Pride
Philadelphia, USA
How do you understand and deal with pride and envy? To me, it’s inherent in us all, but it never is something that is defining.
Dear Pride—
Hi! I am writing to you now from Philadelphia! So we are in the same place.
I have always been a very prideful and envious person, which has caused me great shame ever since I was a girl. Envy is something I actually associate with girlhood as a state, like a birthmark I can’t scrub off.
What’s the difference between jealousy and envy again? I think jealousy involves three people: I (1) don’t want him/her/them (2) to have access to the person I love (3), whereas envy involves two: I (1) want what he/she/they (2) has. Or is it that jealousy is defensive and envy is offensive? I’m not sure. I often use the terms interchangeably.
It wasn’t until graduate school when I read the book Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai that I came to see envy as a deeply political and creative state, one that often has been associated with femininity and marginalisation. In her introduction, Ngai examines “how envy’s modes of negative or ‘unhappy self-assertion,’ including a negative relationship to property we might call ‘unhappy possessiveness,’ contribute to—but also enable a critical interrogation of—existing gender norms.”
Coveting, wanting, the endless and futile attempt to fill whatever lack is at the center of one’s being with something from the outside, something someone else possesses—this is a state of negative desire that I often find myself operating from and chastising myself for. It is also what makes me such a good little consumer (ick, ugh). I have such conflicting feelings about it! I think it is possible to acknowledge that envy is often a creative way of relating to the world, maligned as it may be. Sometimes writing comes from this ugly and humiliated place of wanting what I am likely not to have. My last book, in a way, emerged from my envy of people who I perceive to be smarter or better educated than I am.
I am envious of writers who seem to publish a book every year, as I am a slow writer. Those Publisher’s Weekly announcements always give me such a jumpscare. This has never caused me to write any faster.
Once I envied (or was jealous of? or one state became the other?) another woman for both her looks and talent and her proximity to a man I was in love with. Grotesque to admit! I decided to write a poem about the intense and shameful feelings I was having, and as I did I realized that I was beginning to address this woman in the poem directly; it was her I was in love with (even though we had never met). It was incredibly erotic, imagining her, imagining her imagining me, focusing all my attention on her body and her clothes and even her writing. In the poem I kind of become her. We were almost twins. I wrote: “So now I’m here, she’s over there, and then we cross to switch places. Now I’m still ‘here,’ and she I suppose is ‘over there,’ how odd after all that walking.”
Envy, Ngai writes, often leads to emulation.
One writer I am envious of is Sei Shōnagon.
One of the very best diarists who ever lived, she wrote her hybrid masterpiece The Pillow Book on a stack of gifted paper, documenting imperial court life in Japan’s Heian period. I love the way her writing is able to switch so seamlessly between listmaking, narrative prose, cultural criticism, and autobiographical writing. Here is one of her lists on the subject of envy.
103. Enviable People
One has been learning a sacred text by heart; but, though one has gone over the same passage again and again, one still recites it haltingly and keeps on forgetting words. Meanwhile one hears other people, not only clerics (for whom it is natural) but ordinary men and women, reciting such passages without the slightest effort, and one wonders when one will ever be able to come up to their standard.
When one is ill in bed and hears people walking about, laughing loudly and chatting away as if they did not have a care in the world, how enviable they seem!
Once on the day of the Horse in the Second Month I decided to visit Inari. By the time I had reached the Middle Shrine I was already worn out; yet I kept going and was on my way to the Upper Shrine when a group of people passed me. Though they had evidently started after I did, they strode briskly up the hill without the slightest look of discomfort — very enviable. I had made haste to leave at dawn, but by the Hour of the Snake I was still only half way to the top. To make matters worse, it was gradually becoming hot, and I felt really wretched. When I stopped to rest, I began crying from exhaustion and wondered why I had come on this pilgrimage when there were so many people who had never even thought of making the effort. Just then I saw a woman in her thirties walking down the hill. She was not wearing a travelling costume, but had simply tucked up the bottom of her skirts. “I am making the pilgrimage seven times today,” she declared to the people she met on her way. “I’ve been up three times already and there won’t be any trouble about the other four times. I have to be back by the Hour of the Sheep.” She was a woman I could hardly have noticed if I had met her anywhere else; but at that moment I wished I could change places with her.
I greatly envy people who have nice children, whether they grow up to be priests or become ordinary men and women.
Women who have beautiful hair with tresses that fall splendidly over their shoulders.
People of high rank who are always surrounded by respectful attendants are most enviable.
People who have a good hand, who are skilful at composing poems, and who are always chosen first when there is a letter to be written… Several women are attending a lady of quality who wishes a letter to be written on her behalf to an important person. Obviously many of them are suited for the task (it is not likely that all her women will have writing as feeble as the tracks of a bird’s feet); yet the lady especially summons a woman who is not in the room and, producing her own inkstone, tells her to write the letter. This is bound to make the others envious. The fortunate woman may be one of the older members of the house hold, whose writing is of the most elementary kind; yet she will set herself to the task with enthusiasm. On the other hand she may be an experienced calligrapher. Perhaps the letter is going to some High Court Noble; or possibly it is intended to introduce a young woman who is hoping to take service in the Palace. The writer is instructed to do her very best, and she begins by carefully selecting the paper. Meanwhile her fellow attendants gather round and make envious jokes.
On first learning the zither or the flute, one is extremely envious of experienced players and wonders when one will ever reach that stage.
The nurse of the Emperor or of the Crown Prince.
The women in the Palace who are privileged to see His Majesty’s consorts.
People who can afford to build their own Chapel of Meditation and pray there in the evening and at dawn.
When one’s opponent has a lucky throw of dice in back gammon, he is most enviable.
A saint who has really given up all thoughts of the world.
I think you might try to write a Shōnagon-style list of enviable things, or even prideful moments, and see what happens from there.
XOX
ES (green with)
Quotes from Ugly Feelings re: envy
For the morally degraded and seemingly unjustifiable status of these feelings tends to produce an unpleasurable feeling about the feeling (a reflexive response taking the form of “I feel ashamed about feeling envious” or “I feel anxious about my enviousness”) that significantly parallels the doubleness on which irony, as an evaluative stance hinging on a relationship between the said and the unsaid, fundamentally depends. In their tendency to promote what Susan Feagin calls “meta-responses” (since it is hard to feel envy without feeling that one should not be feeling envy, reinforcing the negativity of the original emotion), there is a sense in which ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance in a way that the grander and more prestigious passions, or even the moral emotions associated with sentimental literature, do not. (10)
For envy makes no claim whatsoever about the moral superiority of the envier, or about the “goodness” of his or her state of lacking something that the envied other is perceived to have. Envy is in many ways a naked will to have. In fact, it is through envy that a subject asserts the goodness and desirability of precisely that which he or she does not have, and explicitly at the cost of surrendering any claim to moral high-mindedness or superiority. (34)
[W]hy is a subject’s enviousness automatically assumed to be unwarranted or petty? Or dismissed as an overreaction, as delusional or even hysterical—a reflection of the ego’s inner workings rather than a polemical mode of engagement with the world? Unlike anger, another affective support of oppositional consciousness with the capacity to become “a legitimate weapon in social reform” (Schoeck, E, 172), envy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though it remains the only agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its object. (128)
It is impossible to divorce the pervasive ignobility of this feeling from its class associations or from its feminization, which might explain why the envious subject is so frequently suspected of being hysterical. (129)
