Here’s a distastefully corporeal subject: plantar warts. I had one on my foot. I didn’t do anything about it, hoping it would go away. It hurt. Gross. A few weeks ago, I was on the roof of our house, I grabbed something, and my index finger felt swollen and painful – I looked at it and found what looked like a tiny splinter. I asked my wife, Quinessa, if she could try to pull it out for me. I didn’t have the courage to pull it out myself. Like Sugar, the main character of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, does with William, Q refrained from telling me to get myself together so I could pull out the splinter and, instead, indulged my weakness to make me feel stronger. Q cut away at my skin, yanked at the tiny intrusion with tweezers, and repeated the process while I clenched my buttocks and sweated, trying not to divulge the pain I was feeling to her and Maxwell, our three-year-old son, who watched the process and asked what was happening. “I don’t know how you people give birth,” I told her. “I can’t stand this anymore. And it’s only a f**king splinter.” (I didn’t use the asterisks aloud, but I did refrain from using that whole word. Max has a knack for following in our verbal footsteps). I hope my sympathy for the trials of childbirth endured by women makes me different from William Rackham, mostly because I was disturbed by the similarities I saw in his thought processes and in mine. I thought these similarities were amusing, at first. He was introduced as a young man who would like to be a writer – I wanted to be a writer when I was young, and though I would still like to be a writer, I’m no longer young – and I laughed at his literary pretensions and his dandyism (to which I can be sartorially prone when in the mood). As The Crimson Petal and the White progressed, I was more disturbed than amused. (None of this includes prostitution, infidelity, or ignoring my children, by the way. I’m not that similar to William Rackham.) I’m currently proud of myself for writing this blog post AFTER it is due to be submitted. Like William, I’m always going on about how much I have to do. As a high school English teacher who is proud of being a really good high school English teacher, I have many responsibilities. There is teaching every day, of course, which require much planning. But there is also grading, and meetings about Individual Education Plans for students, and department meetings, and building meetings, and make-up work for absent students, and now there is planning for Zoom students in addition to regular school, blah, blah, blah. I’m in graduate school, obviously (or I wouldn’t be writing this blog). I have a lot of stuff to do, and it gets in the way of spending time with the people I love the most. William constantly complains about how many responsibilities he has as a perfumery magnate – but if he were a writer, he wouldn’t have them, would he? So why complain? This was his choice, after all. It was my choice to get another Master’s degree, which is why I’m still awake and writing at this late hour. Meanwhile, Q is in our bedroom, still awake and feeding young Beckett, nearly two weeks old, and she has no choice. Biologically, only she can do it at this point in Beckett’s life. And she doesn’t complain. The Crimson Petal and the White is highly sympathetic to what women have to do in a world ruled by the sociocultural machinations of men. At least, I think it is – I'm a man, so I’m basing all of this on observation. In fact, I’m a man who complains about all the bureaucracy and paperwork of the system I’ve chosen to spend my life serving, and that system was certainly devised by mostly men. I’m a public school teacher, though, so my profession is dominated, on a day-to-day, ground-level, in-the-trenches basis, by women. Collegial relationships with my fellow teachers along with a wonderful wife, a great mother, a doting sister, and good female friends, have all shown me what I think I can recognize as a novel by a man who seems to understand what happens to women in the Western world. As I read the novel, I wondered, “How did Michel Faber accomplish this?” I genuinely believed the women’s perspectives. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Faber explains, “My first wife was gay before I met her so my whole circle of friends were lesbians...There was a lot of anti-male feeling in my environment. I was like an honorary female.” I suppose that explains some of it. But in the same interview, Faber discusses how his wife encouraged him to make his writing more accessible to everyone, even when he resisted; the entirety of the interview is about Faber’s first book tour after the death of his wife, due to cancer. Throughout most of his life, she was there to challenge him, support him, and encourage him – just as my wife is for me. In my reading of this nearly 900-page novel that encompasses all the human emotions I can think of, I was most affected by the loneliness of the women. Agnes’s “madness” could have been understood, and it wouldn’t have been out the question for her tumor to be discovered in the 1870s and treated (though, according to the American Cancer Society’s “Cancer Atlas” page, at the time, surgeries were messy and anaesthesia was not too effective). If only the men in her life, such as her husband and Dr. Curlew, had been more concerned with examining her as a patient instead of a demented child, she and William might have lived the life he dreamed of before they were married and once again after she had disappeared or died. Then there’s Sugar. She suffered innumerable humiliations, emotional, psychological, and physical, while surviving her life of prostitution, forced upon her by her mother. I was most saddened - probably because my mind is currently on childbirth – in the scene where Sugar is accompanying William, Sophie, and Lady Bridgelow. Sugar is watching William woo another woman, even as she hopes he might make her his wife and save her from her former life for good; she is injured, limping, from a fall she took down the stairs at the Rackham house in an attempted aborition. In this scene, when she takes Sophie to the water closet, Sugar miscarries, the successful culmination of the abortion. William was not privy to the pregnancy; Sugar’s only help comes from a six-year-old girl. Sugar is essentially alone in the knowledge and pain of the death of her child, conceived in an humiliating business arrangement she enters to save herself from the abuse of survival. I was with my wife when both Beckett and Maxwell were born. I learned from the first time to turn my head when the anaesthesiologist inserted a colossal needle into Q’s spine. This process was far more disturbing to me than watching both Maxwell’s and Beckett’s entrance into our world, perhaps because it is so much more unnatural. Not that watching the woman I love give birth isn’t a bit terrifying for me: anything could go wrong at any time for Q or the boys. It was natural, though: natural to watch her turn into a superhero. No wonder powerful women throughout human history have been persecuted as witches. Women are magic. They can do things much greater than any man could do, and I know this is obvious, but it still amazes me. I’ve watched a lady who agreed to marry me go through a ten month process of CREATING A HUMAN BEING OUT OF NOTHING! The least I could do was be there to count to ten for her while she pushed. Hopefully, I can do a lot more for her as our family grows. Yes, in addition to performing feats of magic, Quinessa now has to deal with a house full of boys and our egos. All this while coaching high school girls’ basketball, designing web sites, working at a family violence prevention center, challenging and encouraging me, and generally just being a fun person to spend time with. There are plenty of great things about men, boys, and manboys like us, but after plenty of reading and observation, I don’t think there’s any way we could be as great as a woman like Q. P.S. - It was not a splinter in my finger. It was the start of a plantar wart, like the one on my foot. It had nothing to do with my impressive manly feats on the roof. I asked Quinessa to dig around in my hand with metal implements for nothing, and I couldn’t handle it for more than five minutes.
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AuthorIan Avery. Archives
April 2021
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