"Although I long ago lost faith in the idea of Truth, I knew that once I spoke, the stories would take on their own shape, their own truth. In my darkest hour I doubted that there was even a lesson to take from the rubble of time. But whatever the moral was, I knew I needed to fashion the pieces together, and to myself, before all of it came tumbling out, the essence drifting heavenward, gone before I understood what it was"(274).
Reading Jane Hamilton's novel Map of the World, the Book of Job came immediately to my mind. Far from simply being an update of the Bible's classic tale of suffering, Map of the World seems a commentary on it.
Hamilton's take on suffering differs in important ways from The Book of Job. In Hamilton's powerful novel, Alice, a diary farmer's wife who works winters as a school nurse, serves as the Job figure. However, unlike Job who feels his trials as undeserved, Alice feels guilty. Remarkably, her voice is so compelling, at points, the reader's inclined to agree. And, unlike the situation in Job, Alice is not alone in her suffering. Her acts, her suffering, her failings, occasion suffering in those around her. Her tragedy nearly breaks apart her family; it brings about rifts that may heal but will leave scars. It exposes rifts. Near the end of the book, Alice observes: "evil had been done to us, and...we, in our turn had injured those around us.
Alice varies in the responsibility she assumes for her suffering. As to it's cause or justification, sometimes Alice speaks of her suffering as if it were evil done to her and at other times as if it were evil she did.
The novel opens with the books central event. To give each other some free time, Alice and her best and only friend Theresa have agreed to take turns watching each other's children on Monday mornings. While watching Theresa's girls, Alice temporarily loses track of Theresa's toddler daughter Lizzie. Tragically, unwatched, Lizzie wanders off and drowns in a pond on Alice's property. Alice is distraught and nearly suffers a nervous breakdown. She's spared this by the advent of a second tragedy. Alice, who works as a school nurse in the winter months, is suddenly arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct involving children who came to her with illnesses. Unable to raise bail, Alice is sent to prison while she awaits her trial, and is separated from her husband and two young daughters and from their family dairy farm.
Looking back on this nightmarish sequence of events, Alice speaks of how she "fell from grace," and not in a sudden or as the result of one, large mistake. The experience leads her to conclude, "it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap"(3).
A question that the book raises is whether Alice is indeed a Job figure, a by and large innocent sufferer, or whether her suffering has been occasioned by some sort of failing, or, in the language of religion, sin. Seeking meaning, realizing there can't be any without her bearing some blame for what's happened, Alice quite naturally crafts her role in the matter. And, she's not entirely deluded.
In her mind, Alice has take too casual an attitude to certain truths. Prior to her fall, she failed to fully realize and address certain shortcomings, certain truths about herself. Identifying her failure with a Christian conception of sin, Alice comes to realize that for her "God [the presence in contrast to the absence marking sin] was something within that allowed me to see occasionally"(388). This vision, allowing her to see herself with clarity, only comes after the tragedy, after the misfortune.
At the outset, Alice is blind in a number of ways. On a literal level, she fails to keep an eye on Lizzie and the toddler wanders off to drown in a pond. She is blind on a figurative level. By Alice's lights, Lizzie dies because she failed to she what's demanded of her as a mother, a caretaker of children. Her failure is actually her failures. Judging herself, Alice believes herself guilty on a number of fronts: her house is messy and full of hazards; she's secretive; she's easily distracted, eager to escape the reality of her situation and go off on childish daydreaming spells; she's in poor control of her temper and emotions.
As Alice sees it, all of her admittedly small failings come together in a kind of perfect storm in the sequence of events surrounding Lizzie's death. In the moments when the toddler wanders off to her death, Alice is variously distracted. Her daughter Emma throws tantrums and acts irrationally in a manipulative and successful play on her attention. Alice needs to go off and find her bathing suit and because her home's a wreck, her search takes a great deal of time. Then, she has to tend to her daughter Claire, who is attempting to swallow pennies left on the floor. Still looking for the swimsuit, she comes across maps of an imaginary land that she drew as a child. She spends a great deal of time looking over childhood fantasy maps of a world she drew as a means of escape from an unhappy childhood. As she judges herself afterward, these moments with the imaginary maps seem especially damning. While she was supposed to be keeping close eyes on a child, she instead sought escape in the very same manner she sought it as a child.
Her guilt nearly destroys her. She gradually begins to fall off the edge of her world and spend her days sleeping, unable to dress or feed herself, unable to care for her children. Then, just when all seems darkest and lost, salvation of a sort comes in the guise of a greater tragedy: Alice is falsely accused of molesting a child, a disturbed, neglected and hard to love child named Robbie Mackessy. Alice is bundled off to a horrible jail, her bail is set at $100,000, and the entire community turns against her and her family. Worse, although Alice has never molested Robbie, she does come to admit in the course of her narration she did once strike him in a moment of frustration with the difficult boy. As with her guilt over Lizzie, here too Alice has moments where she thinks she deserves this injustice. She clearly can't accept or forgive herself for striking Robbie. She also wonders if maybe her being punished regardless of the reason might begin to provide atonement for all the sins she and other adults have visited on Robbie.
In her self-condemnation, Alice is convincing. At least initially, I was drawn into it. I found myself coming to judge her for her carelessness, her inattentiveness, her inability to focus. I began to liken her situation to that of a drunk driver who kills someone. Many do it, but that doesn't excuse the lapse in those whose mistake results in hurt. Then, when that situation seemed to harsh an analogy, I began to think of Alice's situation as akin to that of a person who drives carelessly and fast on a neighborhood street and strikes a child. Alice has it out for herself. I almost felt manipulated as a reader. Caught in the midst of a senseless tragedy out of which she's trying to make some sense, she needs a villain, even if it's herself. She needs punishment insofar as it provides evidence of misdeed and sin, and misdeed and sin explain the death.
Yet, I only realized this after I put the book aside and gained some distance from Alice. Alice is careless, irresponsible and inattentive but only in the way many if not most of us are. She's a flawed human being. In trying to account for accident and tragedy, she turns these failings into sins.
The clear vision she gains at the end is honesty. She owns up to hitting Robbie. She owns up to her imperfections. She begins to try and accept Lizzy's death as a senseless tragedy. This is her victory. Many books might present a tragic and senseless accident and have the characters begin to make sense of it. Hamilton suggests that a healthy wisdom lies in learning to live and accept imperfection and tragedy as just that. At some point, attempts to explain and atone become simply attempts to escape the realities of our existence.
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