Tuesday, 31 March 2009

• Portraying Yourself in Someone's Shoes Can Reveal Your Hatred

  
  

  To what extent is it ethical to fictionalize about a dilemma that you've never actually been in?

  Not exactly your normal Xanga question, but one I feel is important. simbathe2nd recently posted "Killing My Son," a fictional account of a woman's emotions after a failed abortion. 

  Fictionally putting yourself in someone else's shoes is a tricky endeavor.  Obviously, anyone who has ever written anything that is not 100% true has experimented in this.  It's the joy and often the very purpose of fiction writing -- to understand life through someone else's eyes.  But there is a difference between using fiction to try to understand someone else and using fiction as an excuse to judge someone else.

  Lets take, for example, the depiction of native Americans in the poetry of Longfellow (particularly the long poems "The Courtship of Miles Standish" and "The Song of Hiawatha").  A glancing look at his poetry can lead one to believe that Longfellow is sympathetic toward Native Americans.  They are seen as strong warriors who want to protect their way of life.  A closer look, however, reveals that Longfellow liked to portray Native Americans as incredibly violent, unnecessarily cruel, and incapable of having the same range of emotion as Europeans.  So while he romanticizes their struggles and their hunts, he always comes down to the idea that they are incomplete people.  More importantly, he leaves no room for doubt in his portrayal: he is absolutely sure that he understands Native Americans.

  That is the real danger in stepping into someone else's shoes: believing that you can reach reliable conclusions.  It is a noble thing to reach for understanding, it is an arrogant thing to think you've ever reached it.  It is especially troubling when your estimation of how someone else should feel leads that character to self-hatred -- because in doing so, you are revealing your hatred of them.

  When you present a fictional portrayal of someone, but do so in a manner that seems to indicate that you understand what they are feeling, the conclusions you make come dangerously close to saying "this is what people who have actually been in that situation SHOULD feel."  It's a dangerous move because you can't really get in their heads, and it's not fair of you to define you are they are for them.  If you’ve talked to them, just let them share their story as they want to.  No sense making up your own.  To me, it reeks of trying to control their heart.

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