This week I've been reading Mary Henley Rubio's long-awaited biography of L.M. Montgomery, The Gift of Wings. In it she draws attention to a trend in Montgomery's journals. As she grew older, Montgomery continued to write novels about bright, imaginative girls thwarted in their ambitions by narrow-minded adults, but in her journals she began to collect another kind of tale: stories of parents let down by their ne'er-do-well children. Young men embezzling funds from the church offering plate - young women requiring hastily-arranged weddings ... these are the characters peopling her private chronicles.
Montgomery had reason to be worried: her son Chester had demonstrated a lifelong tendency towards dishonesty and self-indulgence. He pilfered jewelry from their housemaids; he was a compulsive eater; he did his best to corner neighbourhood girls, who soon learned to keep out of his clutches.
Writers don't always make the best mothers, and Montgomery was no exception: even her "good son," Stuart, remembered pushing flowers under the door of his mother's office when she was holed up inside, laughing aloud in private merriment as she concocted her latest novel. What time she could spare for her sons involved policing their social and academic lives, promoting friendships with suitably wealthy and prestigious neighbours and discouraging attachments with those she considered beneath her family's social station. It's not difficult to find parenting mistakes when you're looking for them, yet I cannot believe that Montgomery can be held responsible for her son's misdemeanours (which in due course became full-fledged crimes).
The issue of maternal culpability is central to another book I read last year: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. The narrator of that novel is Eva Khatchadourian, member of a small and exclusive club of mothers whose sons have committed high-school massacres. The novel is made up of letters from Eva to Kevin's father, Franklin, and they all deal, overtly or otherwise, with Franklin's unstated accusation that Eva was responsible for her son's murders.
Eva's recollections of Kevin's infancy and childhood point to the classic symptoms of a sociopathic disorder. Kevin is cold, detached, and malicious, traits he carefully conceals under a mask of bonhomie. His father is taken in, but Eva always insists that there's something wrong. Reading her account, I find it impossible to blame her for her son's crimes, yet what makes the novel so haunting - and lifts it above mere sensationalism - are the hints that his rampage could have been prevented. Long after finishing the novel, I am most haunted by a scene in which Kevin is ill; he briefly drops his usual antagonism and defensiveness, actually accepting and even seeking his mother's affection. This brief glimpse of a Kevin who is not merely vulnerable but, more importantly, capable of attachment suggests that Kevin is more than the "bad seed" - that there is potential in him, even if there's no obvious way to unlock it.
As parents we are responsible for the moral growth of our children. In Montgomery's day this task was described as teaching them right from wrong: it involved instruction in moral and religious precepts, reinforced with punishments for bad behaviour. When Montgomery comments in her journals that six-year-old Chester has always been difficult to "train," she is acknowledging the failure of these tried-and-true methods. More recently, the task of moral education has evolved into meeting the child's emotional needs: our more optimistic generation has concluded that children who are shown love and empathy will learn to display those traits themselves. I suspect that both approaches work well with normal children.
A third parenting approach is explored in the television series Dexter. The protagonist, Dexter Morgan, is a phenomenon that does not occur in nature: a serial killer who kills only other murderers. In the first two seasons the show uses flashbacks to trace the origins of this strange hybrid of monster and hero. There are hints that Dexter may have a genetic predisposition towards sociopathy; if so, the childhood traumas he endured merely sealed his fate. The turning point in his life, however, is a conversation with his father, Harry, who has just discovered that his son has been killing animals, including the neighbours' dog. Harry's reaction is complex: he looks sickened, but he puts his arm around Dexter's shoulders. He knows the signs of what his son is becoming, but he doesn't turn away. Instead he trains Dexter, channeling his propensities for violence in socially beneficial ways and creating the code that Dexter continues to follow as an adult.
Harry is credited for doing what few parents could: facing his son's darkness head-on, without pretense, and loving him unconditionally. As a result, Dexter retains some ability to form emotional connections: he remains attached to his sister and even manages a reasonably successful relationship with his girlfriend and her two kids. But the show always toys with the possibility that Harry, far from saving Dexter from a worse fate, has schooled him to become what Harry believed he already was: a heartless killer. We see a teenaged Dexter reading books on sociopathy, seeing himself reflected in the symptomology and constructing his sense of self accordingly. We see Harry showing Dexter an MRI of his brain, pointing out the enlarged areas governing aggression and the shrunken centres of empathy. No other child has ever been trained, so carefully and lovingly, to see himself as a serial killer.
There is something fascinating about stories of evil children. For Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin grew from a kind of worst-case-scenario thinking - this is every would-be parent's worst nightmare. But for me the fascination arises from the possibility of remediation, the lurking hints that these compulsive liars, these thieves and killers, have some core that is redeemable. According to Mary Rubio, Chester's classmates at school recalled that they "loved 'to get him going' because he created such a lively uproar. Children teased and tormented him because he would react angrily to provocations and retaliate by lunging at offenders, and his clumsy attempts to catch his skinny, fast-footed classmates created a comic delight. They all said, independently, as adults looking back, that he was by nature a 'loner.' He wanted desperately to be accepted, but was socially inept and ostracized." With parents who both suffered from debilitating mental illnesses, Chester seems all too likely to have inherited some kind of personality disorder.
But when I read that passage, describing a boy with a life of failure and criminal disgrace ahead of him, I think not that he needs a good spanking, nor even that he just needs love and affection, but rather that there must have been some way to teach him the things those other children all knew without being taught - that the empathy that springs up so readily in some might still be a plant that can be cultivated in others. Unable to crack the code of social interaction as a boy, Chester was later unable to rely on social cues to restrain the impulses that most of us learn to curb on the playground. He had been told that stealing was wrong - he knew that if he were caught he'd be punished - but is it possible that with the right kind of social skills, he might have learned to acquire what the rest of us think of as a conscience?
