absolutelynotnormal

“So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

– William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’

Guilt is one of the tropes that pops up again and again in the texts we teach.

In Julius Caesar with Year 8, it saturates the play, from the foretold guilt of the statua of Caesar running “pure blood” with Roman citizens “bath[ing] their hands in it” in Calpurnia’s dream, to the conspirators who are urged by Brutus to “bathe [their] hands in Caesar’s blood up to the elbows, and besmear [their] swords” after actually committing the ultimate betrayal.

In Oliver Twist, we see Fagin’s guilt in the plot to betray Oliver lead him to his execution, introducing the idea that bad things happen to those who do wrong.

The mysterious (and vile*) Mr Rochester repeatedly rejects his own guilt over his behaviour towards his wife Bertha and spends an inordinate amount of time justifying his actions by claiming he was duped into an unsatisfactory marriage.

*personal opinion (but you’ll never change my mind!)

By the time we get to Othello at the end of Year 9, the idea that bad things happen to the guilty is fairly well entrenched, so when Othello takes his own life when he is overcome by the guilt of smothering his beloved wife Desdemona, it comes as no surprise.

In Year 10, we study Macbeth with its motif of blood representing guilt and the varying reactions of the characters towards it: from Macbeth bewailing his fate with the question, “Will all great Neptune’s oceans wash this blood clean from my hand?” and his own response that the blood is so great as to turn the “seas incarnadine, making the green one red” instead, followed by Lady Macbeth’s classic and offhand response that “A little water clears us of this deed”. As we all know, this dismissive response soon turns darker with her well-known line, “Out, damned spot, out I say!” as she descends into madness, driven there by her own guilt over Duncan’s murder. It’s an interesting idea that, by the time she’s sleepwalking around the castle, the guilt has become so real to her that she can even smell the guilt of the blood on her hands. This idea that guilt intensifies over time is borne out when even Macbeth acknowledges that he is “in blood stepped in so far that, should [he] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

In Year 11, Simon Armitage’s haunting poem ‘Remains’ examines the guilt felt by a soldier in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He repeats the idea that blood and guilt are synonymous when the soldier, tormented by his pernicious guilt over his part in an unknown looter’s fate, says, “his bloody life in my bloody hands.” Browning’s Duke of Ferrara however, in ‘My Last Duchess’, has a Rochester-like response to his guilt over killing his wife when he merely states, “I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” The implication is that because he felt his wife was too free with her pleasant nature, he chose to have her killed as if she were a belonging that was his to dispose of.

We look at guilt again in Priestley’s play ‘An Inspector Calls’. In this instance, Sheila, the naïve young daughter, is the first to accept her own guilt, working with the Inspector to encourage the others to do the same. Her father refuses any part in the untimely demise of Eve Smith, blustering about the lower classes “ask[ing] for the earth” if you “don’t come down sharply” on them. His justification that the idea of community is “nonsense” makes him seem like the very worst of the entitled upper classes. Although Eric eventually accepts that, “[he] did what [he] did,” his mother denies all responsibility for her part in pushing Eva over the edge. The most socially superior of all of them, Gerald, son of “Sir George and Lady Croft,” not only justifies taking Eva as his mistress but then dresses it up as rescuing her because she “gave him a glance that was nothing less than a cry for help.” Ugh! (In case you’re wondering, I don’t dislike him quite as much as Rochester, but it’s a close run thing!)

Funny how, even in literature, the ones who can ‘justify’ their actions are the men who treated women badly. Apart from Othello, and even then, he managed to justify his actions right up until he had it explained to him, in words of one syllable, that maybe Iago wasn’t quite as “honest” as he had thought. Did he really feel guilty? Or was it just that he was horrified that he wasn’t quite such a good judge of character as he thought?

So  why am i banging on about guilt? Well, I’m off sick from work today. I was yesterday too. Nothing major, but after a week and a half of battling a horrific chest infection and the paroxysms of coughing and lack of voice that come with it, I couldn’t face trying to get through another day of trying to talk. This is the second time I have called in sick in the nineteen years I have been at my present school. I say called in; the first time, I was sent home by the Head of Maths when he found me trying to put exam papers in numerical order with a migraine that meant I couldn’t see the numbers! (As anyone who gets migraines can tell you, the dazzles get right in the way of what you’re trying to look at, but sometimes, if you’re quick enough, you can get a quick glimpse round them. Not ideal, but definitely possible to put things in numerical order if you’re willing to spend forever trying to sneak up on them!)

I don’t really do being ill. It’s not my forté and I’m hard on myself when I succumb to the dreaded lurgy. So, instead of accepting that being at home is the best plan, I’m sitting here feeling guilty. Guilty that I’m not at school to give my Year 10s their mock results (someone else did it instead). Guilty that I probably could have managed to push myself through the last couple of days in my classroom. Guilty that I’m prioritising myself over the school. Guilty that someone had to cover my lessons.

It’s ridiculous. But it’s the truth. I’m cross with myself, and this is my attempt to make myself be a little more rational. I’m going to put the kettle on and watch tut TV. I’ll try not to mutter too much about “damned spots,” but as my students all know, I do identify quite a lot with Lady M. Luckily, I have no battlements, so throwing myself over them isn’t in the cards ….