When the woman was a little girl, her mother would put her to bed. Her mother reassured her and told her that she would always be there for her. The girl would drift off to sleep, but often she would be woken up in the middle of the night. Her father came home when the bar closed, and that was when the shouting started.
She would hear her father shouting, but not her mother. Her mother’s voice was muted, as she was trying not to wake her, but her father didn’t care. She couldn’t tell what her mother was saying, but it sounded like she was soothing him. It sounded like she was trying to reason with him. She couldn’t tell what her father was saying because his speech was so slurred. Once in a while, after the shouting, the banging would start. She almost never heard her mother cry out, but she would hear the thud against the wall in the passage. These sessions never lasted long. Her father would eventually stalk off to bed and slam their bedroom door behind him. Then the girl would go back to sleep.
On weekends, her father didn’t need to go to the factory, so he would lounge around the house in the morning. He started drinking not long after breakfast, and by lunchtime his eyes were drifting in and out of focus. After lunch, her mother would lay her hand on her father’s shoulder, but he would brush her aside and go out. And so the pattern continued.
The girl’s mother tried to protect her. What her mother should have done was teach her to recognise her father as a bad man. But she thought she loved him. Her mother tried to protect her by concealing her suffering. Her mother put on a “brave face”, but the girl did not know this. How could she? If her mother had told her that it was a “brave face” she would have revealed her concealment for what it was.
So the girl grew up in an environment where she was denied the ability to recognise her mother’s feelings relating to her father. Her mother suppressed the outward signs associated with her fear and her anxiety, and the girl was unable to recognise the causal link between her father’s behaviour and the feelings that resulted in her mother. Her mother suppressed the behaviour caused by these feelings so they were not visible to the girl.
When the girl grew up, she went out to bars with her friends. There wasn’t much else to do in her town. She and her friends didn’t have much money, so they would buy cheap beer and have a laugh. No one in the girl’s town was rich, so it was rare for men to buy her drinks. However, one day it happened. He was heavy and brutal, but she thought him manly. He bought her another drink, and they agreed to meet a few days later. She wasn’t used to the attention and she liked it.
When they met next, she thought she should be a bit careful so she did not drink too much, but he put away a fair bit. However, he didn’t appear drunk. As they left the bar, he grabbed her roughly. She smelt the liquor on his breath when he kissed her. She submitted to him, and she had a feeling she had not experienced before.
They went back to his place. When he mounted her, he gripped her arm so that it hurt, and when he climaxed his face contorted into a look of rage. He collapsed on her, and his weight forced the breath from her lungs, and then he fell asleep. She looked at him sleeping, and felt at peace. The feeling that she had felt earlier had resolved itself somehow, and she thought that perhaps that this feeling was love. She was confused by the feeling, but then she had been told that love could be difficult.
She stayed with the man. He didn’t have a good job, and neither did she, so it made sense to move in with him. Why pay rent for her own place, when she could live at his? It wasn’t long before he shouted at her, and it wasn’t long after that when he first hit her; but she didn’t leave. She believed she loved him; so why would she leave?
As an all-seeing narrator, I can look into the girl’s head and see her feelings. Furthermore, I can compare those feelings with the feelings experienced by women who have seen the behaviour that her mother concealed. In real life, of course, this is not possible. What I find is that the feeling the girl experienced when the man grabbed her was the same feeling that another woman would recognise as fear. However, normal women are not subject to the suppressed behaviour of the girl’s childhood. In the girl’s world, her mother had suppressed the outward signs of fear. How then could the girl recognise the feeling for what it was?
Our ability to understand an emotion is based on two distinct causal links: firstly, circumstances in our world cause us to experience a feeling (which is private to us); and secondly, this causes us to behave in a certain way, or display a facial expression (which is on public view). The girl lived in a world where the second stage broke down, and so her concept of the emotion was corrupted. She had never seen that part of the emotion that is normally on public display.
The girl was incapable of refuting her belief that she was in love with the man, because she lacked the understanding of the link between the feeling and the cause. If she lacked this understanding, how could she evaluate her belief that the feeling she felt was love? She lacked the conceptual framework. Sure, she had a word for fear, and she had a word for love, but these words did not reference the correct feelings and emotions.
Casual acquaintances of the girl might have said that what she felt for the man was not love. But the girl’s casual acquaintances are not in our hypothetical world, so how could they know what she was feeling? Who really knows what love is supposed to feel like, and how can anyone be certain that their idea of love feels the same as someone else’s idea?