Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture

THREE: Sadistic Benefactors

45 Sadistic Benefactors Whom best I love, I cross; to make my gift, The more delay’d, delighted. —Shakespeare, Cymbeline 5.4.101–2 Some fictional characters get a glimpse of other characters’ true feelings; others don’t notice a thing; and some may even get a chance to think back and realize what this or that look or gesture truly meant. There is also another category of characters—those who are not content with merely glimpsing other people’s feelings. Instead, they want to script such moments of transparency themselves. That is, they want to force others into revealing their feelings through body language. This last emotional terrain is often explored by horror stories and psychological thrillers. As literary critic Walter Benn Michaels puts it in his discussion of American Psycho, “You can be confident that the girl screaming when you shoot her with a nail gun is not performing (in the sense of faking) her pain.”1 To avoid or soften the charge of sadism leveled against characters who instigate embodied transparency in others, their actions can be shown to be driven by revenge (as in The Count of Monte Cristo) or, paradoxically, by affection or desire to do good. The ethics of the latter situation are extremely ambiguous. An undertow of emotional sadism runs through them. Yet such characters don’t 46 GETTING INSIDE YOUR HEAD engage in what can be characterized as straightforward torture. In fact, they may sincerely believe that their actions will ultimately benefit the people whom they are forcing into transparency. To reflect this ambiguity , I call such characters sadistic benefactors.2 One sadistic benefactor makes his appearance in a work by yet another Fielding: Sarah, Henry’s sister. In her novel The History of Ophelia (1760) a rich man sends a poor man on an emotional roller coaster to enjoy the spectacle of his feelings. Yet he acts on the benevolent principle of Jupiter from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: he “crosses,” that is, inflicts pain on, those whom he loves “best” in order to intensify their subsequent joy. (I bring up Jupiter on purpose. When it comes to deities, their supernatural powers create endless opportunities for forcing mortals into embodied transparency. Were I to write about fictions of transparency in the ancient world, gods would figure in my account most prominently.) Here is how Fielding builds up to that eventual joy. The novel’s protagonist , Lord Dorchester, comes across a starving half-pay soldier, Captain Traverse, and decides to help him. Through his connections at court, Dorchester secretly procures Traverse a choice of two jobs. He begins, however, by telling the captain only of the first job, one that Dorchester knows Traverse will not be able to take because of family circumstances. The poor captain, unwilling to appear ungrateful, receives “this News with as much Gratitude as if it had been the very Thing he wished” and turns it down politely. Lord Dorchester then expresses his disappointment in such guilt-inducing terms as to drive the captain to break down in tears when he thinks nobody is watching. (In fact, several people are watching, including Lord Dorchester’s love interest, Ophelia, the young girl who is telling the story.)3 Not yet content with this show of emotion, Lord Dorchester then reveals the captain’s family waiting in the next room and urges him again to take the first job. In response Traverse “faint[s] away instantly,” terrifying his wife and making the onlookers fear for his life. When he comes to, Lord Dorchester augments “the general Joy” that his recovery occasions by telling him of the second job, one that is completely acceptable and will save the whole family from starvation. The joy now increases “to a great Degree of Extacy,” rising to a “Height that must have been painful.” The captain and his wife look on the “Lord with Adoration, SADISTIC BENEFACTORS 47 and [give] way to Raptures that would have forced a Heart the most insensible to the Sensations of others, to partake of theirs” (1:254–55). We can call Dorchester’s behavior sadistic and think of him as a mini-Jupiter of that claustrophobic world, but there is no way of telling if Fielding herself viewed him thus.4 All we can safely assume about her thoughts on the subject is that, as many writers before and after her, she was intuitively interested in figuring out...