What is evil? A question that has been a source of much reflection over time. Certainly, the connection between the law and morality is always tenuous and much villainy is perfectly legal. In fact, the existence of evil in a world under divine supervision is very disconcerting. Does god bear responsibility for creating evil? Particularly since he made everything according to the Bible. Even if it is people who actually do evil deeds, it was god who created the idea of evil. But there is a paradox involved: if the Creator is good how could he create evil; theologians have tried to explain this by saying goodness exists because god desired it, and evil exists because god apparently doesn’t want it…
…Fiction has perhaps become over subtle, and the frontiers of evil have become blurred into a general and ambiguous category of villainy. Heroes are now anti-heroes and since Henry James few writers have been gifted with a true and genuine sense of evil. From Portrait of A Lady:
Isabel Archer found herself married to a man for whom evil takes the form of emptiness…
—Nicole Kidman in costume for Portrait of a Lady—click image for source…
…Then the shadows began to gather; it was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily increased, and if here and there it had occasionally lifted, there were certain corners of her life that were impenetrably black. These shadows were not an emanation from her own mind; she was very sure of that; she had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the truth. They were a part of her husband’s very presence. They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing—that is, of but one thing, which was not a crime. She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her. That was all she accused him of, and the miserable part of it was precisely that it was not a crime, for against a crime she might have found redress. He had discovered that she was so different, that she was not what he had believed she would prove to be.
He had thought at first he could change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like. But she was, after all, herself—she couldn’t help that; and now there was no use pretending, playing a part, for he knew her and he had made up his mind. She was not afraid of him; she had no apprehension that he would hurt her; for the ill-will he bore her was not of that sort. He would, if possible, never give her a pretext, never put himself in the wrong. Isabel, scanning the future with dry, fixed eyes, saw that he would have the better of her there. She would give him many pretexts, she would often put herself in the wrong. There were times when she almost pitied him; for if she had not deceived him in intention she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was. It was because she had been under the extraordinary charm that he, on his side, had taken pains to put forth. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man. She had kept still, as it were, so that he should have a free field, and yet in spite of this she had mistaken a part for the whole. (Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, 1881)
P.S. …Can it be said that evil is that which has no power of its own; that it is darkness, a negation of light, yet ironically attracted to light as a form of nourishment for obscurity. Its power is in us, and derives its form and activity from our fear of it, cajoling and provoking us as something that must be responded to. Evil, seems to propagate on worries, trepidation, and concessions in our lives that acknowledge its threat. That is evil: attacking us with our own instruments and worst fears. They say if we stoop to conquer evil, we end up in the mud with it, when we should floating on the clouds, ever higher until reaching a blinding light, a light that leaves no corner or crack for darkness to conceal itself. ( to be continued)…
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