminals from a sense of guilt”, “very respectable” patients who had
committed “forbidden actions”. The interesting aspect of these cases is
that these patients experience “mental relief” after having suffered from an
“oppressive feeling of guilt”, mitigated because this sense of guilt was “at
least attached to something”, the forbidden act. The vicious circle in which
sense of guilt gives rise to an even deeper sense of guilt – as will be
evident in the novels we are going to analyze – has its psychoanalytical
basis in this statement.
At one point Freud’s study of guilt gets closer to literature. In the same
1916 work he analyzes several literary characters, ranging from
Shakespeare to Ibsen, as well as actual criminals, and tries to demonstrate
that guilt feelings arise from unconscious creations rather than from real
actions. He goes so far as to consider crimes as the consequence, and not
the cause, of guilt feelings.
Freud took further steps towards the definition of guilt first in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which he tried to explain the origins of
the sense of guilt by referring it to the death wish – the destructive drive of
the psyche to reduce tensions completely and restore all living things to
the inorganic state – and then in The Ego and the Id and The Economic
Problem of Masochism (1923-1924), where he spoke again about an
unconscious sense of guilt (unbewusstes Schuldgefühl, as opposed to
Schuldbewusstsein, consciousness of guilt), although he seems to replace it
with “need for punishment”, a “‘moral masochism’ complemented by the
sadism of the ‘superego’”.8
Without ever abandoning the starting point of the Oedipus complex,
the definition of the superego marked an important stage in the definition
of the sense of guilt. As Kalu Singh observes, “the resolution of the
Oedipus complex is the establishment of the Superego”, that he defines as
“the guardian of the line of guilt”.9 As a matter of fact, in Freud both the
accuser and the accused are internal, as the former is the superego and the
latter is the ego. All senses of guilt depend on the relationship between
these two, the “directors” of our inborn aggressiveness which is taken
restrained by our inner “controller”, the superego, or, as John McKenzie
calls it, the “infantile or negative conscience”. 10 The origin of guilt
feelings depends upon our aggressive instincts; the repression of
instinctual trends causes its emergence. The more we renounce our instinct,
the more we deny our true nature, the more we feel guilt, the result of our
unconscious temptation. Theodor Reik gives a powerful metaphor in this
regard:
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 13

[The superego] is omniscient as God. Exactly as He it tortures just those

people who are virtuous. Like God, the superego is more severe toward
those who renounce many instinctual gratifications than toward those who
are lenient and allow themselves some satisfaction of this kind.11

Freud himself explained why “saints” are right to call themselves

sinners: they are exposed to temptations, to instinctual satisfaction in a
particularly high degree, since temptations are merely increased by
constant frustration, while occasional satisfaction of them would cause
them to diminish, at least momentarily.12
This concept is further developed in what is perhaps Freud’s most
significant work on guilt: Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). In this
study he reaffirms guilt feeling as a reaction to the unconscious
appearance of aggressive drives, and the anxiety that results from the
temptation of aggressive acts. The sense of guilt is the need for
punishment arousing from the tension between the harsh super-ego and the
ego that is subjected to it: “Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over
the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and
disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a
garrison in a conquered city”.13
Men can feel guilty – or sinful if devout – not only when they admit to
having done something they think to be “bad”, but even when they just
think of doing it:

We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to

distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not all what is injurious or
dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something which is
desirable and enjoyable to the ego. […] At the beginning, therefore, what is
bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with loss of love […]. This
state of mind is called a “bad conscience”; but actually it does not deserve
this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of
love, “social” anxiety […]. A great change takes place only when the
authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The
phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until
now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt. At this point,
too, the fear of being found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover,
between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely,
since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts.14

Therefore there are two origins of the sense of guilt, according to

Freud: one arising from the fear of authority, and the other from the fear of
the superego. Both civilization and each individual have been marked by
the onset of these two sources.
14 Chapter One

In the same work, Freud makes one of the most famous assertions
about guilt and the burden that it has brought to humanity: he explains
how the sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development
of civilization, and how the price we pay for progress is the loss of
happiness due to its heightening. Twentieth-century civilization knows this
only too well. The World Wars, the Holocaust and all the genocides we
have witnessed, as well the traumas they have generated, have been
transformed, in the novels we are going to analyze, into an underlying
unhappiness which becomes almost cosmic.
When considering the whole of Freud’s studies on the topic, therefore,
different kinds of guilt emerge, among which we can find the already
mentioned guilt of the unresolved Oedipus complex, the guilt caused by
the impulse of hate, the longing of the melancholic, and also the idea of
collective guilt, that we will discuss later. In all cases some constant
elements emerge which tend to mark all men and women, and also their
literary counterparts. Firstly, guilt appears as something inescapable,
because it is connected with an ancestral crime and an “inherited mental
force”. Furthermore, guilt is not necessarily felt when we are “objectively”
guilty. As we have already seen, it is paradoxically experienced more
often when we are perfectly innocent. On the contrary, actual
responsibility can be completely detached from any sense of guilt, as is
seen in those criminals who are unable to feel any remorse, either for
personal causes or because the culture in which they grew up exculpates
them.15
Another of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Stekel,
also focuses on guilt in his studies, although he diverges from Freud’s
ideas. In Conditions of Anxiety and Their Cure (1908) neurosis is the
disease of a bad conscience, and the “internal system of authority” of an
individual is regarded as necessary for a human person to be considered as
such, but “the price he pays is to be inflicted, by the excessive
development of authority, with feelings which are described as guilt,
anxiety and despair”.16 Also for Donald Winnicott guilt is an “anxiety with
a special quality”, clarifying with Freud that it involves longing for the
loved object; he also seems to agree that anxiety needs a certain degree of
sophistication and self-consciousness in order to become a sense of guilt.
As a consequence, in his opinion guilt feelings are not something
inculcated but “an aspect of the development of the human individual”.17
Jung’s psychological approach – defined by Martin Buber a
psychological type of solipsism 18 – adds a different perspective to the
question of guilt. The centrality of the self and its projections on the
external world, which are characteristic of his method, are also evident
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 15

when considering his idea of the “seat” of evil in an individual, whose

process of individualization and realization is indeed brought out by the
“integration of evil as the unification of opposites in the psyche”. As a
consequence, Buber affirms, Jung’s pan-psychism (like Freud’s materialism)
implies no ontological sense in guilt, no “reality in the relation between
the human person and the world entrusted to him in his life”.19 Nietzsche
had said quite the opposite in On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887. He
highlighted the fact that in German the word guilt (Schuld) has its origin in
a very material concept, Schulden, “debts”. Nietzsche wonders if any guilt
can be “expiated” by suffering, considering that everything can be paid for.
The solution he finds implies a radical, seemingly paradoxical resolution:
the complete abandonment of Christian faith:

The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was
therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on
earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there
is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the
Christian God there is now also a considerable decline of faith in
mankind’s feeling of guilt; indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that
the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this
whole feeling of guilty indebtedness toward its origin, its causa prima.
Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.20

We will investigate the relationship between guilt and religion and

their interactions more deeply in the following chapters, and we also see
how religion can enhance the sense of guilt in the characters of our
novels, especially in the Japanese case. Here the “imported” sense of
guilt related to an alien faith acts as an even stronger external superego
which confounds more than a culturally inherited creed, somehow
engendering the same development pattern that Freud identified in the
growth of a man; that is, the change from social anxiety into internalized
guilt.
Melanie Klein, possibly the major psychoanalyst to have paid attention
to guilt after Freud, also connects the sense of guilt to aggressiveness, as
Freud did. We feel guilty whenever we feel a real or supposed
aggressiveness inside us (and this idea of the sense of guilt resulting from
the repression of natural aggressiveness is not dissimilar from the
philosophical tradition stemming from Leibniz, whereby the limitation of
creatures – the limitation that contradicts human nature itself – is the
origin of moral evil). However, whereas Freud posits the birth of the
superego around the age of five, when the Oedipus complex declines,
Klein attributes it to an earlier stage.21 In addition, according to Klein, the
16 Chapter One

sense of guilt emerges within the relationship between mother and child,
and not in the three-party situation described by Freud.
Melanie Klein gave her most significant definition of guilt in 1935:
guilt feelings originate from a depressive position, which she called
“depressive guilt”. In her opinion, only a sufficiently integrated personality
can experience guilt, because it emerges only if the individual is capable
of representing a person who suffers for what he/she has done as an inner
projection. As a consequence, in this perspective guilt feelings do not arise
in a primitive human status, but, on the contrary, they can happen only if
the person has reached a certain maturity.
An interesting stage in the onset of guilt is explained in Envy and
Gratitude (1957). In this study Klein asserts that if guilt appears
prematurely in a person who is not ready to bear it, it is experienced as a
persecutory feeling: the subject feels persecuted by the object which has
caused guilt. This second kind of guilt is called “persecutory guilt”. It
originates during the early life of an individual, and its effects continue to
haunt the person even in adulthood, like depressive guilt, coexisting with
it.22 Persecutory guilt can cause other symptoms such as insomnia, somatic
reactions, and obsessive rituals, as well as apparently opposite behaviour
patterns like excessive or manic lack of inhibition, or sadism, as an attempt
to identify with the aggressor, and the sadomasochistic tendency to engage
in such relationships. Interestingly enough, as Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca
suggests, “[w]hen we live in the world of persecutory guilt, we are so to
speak victims of guilt, a guilt that can be handed down from father to son,
even down to the fifth generation, as the Bible has it”.23 The same kind of
guilt can be found in Kierkegaard, and in literature; for example,
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while, for Speziale-Bagliacca, the
Erinyes could exemplify the persecutory sense of guilt in classical
mythology.24
The internalization of guilt – so important in the definition of its
deepest feelings – is explicit in some of the behaviour patterns described
by Klein, as it was in Freud. In “On Criminality” (1934), Klein describes
how disobedient children “would feel compelled to be naughty and to get
punished, because the real punishment, however severe, was reassuring in
comparison with the murderous attacks which they were continually
expecting from fantastically cruel parents”.25 As naughty children look for
punishment, so do our characters. And as our deepest hatred is directed
against the hatred within ourselves – as exposed by Klein in Guilt and
Reparation (1937) – so will our characters direct their need of punishment
against themselves, turning into outcasts, wanderers among strangers
isolated from the ones they love, or should love.
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 17

The relationship between guilt and need for expiation is one of the
most interesting aspects related to guilt, especially for this study. Whereas
for objective guilt the act of reconciliation with society takes place through
the law structure and its penitentiary system, for subjective guilt the
question is more complex. When considering the difference between
realistic and unrealistic guilt, McKenzie says that all guilt feelings are
subjective, making psychoanalysis necessary for the resulting symptoms
of anxiety-feelings, obsessions, phobias, compulsions and depression. 26
Nonetheless, as we well know, psychoanalysis is not the only means that
humanity has developed to fight guilt; on the contrary, it is the last in order
of appearance. Subjective guilt does not pertain to the sphere of law but to
that of ethics and theology, although the two are obviously connected;
morality and religion are strictly linked to the way men try to confront the
sense of guilt.
If we first consider how, from a psychological point of view, people
react to guilt, and the consequences of these feelings on one’s mind, we
can better follow how the major systems created by men – in particular
religions – have worked to build structures and substructures to tackle it. A
sense of guilt can be avoided by many different mechanisms, many of
which may interact at the same time. It can be displaced from one object to
another, for example, although in this case the root of the problem is just
moved to something else – probably, even deeply repressed. Guilt can also
be exploited as a means to obtain masochistic pleasure in exercising
sadistic control over people and making them feeling guilty for something.
Sometimes we try (just like the characters of our novels) to provoke others
into accusing us unjustly, in order to defend ourselves properly, having
failed painfully on a previous occasion. Complex techniques like these are
evident in sadomasochistic relationships, in which we create events in
order to render other people guilty, or when we try to share with others the
unfortunate acts we alone have committed. More often, these mechanisms
are not used against other people, but against our inner world, in order to
attack ourselves.27 This is evident in the characters we will meet later in
this study, where masochistic impulses very often dominate the scene.
Masochism and self-reproach are also generated by what one often calls
“ill-luck”, that is, according to Freud, external frustration which

so greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long

as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do
all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul,
acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience,
imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances. […]
Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is
18 Chapter One

unfortunate it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power […].

This becomes especially clear where fate is looked upon in the strictly
religious sense of being nothing else than an expression of the Divine Will.
[…] If he has met with misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself
but on his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it a
thrashing instead of punishing himself.28

Defined by Speziale-Bagliacca as a common psychological “habit”, the

attempt to reduce the pain of self-accusations can also give rise to a desire
to believe in fantasies which make us feel justified, or at least less
culpable.29 Needless to say, this mechanism is not always successful in the
novels presented here.
Our civilization seems destined to feel guilty and to find no proper
means to avoid this feeling. Man is the “moral climber”,30 but on his way
he experiences some moments when guilt seems to be heavier than at other
times. The characters we are going to meet are of this species, in one of
those historical moments.

1.2 Psyche and Myth: Patterns of Guilt

We have seen how the sense of guilt is installed in our inner self –
mind, soul, psyche – intrinsically and unavoidably, forging our
relationship with the outer world. The cultural responses to this “presence”
within us have been various and have taken many forms in the history of
mankind; they are easily recognizable in the extensive occurrence of guilt-
related topics in myths, literatures, and religions.
From this point of view, psychoanalysis and mythology aim at the
same result: to free people from the burden of their guilt, and doing so in
the most explicit way possible. In Myth and Guilt (1957) Theodor Reik
investigated the ways in which guilt has always been interpolated in myths,
traditions, and religions, arguing that religious and moral laws have
aggravated the consequences of guilt.
It is interesting, therefore, to see how cultures with different
backgrounds have reacted to an acquired burden of guilt, and how they put
this into fiction. Eastern traditions, for example, have had a completely
different relationship with guilt feelings; we will see how in the following
chapters. Guilt, as psychoanalysts affirm, is not just related to a single
culture but to a sort of “universal” common brain structure, as Jung
believed. Reik accepts as true the idea of a “World Sense of Guilt”, and
considers it the “fatal flaw inherent within our civilization itself”.31 This
has been shared by Freud and many philosophers, including Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and informs the creations of
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 19

Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Sartre, O’Neill,

Faulkner, to mention just some of the major literary figures. Nonetheless,
Reik continues, there is at least one other fictional product which portrays
this universal feeling, “one kind of collective production that can be
compared to those individual fantasies. They contain, distorted and
transformed by changes during thousands of years, memories from an
early phase of human evolution: I mean the myths”; 32 myths open
windows onto man’s past like “fossils for archaeologists”. To dig into
myths is like digging into the fears and conflicts of mankind, and their
fictional outcomes.
To begin with classical culture, Roberto Calasso, in his description of
classical myths, makes an interesting consideration about the origin of
guilt feelings as associated, in Western culture, with the myth of the
original sin. Because of its relation with primitive necessities – or perhaps
the other way around – guilt is, according to Calasso, unavoidable:

The primordial crime is the action that makes something in existence

disappear: the act of eating. Guilt is thus obligatory and inextinguishable.
And, given that men cannot survive without eating, guilt is woven into
their physiology and forever renews itself […]. The gods aren’t content to
foist guilt on man. That wouldn’t be enough, since guilt is part of life
always. What the gods demand is an awareness of guilt. And this can only
be achieved through sacrifice.33

Guilt is something for which the gods, or society, or our psyche,

require acknowledgement. Sacrifice, or self-sacrifice – as we will see in
our novels – serves this purpose. As a consequence, when mankind is
forced to sacrifice, as in the case of calamities and misfortunes, it tends to
associate bad luck with its faults, and to see it as the just punishment for
its misdeeds. Greek literature, for example, is full of examples of what
Reik calls “unconscious communal sin”: “Primitive civilizations as well as
half-civilized peoples share the view that crime is committed by the
community and that it has to bear the burden of penalty as long as it is
polluted by the misdeeds of one of its members”.34 The classical scholar
Lewis Farnell observes that in Greece and Babylon, and perhaps in the
entire ancient Mediterranean society, the concept of collective
responsibility, the idea that the tribe is one unit of life made of the same
flesh, marks an early stage of social moral.35
Another perspective on the concept of guilt in Greek culture is offered
again by Roberto Calasso. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
(1988) he examines the role of guilt in the depiction of Homeric heroes,
for whom, he believes, there was no guilty party, only an immense guilt.
20 Chapter One

There was no distinction between a possible abstract concept of evil in an

individual and his deeds:

With an intuition the moderns have jettisoned and have never recovered,
the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of
the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the
road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer
as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless
computation of the forces involved.36

The forces involved obviously change according to variations in

society. There are hypotheses that guilt feelings appeared in the life of
man at a certain phase of his evolution, five or six hundred years before
Christ, among the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other Mediterranean peoples;
it was conceived as a reaction to an action or to a conduct that was
considered wrong or evil. 37 Hybris and Nemesis, for example, are two
intertwined concepts that reflect the Greek cultural attitude towards guilt.
Hybris is the immoderate violence of those who cannot contain their
actions, who, in their relationships with others, “coldly or angrily,
overcome the limits of what is right, deliberately resulting in injustice”, to
use a definition by Carlo Del Grande;38 against it, there is Nemesis, “an
impersonal divine punishment that strikes the wicked one, or Zeus’ female
minister who materially punishes according to the god’s orders”. 39
Together, these two entities represent guilt and punishment, which,
according to Del Grande, from Homer to the classics, would increasingly
acquire the character of necessity. Under the influx of religious and heroic
currents, characters were “assembled” by the principle that going back to
the origins and the consequent pacific life or, on the contrary, violent death
were determined by the gods as a prize or as a punishment, according to
merits or faults.40 However this principle entered literature from religion
and established itself, it is a fact that guilt concepts were rationalized, in
Western civilization, by the Greeks.
For early psychologists, myths were collective daydreams, whereas
today psychologists tend to study them analytically. Joseph Campbell, for
example, believed that myths have constant characteristics, although they
have developed into different forms when separated from the original
source, “as dialects of a single language”.41 Guilt, and the myths related to
it, can thus be considered as two equally unavoidable features of human
civilization: all men feel guilty for a “universal or ubiquitous crime, since
it was committed before all history […]. More than this: if our assumption
is correct, the very concept of crime began with it”.42 The possibility of the
existence of a “mother mythology” from which different traditions
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 21

diverged on the basis of some traumatic historical event, as proposed by

Joseph Feldmann, would explain the similarities in Iranian-Indian sagas,
Egyptian and Babylonian myths, and also those of the Israelites.43
When considering the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the story of the Fall
is without doubt the first important reference to human guilt in the
Western world – or, at least, the one which influenced it most. The
Jahvistic source is dated from 8,000 to 1,000 B.C., but the myth of the Fall
has been certainly dated back to much older sources, transmitted orally for
a long time before its shaping into the biblical text. Interestingly enough,
the concept of original sin appears much later, with Sirach (200-175 B.C.),
where there is an allusion to a primeval sin, or with the Apocalypse of
Baruch (A.D. 80-150), in which we can find an allusion to the notion of
the Fall bringing upon man the responsibility for future punishment.
Even more interestingly, in the New Testament Jesus makes no
reference to the Fall. According to Reik, it was only after mankind was
redeemed by Christ that the original sin became significant: “It was only
after mankind was redeemed from it that that crime, forgotten for ages,
became a cause célèbre”.44
However, before Christianity prevailed in the Western public
imagination with its myths and symbols, a story similar to that of Adam
and Eve had already appeared in Greece, Rome, Persia, Syria, and also
among the Arabs prior to Mohammed. Since for the primitive mind evil
came from something external to the individual, sin was thought to be
caused by the temptation of something or someone supernatural: it is God
that moves David to sin. Then, of course, there is the figure of Satan, who,
according to Reik, is a degraded god, just as God is an elevated demon:
“As remnant of an earlier phase a god is present twice in many myths:
causing the sin of mortals, but also punishing them for it”.45
In the beginning, sin is always committed by a god or a demon; as a
matter of fact, in rabbinical literature Adam is a perfect man, almost
supernatural; in Greece there is Prometheus, but there are examples also in
Babylonian, Phoenician, Egyptian myths too. There are often two
superhuman powers fighting, one of which is banished in the end. 46 In
Japan, for instance, one might think of the legend of the first two Shinto
deities, Izanami, the goddess of creation and death, and Izanagi, her
brother and companion. After having generated a series of deities, Izanami
dies in giving birth to the god of fire. Izanagi descends to the Yomi, the
land of the dead, to find her and bring her back to him; but it is too late,
she has been transformed into a rotten, ugly body. Izanagi flees in disgust,
and Izanami, angry and shameful, chases after him, but he succeeds in
confining her to the Yomi, pushing a rock against the entrance of the
22 Chapter One

cavern, and she promises to kill 1,000 people a day – a promise of

vengeance and death that, although mitigated by Izanagi’s reply of giving
life to 1,500 people a day, all the same transforms Izanami into the “evil
part”, destined to be fought and segregated in a dark zone, a zone of the
repressed, just like guilt in our psyche.
As Reik said, “[m]an took only hesitantly and reluctantly the
responsibility for his fall, for sin or crime as source of all evils upon
himself”.47 The entrance of death and evil into mankind is often ascribed
to the breaking of a taboo, related to a forbidden fruit or to a mistake of
some sort. An Egyptian legend tells that Set, the enemy of all gods, kills
his brother Osiris, the son of the Earth and Heaven, marking the end of the
Golden Age. As with Cain’s crime, death gained entrance into the world
through the criminal act of a brother:

After the end of the patriarchal horde came a long phase of a fatherless
society, and interregnum. It was filled with wild fights among the sons,
who fought with each other, and each of whom tried to occupy the place
and to exert the power of the father tyrant. Violent struggles among the
brothers often led to fratricide, to a repetition of the primal deed, displaced
to the competing brothers. As a matter of fact, the first murders of which
the Semitic tradition tells, the primal crimes, are not the killing of a father,
but of a brother. The legends of Osiris and Set, of Cain and Abel present
prominent cases of such murderous strife within the primeval society. In
these and other myths […] echoes from that phase of brother jealousy and
brother hate reach us children of a progressed time in which murders of
brothers became rare and are replaced by mass destruction within the
brotherhood of mankind.48

It is this mass destruction within the brotherhood of mankind that

forges our narratives around the sense of guilt generated from it.
But a long time before that, in Greece there had been a shift in the
perception of guilt: from the ineluctable misery of hereditary powers,
individual responsibility entered human consciousness, and the “curse that
chains generations” was abandoned: the Erinyes became the Eumenides,
“the kindly ones”, as Paul Ricoeur points out.49
If the penal rationalization of guilt was due to the Greeks, the
internalization and refinement of the ethical conscience is of the Judaeo-
Christian tradition, according to Ricoeur. But contrary to what one might
expect, in Jewish culture guilt is very different from the one emanated by
Christianity. In the Torah there is no absolute evil, no ontological
connotation of what is bad; the basis of moral conduct is personal
responsibility. In the Jewish tradition, more than sin, and the consequent
sense of guilt, there is transgression. There is never a dichotomic
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 23

dimension in biblical literature; and there is no original sin. Even the Fall
of Adam and Eve has to be considered simply the result of a choice, since
everyone is responsible for him/herself. Unlike Greek tragedy, there is
nothing definitive, no immutable destiny in Jewish literature. As a
consequence, although on a few occasions the Bible refers to the concept
of a crime to be punished over many generations,50 the actual presence of
guilt in Jewish life is largely practical and only partly transcendental. The
biblical concept of guilt arises from the conviction that deeds generate
consequences and that sin is a danger to the sinner. We will see shortly
how the concept of expiation differs accordingly.
In Christianity, this belief in human free will in choosing good or evil
is generally maintained; every man is guilty not because of Adam, but
because of his own nature – a position not too different from Islam, in
which Adam and Eve’s mistake is forgiven by God once man has repented
for it. Similarly, for a Christian only the belief in Christ can save us from
the intrinsic imperfection of man. In fact, the concept of an original sin can
be traced back to Augustine, and therefore not before the 4th-5th century;
guilt started to be considered hereditary and transmitted from generation to
generation on account of the sexual act. Compared to Catholicism,
Protestantism is historically stricter in this regard, as Luther proclaimed
the definitive corruption of the soul caused by the original sin: salvation
depends on God’s will only, especially according to the Calvinist doctrine
of predestination. In any case, it is significant that Christianity brought
into Western culture the idea, not to say cult, of an intrinsic human
imperfection; an imperfection that can be related to the awareness of being
the victim of an inescapable guilt, which was, for this reason, associated
with the foundation act of mankind.
In Christianity the “stain” is sometimes referred to as felix culpa
(happy fault), because it generated in God the compassion of the
Incarnation, but nonetheless it requires individual guilt as part of the
necessary mortal repentance.51 It is perhaps from this certainty that all the
vendettas carried out by ancient deities have arisen: in the Bible, as
previously mentioned, there are various examples of iniquities being
“visited by the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation” (Exodus 20:5, but also in Genesis). Christianity seems to
alleviate the strictness of the vengeful divinity with the New Testament,
but guilt has continued in the Christian tradition all the same.
This inescapable sense of guilt is acknowledged in both religion and
psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists find themselves in
agreement with the basic assumption of religious beliefs, that is, man was
born guilty, victim of original sin; and although they trace it back to the
24 Chapter One

emotional evolution of men rather than theological motivations, both

acknowledge the existence of this constant. Priests and clergymen have
proclaimed that we are all sinners, assuming that we have to believe in a
universal guilt. Reik himself raises a fundamental question:

Is it conceivable that there is a free-floating guilt feeling in all men beyond

the frontiers of races and nations, a collective sense of guilt of mankind
that only occasionally reaches the threshold of conscious feeling? Is it
possible that beneath the self-assurance, complacency and smugness of our
civilization an unconscious sense of guilt is operating, shared by all?52

Archetypal criticism is partly based on such assumptions: something is

shared by different communities at the historical, anthropological, social,
or even, as in this case, psychological level. The results can differ, but in
many cases some common patterns or features are maintained. Religions
are one of the mirrors in which these shared quintessences are reflected.

1.3 Psyche and Religion: Patterns of Faithful Guilt

Indeed religions have always been one of the most powerful mirrors.
They have absorbed man’s fears, questions, and psychological structures
and built superb constructions around them, feeding on these sources but
also modifying them. Guilt as sin, or sin as guilt, are just two of the
binomials interwoven in the plot of religious systems.
Guilt as sin can be traced in all ancient religions: in Babylonian hymns,
in Egyptian prayers, in the Bible, in St. Paul, and so on. In this study an
important distinction between the two concepts has to be made, even if in
our novels the difference is not always evident or significant. It is also
important to underline that in neurotics and psychotics the experience of
guilt and sin merge.
To put it simply, we can say with Speziale-Bagliacca that in most
religions sin is a breaking of the moral laws given by the divinity;53 in
Christianity, for instance, these laws are the Commandments. Sin is
something connected with the sacred and its relation with purity and
impurity; a person sins when he or she offends the god in committing an
impure act. It is noteworthy that in the Vulgate, together with conscious
sin (see Psalm 50), there also seems to be an unconscious sin: “ab occultis
meis mundame” (at least this is how Lewis and Short interpret the
sentence in their Latin Dictionary of 1980). This is a hint that religion too
can acknowledge the existence of a hidden, gnawing feeling which is not
necessarily linked to an actual breaking of rules or moral dictates. But
generally speaking, when we talk about guilt we refer more to a moral
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 25

judgement, whereas sin is closer to a religious rebuke. Nonetheless, as

Speziale-Bagliacca suggests, one only has to consider the seven deadly
sins to see that each corresponds to a psycho-pathological syndrome. 54
Although the distinction between the two concepts seems to be obvious
and apposite when considering how different cultures react to guilt
feelings, it is significant that the two phenomena are not so different;
psychiatrists and also philosophers – Paul Ricoeur, for example –
recognize a complete “ontological” scission between being guilty and
committing sin, but actually psychoanalysis treats sense of guilt and sense
of sin in the same way.
Sin and guilt have followed a certain pattern: at the beginnings of
society, wrongdoing was considered according to “objective wrongs”
which were established by external social laws. Only in a later period guilt
was interiorized, and sin stopped to be conceived as a sort of “demonic
reality” for which the individual was not wholly responsible, as already
outlined.55 In a way, therefore, sin marks a later stage in the history of
guilt feelings, nonetheless preceding what we can consider as its “modern”
idea.
Religions have run in parallel in the process of the internalization of
guilt. For Victor White guilt and religion have such a strong connection
that “without such a sense [of guilt], Christian faith and practice, the whole
Gospel and message of Salvation, and the rites of the Church would be
completely meaningless”. 56 The eating of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge that constituted the Fall of Man essentially symbolizes the
moment in which man acquired the knowledge of good and evil, thus
becoming an ethic being. The price for this, to say it with Chamfort, was
disillusionment that precludes happiness and leads inevitably to the death
of the soul and to disintegration. 57 “Original sin”, therefore, can be
considered the Christian response to the innate guilt feelings that every
person must experience.
Philosophers, psychologists and many other scholars have associated
guilt with religion. In Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacré,
1972), René Girard based the whole idea of the foundation of human
society on the short-circuit between violence and the sacred, explicitly
linking the necessity of a sacramental attitude towards existence with acts
of force of the first men; whereas in The Scapegoat (Le bouc émissaire,
1982), but also in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Des
choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, 1978), he examines the
nature of those figures who embody the need for punishing innocence,
foregrounding the Bible as well. Kierkegaard based his concept of guilt on
a Jewish way of thinking: the very possibility of sinning generates guilt
26 Chapter One

feelings and therefore anxiety. His idea of original sin was connected with
the sensual and procreative instinct, the leaps necessary to humanity for
the abandoning of the state of innocence and the entrance into real
history. 58 Each of us repeat Adam’s first sin in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, and this concept was similarly expressed by Freud himself.
Wilfred Trotter, instead, made an interesting connection between another
aspect of the development of human society and the development of guilt.
In his study on social psychology called Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
War (1908-1909) he linked morality – and therefore guilt – to the
development of language: “Being spoken to can mean not only influence,
but also judgement. This is why herd animals (such as people) have a
‘conscience and feelings of guilt and of duty’”.59
Paradoxically, although guilt might seem such an “intrusive” presence
in our lives, we know that it can often be unconscious. As a matter of fact,
as we have already seen, Freud too argued that a sense of guilt can emerge
also when we are objectively innocent and have committed no crime
(whereas when one is “objectively” guilty he preferred to speak of
remorse). Just as an event can be a catalyst for re-awakening guilt feelings,
so the infraction of religious commandments can be a trigger to revive
ancient and undisclosed guilt feelings. It is not difficult to agree with León
Grinberg and Speziale-Bagliacca that “the high spiritual value attributed to
religious feelings and beliefs seems to owe much to the fact that ‘it
satisfies deep longings of the human psyche and in some way appeases
unconscious moral guilt’”.60 Religion can assume the function of a means
used to purge oneself of hidden and unconscious guilt feelings; this is why,
in a cultural environment such as the Japanese one, where local religions
do not imply a strong judgement from above, Christianity is taken as a
psychological scapegoat for inner guilt feelings, as happens in ƿoka’s
Fires on the Plain.
In fact, displacement is one of the main elements in any kind of
purgatory ritual. It is no coincidence if, in psychoanalysis, religions are
often compared to obsessive acts, the “everyday rituals” which we use as a
measure to protect ourselves against punishment if the ceremony is carried
out properly and meticulously.61 In the sense of guilt, with its anxiety and
terror of doom, one tries to exorcize the fear of a long awaited punishment
for the inner sense of guilt; religious people speak of divine punishment.
Sense of guilt and sin, their interrelation and their ambiguous overlapping,
lead to a short-circuit of cause and effect, as in neurosis, where the result
of repression has been successful, yet insufficient: “The believer can also
backslide into sin and from there develop a need for acts of atonement.
This has once again similarities with the character of an obsessive act”.62
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 27

Repression and the subsequent displacement of fears and desires are at the
basis of the thesis illustrated by Herman Westerink:

it now appears as if obsessional neurosis is the pathological counterpart of

the formation of religion, and religion is simply a universal obsessional
neurosis. But with regard to religion, the renunciation of the drives forms
the fundament of cultural development. Renunciation of the drive means
the “instinctual pleasure” is partly transferred to the deity. Freud cited by
way of example from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”. This
is a citation from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (12:19b). Paul in turn cites
freely from “Moses” (Deut. 32:35-36). For Freud the meaning of this
citation is illustrative: God may do what men repress, namely express his
vicious, socially dangerous urges. He described that as a liberation and I
believe he meant that the thought that God may indeed seek revenge can be
liberating for those to whom vengeance is not permitted and/or those who
do not permit revenge.63

For Freud, therefore, “the problem is not that religious sublimation is

absurd, but rather that existing religious traditions contribute to a culture in
which neuroses are more prominent than ever before”.64 As a matter of
fact, in The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy (1910), Freud
affirmed that there was a great increase in neuroses in his day, when
religions were starting to exert less influence: “culture still demanded
repression whereas religion offered no better prospect to satisfy desire”.65
We will see how this phenomenon proved essential in the psycho-
emotional status in which our characters play their roles. The conflict of
the characters who still have a religious sense is complex and tormented;
solace is not always obtained, and often is no longer even pursued. Guilt
and repression continue to be an obsession, but “souls” have ceased to be
protected from above and have become guilty “psyches”, “minds”, or even
just “bodies”. The historical context of our novels saw increasing
repression, in addition to a continuous oscillatory movement between the
desire to “confess” these guilt feelings and the paralyzed, apathetic attitude
of hiding behind other self-defensive strategies. We will see in the
following chapters how these strategies forge the narrative forms.
In Totem and Taboo Freud observed that “we are all miserable
sinners”; but from this perspective, Jung did not understand these sins:

With Jung it appeared that sins were linked with an unhappy relationship
between person and reality, a conflict in which religion or fantasy could
offer solace. Jung’s theories of the primal libido repudiated the existence of
fundamental, sadistic hostile wishes. Guilt feelings thus played hardly any
role to speak of. They were ultimately a secondary phenomenon, one
28 Chapter One

which additionally did not appear to be a burden, but rather to be liberating

[…]. Self-criticism, which can arise as an expression of this tension, is
subsequently employed in order to develop a new plan in order to reach the
goal anyway. Self-criticism is thus useful, just as religion can also be
useful when it is able to identify sin and offer forgiveness.66

Thus Jung was more positive about the possible effects not only of
guilt feelings but also of the “solutions” that religions can offer, at least
from a psychological point of view.67 But what do religions offer in terms
of expiation?
Christianity is based on the belief that Christ, personifying the last
Adam, atoned for the sins of all mankind, as Paul of Tarsus’s message
says: we have been delivered from guilt since Christ laid down His life in
expiation for our sin. Reik recognizes that changes in religion tend to
lessen the accumulated temptations, citing as an example Luther’s motto:
“Pecca fortiter” (Sin bravely!). 68 A similar pattern is also present in
Buddhism: once Enlightenment has been reached, the enlightened person
can decide not to abandon himself to the Nirvana but to dedicate his life to
the others, becoming a Bodhisattva. However, needless to say, guilt has
not vanished from the earth, and we still feel guilty, notwithstanding the
salvation offered by religion. Religions, one might expect from their main
aim, should have resolved the sense of guilt of their believers, but on the
contrary it very often seems the other way around. Winnicott says that
“religious and moral teaching do not elicit guilt-feelings. Indeed, such
teaching may accentuate real guilt-feelings and arouse unrealistic guilt-
feelings”.69 It is a paradox that Kalu Singh traces back to the Renaissance:

religion has failed in its promise to alleviate guilt – the guilt it had created
in order to demonstrate the faith’s power by healing it. The only remaining
excuse is the perennial plea of the tension between the perfection of the
theology and the culpability of the believers. But from the psychoanalytic
point of view, clients arrive at the therapeutic realm variously crippled by
guilts which religion has failed to heal, even if it didn’t create them.
Religion has had two to seven millennia, depending on your religion, to
perfect its theology and its technique: psychoanalysis has had one
century.70

Provocative challenges to creeds and their efficacy can be shared or

rejected; but it is a fact that literary works derive their effects from this.
Twentieth-century society and literary production reflect a change that the
psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance summarizes in the following way:
 The Analysis of Guilt: Psychology, Myth, Religion 29

the anxiety and guilt-feelings connected with mental illness in our day, and
which preoccupies the pages of our novelists and poets, is due to the fact
that guilt is divorced from the real source, namely, alienation from God,
the object of anxious longing. Psychologically the anxiety can be expressed
in terms of the thwarting of what Hadfield calls “The urge to
completeness”, or as it has otherwise been termed “The prospective aim of
personality”. In theological terms, it is the thwarting of the Image of God,
the religious telos of personality. The mentally ill person experiences this
lack of completeness, the blocking of his personality, he feels that the very
aim of personality is lost: “I have nothing to live for” he repeats endlessly.
He has divorced his sense of the urge to completeness and its consequent
anxiety from religion and Redemption. In Torrance’s language: neither the
patient nor the psychiatrist has dealt “with man’s deepest root of the
problem which is sin and guilt before God”. The guilt is displaced, and
becomes either psychosomatic disease or mental illness.71

Guilt has replaced the idea of sin, and perhaps many other things –
responsibility, consciousness, lucidity, as our characters go to prove. It is
not a coincidence that existentialism has played with the idea that man
degrades everything he touches, “a measure of the existential guilt which
every man bears vaguely within himself, the Promethean sense of man’s
curse”.72 We find ourselves asking: “Is our sense of guilt the mark of our
total depravity, or is it the sign that man cannot but seek the loved but lost
object, God? Is guilt ‘the image of God’ seeking its realization, or is it the
final proof that the image is totally destroyed?”.73 It seems that wholeness
is the price to be paid for Knowledge. Once again.
 CHAPTER TWO

WANDERING CAINS

As for me,
I am a worm, and no man:
a very scorn of men,
and the out-cast of the people.
—Psalm 22:6

2.1 Paradigms of Self-Punishment,

Paradigms of Atonement
As a “social” construct – at least to a certain extent – the superego of
an individual can have a weaker or stronger power over the psyche
according to the culture in which it develops. Generally speaking, the
more civilized a culture, the more punitive the superego; and, as a
consequence, the heavier the guilt, both quantitatively and qualitatively.1
We have seen that, as guilt entered human society, man developed
different “psychological devices” to overcome the sense of guilt and make
atonement for the bites of his conscience. Theories and practices of
expiation made their appearance in the history of man quite early on, and
myths and religions have reflected this need for inner purity in creating
patterns and laws through which one can make amends either with oneself
or with the external divine projection.
Hence man suffers from a “need for punishment”: a need to be
chastized by someone else – if possible more powerful than himself – who
can judge him from the outside, and consequently release him from the
task of self-judgement, which is perhaps more painful and less definitive:

When we examine the origin of guilt-feelings we shall find that the Super-
ego or conscience seems to demand not merely obedience or compliance
with its dictates, but demands punishment if these dictates are disobeyed.
This is the root of what is called “the need for punishment”. It is the
psychological root of the idea that “guilt must be paid for”; and thus the
root of some theories of Atonement as well as of the Sacrament of
Penance.2
32 Chapter Two

People strongly believe that the guilty must be punished, and although
this certainly is not the purpose of curative psychoanalysis, it is extremely
evident in literature, where, from Greek hybris to Richardson’s Clarissa,
there is a long sequence of scarlet letters and suicidal bovarists, leading to
the meaningless and causeless torture of the Kafkian trials, and much more.
Together with this persuasion, there is the belief that a chance for
atonement has to be given, and that we must have the opportunity to make
amends for our faults – even while the desire to think that in the end “it is
not our fault” persists. The conflict between the need for punishment and
the desire of being, or at least thinking of ourselves as, innocent, creates
the most interesting outcomes in contemporary novels.
This conflict is even more complex if we consider the fact that, from a
psychological point of view, forgiveness cannot be offered by the law or
by any other political or governmental entity, even when we are
objectively guilty. Unconscious guilt cannot be cleansed by religious
confession or legal punishment. Also, we must distinguish between
different attitudes towards our guilt feelings: we can have so-called
“mature” guilt feelings, or those related to objective wrong-doing,
controlled by positive conscience; and those controlled by the superego,
unmotivated, difficult to govern. An “effective” atonement can happen
only when there is a transition from the latter to the former, called by
theologians metanoia, repentance, but literally meaning a change in mental
attitude, a change of mind consisting of contrition for improper behaviour
and a desire to avoid such behaviour in the future. When guilt is
acknowledged and there is a positive response to it, typically there is a
tendency to make reparation – and this is a tendency that is still present in
Judaism. In less well-balanced situations between the self and the sense of
guilt, however, the desire to atone is not explicit and consequently not
really performed, not properly achieved, and, most importantly, not
consciously lived. This is a very important aspect we have to keep in mind
when analysing the novels in question. Catholicism, in particular, has
created a fascinating short-circuit between the possibility, and then the
need, to confess one’s sins and the subsequent feeling of desperation at
both the sensation of being obliged to confess and the realization that you
will never expiate sufficiently. McKenzie effectively summarizes the
reasons why atonement seems so necessary and desirable:

After all, when we experience guilt-feeling, it is not for what we have done
but for what we are. When we pray for forgiveness it is not simply that we
think of particular sins we have committed and seek pardon for them: we
seek forgiveness as selves […]. Our sins cannot be undone; the physical
and psychological effects of these sins, it may be impossible to remove.
 Wandering Cains 33

But the soul may be restored, the burden of guilt lifted, and an end made to
the estrangement and alienation.3

There is no doubt that the concept of religious Atonement “has brought

peace to many a guilt-burdened soul”.4 Some kinds of penance are good
for the spirit, as both psychoanalysts and theologians recognize. Even in
literature, confession is a primary way to expiate guilt, as the Ancient
Mariner and many other characters go to show.
It is not a coincidence that all major religions encourage sinners to
confess or pay penance. According to Coleman, some religions tend to
make confession as painless as possible by separating it from the crime:
“The Catholic penitent, for example, is allowed to make his peace directly
with God, thereby avoiding the embarrassment of having to make
reparation directly to the individual who has been offended or harmed”.5
Instead, this is what happens in Judaism. For the Jews atonement means
making amends, paying one’s bills, and offering reparation to people to
whom we are in debt. This is how the Encyclopaedia Judaica defines the
English word “Atonement” (Heb. kippurim):

The English word atonement (“at-one-ment”) significantly conveys the

underlying Judaic concept of atonement, i.e., reconciliation with God. Both
the Bible and rabbinical theology reflect the belief that as God is holy, man
must be pure in order to remain in communion with Him. Sin and
defilement damage the relationship between creature and Creator, and the
process of atonement – through repentance and reparation – restores this
relationship.6

Once again the concept of wholeness reappears. Interestingly enough,

one of the words used when speaking of atonement in Hebrew is Teshuva:
it can be used to mean “repentance”, “atoning for sins”, but the literal
meaning is “going back”, “return” – to home, to the origins, to God.
Redemption is something that can be acknowledged and paid for, and after
that it is possible to go home again. In this perspective, Cain’s alienation
could represent a simple isolation from a tribe after having committed a
crime that broke the moral and social rules of the community. After his
separation from the original nucleus, Cain is able to found another city
somewhere else, to be reconciled with the divinity, or is simply allowed to
build a new family in a place far from the one stained by his mistake. One
might wonder if founding another city means going home, or if, on the
contrary, it means being alienated from it forever. However one wants to
interpret it, the Judaic sense of guilt implies that punishment, or just its
burden, is not eternal, that it can be overcome if only you reunite yourself
34 Chapter Two

with others and God: at-onement. Also, one must consider that in Judaism
there is no cosmic expiation, as has been generated by Christianity; there
is no Messianic age, no harmony to be reached. One should do teshuva
everyday, but especially on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement
(September-October), a day of fasting at the beginning of the new year.7
Early Judaism, as well as Christianity and Islam, based atonement on
ritual sacrifices. In the Bible, a sacrificial rite is the basic meaning of
atonement, and it is necessary “to purify man from both sin and
uncleanliness” (Lev. 5).8 Personal purification, however, is necessary in
order to accomplish the rite effectively. Fasting and prayer are also
considered means of atonement. The destruction of the Temple and the
consequent end to sacrifices saw a significant change, as the words of the
rabbis of the time testify: “Prayer, repentance, and charity avert the evil
decree” (TJ, Ta’an. 2:1, 65b). This new phase is characterized by new
attention to other patterns of atonement: suffering, the destruction of the
Temple itself, the Day of Atonement, exile – Cain’s legacy – and even
death can be the final atonement for one’s sins: “May my death be an
expiation for all my sins” is a formula recited when death is near (Sanh.
6:2). Rabbis tended to deritualize atonement, paying more attention to
personal religious life and the individual’s relationship to God – in short,
in this respect Judaism has somehow got closer to Christianity.
Apart from the parenthesis of orthodox Calvinism and its belief that
salvation depends on God’s will only – somehow similar to the theory of
atonement in Islam – Christianity has developed complex structures and
ways of expiation, although, ultimately, the mercy of God continues to
play a major role.
Separation is also a central point when considering sin. Sin, or its
secular version, guilt, alienates man from truth, from wholeness, from
good. Sin also separates man from God; it entails spiritual and physical
death – following spiritual and physical alienation. Let us not forget that
Cain wanders alone, banned, far from everyone. Although Cain is depicted
with no explicit sense of guilt in the Bible, but rather with a heavy sense of
having committed a crime, 9 his attitude is a perfect paradigmatic
representation of the state of mind of a guilt-ridden individual. Literature,
as we are going to discover in the next chapters, was to use his image for
endless distressed characters and paradigmatic atoning journeys.
As a matter of fact, guilt feelings “can produce a horrific sense of
alienation from one’s self, from one’s family and from God”.10 If Judaism
is the religion of the Father, Christianity is the religion of the Son; and
since the Son serves as a scapegoat for humanity, reconciliation is possible
for the reconstitution of the original familiar harmony. To ask for
 Wandering Cains 35

forgiveness is to ask not merely for pardon but for the recomposition of
the “undisturbed relation with the loved object, in this case God. It is to
seek change in the governing principle of our personality; it is to seek
freedom from our Ego-centricity and to become centred in God”, just as
Saint Paul desired.11 To be saved (in fact all Eastern as well as Western
religions offer Salvation from sin)12 is to be freed from the burden of guilt,
to be able to say that your beloved is in your possession, and that your
beloved possesses you. In religious terms, according to McKenzie, this is
“eternal life”.13 Actually, together with the anxiety or longing for the lost
ideal or the lost loved object typical of all guilt feelings, several postwar
characters – the “whisky priest” of The Power and the Glory, soldier
Tamura in Fires on the Plain are two examples – suffer from religious
guilt feelings.
As a matter of fact, the Cross in Christianity is a new human symbol of
sacrifice and atonement: “the sacrifice of the Cross, which the Church re-
presents daily in the celebration of the Eucharist, meets a deep emotional
need without which full atonement is impossible”.14 Forgiveness is often
linked to this image in Western culture. Even Jung agreed that the Church
had provided symbols such as Atonement, Baptism, the sacrament of
Repentance and the Confessional as reconciling systems thanks to which
guilt feelings can be dissipated.15 In the Christian world, forgiveness and
judgement are transcendental, and therefore transcendental expiatory
systems had to be adopted in order to atone. In other cultures, such as
those centred on Buddha’s teachings, guilt is more contingent, as are
punishment and hell. The sense of guilt is related to society; it is not
perceived as an ontological essence. Consequently, forgiveness – if it
exists and is needed – is of society and not of a metaphysical entity.16
However, not only Christianity has influenced our behaviour towards
guilt and, as a consequence, our imagination about guilt. Paul Tournier, for
example, describes the attempt at atonement made by religions as follows:

I am not only speaking of our traditionally Christian western world. Think

of the innumerable multitudes of Hindus who plunge into the waters of the
Ganges to be washed from their guilt. Think of the votive offerings and the
gold-leaf which covers statues of the Buddha. Think of all the penitents
and pilgrims of all religions who impose upon themselves sacrifices,
ascetic practices, or arduous journeys. They experience the need to pay, to
expiate. In a more secular sphere, less aware of its religious significance,
think of all the privations and all the acts of charity which so many people
impose upon themselves, in order to be pardoned for the more or less
unfair privileges which they enjoy.17
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Martha
Schofield, pioneer Negro educator
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Martha Schofield, pioneer Negro educator

Author: Matilda A. Evans

Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68234]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: DuPre Printing Co, 1916

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTHA

SCHOFIELD, PIONEER NEGRO EDUCATOR ***
 Martha Schofield

Pioneer Negro Educator

Historical and Philosophical Review of

Reconstruction Period of South
Carolina

By MATILDA A. EVANS, M. D.
Graduate Schofield School
 Copyright, 1916.
By Matilda A. Evans, M. D.

DuPre Printing Company, Columbia, S.C.

 Dedicatory
To the men and women who braved the
dangers and suffered the hardships of frontier life
and bore with fortitude the pain of social
ostracism and the sting of poison slander that
through their work a lowly race might be
educated, this work is respectfully dedicated by
The Author.
 FOREWORD

One of the benefits conferred by education is that of enlightening

the mind on the subject of one’s duty. Finding what is duty the
manner of discharging it will suggest itself to the alert, the active, and
those of industrious and intelligent discernment. Perhaps forever
hidden would remain the necessity for certain tasks were it not for
the inspiration idealists receive from education. This education, if
proper and well rounded, also forces all who embrace it into the line
of work promising the accomplishment of the greatest achievements
—achievements such as in leaving foot-prints on the sands of time
leave no mark of dishonor but such as really and truly do give new
heart and new hope and new courage to the weaker brother.
That Martha Schofield was inspired by the highest motives that
possibly could influence any one in choosing an occupation to be
made a life-work is evidenced by the personal sacrifices she made in
order to engage in it. The fortitude with which she bore the poison
sting of slander, the cruel whip of character assassination and
braved the threats of personal violence forcibly attests the sincerity
actuating her in pursuing her chosen work. The results accomplished
by the fifty years of earnest endeavor by her form a tribute to
efficiency of women in administrative affairs that is seldom ever
equaled by other human beings claiming greater strength by reason
of sex. When the final history of the war between ignorance and
enlightenment, between superstition and science, between vice and
virtue shall have been written of the colored race the foremost name
among all will be—Martha Schofield—Pioneer Negro Educator.
Matilda A. Evans, M. D.,
Columbia, S. C.
Martha Schofield
 CHAPTER I.
The Hunted Beast.

A woman apparently thirty years of age, of mulatto skin, fell limp

into a chair in the kitchen of Mrs. Oliver Schofield of Darby, Bucks
County, Pennsylvania about the year 1857, with blood hounds and
the voices of angry men following close upon her heels through the
tangled swamps from which she had just emerged.
“Who can thee be? Who can thee be?—and what does thee want
here?” inquired excited Mrs. Schofield as she dropped the dish rag
and rushed to the prostrate form in the chair, eager to render aid and
comfort to the suffering and afflicted woman as well as to ascertain
the cause of her abrupt, unannounced entrance into her home.
Out of breath from the long run made necessary to escape the
dogs and the traps laid by experienced officers of the law who had
been so diligently upon her trail for more than a week, that she had
had time to stop and rest and take nourishment for only a few
minutes at a time, Laura Duncan was unable at first to give any
coherent account of herself. She managed, however, to make it
known to the kind Quaker lady that she was an escaped slave and
was endeavoring with all speed possible to reach the Canadian
border and enter the world of freedom, which she had been informed
existed under the British flag in the Dominion of Canada for all who
might enter that country.
As causes moving her to take this drastic step in defiance of the
law of her own land and the possibility of involving the liberty and
happiness of all who might be kind enough to assist her in the
accomplishment of the task, she recited such evils as brought tears
to the eyes of her enforced host. She exhibited a lash-scared back, a
broken bone or two and a deep cut on the head that had since been
healed without serious results only by the aid of a skillful surgeon.
 But the physical suffering attested by these outward signs of the
practice of brutality on the woman were but a fraction of the pain and
torture which Miss Schofield knew was gnashing at her heart over
the parting of herself and husband and children more than a month
before, when at a public sale little Gabe, her ten year old son, and
Jennie, the only daughter, and her husband, “Jim,” were each sold to
different masters in as many different States and carried away where
she would never see or hear of any of them again.
“Martha” said Mrs. Schofield addressing her daughter, whose face
was covered in an immaculate white apron that adorned her whole
front, to hide the freely flowing tears that rushed from her eyes like
water from the fountains, “do thee find thy father at once and tell him
to come to the house as quickly as possible.”
Then laying her arms around the body of the inconsolable wife and
mother she spoke words of consolation and cheer, assuring her that
God in his own way and wisdom would destroy the power of the
government of human beings by the lash, would break the chains
that bind the hand and foot and visit a just retribution on all those
responsible for the sale of babies from the breasts of mothers. She
begged and pleaded earnestly that Laura abandon the attempt to
escape and entreated her to surrender to the officers and return to
her master, but the slave, chafing under the influence of a life of
injustice and brutality, expressed a firmer determination than ever
before, to continue on in her course and begged pitiably of her host
that her presence in the home be not divulged. She threatened
suicide if captured.
Mr. Schofield, himself, by this time had reached the house and
instantly grasping the situation, requested of Mrs. Schofield a familiar
old shawl and bonnet of hers. Dressed in these Laura, in company
with Mr. Schofield, passed readily as Mary, his wife, among
acquaintances of the latter, and successfully eluded all pursuit by the
officers, who a half hour after her departure had ransacked the
Schofield home from turret to foundation stone in search of the
fleeing fugitive.
 Reaching a zone safely out of reach of harm’s way, the leader of
the church of the Society Friends, deposited his burden, wishing her
God-speed in her undertaking and placing in her hand one dollar in
gold to assist her on her journey, turned his horse, after many days
on the road, and made his way slowly back home, with a painful
heart.
During the interval of her husband’s departure and return, Mrs.
Schofield was kept busy in the attempt to control the indignant and
outraged feelings of Martha, who had gone to her mother dozens of
times with the question of the justice and mercy of God and the
wisdom and power of the government in permitting the fettering of
four million bodies in chains and the trampling under foot by brutal
might of all the sacred relations of wife, father and child.
“Ah, my daughter, ’tis not for thee to question the mysterious
workings of God,” she would reply, “in the Master’s own time and
way He will touch the auction block, the slave pen and the whipping
post, and in their place thee shall see what thy dear heart desires so
much to see—happy homes and firesides, and school houses and
books, where today thee only sees crime and cruelty and fear.”
“But mother,” Martha would protest, “for how much longer must the
poor ignorant slaves endure the infinite outrages heaped upon them
by reason of the barbarism of the slave-holding oligarchy? Have they
not suffered enough already? Is it not time to close the door on the
slave-holding class and render judgment as swift and implacable as
death? Their cause was brought forth in iniquity and consummated
in crime, and I for one believe God would only be served by our
societies (the Society of Friends and the Abolitionist Society)
hastening on the inevitable civil conflict, believed by most people as
absolutely necessary in the settlement of the whole question of
slavery.”
“My daughter, oh, my daughter, pray thee do not talk that way”
said her mother in tones of profound anxiety; “does not the good
book command thee not to kill? Eternal torment for thy portion if thou
should commit murder, and to wish it to be done is father to the
deed. Oh, my daughter! my daughter! thee frightens me!”
 “Oh, no my mother, there’s no murder in my heart, I assure thee,”
said Martha; “I only desire the government’s protection for every
human being subject to its authority and I want that same authority to
turn every auction block and slave pen into a school house even if its
necessary to exact by bullet every drop of blood that has been
spilled by the lash, in accomplishing this result. Thee must concede
that the Bible also teaches us to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth. But I wish this to be done, Mother, only to make possible
a happier and blesseder existence here on this earth for a lowly
race, when all other means of accomplishing so desirable an end
have been tried and proven in vain.”
 CHAPTER II.
Revolution and War.

During the ten years intervening between the precipitate

appearance of the runaway slave at the Schofield home and the
coming to Edisto Island, South Carolina, of Miss Martha Schofield for
the purpose of founding an industrial school for the colored race, the
new form of liberty conceived by our fore-fathers and dedicated to
the principle that all men are born free and equal, had been put to a
severe test as to whether this new form of government could be put
into practice. The great Civil War predicted by Martha as inevitable in
the settlement of the problem of slavery broke out in all its fury in
1860-61 and was not only attended by the loss of hundreds of
thousands of priceless lives, whose bodies filled countless hospitals
of pain, and made gory the prairies and furrows of old fields, as they
on the side of the South as well as they on the side of the North bled
and died for the eternal right as each saw what was their duty; but
the demoralization precipitated by this gigantic conflict, followed by
the assassination of President Lincoln, the idol of the whole free-
civilized world, was even more staggering in its influence on the lives
and fortunes of those left to solve the problems created by the great
revolution.
The waste of inconceivable sums of money through the awarding
of contracts involving millions and millions of dollars by which
fortunes, through little or no effort at all, were made in a single night
was openly countenanced at Washington.
Superfluous wealth chocked the nation at the North with its mighty
grip and the riot of speculation, corruption and debauchery which
followed, in the voting away of the public lands free of any charge to
private corporations and the granting of subsidies of millions of
dollars without any compensation whatever, laid such burdens upon
the people that many of them until this day (1916) remain
undischarged.
The paralysis experienced by the business interests as a result of
this whirlwind of corruption resulted in the decline of the credit of the
country to such an extent that the six per cent. bonds of the Republic
dropped to about seventy-three cents on the dollar in the open
market. But the disastrous financial calamity which the war produced
is of no consequence in comparison with the moral degradation into
which the country sank.
A few years before the panic of 1873 nearly everybody in the
North and West, where conditions were prosperous in spite of the
war, wanted to go to the cities where fortunes were waiting for them,
and almost every farmer’s son took an oath that he would never
cultivate the soil. At the age of twenty-one they left the dreary and
desolate farms in droves and rushed to the cities to become
bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, merchants and sewing machine
agents, anything to escape the heavy work of the farm. Those with
capital wanted to engage in something promising huge and quick
returns and so these built railroads, established banks and insurance
companies. Some speculated in stocks of Wall Street, while others
gambled in grain in Chicago with the result that the riches of the
whole country flowed to their coffers in immense volume, and in their
carriages and palaces the pitied their poor brothers on the farm, who
as earnestly envied them.
But the lap of luxury in which these citizens were being nursed
was doomed to become thread-bare as, indeed, it did do, and
always will do, when the world’s advance is checked by the want of
assistance and co-operation of all classes of laborers. The railroad
and insurance presidents became bankrupts and their companies
went into the hands of receivers by the score. Large numbers of
young men who imagined they had entirely too much education to be
wasted on the farm and flocked to the cities in incredible numbers
became in time, either absconders and fugitives from justice, or plain
tramps and hobos, a demonstrative force to prove the saying, that
the only really solvent people, the only independent people, are the
tillers of the soil.
 At the South which had been reduced to the most degraded type
of poverty there were no such opportunities for the accumulation of
wealth as existed at the North and in the West. The few railroads
that before the war intersected this section had been torn up by the
necessities of war and needed rebuilding, but there was no money to
be had anywhere with which to do the work. All the strongest blood
and brain had been either slain in battle or rendered incapacitated
for the tasks which the new order of conditions had forced upon the
country. Aside from the loss of millions and millions of dollars as a
result of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves the South
was forced also to bear the burden of an exorbitant tax on all crops
produced, especially the cotton tax.
The agitation set up by many of the acts of Reconstruction,
impeachment proceedings against President Johnson and the
foment and strife engendered by the rule of the military authorities
opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, all served, to keep for years longer
than necessary, the bleeding and prostrate South securely on its
back, a helpless beggar at the mercy, in many instances of an army
of unscrupulous and grafting office-seekers. Under such conditions it
was impossible to obtain credit anywhere for the most necessary
things of life and as there was almost nothing of any value produced,
the greatest hardships and suffering, if not actual misery, was
endured by the people of the South.
Scores of persons gave up in despair and died. Cow peas, corn
bread and molasses of such quality as only a few years before would
have been considered unfit food for the slaves formed the sole diet,
for the first few years after the war, of delicate and cultured women.
Little children often went to bed crying from hunger. An element of
the Negro population, rendered conspicuously brutal and vicious by
service in the army, stole and threatened even blacker crimes, just
as the game of war has affected the morality of all races of men
throughout the history of recorded warfare.
 CHAPTER III.
Pioneer Educator Arrives.

Into the midst of these terrible times which made weak the souls
and hearts of the strongest of men, came Miss Martha Schofield, the
first of the pioneers to push into the distracted South to labor, to
suffer, and if need be, to die for the millions of ignorant, irresponsible
Negroes. Their education, along industrial lines, she made her life-
work—crowning it on the 77th day of her birth, February 1, 1916, by
passing from earth to heaven. But she left to show that she did
something on earth a school and campus comprising an area of two
entire blocks in the beautiful City of Aiken, S. C., on which she had
erected eight buildings.
The school farm, adequate for all farm demonstration work,
consists of about 400 acres. The funds by which all this valuable
property was acquired was raised by Miss Schofield herself, through
the fluent use of her trenchant pen, which she knew how to wield as
few women have ever learned to do. Everything contracted for in the
interest of the school was paid for in cash as Miss Schofield, in all
her fifty years of administration, never contracted the outlay of
money without first having provided the means with which to meet
claims. She enjoyed the good-will and friendship of men and women
of wealth and influence throughout the country, especially of the old
Abolitionists, who supported her institution generously as long as
they lived and possessed the means with which to do so.
The Schofield School at Aiken has sent out into the world many
young men and women who have gone back among their own
people accomplished teachers, ministers, physicians, farmers and
artisans, leading the colored race of the South to the highest
appreciation of what Martha Schofield’s motto for life was
—“Thoroughness,” thoroughness not only in books and the industrial
arts, but in thought and action as well. No doubt the success which
attended the efforts of the graduates of this School is due, in the
main, to the strict regard for efficiency with which this great woman
inspired every student coming under her influence.
When we contemplate the wide-spread influence which the life
and work of Martha Schofield has exerted on the education of the
people of the South, the white as well as the colored, words become
inadequate to pay proper tribute to her; to justly express the
appreciation felt by those having knowledge of her achievements.
There is not a colored school in the entire South that has not
acknowledged the wisdom of this Divinely endowed leader and
instructor by establishing an industrial department. Recognizing the
imperative importance of this sort of instruction almost all the schools
and colleges for whites emphasize it by giving it first place in their
curriculums. Clemson, for white men and Rock Hill Normal and
Industrial Institute for young white women were established long
after Miss Schofield brought home to the people of the South the
crying necessity of preparing our boys and girls of all races for the
actual duties met with in every day home life. The vision which she
herself had of a thorough preparation for the humbler tasks lighted
the intellectual skies of the whole South after years of success by
her in the education of the weaker race. This fact is made more
prominent by the action of many of the States in incorporating
industrial courses in the common schools.
Much credit must be given to the practical success of Miss
Schofield’s school work for the marvelous strides made by the
education of the Negro at such celebrated institutions as Hampton,
Va., with an enrollment annually of over 1,500 students and an
endowment of over $1,000,000.00; and at Tuskegee, with about an
equal number of students and as great or greater endowment fund.
Then there are other great institutions devoted entirely to the
education of the colored race, making quite a feature of the industrial
department, such as Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga., Fisk University,
Nashville, Term., Haines Institute, Augusta, Ga., Spellman
University, Atlanta, Ga., Claflin and the Agricultural Colored State
College at Orangeburg, S. C. Also Benedict at Columbia and
Voorhees Institute at Denmark, all of which have grown into
existence and attained the top-most rung of the ladder of fame since
the coming to the South of Martha Schofield in 1865.
Near the Schofield School is the Bettis Academy in Edgefield
County, South Carolina, formed and modeled after the fashion of the
Aiken School. Alford Nicholson, the principal, is a product of the
latter and is working out with great similarity the ideas and theories
of his Alma Mater. The good being accomplished here in a small way
is one of the great triumphs of the life-work of Miss Schofield, it being
her greatest aim in life not to create and endow great institutions of
learning with money and high sounding names, but to plant in the
heart and soul of every child coming under her influence those
principles of efficiency that would enable them to get out into the
world and actually do something to lift up the fallen. She acted
always as if the taking of the name of the Lord in vain consisted
entirely of praying for the Kingdom of God to come but doing
absolutely nothing to bring those prayers to pass. “Deeds, deeds, my
children,” she was fond of saying, “are what count, not mere words.”
The absence of faith in God, she asserted, was seen in all those
who did not turn their hand to accomplish the results for which they
prayed. No one can successfully accuse her of hypocracy in the
least. She practiced what she taught and taught others that anything
less than that was hypocracy and infidelism.
Miss Martha Schofield was born near Newton, in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, on the first day of February in the year 1839 of well-to-
do parents, who professed and lived true the principles of religion as
enunciated by the Society of Friends, or the Quakers, as they are
commonly called. This stern sect of religious puritans date their
arrival in America along with the earliest immigrants, and in
proportion to numbers can lay as heavy claim to being responsible
for the civilization of the present day as any other denomination
inhabiting the New World. The same cause, religious persecution,
leading other denominations to seek a home on American shores,
where they could worship God in their own way, inspired the Friends
to come to this country. William Penn, a very wealthy and highly
educated man, famous the civilized world over for his kindness of
heart and generous benevolences, was a member of the Society and
one of its chief supporters in England and America. He founded the
City of Philadelphia, which means brotherly love. The foundation
stone of the whole structure of the Quaker religion is carved out of
the rock of brotherly love, and it was this love that placed Ben Abon
Ahem on the highest seat in the house of the Hall of Saints when the
wandering Angel of the earth went to Heaven to pick out the
Archangel within the pearly gates.
The love which Martha Schofield bore for all mankind, white and
black, Jew and Greek, male and female, friend and foe, was
evidently inspired by a religious conviction that held her thrall.
Not since Christ has there been a man or woman of whom it can
be truly said he or she could not possibly, wilfully sin, but it is
believed confidently by all who knew Miss Schofield best that she
would not under any circumstances knowingly commit sin. It was as
natural for her to be virtuous and righteous as it is natural for the
vicious to be bad, unkind, selfish and immoral.
While Miss Schofield was kind and generous to prodigality she
was also as brave as a lion and quick as a tiger to fight if the
occasion demanded it. While she always took counsel and weighed
matters carefully she never failed to contend for what she believed to
be right. Her nature seemed blended with the holiness of a sacred
spirituality, imparted to it no doubt by her religious training, and an
invincibleness in matters affecting social relations that bordered the
stubbornness of Satan. Influenced, possibly, to greatness in the
latter attribute by the teachings of the Abolitionist Party, to which she
belonged in heart, mind and soul?
As one of her most valued friends and one of the most brilliant of
the many noteworthy people said of her at the funeral, the author
wishes to repeat here: “Martha Schofield is not dead; she lives and
will continue to live in the memory of her students scattered all over
South Carolina and other States. She lives in their memory and in
the memory of their children’s children, for there are few colored
homes in which her name and deeds are not recounted in the family
circle. I count some of her best work, the efforts she made to elevate
and purify the home. She spent much time and endured many