The Other Woman / The Other Side

As a blog manager, you can see which blogs of yours people read the most, where else on the web they come to you from, and what else they are looking at when they leave your place. That was how I came across “The Other Woman,” a blog written by She Who Has Affairs with Married Men. The link is in my blogroll, to your right.

I spent some time looking around on it. I’m always fascinated by the other side of the story.

It seems I’m not alone. Looking at the other story, the other side, the traditionally unsympathetic perspective is arguably a cultural pastime. These days — or these last several years, even — we love old stories told from the “other” points of view. Wicked: The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the wicked witch. Wide Sargasso Sea: Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason, madwoman in the attic. The Red Tent: the murder of Dinah’s husband and husband’s family from the points of view of Rachel, Leah, and Dinah. Ahab’s Wife: what Ahab’s wife was up to while Ahab was at sea hunting down Moby Dick. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Francis Ford Coppola’s account of the vampire as a misunderstood proto-modern Bohemian and ideological outcast. The Mists of Avalon: the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table lambasted from the pagan-feminist perspective of Arthur’s “evil” sister Morgain.

Those are the just the first to come to mind. There are others, aren’t there?

Once I got thinking down this road, I started to wonder. Why are we so attracted to these re-tellings? What happens to us when we read them? Why do I care what happens to the bad guy, how he feels, or what his excuses are?

There are two sides to every story, indeed. Do you remember the first time someone pointed that out to you? I do. I was in the sixth grade. My sixth-grade experiences deserve their own blogpost (or several), but suffice it to say here that I had suffered a serious injustice at the hands of a classmate named Troye. I had caught her flyball during an intense game of kickball and, the next thing I knew, she was clobbering me over the head with a rock the size of a citrus fruit. (Luckily rocks in NJ are pretty soft.) When I complained bitterly at Troye’s behavior, why she would do such a thing, how come no one threw her in jail or put her in shackles, my father had told me, “Leilani, you don’t know her side of the story. You don’t know why she did what she did.”

So? Did I need to know? Would knowing her side of the story make what she did okay? Could I go around clobbering people with rocks because my parents were going through a divorce or because we’d just moved to NJ from Guam or because my breasts were not developing at a rate rapid enough to suit me?

Tit for tat. Eye for an eye. If she got to do it, then what was to stop me from doing it, too? What on earth was the world coming to?

My father was trying to teach me compassion for the other side. Compassion was foreign to me when I was that young. What came much more naturally was a sense of moral superiority, the comfort I got from being righter than the next person, from assuring myself that I didn’t deserve what happened to me, that I did nothing to provoke, invite, or incite painful action. Basically, a sense of moral superiority was the booby prize I got for all the excuses I could make for my lack of compassion.

It’s interesting how, until graduate school, I assumed that the phrase “There are two sides to every story” described the natural state of things. It doesn’t. “The other side of the story” is a figure of speech built upon the assumption not only that there are two sides, but that the sides are opposed. What if they’re not? What if thinking about stories that way is what gets us into moral trouble in the first place?  Sure, Troye hit me in the head with a rock because I kicked her butt at kickball. She’s the bad guy for being a sore loser, etc. Whatever. From another perspective, you got two little girls who are struggling for power and there’s not enough to go around. Maybe Troye had a stomach ulcer that hurt her all the time and a mother who had to work three jobs and a little brother who died the year before in a freak car accident. Maybe the exultant look on my smug little face was, finally, more than she could bear. Maybe then she found herself clutching a rock and wanting to release some of her frustration with it.  Maybe it wasn’t just the two of us that day, but Troye, her mother, her dead brother, my divorcing parents, the negligent yardwatchperson . . . .and maybe we were collaborators rather than antagonists . . .

Troye versus Leilani. The adverserial interpretation is only an interpretation. There’s nothing inherently adverserial in people making contact as they work out their problems. “Two sides to every story” is a metaphor–a way of describing the first thing (the human interaction) as a second thing (a story). It is a metaphor, a tool for understanding something valuable, but not an actuality. And yet. Metaphors are powerful ways of organizing information, especially metaphors derived from stories. And our Western stories drill into us that there are sympathetic heroes with moral superiority over nasty villains who deserve to be vanquished.

I guess that’s the thing, huh? In my own story I am Dorothy but in, say, the other woman’s story I’m the wicked witch. And she’s Glenda. This is where humility comes in handy.

But is it that simple?  It would be nice to think that we are presently fascinated with “the other side” of the story because we’re a more compassionate culture. It would be nice to think that the popularity of the villain’s point of view stems from our enlightened progression away from the moral dichotomies of, for example, Victorian England, where moral superiority was a handy excuse for colonizing 3/5 of the globe

There’s another way of looking at it, though, one that makes this sympathy for the villain look dangerously like convenient moral relativism. How about this: As a culture, as Americans, we are now the villains in somebody else’s story, perhaps even in our own, and we know it, and we want to make it okay, make being the villain more comfortable. So we run around trying to show ourselves how being the villain (the Wicked Witch, Morgaine, Dracula) is actually, underneath it all, heroic — how from “the other side” of the story it is possible to perceive us villains as heroes.

But maybe that’s just making excuses for being villainous. Maybe sympathizing with the wicked witch of the west comforts us because we are the wicked ones now.