"Hing hang hung, see what the hangman done."

I posted a while ago about the paired images of virtue (masculine/feminine, chastity/matrimony, integrated/exiled) that pop up in Christianity. Each half is complete and coherent but also utterly incompatible with its other half. In other words, perfect manly virtue and perfect womanly virtue cannot coexist in the same person.*

Pip disagrees with me that innocence/wisdom is an example of this kind of dichotomy. He thinks innocence/wisdom is more like justice/mercy, which isn’t an example of paired images of virtue, because both perfect justice and perfect mercy are failures of virtue — one makes you Angelo in Measure for Measure, the other makes you a Quaker.

Cigarettes bracket time, and the argument between me and Pip very much needed to be bracketed. I do not think I can continue my end until Pip watches Night of the Hunter (because any discussion of the question “Can innocence and wisdom coexist?” has to include James Agee).

Night of the Hunter is a lot like A Death in the Family: both deal with what happens when innocence, in the form of a young child, is confronted with absolute evil, either in the form of a murderous preacher or the random death of a father. Our expectation is that it will harden the child and force him to transition from innocence to experience a little earlier than usual, but Agee has a different understanding. In his world, children confronted with absolute evil remain innocent. They are able to identify evil, but can neither comprehend it nor protect themselves against it. (One of the lessons of NoTH is that it is the responsibility of old, wise people to protect the innocent who should not have to sacrifice their innocence in order to protect themselves, and never has this looked better than Lillian Gish holding a big shotgun.)

It is a choice to protect one's innocence, a choice that everyone under a certain age should make regardless of circumstances. At the end of the film, little John Harper is asked by the judge to point at the man who tried to kill him, and he can't do it, not because it would be contrary to his conscience to finger Robert Mitchum but because it would be contrary to his innocence. Robert Mitchum should be punished, but John shouldn't be the one who does it. Incidentally, this also explains the part of the movie that always puzzled me, which is why John reacts the same way to the police hauling off Mitchum at the end as he did when the police hauled off his father at the very beginning.

Innocence is more complicated than "not knowing about evil." It's a kind of purity, like chastity — there's something wrong with a world where everybody does it, but for certain people (children under the age of twelve for the one and those with vocations for the other) its preservation is worth every sacrifice. It is true that innocence/wisdom is more fluid than masculine/feminine, but that doesn't mean it isn't the same kind of thing.

*I almost wrote that each half is “self-contained,” but I am not sure I want to claim that masculinity makes sense in a world without women, or vice versa.