I was recently conversing with a friend about a book that asks women to stop chasing the goal of selflessness and instead embrace the idea of becoming “full of themselves,” or their most “authentic” selves. I talked about how that idea is antithetical to the gospel as preached by Jesus Christ, who taught, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Matt 16:24)
She countered by saying that’s all very well, but she can see the author’s point - for centuries women have been oppressed and subjected to much unfairness in the name of selflessness, and there needs to be a correction to those long injustices. I found myself wanting to backtrack slightly, to sound more reasonable, and I said that of course I’m not in favor of placing unfair burdens on women, and that I don’t think that’s what Christ was advocating, and we shouldn’t run faster than we have strength etc. We had come to the end of our walk and had to get on with the rest of our busy days, but we parted with lots of food for thought, at least on my end.
It is common in society today to speak rather disparagingly of women who “live only to serve and nourish the lives of others,” and to assume that this path leads only to women who feel dissatisfied and lost. Instead, many say that the path to fulfillment and happiness begins (and perhaps ends) with heeding the call of our individual desires - be they emotional, physical, or spiritual - and establishing a true, authentic identity. In this way we “live our best lives.” Indeed the argument is also often (un-ironically) made that this philosophy is not only best for ourselves, but is also best for those around us - in the words of a Goop contributor, “giving to yourself first is one of the greatest gifts you could ever give to those you love.”
Anecdotally, when I look around me at women who seem to be always engaged in selfless acts of service, some do seem rather chronically stressed. But many more stand out for their optimism, sense of humor, and good cheer. None of them strike me as disappointed or lost, even though some are shouldering heavy, life-altering burdens. That being said, the author mentioned above also seems, at least publicly, to be very happy; she speaks of having found the truest, most beautiful version of herself by following her deepest desires - desires which led her to dismantle the life she had built with her husband and children to marry a woman (she now co-parents her children). In either case, it’s hard to discern the truth from the outside, much less see what lies in the future.
Interestingly, a character in one of my favorite novels (George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss”) faced a similar dilemma. Maggie Tulliver, the heroine who incidentally has led a life of deprivation and wearying service, finds herself developing a mutual, overpoweringly powerful attraction to the man who is tacitly promised to her cousin. This man, Stephen Guest, tries to convince her to go away with him using arguments that sound very familiar:
“It is unnatural - it is horrible, Maggie, if you loved me as I love you, we should throw everything else to the winds for the sake of belonging to each other. We should break all these mistaken ties that were made in blindness, and determine to marry each other… we can’t help the pain it will give. It has come upon us without our seeking: it is natural - it has taken hold of me in spite of every effort I have made to resist it. God knows, I’ve been trying to be faithful to tacit engagements, and I’ve only made things worse - I’d better have given way at first.” And he later adds, “Would they have thanked us for anything so hollow as constancy without love?”
Stephen is proposing that they follow their desires because they are natural and powerful. But that argument sounds a little shaky to me - why should we give in to our desires simply because they come from within us? Giving in to his physical desires is what caused Esau to trade his birthright for a mess of pottage; it led King David to do much worse. Natural desires can be undesirable, or even evil, and the strength of a desire is not correlated with its rightness. Nowadays desires, particularly sexual ones, are often allowed to dominate or define a person’s identity, but to assume that is inevitable is to imply that we have no choice in who we are (or who we want to become). In any case, Maggie is not convinced. She replies,
”Oh it is difficult - life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us - the ties that have made others dependent on us - and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in Paradise, and we could always see that one being first toward whom… I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes - love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see - I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life: some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me; but I see one thing quite clearly - that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused...
If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment... faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us - whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us.”
It is hard to accept that some of us might need to renounce love in this life. Nevertheless, I find Maggie’s understanding of the situation to be fuller and more complete than Stephen’s. His version of being true to oneself seems to imply a narrower, more static vision of the self, one in which natural desires are all that really matter. Maggie’s version, in contrast, involves becoming - her nature is bound up with the virtues she has been striving for her whole life. In choosing to sacrifice some of her desires, and deliberately binding her happiness to the well-being of those around her, she is not diminishing her self, but shaping and expanding it. This understanding dawns on her as she struggles with her decision:
“She had had to suffer through many years of her life; and who had renounced anything for her? And when something like that fullness of existence - love, wealth, ease, refinement, all that her nature craved - was brought within her reach, why was she to forego it, that another might have it - another, who perhaps needed it less? But… was that existence which tempted her the full existence she dreamed? Where, then, would be all the memories of early striving, all the deep pity for another’s pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of affection and hardship, all the divine presentiment of something higher than mere personal enjoyment which had made the sacredness of life? She might as well hope to enjoy walking by maiming her feet, as hope to enjoy an existence in which she set out by maiming the faith and sympathy that were the best organs of her soul. And then, if pain were so hard to her, what was it to others?”
In this imperfect world, where someone suffering is inevitable, it is tempting to ask, “why me?” Indeed, Christ is asking us to do something that sounds a little terrifying - to give up seeking to protect and care for and find ourselves; to lose ourselves in selfless service to others and trust that He will take care of us. That last part is key. Self-denial alone does not result in the “full existence“ that Maggie craves - but when we also strive to follow our Savior, the compensatory and transformative power of His Atonement will ultimately lead us to a fullness of life. In the end, we are simply following in His footsteps, for the very act of the atoning was an act of self-denial - “not my will, but thine, be done“ (Luke 22:42); one that enabled Christ himself to attain perfection (3 Ne 12:48).
I should note that while I find greater truth and wholeness in Maggie’s point of view, George Eliot herself refrained from giving her a happy ending, and was careful to avoid passing judgement, writing,
”The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question, whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases… the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and [to lace] ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy… [we will not be led to justice] by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality - without any care to assure [ourselves] whether [we] have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.”
Wise words indeed.
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