for your own good

[boxofdelights]

I've been intensely fannish about The Good Wife lately, wolfing down the backlog, waiting for the next episode like a dog waits for dinner, and reading all the commentary I can find. I've been running into the notion that Alicia couldn't tolerate being deceived over the Peter/Kalinda affair because Alicia doesn't lie.

Alicia does lie. She lies less than any other main character, maybe less than any recurring character except Pastor Isaiah, but she does routinely lie: to her children. She lies to them in that very episode. Zach asks why his parents are separating, and Alicia says, "Because we decided it was time." No, actually, Alicia decided. Unilaterally. Peter did not even get the chance to discuss the decision after the fact.

And a minute after telling her kids this lie, which will not fool them for long even if Peter backs her up on it, Alicia tells them, "We don't lie here. We don't lie to each other." This is exactly the double bind that creates liars like Peter. On the verbal level you learn that you must not lie to the people you love. On a deeper level, you learn that you must lie to the people you love, and you must do anything (including lying) to prevent them from finding out that you lied. And both those messages come from your parent, your moral teacher, the person without whose care you would have died.

I'm sure that Alicia can rationalize why she had to say that then, to protect Zach and Grace, because she loves them, because the truth would only hurt them and what difference could it possibly make? And I am sure that Peter's rationalizations for his lies to Alicia sound remarkably similar. And I am intensely interested in whether the show is going to bring that similarity to light.

Comments

[snowynight]

I haven't thought of it this way. It's insightful.

[amaebi]

So-- I haven't seen the show-- do the scriptwriters think she's being honest? Or can you tell?

[boxofdelights]

If the screenwriters think she's being honest, I am going to scream. I can't tell. I do have hope, because so far no one is too simple to live. The more we see of any character, the more morally complex they are.

[snippy]

She's lying to protect their relationship with their father--she's lying to them so they think their father is a good man, and he's not. I did the same thing in my divorce. There are so many good reasons to do this, among them that children carry part of their father in themselves, and any criticism of that person is a criticism of them; that if I interfered with their relationship with their father, they might be taken away from me; and that expecting my children to deal with my emotional trauma would be wrong and damaging for them.

And after all, in their relationship with their father, he has been a good man; they won't be in the same kind of relationship with him as I was. And I could, and did, slowly teach them how to manage and protect against the parts of him that were bad for them.

But I think the real reason Alicia is doing it is that she is in too much pain to think about it clearly. None of my reasons hold for her and her teenage children; they are old enough to understand a simple statement of fact, "Your father lied to me about how many women he'd had affairs with."

[boxofdelights]

I agree with you, and add that Alicia consistently treats her children as if they were much younger. Did you see the episode where Alicia asks them to reassure her that they know they can talk to her about anything, and Grace asks whether she should get the HPV vaccine, and Alicia flips out? (I know the kids did it on purpose to make her flip out, but that just reinforces my point: she talks a good game about honesty and trust but she doesn't follow through and they know it!)