Down Here Among the Living, Things Are Not So Simple

December 7, 2021 7:34 AM

A worn face crusted with sores in the mirror, old before its time. Memories of a man’s flying fists visit every room. A belly swells with the inevitability of another life. Slut. An infant squalls. Wheezing. Laughter. Cigarette smoke. Young voices inside and out. The screen door opens and slams shut. And the undefiled border blooms with seductive promise as she sings to herself and carefully irons her blouse for school. from The Scapegoat: Siri Hustvedt on the Torture and Murder of Sylvia Likens [CW: pretty much everything awful]
posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

I was 7 years old, and living in Indianapolis, when Sylvia was murdered. I don't recall knowing any of the details of it then, other than a girl died somewhere. What I do vividly recall, though, was that every grownup I knew suddenly got real quiet and acted like their worlds had suddenly been utterly changed for the worse. Which, in hindsight, was true.

The look of fear, worry, and confusion on their faces was kind of scary to a little kid. You could tell something was very, very wrong, but they were never going to tell you about it. My father and uncle were Indianapolis city firefighters at the time (dad's station was a few blocks away from the house Likens was murdered at) and, knowing how information traveled throughout and between the police and fire departments, it's hard to imagine my dad didn't know details about the murder that the public wasn't being told. He would occasionally talk about some horrific stuff he saw on duty, but the Likens murder was never mentioned.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:54 AM on December 7, 2021 [7 favorites]

I just really appreciate the way Hustvedt writes about how we might understand the world and each other, knowing that there is something beyond the reach of surety in our imagined connections. She offers thoughts that can't be entirely conclusive but come from looking at the possibilities, the suggestions of evidence, but doesn't expect that alone to hold, so offers other alternative considerations as well, which themselves are not adequate to explain what is beyond the reach of our normal and tidy shared social existence.

It's the things that don't fit the stories we would prefer to believe about ourselves or those that point to the discordant elements between us that draws her attention and brings her to sort through the thoughts of others to hold against her own which she then offers to her readers less as an answer than as another part of a process they might continue. I haven't read anyone else quite like her.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:21 AM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you for posting this article. Hustvedt's writing was really articulate and offered some useful insights into this horrific treatment of this young woman. Difficult to read, but worth the insights.
posted by effluvia at 9:58 AM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

That was hard to read. I doubt that anyone can honestly say they haven't been part of or seen a situation like this developing, although almost none of them end up going close to this far. We collectively and unconsciously 'other' the weak and submissive because we recognise in them some not-quite understood weakness in ourselves. All it took was a single person with no moral compass and the absence of even the slightest influence saying 'hang on, this isn't right' for the situation to devolve into the horror that Sylvia Likens experienced.
posted by dg at 1:12 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Horrifying. I don't think Hustvedt's piece needed to be written though. Didn't add much for me. Felt a bit exploitative. Just the facts of the wikipedia account suffice.

I looked up Hustvedt and saw this bit. She has no formal education in psychiatry, what would qualify her for such a position?

"In 2015, Hustvedt was appointed as a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical School of Cornell University."
posted by Borborygmus at 2:27 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I had a vague awareness of the case, but only the vaguest outlines. So, I was curious a few years ago when I heard that Elliot Page was in a movie about the crime and then I read a bit more about the reality it was based on and decided that, no, I didn't need to see more about that.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:07 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I shouldn't be so happy that the perpetrators are all dead, some due to cancer (i.e., I know they suffered). It's not good for my soul. But.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 12:16 AM on December 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Jeez, what an absolutely awful, awful, awful story. Read the wiki and couldn't stomach reading a more narrative or editorial version.

And yeah the deaths are quite something, mostly from cancer it seems? One of them died of lung cancer at age twenty-one?
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 7:54 AM on December 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

I shouldn't be so happy that the perpetrators are all dead

I think Paula and Stephanie are still alive? Although Paula did get fired in 2012 from her job as a school aide(!!) once her connection to the Likens case was uncovered.
posted by Recliner of Rage at 5:21 PM on December 8, 2021