Dear Reader,
Word Raccoon asked me recently why there are so many novels in which characters slap one another.
WR, where did that come from? There’s no point in asking; she is off on a tangent.
Okay, raccoon of mine, what are you talking about?
She clears her throat, shows me her non-murder board (you’ll get that joke when my novel comes out) and slams her pointer across it.
Exhibit A: (for no good reason she did not label her other exhibits)
Wuthering Heights
Well, obviously a Brontë is involved.
In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw wants Nelly Dean to leave the room so she can be alone with Edgar Linton.
Nelly refuses.
Catherine pinches her.
Nelly still refuses.
Catherine slaps her.
Unfortunately for Catherine, Edgar is there to see the whole thing.
WR writes COURTSHIP GOING WELL?? on an index card.
I tell her that’s editorializing.
She informs me that this is not the only slapping going on in Wuthering Heights.
Of course it isn’t.
It’s Wuthering Heights. And let’s not forget Heathcliff’s slapping Cathy when she tried to grab the key from him to secure her freedom. (How exactly did he become a romantic figure?)
Great Expectations
Then, what the Dickens? (Couldn’t resist.)
Pip tells his sister Estella that she isn’t as insulting as she used to be, so…she slaps him.
Then she asks:
“Now?”
Reader, do we call that efficiency or dastardliness?
WR writes COUNTEREVIDENCE on the board and asks permission to add dastard to the list of curse words.
I have no objection.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
WR brings me Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
I already know this isn’t going anywhere good. Even if I have stood in front of Stonehenge reciting passages from the book. Maybe. I think so. Been too many years and it’s too good a story to say I don’t remember, so sure, I did that.
Alec has returned to Tess’s life and continues trying to exert power over her. When he disparages Angel, Tess slaps him across the face with her glove hard enough to draw blood.
WR and I confer.
Does a glove count?
She points out that there is a hand inside the glove and Hardy calls it a slap.
The tribunal accepts it.
GLOVE: COUNTS.
No further questions.
A Farewell to Arms
And then there’s Hemingway.
Early in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry tries to kiss Catherine Barkley.
She tells him no.
He tries anyway.
She slaps him hard across the face, then apologizes for what she sees as a mere reflex because she is grieving and then says he may kiss her.
WR looks at me.
I look at WR.
She already said no.
WR nods. “But then she apologized.”
I refuse to quibble with her. We are not researching motives. We are looking into instances.
CONFIRMED SLAP.
Then WR clears her throat.
What?
Apparently A Farewell to Arms contains another slap.
Who?
The baby.
What?
THE BABY GETS SLAPPED.
During Catherine’s labor, the doctor holds the newborn by his feet and slaps him.
Twice.
WR, I hardly think…
“It counts.”
I hate this project. Why is she doing this? We have a perfectly respectable poem we are still working on, plus the Genette book came in today. AND we downloaded the newest Allende, which is a book on writing, and we are eager to read what she has to say, particularly because we used to be very interested in magical realism.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
At this point WR has begun to suspect she needs a larger board.
There are multiple slaps in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and this is where our investigation becomes heavier.
Early in the novel, Nanny slaps Janie during their argument about Janie’s future. Janie wants love. Nanny, whose understanding of security has been shaped by everything she has survived, is desperate for Janie to marry Logan Killicks and have the protection she never had.
Later, Joe slaps Janie after a dinner doesn’t turn out the way he wants. WR and I are not a fan of Joe. At all.
And later still, Tea Cake hits Janie out of jealousy and possessiveness, including slapping her. That’s not why Janie shoots him later. It’s really not. (And sorry for the spoiler, but damn, if you haven’t read it by now, are you really going to?) But she does shoot him.
Anyway.
WR reminds me we’re counting slaps, not deaths.
Right.
WR looks at the board.
She writes only:
MULTIPLE.
Then puts down the pointer while shaking her head.
Beloved
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe remembers her mother showing her the identifying mark on her body. Young Sethe asks to have one too.
Her mother slaps her.
Sethe doesn’t understand why.
Not then.
WR quietly puts down her pointer.
We leave that one alone, too, and regret some of our earlier unintentional lightness while investigating these slaps. Except the baby slaps. That was funny because they were not malicious on the doctor’s part.
The House of the Spirits
WR brings me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. (Oh, shoot. I should have mentioned her new book here. Oh well.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve read this one, but I own a battered, second-hand copy full of lovely scribbles. In it, Esteban Trueba strikes Clara across the face during an argument so violently that he knocks out some of her teeth.
Clara never speaks to him again.
Not for the rest of her life.
Horrific behavior by him. Understandable reaction from her.
But.
Was it technically a slap? I mean, since that’s what we’re recording.
Checks notes.
We can establish the blow to the face. We cannot establish that it was specifically an open-handed slap. We are not convinced that a slap could do such damage.
WR is displeased.
STRIKE: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says.
Your rules, raccoon. Now if we were to expand this to include violence in literature…
WR raises her tail and hisses.
Okay, okay. Enough said.
The Great Gatsby
And finally, because apparently Tom Buchanan wasn’t awful enough already, in a scene that sounds a bit like the one we just mentioned, at the drunken apartment party in The Great Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson repeatedly says Daisy’s name.
Tom tells her to keep Daisy’s name outta her mouth.
Myrtle:
Daisy. Daisy. Daisy.
(I had an aunt named Myrtle. My grandfather’s sister.)
Fitzgerald doesn’t actually use the word slap, but he describes Tom making one “short deft movement” and breaking Myrtle’s nose with his open hand.
WR points violently at OPEN HAND.
Yes, I see it.
She points again.
Fine.
OPEN HAND: COUNTS.
I look back at Allende.
Wait.
Didn’t we just reject that one partly because we weren’t convinced a slap could do that much damage?
WR freezes.
I believe there is a precedent problem.
She reaches for the Allende card on the board.
No. We are not reopening the case.
WR, I feel like this post is a little messed up. What are you even doing?? Why are we spending perfectly good writing time writing about such a depressing topic?
WR steps back from the non-murder board. She looks wounded, because she thought I knew that she enjoys her tangents, however morbid.
In the meantime, the non-murder board has become considerably more murder-boardish.
There are index cards everywhere threaded about with red string.
CONFIRMED SLAP.
GLOVE: COUNTS.
BABY: ALSO SLAPPED. (At birth, WR!)
MULTIPLE in several novels.
OPEN HAND: COUNTS.
STRIKE: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.
And, in increasingly large letters:
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY?
I don’t know, WR. And we are aware of other novels with slaps and plays that we decided not to mention. Apparently, once you start looking for literary slaps, they are everywhere. They deserve a proper deep dive, but this is not that.
WR has suggested a spreadsheet.
I have declined, although something about the idea interests me, too. Not just for slaps, but some sort of literary database for the color blue in novels, and those featuring raccoons, for instance, or paintings, and so on.
WR considers this.
Then she nods. She nods again, concluding her slap search.
Thank goodness.
I start gathering the books.
Behind me, I hear the squeak of a marker and get gooseflesh.
WR!
She is writing on a fresh index card.
NEXT INVESTIGATION: SLAPS THAT DON’T INVOLVE HANDS BUT STILL STING LIKE HELL.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
She reaches for the red string.
I still her paw.
Dear Reader, I would never.
Drema