Schadenfreude, Faith, and the Human Pysche

When reading or discussing books and various other texts for classes, in my experience there’s always at least one person who makes a comment or mutters about how things like this would never happen in today’s world.  But is that really true?

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, for example, Hester Prynne is made to stand on the pillory in town with her baby and the red ‘A’ stitched into her dress for all to see for three hours.  In this way she’s made to be a living sermon against sin, a living and breathing example parents can point to and say to their children “She’s a sinner, and that’s bad”.  Just like Cotton Mather’s explanation of the Salem Witch madness, in this tale one woman is persecuted for the good of the whole congregation.  She’s used as an educational display for the congregation, her shame used to dissuade others from making the same mistake.  In this way people like Hester became part of human stigmata, which we discussed in class, by being incorporate into the ritual of public shame.  Historically, this has happened before "during the fourteen century Holy Inquisition" (Shaw 286)*.  The church began "digging up the bodies of non-believers it wished to disgrace" by "pubically mutilating their corpses" (Shaw 286).  This practice only furthers the theory that public humiliation is a ritual in which different sects of human kind choose to incorportate into their teachings for the sake of using it as a teaching method.

However, if you take a look at Puritan culture, what happened to the fictitious Hester  Prynne would have been – in the eyes of the ministers and congregation – seen as an attempt to offer her salvation.  Part of weeding out sin was to have the offenders admit that they’d done wrong and thus seek salvation.  In The Scarlet Letter, there is a passage I think illustrates this brilliantly, when Dimmesdale calls on Hester to reveal the name of her baby’s father:  “If thou feelest it to be for they soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow sufferer!  Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide his guilty heart through life”  (Hawthorne 31).  In this society, admitting to sin was part of the ‘healing’ process, like how in the witch trials one surefire way to survive was to admit to witchery and thus be allowed to live and pray for salvation. 

But were all acts of pillory simply meant to educate and bring salvation?  Based on pure human psychology, that answer would be a resounding NO.  For the pillory to be effective as a punishment, there had to be a crowd to come and jeer at you – and I’m pretty sure the last thing on the crowd’s mind would be anyone’s salvation.  It’s inbred in human beings to laugh at someone else’s pain in various forms, and always has been.  Sure, today we don’t have pillories so we can go point and laugh at criminals or sinners, but for a minute think about what we do have.  Most of reality television is centered on people that can easily be mocked.  Shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” contain quite a bit of ‘hilarious’ videos of people injuring themselves or other people.  And, just for a second, think about the song Schadenfreude from the musical Avenue Q.  The lyrics state it quite plainly: Human nature/Nothing I can do/It's Schadenfreude/Making me feel glad that I'm not you! 

Another interesting point that people haven’t changed over the years is in how differently men and women are treated in regards to sex and sexual matters.  For a moment let’s pretend that Dimmesdale had come forward with Hester in The Scarlet Letter.  If our understanding of history serves us right in his instance, we can infer his punishment would have been less severe than Hester’s for the same crime.  On the handout we got in class, it even said “Still, mothers of bastard children were punished more severely by both the church and the courts than their male counterparts.  Unwed mothers would not be reinitiated into the Puritan community with a simple penitent statement and a fine” (handout 19).  Seriously?!  They let the men off with a fine and a penitent statement, but girls wouldn’t even be let back into the community?  I wish I could say that this kind of treatment ended with the Puritans, but that would be a lie.  As we saw from the clip of “Easy A” we watched in class, Olive was being picketed for supposedly having sex.  And, just for a minute, think about your own high school experiences.  In my high school, I remember girls who had reportedly had sex or performed sexual favors getting called any number of names, from the seemingly less offense – slut – to the highly offensive – whore.  You’d think they would have treated the guys just as badly, but they didn’t.  For the most part, a guy who was reported to have ‘got some’ from any number of girls was treated like a king in the popular circles.  Since I was not a part of any of these popular circles, I felt no qualms in muttering to myself about how certain guys were man-whores or sleazebags, but for the majority of my high school population, the bad reputations came down mostly on female heads.

Still, is there power in being othered by a culture?  According to human stigmata, several of the other options of what happens to social dirt is to other it, segregate or isolate it, or label it as dangerous/evil. But could there be power buried inside being set aside?  For Hester, continuing her life as best she can under the circumstances thrust upon her shows how strong she really is.  In being able to survive what was before thought to be unlivable, Hester gains power over her life and actions.  For Olive in “Easy A”, for a while she finds power in the fact that where she used to be invisible, she’s now (overly) visible to her peers.  In this way, finding a way to self-author your own identity can be empowering, even if the identity you’re working under can be wrought with bad connotations.  After all, once you’ve hit rock bottom, you have two choices:  wallow, or try and find a way to fix things.

Thus I come to Mary Rowlandson, and A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration.  Honestly, I think Mary Rowlandson chose to wallow.  Without the sudden lucky appearance of a Bible into her existence among the Indians, I feel she would have gone and wallowed herself to death in self-pity.  For me, it rings true with the question of ‘When you have nothing else left, what do you cling to?’  For Mary Rowlandson, religion became her sole rock in a sea of uncertainty, both for the hope her faith gave her and the fact that it was a tangible piece of her old life she could cling fast to, much like it has been said that the Jews in concentration camps clung to their religion to see them through the Holocaust.  Throughout the text there were points where Mary would find a section of text she could attribute to her own misfortune, such as “I opened my Bible to read, and the Lord brought that precious scripture to me.  ‘Thus saith the Lord, refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears, for thy work shall be rewarded, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy’ (Jeremiah 31.13) This was a sweet cordial to me when I was ready to faint; many and many a time I have sat down and wept sweetly over this Scripture” (Rowlandson 316).  In her captivity, the Bible became her source of hope that she would be saved. 

However in her predicament, I can’t blame her for scrambling for something to cling to.  Having something to hope for, and something to put your faith in, must have been an amazing tonic for the pain and fear of her captivity.  If ever there comes a time that I or someone I know would be in any kind of situation that can compare, I only hope they too can find some kind of solace.

*Quote taken from The Giant Bathroom Reader by Karl Shaw