Speaking for Others

A man in Iowa was accused of raping his wife, who had Alzheimer's. The charge was the wife was incapable of consenting to sex. The State presumed to speak for her, or at least in her behalf. The details of the case were murky, but apparently nobody ever elicited from the wife she felt she had been wronged.

There are situations in which we feel we have to speak for others--when children are involved, or when people are incapacitated and when people are clearly inhibited from speaking their minds.
Here are some rules we mostly like:
1. Men, in general,  should refrain from having  sex with a woman who is rendered incapable of judging whether she really wants to have sex. This forms the basis of many college "date rape" cases, where the girl is drunk.
2. No mother should give up her child for financial gain. We've heard about cultures in which children are sold or married off by parents who justify this as a good thing for the family. 
3. Promises made should be promises kept.

But consider three stories, just fiction:
1. "Away from Her" a movie starring Julie Christie
2. "The Adopted Son" a short story by Guy de Maupassant.
3. "Forsaking All Others" a short story by Ulbert.

In "Away from Her" Julie Christie insists her husband take her to a nursing home for Alzheimer's patients as she feels her disease closing in on her. They clearly are still in love and he cannot stand the idea of losing her; it's like bringing her to the graveyard for him, but she insists. He continues to visit her, but over time it's clear she barely recognizes him, if at all. Eventually, she enters a love affair with another Alzheimer's patient, which appears to give her and the man some measure of joy and comfort and the husband  realizes the woman who inhabits his wife's body is no longer his wife. The crucial element of memory is gone. She cannot remember the husband she has left behind.  The nursing home officials are all aghast: They think they should intervene and expel either the wife or her lover, but the husband is not so sure. He does not think he can speak for the wife he has lost. 

In "The Adopted Son," two families live in adjoining cottages, poor, but happy. The many children run back and forth between the homes and the families are almost melded. One day, a rich, childless woman rides by in her carriage and is particularly taken with one of the children and she proposes to his mother she adopt the child. She says she will support the child's mother and family handsomely, if only the mother will give up her child. The mother reacts in a fury and says she would never "sell" her child.  Some time later the rich woman spots a son of the other family and is equally taken by him and makes the same offer to that child's mother, who, agonizes but agrees to hand over her child. 

The two families are fractured by this event; the first mother cannot abide the decision to give up a child. The family which gave up the child prospers in many ways which appalls the mother who refused the rich woman's money. She accuses the mother of accepting blood money, of prospering from the sale of her own son.

 Years later a carriage draws up outside the cottages and a young gentleman emerges, dressed richly and he knocks on the door of one of the cottages--it is the adopted son, now educated, rich and very happy. He thanks his mother for having sacrificed her own happiness for his, for having given him a better life.  When he leaves, the son who was the rich woman's original choice excoriates his own mother for not having given him the opportunity which benefited his friend. His mother had spoken for herself, but also for him, and we are left pondering whether she got it wrong. Had she thought, as her neighbor had, this is an opportunity for a better life for my son, she would have made a different decision. How different would sending her son away with the rich woman have been from the decision to send a 12 year old off to Phillips Exeter Academy? Separation for a better life.

In "Forsaking All Others" a woman is introduced by her fiance to a chivalrous man whom she calls her "knight errant" with whom she falls in love. She has adored her fiance since childhood, and she has grown up thinking she is lucky to have won him and she asks herself how she can give up what she wanted for so long for the knight. She marries her fiance, as she has promised to do. The knight, saddened by her choice, leaves town and eventually finds another woman, and invites the heroine to the wedding. The heroine sees the bride is in some ways the right choice, the right religion and social class for the knight,  but the night before the wedding, the heroine  winds up in bed with the knight. She stops things before the consummation.  She tells him she cannot ruin his life, and  she gets dressed, leaves, and the next morning goes to the wedding. She does not see him again for years, when both couples wind up in the same city and become friends sharing dinners and outings, until her own husband announces he is leaving her.  We are left wondering whether doing the right thing was the right choice. She left the knight's bed that night because she felt it was best for him, and because she was thinking of her own husband. She was thinking for others, but the only feelings she really could know for sure were her own.

In each, we are presented with the conventional demands of love and we presume to know what is best for another human being, but we come to question how well we do know and it is the conventional idea of love and obligation which comes to seem, if not wrong, at least ambiguous.