THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507290045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
ONCE AGAIN, this time in Union, S.C., the lovely fairy-tale princess failed to transform a frog with a kiss into Prince Charming, and live happily ever after in the magic kingdom.
Instead the frog turned out to be just a frog, and the princess was just another young woman with a desperately low opinion of herself. This time, however, not only was Cinderella ready to take her own life but she did sacrifice those of her children.
Susan Smith, 23, may yet assume a throne, but it will be one wired with electric current. She was convicted July 22 of first-degree murder for the Oct. 25 drownings of her two young sons.
Smith may seem an unlikely candidate for fairy-princess status, with her Faulknerian background of lust, incest, adultery, suicide and murder beneath the live oaks, and her unconscionable crime and coverup. But she occupies an important place on the female fantasy love continuum - the continuum that begins with the deeply ingrained false hope that ``love'' conquers ``all'' and that having a man provides the ``all.''
A victim and a victimizer herself, Smith represents the pathological extreme, a few shades beyond women like Smith's mother who, deathly afraid of losing their cold, angry, narcissistic and/or cruel mates, allow them to abuse their children and then deny the truth. In killing her children, I suspect that Smith attempted to destroy herself, an alienated, fragmented self on which she could not depend when ``the going got tough'' and no man could - or would - rescue her.
The ``Cinderella complex,'' a term coined in the early 1980s for women's ``hidden fear of independence,'' continues to reel as desperately out of control today as it did 30 years ago at the birth of the modern women's movement. Turn on any daytime talk show, and Cinderella will be in attendance, sometimes with her openly critical prince beside her.
In the interest of becoming the fairy princesses they believe they should be, and the popular culture has taught them to be, women engage in a variety of self-destructive behaviors: binging and purging their food to achieve the ``perfect'' body, obsessively calling lovers who have ended affairs to thwart sexual rejection, having repeated plastic surgeries to forestall the inevitability of aging and the perceived loss of attractiveness.
Such actions underscore a psychosexual unhealthiness in many male-female relationships, an immaturity in notions about happiness and a mythology of female desirability. All Cinderella had to do, remember, was fit a glass slipper and her wretched, lonely life was transformed.
There are no excuses for what Susan Smith did. The act itself is reprehensible and horrific to contemplate. But contemplate it we should, and not just to pass self-righteous judgment as would the ``Baby-killing bitch!'' mob outside the courthouse or the vengeful 24-year-old father-turned-book-author. We should search for and demand accountability above the din of recrimi-nation.
Though grievously wounded, David Smith is accountable: He married a suicidal, promiscuous teenager, knew her to be unreliable and depressed, but still left his sons in her custody. What fantasy was he living?
We should look at Smith's life, acknowledge the exploitation and betrayal therein, and hold responsible those people who damaged her: two absent fathers, one who killed himself when she was 6, and another who sexually violated her when she was a teenager; and the see-no-evil mother who looked the other way until it was too late.
And we should challenge a culture that still instructs women that physical beauty, sexuality, romantic love, and later, marriage and children, constitute their true measure.
No excuses, just explanations. We don't need any more ``next times.''
Above all, we should ask, where is Susan Smith? Who is Susan Smith? We've heard the sordid allegations, we know the violence she committed, but we have yet to hear about an independent woman, existing on her own, and not merely as an extension of men.
Ironically, in an Oct. 17 letter to Smith, Tom Findlay, the man whose alleged rejection, according to the prosecutor, prompted Smith to ``selfishly'' kill her sons, wrote about ``self-respect'' and personal ``accountability.'' A college graduate, Findlay advised Smith to ``do the things in life that you want to do'' and to ``wait and be very choosy about your next relationship.'' He commiserated over her ``missed youth'' and counseled her not to ``settle for mediocre.''
But Smith couldn't possibly understand this language. No mother or father had ever taught it to her. In an earlier flowery thank-you note - fairy princesses know to show appreciation - to Findlay, she mused about their lovemaking, their ``special'' friendship, and wrote, ``I have never felt so needed.''
Any honest woman who has struggled with self-confidence, determination and control in her life, and cursed the cultural roadblocks - ridiculous fashions, wrongheaded definitions of beauty, bimbos in the movies, etc., etc. - to her fulfillment, must recognize the ``need'' trap. A woman subjugates her needs to the needs of others, those of Prince Charming - who, after all, has learned to desire Cinderella - and above all, those of her children.
Susan Smith never developed a reservoir of character and strength that she could draw upon to arrest - or seek help for - a dangerous spiral into depression. Love is key to developing that strength, but so too is hard-earned self-awareness: We're all just frogs, warts and all. Smith never got the chance to learn that ``happily ever after'' comes from within. And now she never will. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB