The Shawl: Louise Erdrich
The Shawl, by Louise Erdrich, is a fictional short story about a woman, Aanakwad who, after having two children with her husband, gives birth to another child born out of wedlock. For a while, she remained in her marriage miserable that she could not love her true love and his baby as she wanted. Eventually, her husband decides that it’s better if she leaves for the other man and the other man’s uncle comes to fetch her in a wagon. She takes the baby and daughter, leaving her son behind with his father. As the wagon leaves, wolves attack and Aanakwad sacrifices her daughter to them.
Aanakwad’s melancholy while she had to remain with her husband exemplifies the social aspect of love and how feeling rules shape the expression of love. Aanakwad cannot express her love for the man she actually loves and their baby because of the stigma attached to extramarital affairs. That stigma determines feeling rules around such relationships which means that it is not socially acceptable for Aanakwad to express the emotions she wants to. Instead, she sulks at home and doesn’t do much of anything which finally leads her husband to give in and send her off to the other man.
When Aanakwad leaves, the baby and the daughter of she and her former husband go with her. This deeply hurts the son, who is left behind. The desertion deeply hurts the boy because it deprives him of affective capital, a concept that Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman describes in “The Color of Love”. Affective capital refers to emotional resources that come from a family’s love and affection. Aanakwad taking her other children but not him deprives her son of those precious resources. In the fictional story, he is described as coming down with tuberculosis that slowly kills him over years. I see this as a metaphor for how a lack of affective capital can prevent a child from thriving. As he’s close to dying, the father tells the son that Aanakwad sacrificed his sister to wolves in order to escape with her baby. The boy feels for his sister because he knows what that betrayal and subsequent loss of affective capital feels like.
Master and Man: Leo Tolstoy
“Master and Man” chronicles the arduous, tempestuous journey of an innkeeper, elder of the church, and merchant, and his workman to complete a business deal. Vassili Brekhunoff has been wanting to buy a nearby grove from another local merchant for months, and he takes Nikita, the only worker who is not drunk that day, with him to assist. Nikita is a good workman, but his social status as a drunkard and the fact that he owns no property forces him to sell his labor for far less than it is worth. Vassili embodies the spirit of a master and a merchant. He is constantly on a financial venture, even on his deathbed. Given this spirit, he quickly takes advantage of Nikita’s skill and labor. As the two face the fierce blizzard on the road to the local merchant, they get lost multiple times and must make a stop into a town just off the road for a warm respite and some directional guidance. However, the route is soon lost again under the snow. Vassili and Nikita end up stopping the sledge to lie overnight for their best chance of survival. While Nikita tries to compose himself and reach sleep, Vassili thinks through his pending business deal and the wealth it would bring. The master ultimately ends up taking the horse and trying to escape, before becoming lost and cold and returning to Nikita. Vassili lies on top of his worker to maximize warmth, and passes away overnight, leaving Nikita alive.
As Vassili sacrifices his life for the survival of his workman, he reflects on the value of his own life. He laments the fact that he focused so much on money and finally feels free when he releases this idea and sees his and Nikita’s lives as equal value. However, the beginning of the story clearly illustrates his loss of personal authenticity because of his job as a merchant. Vassili had just negotiated unfair compensation for Nikita’s labor, and his reflection on this deal shows how much deep acting he has done to align with the apathetic, self-focused front of a “master” in this time:
“In saying this, Vassili really had believed that he was being good to Nikita, for he could speak so persuasively and had always been so entirely supported in his decisions by his dependents, from Nikita upwards, that even he himself had come to feel comfortably per- suaded that he was not cheating them, but actually benefiting them” (Tolstoy 3).
Vassili’s ability to convince himself that he was actually improving the lives of those he was cheating shows how powerful deep acting can be. Hochschild describes deep acting as eliciting an emotion contrary to the authentic emotion through imagination or other forms of prompting (Hochshild 38). She describes the value of this tactic by citing emotional labor that flight attendants and bill collectors do, in particular. For example, some flight attendants may persuade themselves to be composed and grateful for their job when accosted by an obnoxious customer. For Vassili, his own ability to justify and his subordinates’ affirmations enabled his conflation of authentic self and his professional self. As Hochshild states: “All in all, a private emotional system has been subordinated to commercial logic, and it has been changed by it” (Hochschild 186). Vassili was thoroughly changed by the commercial logic of being a merchant.
Sources:
Erdrich, Louise. “The Shawl.” The New Yorker, 25 Feb. 2001. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/03/05/the-shawl-2.
Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth. The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families. First edition, University of Texas Press, 2015.
Hochschild, Arlie Russel. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Updated ed, University of California Press, 2012.
Tolstoy, Leo. Everyman’s Library: Master and Man and Other Tales, By Count Leo Tolstoy. Edited by Rhys Ernest, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1910, https://library.um.edu.mo/ebooks/b32267009.pdf.