Individual Responsibility & Culture

One of the discussions that comes up a lot when we are talking about Wide Sargasso Sea is exactly how much sympathy we can extend to Rochester. I tend to sympathize with him until he refuses to let Antoinette go with half the money because of his pride. Regardless of where exactly we lose sympathy with him, or if we do at all, I think his character brings up interesting questions about an individuals responsibility to rise above the prejudices of his culture. While many of his problems are distinctly a result of his pride and his own flaws we can see where his ideas about possession and ownership of Antoinette can come from the gender roles of his time. English law and customs tend to support the idea that while she may not be exactly his property her status is pretty close, and so we can see how some of his fixation on owning and objectifying Antoinette is a partly trying to live up to social standards. I think we can also blame Victorian culture for the unsatisfactory relationships in Mrs. Dalloway, if you judge those relationships to be unsatisfying. This raises questions about whether or not an individual is responsible for overcoming the prejudices of their culture and whether or not we should judge them harshly for failing to do so.  

The racism that is present in Mr. Mason and to a lesser extent in Rochester is reprehensible but is not unexpected. Neither of them have any real contact with the people of Jamaica before coming there and the their preconceived notions come from people with huge authority in British culture. So there is a viable argument to be made that they should not be held responsible for their own attitudes, as they have to overcome huge cultural barriers. That said if you excuse people for simply going along with authority and culture you justify being complicit to any number of horrible actions. From the holocaust to slavery absolving individuals of the responsibility to resist evil authority is something that is problematic, and has been something Americans have been reluctant to do. I think we ruled in Nuremberg that following orders is not a valid excuse for a war crime, though we have been inconsistent in that ruling.

    In addition people clearly have overcome the biases of their culture and we celebrate those people for doing so. If we want to believe human equality is a self evident universal truth then we have to believe that people who lived in other cultures had as much an opportunity to discover it as we do now. Therefore we have to condemn those who did not, but that makes up the vast majority of people living in those cultures. It is hard to say that everyone who was a part of a system like southern slavery are reprehensible human beings and should be held accountable for their actions, I am sure many of them were good people who loved each other and lived meaningful lives. Yet the progress our society has experienced from things such as suffrage and the civil rights movement are based entirely around forcing people to stand up to authority by demonstrating the injustice of the culture or authority in question. I think we would be far less forgiving of a person with racist attitudes living in the 1960’s then in the 1700’s, yet both of them have been exposed to the same ideas that we would hold fly in the face of a universal principle such as human equality. We tend to hold modern people more responsible for racism because culture goes against their beliefs so they have no excuses. Yet if we accept that people in teh 1700’s are not guilty we absolve them of responsibility to oppose an unjust majority, a dangerous act.

If it seems like this is going in circles I think that’s because my thought process is. I certainly think we should hold people to a high enough standard that we should expect people to be able to overcome the biases of their culture, yet throughout history most people have not. This means either humans are so flawed we should not be expected to oppose injustice, or most of the people who lived could rightfully be considered evil. I really don’t want tor each either of these conclusions and I think the most popular answer is probably going to be to hold them responsible to a limited extent, which makes sense but I find unsatisfying.