Voice in the Wind: Julia Cares, Y’all

Voice in the Wind: Julia Cares, Y’all December 22, 2017

Voice in the Wind, pp. 408-410, 415-17

Decimus’ illness is getting worse, despite his visits to the Temple of Asclepius, and time spent among snakes, their bodies slithering over his. So far so good—Asclepius was the god of healing, and his symbol was a snake. But then things get weird.

Columbella, a spiritualist, convinced Phoebe that physicians shouldn’t be trusted; she claimed that they used patients they couldn’t cure to perfect new methods of treatment. Columbella said nonscientific methods would restore Decimus’ vitality and recommended her own potions and herbs, which had been passed down through the centuries. Health, Columella insisted, was a matter of balance with nature.

Decimus drank her foul brews and ate the strange bitter herbs she prescribed, but they didn’t harmonize and balance the energies within his body as Columella claimed they would.

This feels oddly like something an evangelical might write about the present. I mean, did the Romans even have a concept of “scientific” and “nonscientific” methods? I don’t know the answer to that offhand, but what Rivers has written here sounds close enough to how an evangelical would describe modern New Ageism that I’m somewhat skeptical of her ability to history here.

You know the verse in Ecclesiastes that says there is “nothing new under the sun”? I think evangelicals like Rivers sometimes assume that modern things can just be transplanted like that, that the things we have today must have existed in parallel in the past. Or maybe it’s just lazy writing. Consider Decimus’ disgust for homosexuality, a disgust expressed in ways that seem strongly modern.

I’m going to skip ahead for just a moment and bring you something that I think fits just as well in the discussion here. You’ll see why in a moment—it touches on what I was saying about transplanting things from the present in the past. After a visit to Julia (which I’ll cover next week), Atretes leaves to walk home alone, angry (we’ll get to that). Hadassah follows him around. She follows him while he walks all around the city, still angry. He walks into the empty stadium, in the middle of the night.

The little Jewess stood beside him.

“We both serve Julia, don’t we?” he said, but she didn’t answer.

This has been asked before in the comments—but really? Why do we constantly need the word Jewess?

As they talk, Hadassah begins philosophizing. Because of course she does. “Maybe death is the only freedom,” Atretes says. “It’s not the only freedom, Atretes,” she says. “What other freedom is there for a man like me?” he asks. “The freedom God gives,” she says. And so on.

“So I should become a Jew?” he said sardonically.

“I’m a Christian.”

He let out his breath sharply, staring down at her as though she were a doc that had suddenly sprouted horns. Christians were fodder to the arena. … Christians were fed to the lions because it was a shameful thing, reserved for the worst criminals and the lowest cowards.

We’ve been over this. At this time, most people wouldn’t have known what Christians were. They were just one more sect, and not a large one at that. Widespread persecutions of Christians across the Roman Empire didn’t begin for another decade or so, and even those were often regional, or sprang up at specific moments (such as the famed Diocletian persecution). Yes, Christians were often persecuted during the Roman Empire. But Rivers is engaging in Christian mythology, not historical understanding of those moments.

Atretes wonders at Hadassah telling him that she is a Christian, and thinks momentarily about Julia’s contempt for Christians (it would be nice to have actually been shown that), and ponders that at a word from him, Hadassah could be sent to the arena to be torn apart by lions (what’s with the lion fixation, seriously). But Hadassah, worried about Atretes’ upcoming games, tells him that this may be her last chance to talk to him. At that she launches into an attempt to evangelize him.

“Please listen,” she pleaded. “God lives, Atretes. Turn to him. Cry out to him and he’ll answer. Ask Jesus to come into your heart.”

“Jesus. Who’s Jesus?”

WTF. Early Christians wouldn’t have told people to “ask Jesus to come into your heart.” That phrasing is a modern invention. This is a complaint I have with historical fiction in general, a complaint that goes far beyond Rivers’ writing. You can’t just transplant people or ideas from today into the past and assume that that is how people and ideas were back then. It’s simply not. And yet historical fiction authors do this repeatedly.

Hadassah never has the time to finish the thought. Instead, she and Atretes are interrupted by guards. It’s almost dawn, and Atretes turns to go.

When he reached the opening into the corridor that led to the stairs out, he looked back. Hadassah was still standing there.

He’d never looked into such eyes before, eyes so full of compassion that they pierced through the hardness of his heart.

We are constantly told of Hadassah’s compassion, but does she show compassion? Sure, she’s tended Julia when she’s been ill, but her reaction to Julia’s abortion was certainly not compassionate. She knew at that point that Caius was abusive. She still told Julia off and judged her up and down for having an abortion. She’s judged Julia for much more than that, too.

This is a problem that goes deeper than this book. We need to have a wider discussion about what compassion means, in the evangelical world. I think there’s a definitional disagreements bout what this concept means taking place.

Now we return to Decimus’ suffering and illness. Marcus takes Decimus to the baths to no effect. Julia visits Decimus repeatedly, trying to help him cure himself by tapping “into the resources of his own imagination and mind” on Calabah’s suggestion.

First, let’s be clear right here that Julia cares about her father.

Throughout this book we’ve seen both Decimus and Phoebe and, hell, even Marcus act as though Julia doesn’t love her father. But we’ve also seen, in several points, indications that Julia does love her father. Does Rivers think Julia doesn’t love her father, even as she writes in bits suggesting, contrarily, that she does? Or is Rivers writing Decimus, Phoebe, and Marcus as obtuse, and judgmental toward Julia, even though she seems to see these characters as the “good” characters in contrast to Julia’s selfish foil?

Second, even here Decimus can’t take her at face value. Julia, remember, is trying to help his father cure himself by tapping into “the resources of his own imagination and mind.” Decimus thinks the whole exercise ludicrous from the beginning—if he could will himself to be well, he would have done it already, he reasons. And so we get this:

With each visit, he saw in his daughter disappointment and subtle accusation and knew she believed he lacked whatever “faith” it took to cure himself.

Does Decimus know that Julia is blaming him for lacking the faith to cure himself? Or is that just his biased read, once yet again, of a daughter the has never taken the time to try to understand? This is told from Decimus’ perspective, and we already know that these perspectives are not infallible—but does Rivers know that? We are not given Julia’s perspective or thoughts.

And so we have Julia trying to help her father in the only way she knows how. And we have her father responding by reading judgement onto her, choosing to assume that she has taken his measure and found him lacking. Julia never catches a break.

“Try this,” she said one day and put a carnelian crystal around his neck. “It’s very special to me. It vibrates in harmony with the energy patterns of the gods, and if you can give yourself up to those vibrations, you will receive healing.” Her voice was cool, but then her eyes flooded and she lay across his chest weeping. “Oh, Papa…”

Let no one ever suggest that Julia does not care about her father.

Her visits became less frequent and brief after that.

Decimus cast no blame upon her. A dying man was depressing company for a beautiful young woman who was so full of life.  Perhaps he had become a grim reminder of her own mortality.

Rivers makes it seem as though Decimus is not reading negative reasons onto Julia for not coming, but he’s still reading his own ideas about her onto her. He assumes that she keeps away because “a dying man is depressing company” and because “he had become a grim reminder of her own mortality”—but what if she is simply so stricken by her grief that seeing her father wasting away and being unable to help him has become too painful to see? Even here, Decimus assumes he knows his daughter when we already know he does not.

As the illness progresses Decimus sometimes contemplates suicide, but he is afraid of death: “what [he] saw ahead was darkness, obscurity, an eternity of nothingness, and that terrified him.” Unsurprisingly, this is an evangelical interpretation of how the unsaved view death. It also seems predicated on the assumption that Decimus does not believe in any gods. Why doesn’t Decimus at least have a philosophy? There is no exploration, here, of how the Romans approached or understood death.

At this point, Phoebe despairs. And so she begins to pray, “not to her own gods, but to the unseen god of a slave girl.” I imagine we can all see where this is going. Who wants to sketch out the rest of this storyline, and see how much you can get right?

Next week we return to Julia.

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