Greg Hanks

䔀猀 猀 愀 椀 猀 䄀渀唀渀搀攀 爀 最 爀 愀 搀甀愀 琀 攀䨀 漀 甀爀 渀愀 氀 昀 漀 爀䔀猀 猀 愀 礀 猀椀 渀䰀椀 琀 攀 爀 愀 爀 礀䌀爀 椀 琀 椀 挀 椀 猀 洀 What Comes After Emotional Abuse: Writing as Remedy in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader Greg Hanks A n understandably debated character in Bernhard Schlink’s controversial novel The Reader is the protagonist and narrator of the book, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg. Writing as an adult, Michael tells readers the story of his emotionally damaging relationship with Hanna Schmitz, a thirty-six-year-old woman who is later revealed to be a Nazi war criminal. While recovering from hepatitis, Michael meets Hanna after he vomits on his way home from school one day. She grabs him, takes him to her home, and cleans him, but not without leaving a mental mark upon his mind that draws him back a week later, when they begin a sexual affair. Starting as a “thank you,” Michael fetches some coke from Hanna’s apartment complex, and returns covered in soot. Hanna immediately draws a bath without any questions, and he succumbs to her seduction. Afterward, Hanna dries Michael with a towel, and they proceed to have sex. Their relationship lasts a few months, during which Michael endures a substantial amount of emotional abuse from Hanna. Without a stable family life at home, and because this is his first sexual attachment, Michael has been set up to reap the selfrending consequences of this indecent affair. The book’s narration consists of uncertainty, guesswork, and shrugging, What Comes After Emotional Abuse which has caused much contention among readers and critics about the authenticity, reliability, and overall integrity of his character. To some, the narrator might be perceived as a negative force in Schlink’s novel—totally untrustworthy, indecisive, and even boastful. He continually forgets whole memories as he retells his history, and he does not seem to care that he has lost much of the truth. Oftentimes the reader may feel misguided by his narration. If readers are not careful, they might begin to loathe Michael’s ineptitude, and regard him as unsympathetic, instead of paying attention to that ineptitude as it pertains to the larger issue of emotional abuse. While most readers would agree that Michael’s own narrative exhibits classic signs of emotional abuse inflicted upon him during the course of his affair with Hanna, in this paper I argue that his narration—the actual writing—suggests he is moving past the emotional abuse to recover his sense of self, and is indeed a character for which the text compels us to find sympathy. While Michael is not always the central focus in many arguments across the spectrum of scholarship involving The Reader, as Hanna draws much of the attention, his share of problems is still evident. For instance, Omer Bartov from Brown University compares The Reader and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments as a way to respond to Germany’s identity after WWII, and the country’s involvement in the Holocaust. When introducing Schlink’s novel, Bartov affirms Michael’s emotional disparity: For he too is a victim, both of the fate of his generation, and of his inability to emerge from the emotional cul-de-sac of his passion for Hanna and the knowledge of her crime . . . he is a victim’s victim, a condition that leads to emotional paralysis, as he escapes from his feelings into a sterile, empty existence. (30) Here, Bartov claims that because Hanna has had such a strong, lasting effect on Michael, the teenager has effectively 119 Greg Hanks become a victim of the emotional attachment resulting from their relationship. Michael continues to be the subject of different scholars, such as Lucy D. Freund of Northwestern University, who takes a psychoanalytic approach to the interpretation of Germany’s guilt by examining him. While she makes note of the many political and historical questions about the novel, she is most interested in the psychology of Michael, whom she sees as “damaged” (Freund 601). She firmly insists that Michael’s “depleted self can be explained and our understanding of it enriched by using self psychological ideas” (601). For Freund, Michael’s sense of self has been impaired by his relationship with Hanna, set up by the emotional distance found in his home. Freund argues that Michael’s lack of stable role models has made it easier for Hanna to inflict this emotional injury. Not only is Michael’s lost sense of self the subject of interpretive scholarship in literary studies, but many empirical studies have sought to understand emotional abuse in general. Judy Keith-Oaks, the director of the Center of Personal Recovery in Jonesboro, Tennessee, believes that the effects of emotional abuse are “insidious,” that “the result is a destruction of the spirit, a loss of the sense of self, a reflection on the ability to succeed, and a barrier to interactions with people” (31). Keith-Oaks adds her voice to the many who have said that emotional abuse eats away at the self and is detrimental to a person’s identity, especially in relation to others. Roberta Culbertson, founder of the Center on Violence and Community in Virginia, argues that people who go through trauma have a way of overcoming the symptoms through a process called “telling,” a way for victims to face their trauma, and come forth from the silence that they exhibit from their experience. She claims, the survivor [of abuse] most often . . . becomes silent about his victimization, though the experience nevertheless in every case remains somehow 120 What Comes After Emotional Abuse fundamental to his existence, and to his unfolding or enfolded conception of himself. (Culbertson 169) In every subject she examined, Culbertson observed that even though instances of emotional abuse engender a muteness in the victim regarding the event, the event itself continues to form the victim’s sense of self throughout his or her life. In addition, Martin J. Dorahy of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Ken Clearwater of the Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust, provide a study of surveys and interviews that examine sexual abuse in seven men. Speaking of one of their findings, they conclude, isolating oneself from others became a means by which participants isolated their secret fears and histories and sense of self. This isolation operated on the premise that it is safer to keep true feelings covered up. (Dorahy and Clearwater 164) Dorahy and Clearwater find that when someone is affected by emotional injury—in this case, from sexual abuse—the victims will hide their fears and ultimately their identity. These victims isolate themselves to keep their innermost feelings choked in order to appease a nameless force that was once driven by their perpetrators. Finding Michael’s behavior in Schlink’s novel to be contestable, I was inclined to explore the reasons for his unreliable narrative. I began to notice many instances of emotional abuse found in the text. To be able to accurately judge the character of Michael, I propose readers need to understand the emotional abuse he faced while in his relationship with Hanna Schmitz. In this paper, I will argue that Michael is indeed a sympathetic character in The Reader and that his narrative should be seen as a marker of his recovery to an original sense of self. To support my argument, I will examine three key components: emotional abuse as such, Michael’s character as an abused victim, and his recovery from said abuse. I name these three sections “Emotional Abuse,” “Michael’s Abuse,” and “Recovery.” 121 Greg Hanks Emotional Abuse The causes of emotional abuse are varied and many. Judy Keith-Oaks defines different terms for emotional abuse namely, “mental cruelty, mental injury, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, emotional maltreatment, and psychological abuse” (31). According to Keith-Oaks, abuse is not a single event or an irregular outburst from a flustered individual. Abuse consists of “several abusive patterns” and “negative interactions” that are “repeated frequently” (31). Several causes of abuse are detailed in her findings, all of which consist of abuse coming from a parent figure, but I will limit myself to six different causes from which emotional injury can stem. It is important to note that Keith-Oaks’ study refers to the parent as the primary abuser, but parent figures can be anyone who fills a parental role. (1) An adult can “[blame] the child for things over which the child has no control;” (2) The adult can disparage the child to assure that the child feels he or she can “do nothing right” (31); (3) The parent does not take any interest in the child’s life, and does not provide adequate nurturing; (4) The parent can refuse or withdraw from the child in a form of punishment, denying “emotional responsiveness;” (5) The parent also might demand things that are unrealistic or impossible to satisfy; (6) The child can be socially isolated from peers and other family (32). Keith-Oaks insists these six kinds of causes can be emotionally destructive to an individual, leaving the victim to “believe that if somehow they could change, then problems would be solved” (33). Perpetuating their own inadequacies, the perpetrators stand on a pedestal of power, looking down upon the helpless victim. After the appropriate causes of emotional abuse have been enacted, symptoms arise. To be sure, not every case of abused victims is guaranteed such outcomes, and certain studies are limited by a number of controls, such as participants, etc. For instance, in their study “Shame and Guilt 122 What Comes After Emotional Abuse in Men Exposed to Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Qualitative Investigation,” Dohary and Clearwater explain three different outcomes of abuse in the men they analyzed: the subjects consider themselves shameful beings, a pervasiveness of self-doubt and denial, and problems with uncontrollability. In the article’s section about shame, one of the subjects described the way he was left feeling after the abuse: “‘it’s like being put in a box you can’t climb out of ’” (162). Several others in the study agreed that there is a strong sense of not belonging anywhere, and that the abuse has affected them in such a way that their sense of self has been warped, changed, or even stolen. Another participant recounts, “‘I found myself lying to people that I run into . . . well not lying but exaggerating facts . . . ’” (163). That is to say, the abuse these men suffered has changed the course of their lives, permeating every aspect of their day-to-day experiences. The memories of abuse inflict great distress upon the subjects, oftentimes without giving any notice of their arrival. One of the participants, Zack, describes that “‘you don’t realize that these stupid little things you see or things you hear, just trigger you off and you’re back there’” (167). The data that Dohary and Clearwater present suggests that professionals in the medical field should be more inclined to act in cases of male sexual abuse, to take the effects more seriously, and that recovery will require a more dedicated, concerned effort. Sexual abuse can be the catalyst of or a form of emotional abuse. There are many kinds of effects of sexual abuse, some of which immediately arise in the victim, and others that stay with a victim for longer periods of time, even throughout the remainder of the victim’s life. Briere and Elliott present six individual effects of sexual abuse: post-traumatic stress, cognitive distortions, emotional pain, avoidance, an impaired sense of self, and interpersonal difficulties. Speaking of the impaired sense of self that follows 123 Greg Hanks sexual abuse, Briere and Elliott affirm “how a child is treated (or maltreated) early in life influences his or her growing self-awareness” (58). This loss of self-awareness can have harsh negative consequences to a victim’s sense of self—his or her identity. Briere and Elliott continue, Adults molested early in life have more problems understanding or relating to others independent of their own experiences or needs, and they may not be able to perceive or experience their own internal states independent of the reactions or demands of others. (59) Here, Briere and Elliott suggest victims have a harder time understanding others on a personal level. Victims might try to please others, fulfilling the other’s own inquiries and individual needs before their own. That is to say, abused victims have lost their sense of self, and identify themselves based on the lives of others. Victims also have trouble interacting with others, as their “social functioning” has been robbed by their perpetrator (61). Victims tend to be less trusting of those in their immediate environment. They have fewer friends during childhood, less satisfaction in relationships, and report less closeness with their parents than do nonvictims. (Briere and Elliott 62) Briere and Elliott observe the great disparities of sexually abused victims and the devastating impact those disparities can have on interpersonal relations. According to their findings, victims are at a far greater risk of social ineptitudes and follies than those that have not been abused. To sum up, this social depravity is a monumental problem; losing the ability to function properly in social settings can derail the course of the victim’s life. Victims may lose opportunities in work, school, or other vocational and political ventures, to say nothing of their obscured identity. 124 What Comes After Emotional Abuse Michael’s Abuse With important highlights of emotional abuse established, there is now a platform on which to discuss emotional abuse within The Reader as it pertains to the main character Michael Berg. While I am aware of the silence in his home and the lack of love and joy found therein, one thing is certain, and is the sole focus of this paper: Hanna Schmitz is the perpetrator of Michael’s emotional abuse. Admittedly, most studies I review and compare here regarding emotional abuse relate to a child/parent relationship. However, Hanna can easily fill the motherly role in Michael’s life. When the two of them take their Easter vacation, the narrator writes, I was the one who picked out the inns where we spent the nights, registered us as mother and son while she just signed her name, and selected our food from the menu for both of us. (54) Here, Michael uses the age difference in their relationship to benefit their vacation. While Hanna only signed her name instead of taking an active role in this decision, Michael was able to easily view their relationship in a mother/son role to achieve his goal. To be sure, I know that Michael and Hanna’s relationship doesn’t translate perfectly to mother/son, but due to Michael’s own mother being absent for most of the novel, as long as there is a role filled—which Hanna succeeds in doing—then I argue these studies can apply. The emotional abuse Michael faces in The Reader is apparent in many scenes throughout the novel; however, my focus will be limited to the passage of Michael’s visit to Hanna during her shift in the streetcar and their subsequent fight. Michael wakes early on his Easter vacation, determined to pay Hanna a visit at her job. On the streetcar, Hanna refuses to acknowledge Michael’s existence even after his failed attempt of holding her “glance,” which is all she would allow (45). Michael specifically chooses the second car, the most empty, to ensure his obligatory “hug [and], 125 Greg Hanks a kiss” from Hanna (44). Michael’s paranoia escalates the longer Hanna neglects him. “Imprisoned” inside the streetcar, Hanna’s young admirer finds himself losing touch with reality around him, focusing on his implied reasoning for Hanna’s lack of affection. The narrator feels “rejected, exiled from the real world in which people lived and worked and loved” (45). This announcement is key as the narrator’s statement transcends his fifteen-year-old experience to incorporate his current adult mindset. Keith-Oaks paraphrases E.P. Benedek’s comparison between victims of abuse and prisoners of war with post-traumatic stress disorders: The child lives in an environment where there may be no other models to use for comparison and therefore can not [sic] develop any idea that his or her behaviors are adaptations to an abnormal situation. (32) Here, Keith-Oaks maintains that without a stable environment for a child to have a model in which to gain perspective, the child will lose sight of what is normal and what is not. Thus, on the streetcar, Michael starts to put his sense of self upon an altar, unable to distinguish the abnormal consequences of his actions because there has been no model in his life telling him otherwise. Following the unexpected streetcar incident, the narrator describes himself as “miserable, anxious, and furious” as he decides to wait for Hanna at her apartment (Schlink 46). When she arrives, her investment in their relationship becomes irrevocably clear in their dialogue. “‘Are you cutting school again?’” are the first words she speaks to him, knowing full well the reason for his visit. When Michael asks about the streetcar dismissal, Hanna’s intentional ambivalence, as I see it, serves her when she asks “‘ . . . what was going on this morning?’” (46–47). Hanna’s disinterest in Michael’s introductory words immediately sets the dominance levels in her favor. Michael has never had an intimate experience before Hanna, let alone one so provocative, therefore 126 What Comes After Emotional Abuse his attention to detail and equality have become disfigured by his infatuation and need for her love. One could say that Hanna has inserted this idea of love into Michael’s head, an idea that would lead him to want to visit her at her job without thinking about the repercussions of their indecent affair. What would seem like an innocent mistake to a young, enchanted teenager is taken by Hanna as a chance to assert more bondage. Even though she is aware of the status of their age difference, she blames Michael for having chosen the second car knowing she was located in the first. As noted earlier, Keith-Oaks observes that the abuser “blames the child for things over which the child has no control” (31). The real blow comes when Hanna turns to sarcasm, calling Michael a “poor baby,” turning what could have been a romantic gesture into a thing of childishness. She further distances herself from him by saying that his “business” is “not [hers]” (Schlink 47). Michael then “[becomes] uncertain” about Hanna’s stake in their fight. He wonders, “could she have . . . misunderstood me? Had I hurt her, unintentionally, against my will, but hurt her anyway?” (48). Paraphrasing R. Inglis, Keith-Oaks mentions the kinds of tactics an abusive parent can exert over his or her victim. One such tactic is called “Mystification,” where the “parent denies or invalidates the child perceptions, distorts what he perceives as true or false” (Keith-Oaks 33). Hanna exerts this kind of tactic over Michael a number of times throughout the novel. Michael has invested a great deal of trust and love into this relationship, and when Hanna neglects to validate his actions or honor his perceptions, she effectively mystifies his idea of truth, which usually results in his submission. Hanna asserts her dominance again when she says, “‘You don’t have the power to upset me’” (Schlink 48). In her use of the word “power” it is almost as if she openly admits she has total control over him, confident he will not understand the full meaning. It is after this use of dominance that Michael leaves, only to come crawling back “half an 127 Greg Hanks hour later . . . at her door” with the intent to apologize (48). The capstone to the entire altercation comes when Michael states “In the end, I was happy that she admitted I’d hurt her” (48). Thus, Hanna successfully changed Michael’s thoughtful idea of a surprise visit into a hurtful, manipulative act of inconsideration. In the conclusion of her interpretive reading about The Reader, Freund believes, The ending [of Michael and Hanna’s relationship] traumatizes Michael in several differing ways: the real loss of Hanna and her love; the loss of her as a valued and needed self-object [sic]; his inability to understand his inner turmoil and his utter helplessness at being able to have any control or influence over any aspect of the external situation. (Freund 606) Supporting her earlier argument that Michael is “damaged,” in this quote Freund insists that the narrator has been tragically affected and emotionally pained to the point of being unable to assess his own self as it relates to the world around him (601). I agree with Freund’s argument that Hanna has indeed traumatized Michael, and I add that not only does Michael suffer throughout his youth from losing the only source of supposed love and warmth he has been offered in his life, he is left also with a soulless body, that is to say, a body without an identity, well into his adult years. Michael cannot hold a relationship for very long, as evidenced in the collapse of his later marriage and the silence he offers to his only child. As with other cases of emotional and sexual abuse, Michael follows suit in that his interpersonal relationships suffer greatly as a result of Hanna’s abuse. Michael is ultimately responsible for his actions and choices, but as I have argued here, he has lost much of his ability to act normally. His unreliability as a narrator comes to us as a clear representation of the emotional abuse he endured at the hands of Hanna Schmitz. 128 What Comes After Emotional Abuse Recovery Michael’s recovery from his emotional abuse is evidenced in the latter scenes of the novel. Freund comments on this recovery in her article “A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Reader.” Referencing Andrew Morrison, Freund claims “Michael Berg’s ‘health’ begins when he returns to reading books for Hanna while she is in prison . . . After some years he starts to write . . . the words and composition are his own” (607). Freund uses a term here by Morrison called “health” to describe Michael’s resurgence from the effects of emotional abuse. She quotes Morrison, who argues, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them” (qtd. in Freund 607). By using this quote, Freund establishes that Michael’s venture into the realm of creative writing, or perhaps writing in general, is one way he has begun the slow march into a true sense of self, an identity all his own. The final pages of The Reader can also give us an example of Michael’s recovery. After Hanna’s death, Michael seeks out the sole survivor of a Holocaust tragedy caused by Hanna. Their conversation is a poignant scene where readers can start to see Michael begin to speak about his relationship with Hanna without ambivalent redirection. The Holocaust survivor asks “‘Did you ever feel, when you had contact with her [Hanna] in those last years, that she knew what she had done to you?’” The narrator responds not with vitriol or protective omission on Hanna’s behalf, but with acceptance and shrugged shoulders: “‘In any case, she [Hanna] knew what she had done to people in the camp and on the march”’ (Schlink 213-214). The final chapter of The Reader continues this discourse of recovery. Michael admits he initially harbored guilty thoughts after Hanna’s death, “sometimes in a rage at her and at what she had done to me” (216), just as Briere and Elliott find that “intense anger, which could be elicited by triggers ranging from abuse cues to minor frus129 Greg Hanks trations, emerged as uncontrollable and frightening” (167). But time and distance seem to heal Michael, as he admits: “ . . . finally the rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me—it was the path my life had taken” (Schlink 216). Some might argue that this submission further personifies Michael’s ambivalence, unreliability and so forth, but I counter by claiming this passage is honest, and that Michael is moving toward a sense of self that is finally defined by himself. One of the greatest pieces of evidence of Michael’s recovery is the entire novel itself. In her article “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self,” Culbertson writes of a therapeutic action known as “telling,” a way of using writing to recover from emotional injury. Culbertson insists “To return fully to the self as socially defined, to establish a relationship again with the world, the survivor must tell what happened” (179). From the first sentence to the last in The Reader, if we are to go by Culbertson’s argument, we are getting a narrative of healing. At the same time, this curative retelling is masked by the immediate story itself, which in contrast with Michael’s disconnection of detail, paints him as unreliable, uncertain, and clueless as to what’s been happening to him at the hands of Hanna. Culbertson continues to explain this remedy of recounting experiences to allow healing: Telling, in short, is a process of disembodying memory, demystifying it, a process which can only begin after memories have been re-membered [sic] and the mystical touched by a buried self seeking its own healing. (179) Here, Culbertson maintains that a victim can only put the experience behind him or her through taking apart the experience, and closely analyzing it, which can only be successful if these experiences can be rediscovered again. The victim 130 What Comes After Emotional Abuse must begin telling his or her traumatic experience to come back to a defined sense of self. Without telling, victims could possibly become stuck in a version of themselves defined by the memory of the trauma, by the abuser, or by the world around them. One can see, then, that as Michael begins telling his story, he is effectively taking those memories apart piece by piece, working through them, and coming to terms with them. Thus, all of the would-be negative energy the narration evokes, all of the ambivalence and shrugging contained in his recollections are not mere thoughts from a man who does not care to clarify, but from a man who is trying to understand the emotional injury he endured throughout his life. Through telling, and through narrative, the narrator is working toward a stable sense of self. This process of remaking his injured self, I argue, exonerates him from any negative reading, and names him the primary sympathetic character in Schlink’s novel. I will examine one final piece of evidence from the second-to-last paragraph in Schlink’s novel. Reflecting upon his experiences with Hanna, the narrator describes his constant issue with triggers that promote painful memories, and he admits, The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, sometimes I find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write my story to be free of it, even if I never can be. (218) Here, Michael Berg finally sees that the writing of his experiences could be a sign of recovery. He explores the idea that our memories are so closely related and packed that sometimes they are uncovered together. Each memory is a single element, an ongoing, breathing entity that holds significant power. By remembering and recounting these energy-filled memories, Michael surfaces from the muck-ridden depths 131 Greg Hanks of emotional abuse to the sunlight of restored identity. Once we have a clear picture of the narrator’s abuse, as well as the way he is coping to obtain a sense of self, we can come to understand how to view his character more fully, not as flippantly unreliable, but as a victim who demands and earns our sympathy. 132 What Comes After Emotional Abuse Works Cited Bartov, Omer. “Germany as Victim.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 80 (2000): 29–40. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Mar. 2015. Briere, John N., and Diana M. Elliott. “Immediate and Long Term Impacts of Child Sexual Abuse.” The Future of Children 4.2 (1994): 54–69. JSTOR. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. Culbertson, Roberta. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169–195. JSTOR. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. Dorahy, Martin J., and Ken Clearwater. “Shame and Guilt in Men Exposed to Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Qualitative Investigation.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 21.2 (2012): 155–175. CINAHL Plus With Full Text. Web. 18 Mar. 2015. Freund, Lucy D. “A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Reader.” Psychoanalytic Psychology. 21.4 (2004): 601–608. PsycARTICLES. Web. 23 Mar. 2015. Keith-Oaks, Judy. “Emotional Abuse: Destruction of the Spirit and Sense of Self.” Clearing House 64.1 (1990): 31–35. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Vintage-Random, 1998. Print. 133