When waves collide.
The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex & Power (1995) by Helen Garner
“Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
John 8:7
By the nature of the the thing, The First Stone is controversial. An exercise in grappling with two cases of alleged sexual harassment on an Australian college campus in the early 1990s, it would’ve generated heat regardless of its author. That its progenitor is Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most well-known writers, only charged its reception with more friction. 30 years on, it’d be simple to see the entire thing as something retrograde; a product of a second-wave feminism that has lost touch with the current and seen its principles drift into the label “conservative.” I gather that is how it was received in many corners upon its publication in 1995. In a sense, that impression is correct. But Garner is too strong a writer to give us something routine, easily dismissed as a commonplace artifact of intergenerational bickering. You may not agree with Garner’s surmise from the jump, but the questions she asks and the honesty with which she asks them results in a book which retains its importance in the debate over the role sex and power play in the condition of women today.
“Honesty” is a tricky word, though. It is easy to understand why Garner’s initial position would nearly invalidate her standing the rest of the way. In short, this is Garner’s attempting to write a “whole” story about a stuffy college, a male headmaster, a drunken post-event party, and two instances of possible sexual harassment he committed against two female students that night. The case ends up going to the police and the courts where “he said, she said” is as close as we get to evidence. Not provable beyond a reasonable doubt to have acted improperly, the courts find the man innocent. He steadfastly maintains that innocence to anyone who will ask, a position which ultimately sees him forced to resign his role and struggle to find professional employment elsewhere. Garner catches wind of all this through an article in The Age and wonders—first to herself, then aloud—if the punishment fits the crime. She dashes off a letter of support to the man and mails it. What follows is a drawn-out pursuit of “the truth” of what happened that night, interviewing any and all participants or bystanders while examining her motives and thoughts along the way.
She will be stonewalled by the plaintiffs whose camp has caught wind of Garner’s initial letter backing the headmaster. That the accusers, their lawyers, their friends, etc. refuse to be interviewed vexes her. Better said, it infuriates her. Angry at being accused of abandoning feminism without having a chance to be won around by their case, as she’d put it. The headmaster, his wife, professors, councilors, and staff at the college all meet with her and, inevitably, she has a stronger grasp on his side of the story. Having initially been supportive not of how he acted, but towards a certain level of mercy for what she construes as a clumsy pass by a man out of his element she tends to push back on the young feminists. Too puritanical, too strident, too weak, too fearful, too willing to enfeeble the progress of sexual freedom from the 60s and 70s, too incoherent. This is her tone. Not exactly going to win over the opposition, I’d imagine.
Yet the question she poses were important then and have become more important in our time. How can we possibly balance the promise of total individual freedom (for men and women) while guaranteeing protection for all? Is complete safety an illusion, one not even possible under a theoretical totalitarian state with an eye on everyone and their actions? What role can spontaneous eroticism play in interpersonal relations? Or is spontaneity out of date, unwanted, finished?
Throughout, Garner largely maintains that the social and professional punishment for all involved doesn’t fit the offense. This is a case of human nature coming up against social norms still in flux—she’d hate to see an aspect of humanity which does have the potential for good to be totally quashed. Rather than have a man and his family humiliated and the students forced to move to new universities and anonymity to protect the rest of their livelihoods, Garner envisions an approach that galvanizes women to tell men off. To hold their nerve in the face of unwanted attention (especially when that attention is construed on some indecipherable spectrum as innocent) rather than use the force of the state to exact retribution. It is a position honestly held and one which persists today; in a world of stronger morality and honesty, it might even have merit. But our real world of imbalances makes it supremely hard to take the argument seriously. A certain reading of this book, then, does present Garner as quaint at best. This is where the negative reviews of her effort come in. And they’re certainly strongly felt.
What balances this reading, though, is Garner’s critical examination of herself. When she gets worked up about this or that, jots down an argument, and rages at the idea of “treason” she is usually quick to ask why this is affecting her so strongly. She relates incidents in which she, too, was come upon or arguably assaulted. How she froze, didn’t know what to say or do to get out of the situation, how she paid for a massage with a masseuse who kissed the back of her hand and her lips. That she, too, has been a victim and acted in a way very similar to the students. It gets her closer to a communing, an understanding of how it all came to this. When the students are harangued by a lawyer in court about why they didn’t just slap the headmaster when he transgressed, her instant internal response seethes:
The word rang in the air, sharp as a palm against a cheek. My skin prickled; a ripple ran round the court. You bastard, I thought – every woman in the room could answer that question. (p. 27)
Later, after a discussion with a female friend of hers who admitted to having been raped as a teen by an abortionist, Garner gets even closer to the state of the students. Really, the state of all women:
I woke up the next morning sad and anxious, aware of the immense weight of men on women, the ubiquity of their attentions, the exhaustion of our resistance. In such a mood it seemed to me an illusion that women could learn to deal with this pressure briskly, forcefully, with humor and grace. I thought about the complainants, Elizabeth and Nicole, and I felt deeply sorry for them. (p. 171)
Through all this, I wondered how the state of Garner’s own personal life was weighing on her. Having recently finished her collected diaries, How to End a Story, I know that she was going through the initial stages of suffering in her marriage. Her husband tended to dismissal of her work, negative views on femininity and the place of women in society, the household, culture, etc. Without backseat psychoanalyzing too much, there’s a chance that The First Stone was a stab at reasserting herself in her life story. To understand where her principles lay and the path that lead her from a bohemian but open lifestyle in the 70s to what would prove a toxic failure of a second marriage a few decades later. Still early in her new marriage, maybe a tendency to excuse bad behavior by otherwise “harmless” men colored her position. Of course, that risks going too far in defining her position for her, but I found it an interesting wrinkle you’d only be aware of through journals published much later after the events in question.
So where does that leave us? The First Stone isn’t on the cutting edge of theory. It deals with a case from the last century. Its attitude can feel retrograde to one reader, open and honest to another. It did not and will not solve the question of male-female relations. But no single book can or will and Garner never aims for that lofty goal. Instead, she lets us peek behind the curtains of her process and the interrogations of the facts and of her position. We can only hope to be as fearless in exposing our idiosyncrasies and paradoxes to ourselves as she was willing to be with a reading public and a career at stake.
New Orpheu 