M is good to her daughter-in-law for years, and she means it. Underneath, the whole time, she holds a low opinion of the girl. Let’s look at what the good behaviour does to that opinion.
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.”
Start with the sentence in the middle. Our wrong readings of people usually get corrected from outside, and they get corrected because they leak into behaviour — we are short with someone, or cool, or we skip them, and something comes back. Someone objects. The room goes quiet. A thing gets said at the door on the way out. M’s opinion never gets into her behaviour, so nothing ever comes back, and that description of D can sit exactly where it is for thirty years without once being touched.
Look at how the second look begins. “Then M begins to examine herself.” Nothing precedes that then. No incident, no complaint, no scene at a birthday. Murdoch gives M no trigger, and in a situation shaped like this one there is no trigger to be had — if something were going to arrive it would have arrived years ago.
You can leave the opinion where it is and go on behaving well. Nothing in the situation is asking for more, nobody is being harmed, and the arrangement is stable for everyone in it. What it costs is information. That view of her now sits in the one place no correction can get to, and you will go on calling it a judgment about her when it has not been looked at since the week it formed.
You can go the other way and stop trusting your own good behaviour, reading every easy interaction as a sign of something you are covering. That costs you the behaviour. Plain kindness and managed kindness stop being distinguishable from the inside, so you hold back on both — and the suspicion is still a matter about you, not about her.
Or you can look again at one particular person with nothing prompting it. That costs you the list Murdoch gives M — old-fashioned, conventional, prejudiced, snobbish, jealous — said at a moment when no occasion requires it. You get nothing visible back, because your behaviour was already correct and does not change. And you may find the first description was partly accurate, which is a smaller result than a conversion.
So what are we aiming at. We want to know which of our views have been put out of reach — the ones that have no remaining way of being told they are wrong.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- A relative you see a few times a year. The visit is warm, nothing goes wrong, and your account of what they are like is the same leaving as arriving.
- A neighbour you have greeted pleasantly every morning for years and could describe in one sentence.
- Someone in the family you handle carefully and well, and nobody has ever mentioned it, including them.
In all three the thing to watch is whether anything in it could have corrected your view of that person, or whether it simply went smoothly.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to think better of anybody. Watch whether anything could have come back, and leave it as it is.