On Self-Respect

June 10, 2018 4:28 PM

Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
posted by knackerthrasher (16 comments total)

Oof.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.
posted by redsparkler at 5:01 PM on June 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

On a skim, there's a weird thread woven through this that self-respect can be developed and kept forever. But this seems a fantasy. There are so many decisions one can make on the assumption that you are certain and then later despise yourself for.

Anyway, time for a closer reading.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:37 PM on June 10, 2018

This came along just in time this afternoon. Self-pity is my personal hobgoblin, and it creeps up on me when I feel overwhelmed my own mistakes, resentments, disappontments or regrets. Keeping the hobgoblin away requires a certain kind of discipline, a kind of radical acceptance of the less pleasant aspects of life, and a willingness to resist trying manage other people’s perception of me or to try to somehow extract pity or comiseration from others. It’s a yardstick that I use when i’ve failed; I didn’t get what I wanted or hoped I deserved, but at least I can keep the hobgoblin This Far Away from me at all times.
posted by ducky l'orange at 5:38 PM on June 10, 2018 [9 favorites]

Pair this excellent essay from 1961 with her account of herself in her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking: "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes." She remains merciless about taking her own measure, even in the waves of grief.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:41 PM on June 10, 2018 [9 favorites]

Great article, thanks for sharing!

Now... if it was written to "an exact character count," there's one character too many: "la donnée" should be "la donne"

It's chilling to read about "Self-respect is something that our grandparents (...) knew all about" and tie it with an imperial war in Africa against muslims and hostile "Indians" in California. Self respect taken to its genocidal conclusion?
posted by haemanu at 5:49 PM on June 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Joan Didion. What an amazing voice. I hold The Year of Magical Thinking in a drawer beside my bed as a hedge against time and fate.
posted by crush at 6:16 PM on June 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

More great writing (nyt) from Joan Didion where she elaborates on the California story.

Turns out she was really talking about her grandparents, though looks like the scene happened in Oregon (Rogue River Indian Wars). Self respect in this case was facilitated by a previous mini war and Father's pistols.

I think the writing is great and the name dropping is fun, but there has to be a better way to portray self respect than a man with a gun surrounded by hostiles.
posted by haemanu at 6:18 PM on June 10, 2018

haemanu, precisely. I perceive an unconscious conflation of self-respect-as-character with privilege in this piece, and it grates on me, even as I certainly extend the charitable understanding that this conflation is likely something she would willingly have confronted and picked apart, or maybe even did.

Or did I misunderstand your remark regarding genocidal and imperial activities? Now I am uncertain.
posted by mwhybark at 6:19 PM on June 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

mwhybark, yes, exactly, I think that's what it was, you put it into words exactly. The connection you mention is definitely there in this article.

Would definitely be interesting to read more from her on this. From the article, this might be at the heart of it:

Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

I think you can have self-respect and accept that some things with a big impact in your life are not your responsibility. But from a position of privilege you will not be forced to confront that distinction.
posted by haemanu at 6:53 PM on June 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

Man, this is on point.

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent.

posted by corb at 12:00 AM on June 11, 2018

there's one character too many: "la donnée" should be "la donne"

From the piece: Indians were simply part of the donnée.

I doubt it should be donne. La donne is a given; la donnée is a data point, but in the way she uses it, can have the additional meaning related to the verb donner, "to give". Now, granted for a native English speaker you may be going "erm but doesn't la donne do the same thing?" Not quite, because in French the two words are more different than that. La donne carries the sense of a concretely objective thing; la donnée carries the sense of having independently pre-existed its perception from a statistical point of view. Whereas une donne is something that was an object before and after. Plus, in French, as I said, une donnée suggests the verb donner, since donnée is the indicative feminine form of it and they're pronounced the same.

Calling Indians part of the donnée is an elegantly horrific way to depict the dehumanization of people as both objects and statistical points that could be manipulated. It's what she describes in the anecdote that leads up to her calling them that: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Whereas calling them part of the donne would be more an objectification on the level of trees and mountains, which were also part of the donne, but were not part of the donnée.
posted by fraula at 1:32 AM on June 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

That bit about the Indians did nearly take the eyebrows off my face—even in 1961, “Indians” as a metaphor for the inevitable alien forces of life to be stood up to at all costs is a bit, hm, something.

My broader issue, setting aside the historically-excusable (?) racism involved in the metaphor, is that the article itself has a kind of (mock?) Victorian or Edwardian sensibility that I find very hard to take seriously. That bit about putting your head in a paper bag to stop crying—she may as well be yelling “come now, buck up!” from behind a massive false Victorian beard. I think human beings are basically pretty contingent and mutually dependent creatures and sometimes it’s important to say no to unreasonable requests and at other times it’s fine to be delighted by another person’s approval or broken-hearted at their rejection. This theory of the self-made and self-determined self has its attractive elements—as Victorian accounts of morality go—but it also has very clear limits. The essay makes much more sense to me as a game, riffing off the word ‘self-respect’ for x number of characters and no more, than as a considered and seriously-held account of how people should live.
posted by Aravis76 at 1:36 AM on June 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

Victorian? Greek: Knowing thyself is a very powerful thing.

I like this essay. I appreciate that it appeared in Vogue, an exemplar of costuming in order to create a self, an image, an amulet on which to pin one's self-definition. But who are you when the clothes are off? Who are you when the stories you tell yourself are irrelevant? Do you know? It's a good question, and again I recommend The Year of Magical Thinking: she uses her skill as a writer to bring order to her mind's emergency. It's Didion, examining what she did when the given changed, and the bottom dropped out of all of her comforting, comfortable stories about how she lived. "On Self-Respect" is an essay--a try, a run at getting her grounding organized, as much as her diary's statement about the the end of innocence is. "What would I do if--?" is a perilous question if you answer it with your idealized stories about yourself instead of your accurate self-assessment: "[W]e play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us." It's the screenwriter in her asking readers to distrust those particular narratives, not to be fooled by romantic notions, and asking no less of herself, writing it out in her Vogue diary to get a look at it, and to hold herself accountable. A cool customer indeed.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:49 AM on June 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

But who are you when the clothes are off ?

Someone who does not want to be seen.
posted by y2karl at 5:54 AM on June 11, 2018

Self-pity is my personal hobgoblin, and it creeps up on me when I feel overwhelmed my own mistakes, resentments, disappontments or regrets. Keeping the hobgoblin away requires a certain kind of discipline, a kind of radical acceptance of the less pleasant aspects of life.

I suffer from this too, but never identified the malaise as self pity per se. I think this will help me. I do often think that cultivating character is a reason for living. I haven't closely read the essay yet, but several skimmed passages reminded me of Bourdain.
posted by xammerboy at 11:18 AM on June 11, 2018

Yes that essay is effectively my secular bible. During times of adversity, it always makes me feel strong. My two personal favourite quotes from it are:

"Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's life - is the source from which self respect springs."

"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect."

Obviously in the context of the essay in its entirety, but those sentences spoke to me most.

Also just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking during a tough time for me - another great source of strength.
posted by Willow251 at 10:33 AM on June 12, 2018