Knowledge and violence

Knowledge & Violence

The Connection Between Knowledge and Violence in Two Stories

From works of philosophy and fiction to current bumper stickers, the idea that ignorance is expensive has become popular in modern society. Indeed, some call those who wage war, start conflict in society, and halt progression ignorant. And while they may fit with a cultural definition of ignorance, it is also true that knowledge is responsible for many conflicts. For instance, the knowledge of one's enemy -- even if that knowledge is incorrect -- often insights violence. One example of this is the American Civil War. In this conflict, the slave-owners and abolitionists, the Northerners and the Southerners, started a violent conflict because of their knowledge of the each other's beliefs and practices, in addition to beliefs that were antithetical to the other side's ideas. Thus, a link between knowledge and violence can be established, especially when ignorance is considered to be a type of knowledge. In literature, also, this link between knowledge and violence is also often acknowledged. For instance, the two modernists Kate Chopin and Ernest Hemingway acknowledge this link in two of their short stories -- "The Story of an Hour" and "A Soldier's Home." Both of these short stories include a violent event. In "The Story of an Hour," that event is at the very end of this very short story -- the quick and sudden death of Mrs. Mallard. "A Soldier's Home," however, seems to be permeated with violence. Toward the very beginning of this slightly longer story, the horrors of WWI are described. However, the act of real violence occurs at the end, when Krebs commits emotional violence by firing an emotional shot at his mother and telling her that he does not love her. All three of these acts of violence are associated with knowledge. However, two different kinds of knowledge can be isolated -- misinformation and second-hand knowledge. Although both authors incorporate both kinds of knowledge in their stories and all kinds of knowledge produce violence, the association between certain kinds of knowledge and certain types of violence are different.

In both "The Story of an Hour" and "A Soldier's Home" characters are subject to misinformation, or knowledge that is incorrect, and in both cases, this misinformation leads to a specific kind of violence -- a violent but fraudulent hope. In "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard is given the incorrect knowledge of her husband's death. Because of the woman's heart condition, Chopin makes it clear that the news was delivered to her in the softest way possible. Her sister is described as giving Mrs. Mallard the unfortunate misinformation "in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing" (para. 1). Because of this and because she saw her husband's death as an opportunity rather than calamity, "She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her" (para. 3). Clearly, Mrs. Mallard is surrounded by those her love her, her sister and her husband's friend, who take the greatest care in giving her the news so she will not be harmed. What they do not know, however, is through their careful planning and gentle discussions, they are slowly feeding Mrs. Mallard the deadly poison that will cause her death.

Upon retiring to her room, Mrs. Mallard is infected with false hope. She enters her room and begins to imagine her life without her husband. The exultation that overcomes her when she retires to her room away from prying eyes is clearly a significant experience. She is described as waiting for something "fearfully," breathing while "her bosom [rises and falls] tumultuously" (para. 10). Clearly, Mrs. Mallard is beginning to experience a "monstrous joy," a "joy that kills" (para. 19 & 30). And it is, indeed, that joy that ends up committing the ultimate violence against her. The misinformation -- the false knowledge -- that Mrs. Mallard receives is responsible for her fraudulent hope, a fraudulent hope that turns violent at the end of the story, when it is implied that Mrs. Mallard suffers a heart attack -- clearly a mode of death that could be described as violent. and, yet, this kind of violence is an internal violence. Although her sister and husband's friend feed her the information that ultimately kills her, her violence is ultimately caused by herself. Thus, her violent end is associated with the kind of knowledge she receives -- misinformation leads to false hope, which leads to internal violence. From her choice to accept the so-called fact that her husband was dead to her flights of fancy to her heart attack from monstrous joy, Mrs. Mallard's mind takes her from knowledge to violence.

Like Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," misinformation, or false knowledge, plays a role in Hemingway's "Soldier's Home." When Krebs comes home after the war, he has the kind of knowledge that no one else has, the knowledge of what it was really like in the war. However, he soon realizes that this isn't the kind of knowledge his peers want because they have heard so many sensationalized stories. Because of this, Krebs gives them information that he creates -- misinformation or false knowledge. When that knowledge eventually leads to Krebs' peers continued refusal to accept him, Krebs experiences an internal violence similar to the kind that Mrs. Mallard experiences. Krebs "found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it" (Hemingway 87). Because of his lies, Krebs has trouble accepting himself, his role in the war, and his desire to express himself and to move on. Indeed, "A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told" (Hemingway 87). Thus, it can be argued that the emotional violence inherent in Krebs' homecoming is, once again, internal violence that Krebs' brings on himself through investing in a false hope that he receives because of misinformation or incorrect knowledge. Krebs lies, and then begins to have a "distaste" for himself, in addition to the emotional violence that is done to him because of others' refusal to accept him. In addition to the fact that Krebs commits violence against himself through his own skewing of knowledge, Krebs' false hope fueled by misinformation has a casualty -- his mother, whom he ruins with violent emotions through telling her he does not love her.

Like misinformation -- or incorrect knowledge -- second-hand knowledge features prominently in both Hemingway and Chopin's stories. In "Soldier's Home," Krebs has knowledge that none of his contemporaries have -- his knowledge of the war. The community must rely on Krebs and other soldiers for details about that war. And because the knowledge that Krebs and his fellow soldiers have is second hand, it dulls the violence that occurred. At the beginning of "Soldier's Home," Hemingway details the sensational stories that the community has heard, such as the stories of German women who were chained to machine guns. However, Hemingway also shows the reader that Krebs "fell into the easy pose of an old soldier among other soldiers" that he encountered, and that during the war Krebs "had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time" (88). Thus, Hemingway emphasizes the fact that the sensational stories even muted the violence that Krebs really encountered, the realness of it, the kind of violence that made him frightened all the time. Because Krebs only became as aware of that kind of violence as he is because he experienced it firsthand, he cannot pass it onto his peers, and so feels separate from them, confused, and void of his identity. Thus, Hemingway suggests that the link between secondhand knowledge and violence is that the violence becomes muted when passed on secondhand, making it nearly impossible for others to understand the violence, and so, therefore, rendering the violence useless.