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Brutal Travel
Venitian Alleyway“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and you lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance....”
This second epigraph of The Comfort of Strangers really summed up the novella for me. Traveling in an unnamed city, Venice, and constantly getting lost in it’s winding streets, the couple is forced to rely on Robert to survive. They “lose sight” of normal precautions that they would have taken back home against strangers like Robert. In exchange they take the relative safety, if you can call it that, which he provides.
I think the parallels between the epigraph and the novella go further than the obvious one of Colin and Mary. One must remember that Caroline and Robert grew up outside of their respective homes. In effect their whole childhoods were one big trip. They were constantly off balance. If one takes the epigraph in this light as well, it is easy to draw the connections to their current behavioral patterns.
Robert, growing up fairly isolated in his families Knightsbridge home while his father was a diplomat, was only exposed to women in the light of them being subservient to the men of the household, he and his father. At an extremely young age, he was, at least symbolically, put in charge of his older sisters. He, out of necessity to trust his father’s judgment, believes all of his father’s semantics about him inheriting the power of the family. Thus, he becomes obsessed with this power and when he apparently fails to receive it his only recourse is to unleash it on a helpless being such as Caroline. Having only seen his father’s “power” exerted via blows to himself and his sisters, he too follows this sadistic path and takes it to the extreme.
Caroline too grew up away from her proper home, Canada. Forced to always be on display for her father, much the same as Robert’s sisters, she feels inferior to the men who seem to rule her life. She, for much the same reasons as Robert became a sadist, falls into the masochistic role. As she and Robert begin having sex, something with which she has no prior experience, she does not seem to find it so odd that he would beat her. She claims to enjoy the helplessness she feels under his power.
By looking at their activities through this light, that of the epigraph, it is much easier to see their actions as “Normal Abnormalities” as the title of the Payandeh article suggests. Their abnormalities arise out of an upbringing that many would consider normal, but because of their particular personalities and their existence together, these preclusions to violence turn into what we would call sadomasochistic tendencies.
touche
Who is this Stranger?
i didn't think about it, but you have a good point: the meaning of the epigraph extends beyond the travels of Mary and Colin and into the lives of Robert, Caroline, and the general public: we are all subject to the mercy of the power dynamics of our surroundings, trusting strangers with titles like "father," "mother," "lover," or "tour guide," etc. Those names imply some authority that comes from blood or money or trust or something, but nothing material- what, then creates relationships? familiarity, seeing people a lot, sex, mutual favorite flavor of ice cream, listening to the same band? I would say, espicially after reading this story, animal impulses. Call it love, religion, or anything you want, but there's some science behind it, chemicals messages from your brain.
maybe our consciouness is the stranger in our own animal minds...(bullshit maybe, but it sounded cool)
all of that said, anyone could be, and is, a stranger. At least in the context that everything is travel.
Normal upbringing?
I would argue that both Robert and Caroline's upbringings were anything but normal, therefore they resorted to the violence and abuse they witnessed. Robert's father forces him to take control of the women of the household, his mother and sisters, and in turn Robert becomes accustomed to always dominating over the females in his life. He wants to please his father, and in order to do so, he must take charge of his sisters.