Predator or prey

 

Elinor De Witt in The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear lives a quiet life, retired after volunteering for the resistance effort in Belgium during World War I and returning to spy for Britain during World War II. Her father leaves the family to join the war effort in the first war, and Elinor makes a silent vow that “she, her mother and sister would do all they could to arm themselves against their obvious weakness; the vulnerability of being female.” After realizing the father has perished at the front, the mother befriends a member of the resistance and allows Elinor and her older sister to observe German train movements and even sabotage the tracks.

Elinor, though younger, is more serious, agreeing to weapon training after the recruiter convinces her that a citizen can either be predator or prey. Elinor soon recognizes that “being a predator filled her with as much fear as being prey,” and the recruiter points out that such fear could keep her safe. Elinor views herself as “a predator who understood what it was to be prey” and armed “with that knowledge, she knew she would survive…” 

After World War I, the three women head to Britain where Elinor excels at her studies and wins admission to Cambridge. Her mother rejects that plan and urges her to remain close in London. The young woman’s curiosity and drive to learn are not vanquished so easily. Elinor masters multiple languages and, feeling distant from her less academically oriented mother and sister, moves to France to work as a teacher.  

Hitler’s rise spurs fears in France, and Elinor returns to Britain, teaching at the boarding school where she often struggled with teachers, including the woman who went on to become headmistress. The older woman viewed Elinor’s behavior as demonstrating resolve and resilience rather than disrespect: “our women in the making will need such qualities to see them through.”

The headmistress points out the tumultuous years of war have been hard on the young, “giving rise to an element of doubt, of unknowing that can in turn lead to undesirable words, thoughts and actions.” She warns, foreshadowing, that “Some of our pupils are the daughters of bankrupt men – and women – and I don’t’ mean bankrupt only in a financial sense…. The years after the war changed our society, and that is reflected in the attitudes and behaviors…”

Elinor is expected to set an example and support high standards that will “become the backbone of everything they do in life. Every. Single. Decision.” The headmistress concludes, “I have found that when one remains true to one’s established values, life’s squalls, storms and doldrums become easier to navigate.” 

Elinor leaves her teaching post to work as an intelligence officer in Belgium, hoping that such values will protect her and villagers who have joined the resistance. Some colleagues, though, are in league with men in the pursuit of power. They betray their country not by cooperating with Nazis, but by prioritizing their careers, adjusting war plans to support a competing group of spies without alerting the full team.

The team barely escapes after a partner orders Elinor to shoot a small child threatening to reveal the position. Elinor refuses, and subsequently endures a month in a mental hospital. She is intelligent enough to cooperate, later awarded with a comfortable cottage in a quiet village.    

Elinor learns the full story about her last day as a spy after mob family attacks a brother, her neighbor. Jim yearns to escape his criminal past, but the family has friends in high places, the same men who betrayed the Belgium villagers. Elinor befriends the mobster’s widowed sister to gather evidence that might end the harassment. 

Protagonists or antagonists – police, spies or mobsters – err by underestimating the capabilities of women. 

Weeds

 

Two women document flora of the Colosseum in Rome, one in 1854 and the other in 2018 in The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith. The first toils for Richard Deakin, a botanist, and the second is a grad student from Mississippi, struggling to win respect from her advisor and approval to conduct similar research in the Coliseum and fairgrounds of Jackson, Mississippi. Detailing how male superiors belittle the women's observations, the book may upend assumptions about adequate feminist responses across cultures and time periods. 

The first woman, who lacks education and viable career prospects, relishes the work and suggests that definitions uphold sanity. Nuance is key as well as who decides and defines. “The point of botany is not to distinguish between value and waste. (There is no waste.) It’s to be honest about what something is. A part, a whole, a root, a bloom. Conditions, habits.” 

The women lack mentors, role models and intellectual nourishment. The woman in 1854 lost her mother to opiate addiction. The other mother provided solid memories of fortitude, and before her early death, urges her daughter: “Truth is all you have.” The graduate students mulls the female tendency to move through life by rote, automatically pursuing education, marriage, children, “Like I was hoping to prove I deserved the space I took up.”  Love is elusive for each woman. Disrespect in work relationships sows mistrust and challenges in other relationships. The first woman longs for another woman who has since married moved abroad, and the second struggles with commitments, even though her mother once advised: “Know what you want before it comes, so you can get it without being gotten.” For her, finding love is secondary, and her priority is securing research funding, a career.  Yet the mentor rejects her observations, and she wonders, “If I can no longer say true things, and am prohibited from saying false things, what … is left?” 

Both narrators remain anonymous, so often the case for women in science. The women strive for creativity, exploration and novel connections that are discouraged by superiors. The modern-day advisor could well speak for both men when publicly admonishing his graduate student: “Scientists don’t arrive at projects with conclusions in mind; we’re passive. Humble. Unresisting. That’s how you open yourself to answers.” 

The narrators give weeds equal attention in a plot interspersed with species names and descriptions. Great care is used in distinguishing common species like S. oleraceus and S. tenerrimus: “Two sides of a genus, a plant that any ordinary passerby would fail to notice, or, if noticed, would call a dandelion,” notes the woman of 2018. She insists on distinguishing the two. “the only lesson I carry from Deakin – every thing deserves its name.” 

The discomfort the limited options in responding to bias are similar in 1854 and 2018, so much so that the identity of the narrator is at times unclear: “You can’t demand love. Nor expect it, nor wait for it, nor want it. It comes on air like a scent.” The more poetic comments likely come from the woman with the broken heart: “With lyrate leaves, shaped like those instruments of old, I wonder at their purpose. If they are accompanying songs too green for us to hear. If this is a signature to mark our deafness.”

The woman of 2018 marvels that Deakin, as a man, wrote about the Colosseum’s plant life in such a charming, thoughtful way: An excerpt from Deakin's actual book, not mentioned in The Weeds: “Flowers are perhaps the most graceful and most lovely objects of the creation but are not, at any time, more delightful than when associated with what recalls to the memory time and place, and especially that of generations long passed away. They form a link in the memory, and teach us hopeful and soothing lessons, amid the sadness of bygone ages.” The graduate student finds herself wishing that she had such an advisor, not realizing that, according to the novel, Deakin died before the flora is published and the apprentice applied extensive edits before submission. Deakin published one book, and biographical information about him or a female apprentice is limited. 

Both narrators are fascinated by plants’ defensive mechanisms, especially those that might harm humans. The modern-day woman marvels: “How easy, to eliminate something living from the earth. As simple as turning up the temperature, or slipping a pill in a drink, or touching a leg, or doubting.” One woman sabotages herself, and the other sabotages her superior, slipping bits of a plant that he fails to recognize into his drink. “He hasn’t done the work, so he’s missing all the signs.” 

The Weeds has a weary tone for more reasons than one. The woman stronger in spirit is raped. And each woman senses that she documents a massive decline resulting from a changing climate, feeling an urge, “Write it down before it’s gone.”  In keeping their respective lists, the woman from the 19th century observes how vetch transformed from staple to “crop of last resort,” and the modern-day woman wistfully recalls cattails, her favorite plant as a child: “brown and whistling with red-winged blackbirds. The pond is gone; it became a football field. Could I slow my town’s unrolling ruin by naming what exists? Is that what we’re doing here with these lists, slowing death?” 

The science of botany is in decline, too, even though there are about 300,000 species. "M]ore and more, colleges and universities are getting rid of their botany programs, either by consolidating them with zoology and biology departments, or eliminating them altogether because of a lack of faculty, funds or sometimes interest," reports U.S. News & World Report. 

Some species survive development and destruction, and others go extinct. The same is true of the human spirit. Some women refuse to be broken by inequities and, one way or another, ensure their voices live on. 

Michigan State University's W. J. Beal Botanical Garden, is the oldest, continuously operated botanical garden in the United States, featuring a collection of more than 2000 plants. The photo is courtesy of MSU Today.  

Shame

 

Social media allows individuals to explore feelings about unwanted behavior in both themselves and others. 

In Society of Shame by Jane Roper, a woman’s world falls apart after she arrives home early from a work trip to discover her garage on fire, her US Senate candidate husband hurrying to dress and conceal an affair. Topping off the bad day, photos focus on a menstrual stain on Kathleen Held’s pants. The photograph goes viral, and women become outraged that a period accident captures more attention than a husband’s infidelity. Activists, including Kathleen’s young daughter, embrace the new #StopPeriodShaming movement. Kathleen, annoyed after her husband expresses concern about damage for his campaign, moves out of the house and gives her daughter permission to participate. 

Leaving home, Kathleen steals an elegant invitation from a secret Society of Shame, intended for her husband. All members, shamed over social media for various offenses, hope to restore confidence and reinvent themselves, and Kathleen wonders, “If she was a stronger, more fulfilled version of herself, maybe her marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart.” Maybe she would have published the book she had written years earlier. 

Maybe. 

Shame can be about self-evaluation and social-evaluation, according to philosopher James Laing, who urges rejection of “the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others.” He instead urges treating “shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection.” Shamefulness, he maintains, can be used for merited avoidance or rejection. 

But the society in Roper's book turns to shame for the sole purpose of winning attention by any means necessary. The society’s founder orchestrates makeovers, activities and social-media messaging to repair reputations. For Kathleen, that means leaning in to support the new cause while emerging from the most embarrassing and painful moment of her life. Reluctance transforms into reflection and passion, as Kathleen, who decides to go by Kat, realizes that women “were bound together, all of them by this strange and mysterious biological process they shared, with its inconveniences and embarrassments and messes; its power to bring relief (not pregnant!) and heartbreak (not pregnant); the thresholds it marked between child and adult, youth and middle age.”

With new clothes and haircut, Kat becomes an instant celebrity, juggling television appearances, newspaper interviews and a book contract. The society cheers, advising her to “Steer into the swerve.” A quiet member of the group urges Kathleen to enjoy the new popularity, but to “Keep telling the truth.” She finds an agent, and a major publisher insists on a ghostwriter, preferring that the author stay busy with promotion and social-media. 

Of course, social media as a tool can build and destroy reputations. Users take advantage of any connection or problem to advance agendas. Interactions are staged, publicized, with daily activities becoming less genuine. Frustrated, the husband plants a story that Kathleen never cared for the family dog, and activists attack her for living in an illegal Airbnb. Danica, organizer of the Society of Shame, stages a bizarre attack at a book announcement party for Kathleen and then expects that the two pretend to have no relationship at all. Kathleen’s daughter accuses her mom of promoting the movement “all for herself.”  

Weary, Kat frets about everyone expecting her to be "so perfect all the time," and critics abound on the internet. “Maybe it distracted them from their own faults and hypocrisies to constantly point out hers. Why confront your own mistakes when you can attack other people’s instead?” Kathleen's husband long prioritized his role as politician in their family life, and she repeats those errors, expressing disappointment that the child fails to understand “how complex it was to be a public figure and a spokesperson for a cause.” 

The plotting and charades become overwhelming and Kathleen abruptly stops obsessing over what others think. “People I don’t know or even particularly like. The thing we’re all doing here. Controlling narratives and changing conversations and getting back on top instead of trying to actually – I don’t know, grow.”  

Calm people, those who refuse to express anger and insist on playing fair, rarely attract as much public attention as do the outrage-makers. A low profile on social media can be priceless. 

The book captures the extreme language and emotions of our time, reflecting how social media can instigate divisions with no resolution intended. “Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel,” suggests a review posted by the Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of How to Do Things With Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures by Owen Flanagan. “At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good.” People can control and adjust emotions, and “Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame," while demonstrating "how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better.”

Forms of shame leading to revenge, anger or harm to others are destructive, the review concludes. Other forms “can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty.” As suggested by Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit, thoughtful and socializing shame starting at a young age, “can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot.”

Anger can strengthen an opponent's resolve.