The first thing that struck me about this story is its
similarity to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter: this is the
story of a woman wearing not a literal A for adultery, but stigmatized with M
for murderess. The second peculiar
literary kinship is with Nabokov's Lolita,
which portrays a villain as a sympathetic character, a protagonist committing
obvious evil acts that the reader fights NOT to identify with and internally "root for" as we do most heroes/heroines. The protagonist in Burial Rites, however, is not so
obviously evil, at least not to the extent that we can be absolutely sure
of. Based on a true story and a
real person's life, Burial Rites
attempts to give a more ambiguous portrayal of Agnes Magnusdottir, an Icelandic
woman convicted for her role in two murders committed in 1828. Author Hannah Kent has carefully and
painstakingly researched this woman's life, the cultural and historical
landscapes of nineteenth-century Iceland, and all available documents
recounting the incident that occurred on a remote farm in northern
Iceland. Kent noticed while
researching that many records portrayed Agnes as a "witchy woman," a
flawed stereotype historically attached to the female archetype that strays
from behaviors, ideas, and images that have been deemed socially and culturally
acceptable; when we think of violent crimes and serial killers, for example, we
usually expect these people to be men. When it's a woman, she gets cast as a
"witch" – inherently evil and incapable of human empathy. As Jeanette Winterson, author of The Daylight Gate and numerous other
dark fantasy novels, notes, “The woman as witch happens historically when the
idea of the Goddess, with her power and sexuality, is too threatening to be
allowed in the social order. The witch is both fearful and fascinating, as
women are. But if she gets tricky, you can always burn her.” I might add that this female version of
power, and the divine, only becomes a threat in patriarchal societies, in which
men traditionally occupy roles of leadership, political power, and dominance in
relationships. Agnes especially wears this black hat in the
comparatively less progressive nineteenth century, when gender roles were much
more entrenched, as is evident in the other characters' initial reaction to the
idea of a female killer: they at
first refuse to even call her by her name and instead refer to her as "the
murderess." It’s as if her
crime, certainly not new to human experience, is so taboo for a woman that she
doesn’t even deserve a human identity with a personal name. That is precisely the stigma that this
book seeks to subvert, and in my experience of reading it, the author far
exceeded her goal. This is one of
the most beautiful and gut-wrenching explorations of the human condition I’ve
ever read. I was crying by the end.
By
the end, Agnes has transformed from an impersonal “murderess” to Agnes, a 33-year-old woman with a
difficult past and traumatic childhood.
By the end, we have listened along with the family charged with the
responsibility of holding her in custody until her execution date to the story
of an abused woman whose lover and employer exploited affections and work roles
for his selfish interests. We have
come to understand that yes, while this woman did plunge a knife into a dying
man’s stomach, it was motivated by love and empathy, like putting a suffering
animal out of its misery, and not a premeditated crime of passion as her
prosecutors have misconstrued the events.
As Agnes laments to Toti, her chosen spiritual counselor, “To know what
a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things….It’s
not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by
sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself….No matter if your
innermost self whispers, ‘I am not as you say!’—how other people think of you
determines who you are” (Kent 103-04). And so the reader agonizes with Agnes and the people
who have come to know her as the human being, at the injustice of ambiguous
circumstances in which one human tried to show mercy to another and is now
denied mercy in facing the ultimate punishment: her own life for that which she took.
Above
all, this book asks the reader to see a human being as an individual with a
unique set of circumstances that made her into the person you see in the
present moment, regardless of actions that tempt our human minds to judge,
label, and group into mass categories of faceless offenders. It's the old
adage, you can't know a person until you've walked a mile in her shoes. Burial
Rites is a darkly poetic walk through the last six months of a condemned
woman's life told in alternating points of view to restore balance to an
unfairly skewed history (or, in this case, herstory).
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