Murdoch sets up a small domestic situation and then does something unusual with it. Nothing happens in the story. A woman changes her mind about her daughter-in-law over a long period, silently, and that is the entire event.
M finds her daughter-in-law D “unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile.” M feels that her son “has married beneath him.”
M “behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way.” Then M begins to examine herself: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.”
And D “is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful.”
in “The Sovereignty of Good,” 1970
Notice what does not change. D does not change. She is not present, she does not do anything differently, she may be on another continent. The entire movement happens in M, and it happens through looking rather than through deciding to be nicer.
M’s first position has a cost that is almost invisible, because from outside she is behaving beautifully. She is polite and she is generous and she is also not in contact with the actual person — she is in contact with a picture she is carrying, and the picture is doing all the work of being present for her.
Looking again costs something specific: M has to entertain unflattering things about herself, out loud, in her own head. Old-fashioned. Snobbish. Jealous. That list is the price of admission, and it is why the second look is rare.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be able to tell, in the moment, which of two things we are doing — looking at a person, or looking at an impression of them that we hold in us. That is checkable. It has two answers and you can run it on the spot.
One caution, because the story invites a wrong finish. Murdoch does not certify M’s second description as the true one. She is tracking the quality of M’s attention, not awarding a verdict about D. If now I am really seeing her becomes its own finished description, that is the same machinery with better manners — a picture again, just a warmer one.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Thinking about someone before you meet them.
- The moment a familiar person does something and you know immediately why they did it.
- Telling someone else about a third person.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — whether you are with the person or with your picture of them. The picture is smoother. It has no gaps in it, and that is how you can tell.
You are not deciding anything about them, and you do not have to think better of anybody. Notice which one you are holding, and leave it as it is.