Because one function of grandparenting has so fallen out of fashion, I feel compelled to single it out. Like cracking a ruler across the schoolboy’s knuckles and washing the young girl’s mouth out with soap (for lying or dirty language), severe dressings-down by old scolds have become only a miserable memory.
Well, not altogether. An old scold appeared in a small tour group I joined in Greece some years ago. Most of the tourists were Americans, a few Europeans. One woman, turning forty, laughed too often, too hysterically. She smiled at everyone in the group and out, connecting all around wherever we traipsed in the rocky, reticent, and sacred terrain. She called herself Debbie.
The oldest woman in the group, from French Switzerland, dressed Debbie down, and in front of some of the others. In essence she said: Debbie’s laugh was too young; moreover, by now she should be using her full name, a beautiful name with biblical origins, Deborah.
The old scold—Madame Lafarge, let’s call her—came from the city of John Calvin and seemed to be acting the censor in his name. Mme. Lafarge was rigid in her code, cool in her connection, and hostile in her style of reproof. She had a lesson to teach: A woman of forty is not a girl. She must consider what comes out of her mouth. She must be able to judge when to connect, with whom to smile, how to contain. Friendliness with everyone is not friendly, but inconsiderate. Such was the content of Madame’s lesson.
For me, there were other lessons. Her intervention alone was one: An older person may risk being offensive in defense of important values—values that some of the other Americans did not perceive. They saw only a clash of cultures—the Swiss were puritan, the French nasty; Europeans are still basically snobs, superior.…
Although we were in Greece, these Americans did not glimpse a far older cultural clash, which has recurred in different ways throughout history. Mme. Lafarge’s sense of manners came from something deeper than Miss Manners. At stake here was Athens against the Barbarians. Behind the old scold is civilization attempting to maintain civility. Mme. Lafarge must have been prompted by the corrective spirit of Athene herself, mother of civilization. No wonder we stood in awe of this small elderly lady’s scolding: Athene has devastating power. No wonder Debbie folded.
I learned a second lesson. Mme. Lafarge took her personal irritation and ran with it. She might have held her tongue, accommodated herself to the group. She might have rationalized her annoyance as her fault, a result of her age, her digestion, her tiredness. Instead, she raised the level of her irritation from the trivial and personal to the cultural and important. She was protesting not merely manners, not merely an ethics of social behavior. Nor was she protesting Debbie’s attention-demanding narcissism. It was as if Debbie had come to a grove of olive trees with a boom box and played the wrong music. Mme. Lafarge stood her senior ground and showed that part of that ground is aesthetic judgment. Fitness, appropriateness, sensitivity—aesthetic considerations belong as much to behavior as does finding the right word to keep the rhythm in a line of poetry.
Scolding is a poetic act: “scold” comes from Skald, Norse for poet. Early on, a scold was not a Calvinist but a ribald, noisy, quarreling woman. The scolding poet reproves the community. Like Jeremiah’s, her scolding constantly warns and she is misunderstood like Cassandra. She is perceived as crazy, offensive; she disrupts communal harmony, so that a scold is commonly seen as a faultfinder who must wrangle her points to the end. The tacit complicity of the group with Debbie’s style under the compact of harmonious equality drove Mme. Lafarge to her eccentric, disruptive rebuke. She became an old scold, as if having stepped back into the word itself.
One of the poet’s tasks is to bring a community to its senses and wake it up, and to do this by aesthetic means that are hardly distinguishable from moral chiding. If the family code forbids cursing, blasphemy, and obscenity, a child who swears and blasphemes is punished for immorality. But if her language is unfitting to the occasion, if her behavior is insensitive, insulting, and self-indulgent, then her offense is aesthetic. Mme. Lafarge was aesthetically offended; Debbie had bad taste.
Was Mme. Lafarge in bad taste for shaming a woman who hadn’t really done any harm? The older woman had not picked on Debbie’s pigtails, her baggy clothes, her snacking habits, or her other idiosyncrasies. Aging was the issue, aging as essential to character—inauthentic in one means inauthentic in the other. To Mme. Lafarge Debbie was essentially inappropriate and therefore out of sync with the cosmos. Not to act one’s age, not to be one’s age, is so radical a fault that all others flow from it.
Later reflections on the incident brought home a third lesson, about authority. What had authorized this elderly, rather quiet and unassuming woman, who was not physically domineering (or even quite up to the pace of the tour), to come forward with such vigor? She was certainly a minority, with no support group. Yet, whether by Calvin, Athene, or civilization itself, she was authorized. She had authority, although she was powerless. Perhaps its source was simply her years. Had these years shown her the intelligence that lies in one’s heartfelt emotions, and taught her that offenses which strike the heart are a call to demonstrate character? She did not deny the passion in her judgment, or avoid the risk of scolding even if everyone else in that little group might find her wrong.
And not everyone did. A young couple told me some days later how impressed they had been by this scolding. Debbie had been ruining their trip. Her habits had usurped their private evening conversations, which had turned to gossip instead of Greece. Instead of their secret bad-mouthing, Mme. Lafarge had issued a public scolding and put the whole group back on track. They admired her guts. She had done a real service.
As Debbie saw it, Mme. Lafarge was heartless. Moreover, what I am now calling authority, the psychologists among the Americans on the tour called a power struggle between generations. They saw two antagonists with equally justified opinions vying for competitive edge: Whose style would run the group? The content of the rebuke was incidental to them. The “problem” was a group dynamic, and Debbie’s crumbling meant that she had low self-esteem. She could not stand up for herself.
After the reflections brought on by this book, I now understand what Debbie knew in her bones: Her personality had been defeated by the older woman’s character.
In my imagination, Debbie has not forgotten this incident. It will last long after the old scold herself has passed to whatever reward she receives. I imagine Debbie will be passing on what she has learned; she may be mentoring others with a sudden tongue. We can all recall a drama coach, a music teacher, a shop supervisor, an old uncle coming down hard, boring in on our character with scorn and ridicule in the name of values that must be acknowledged, defended, and passed on. The scold as instrument of tradition: This is also grandparenting.
Grandparenting means parenting something grander than your own personal offspring. Opportunities to act like Mme. Lafarge are everywhere. Civilization is always at stake; barbarians are always at the gates, or in the high seats, cloaked in the robes of office.