The premise of Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is not entirely unfamiliar. An unnamed narrator relocates to an unspecified northern country to live with her older brother, only to find the inhabitants of this “sparsely inhabited town” typically wary of outsiders. The protagonist’s inability to speak the language only deepens her isolation, and when a series of portentous events befall the townsfolk—from potato blight and stillborn ewes to bovine hysteria and canine phantom pregnancies—suspicion inevitably falls on our innocent newcomer. Innocent, that is, if we can trust her recollection of events.
Such a synopsis might suggest a standard folk horror tale, but Bernstein subverts the tropes of the genre to resist such simplicity, and in doing so offers a far more conflicted view of victimhood. The style is typified by her handling of the narrator’s voice. Ambiguity is a key facet of the folk horror genre, with unreliable narrators often used as plot devices or twisty gimmicks. However, the unreliability of the narrator in Study for Obedience is more nuanced and enlightening. Because it’s not that we doubt the essential truth of her status and circumstances within the novel—hers is not a project of deception—rather the tone of her recollections suggests a level of embellishment. As though, finally granted the opportunity to tell her story, the urge to exaggerate proves overwhelming. Out of a desire to better capture a wider truth perhaps, or merely a sign of an author getting carried away in the joy of the telling.
The question at the heart of Study for Obedience therefore becomes not so much whether we can believe what the narrator is telling us, rather what it says of her as a character that she tells her story in such a manner. Because again, on the surface, she might appear a familiar figure. Her relationship with her brother is exploitative. She serves as his housekeeper and personal assistant, learning the particular demands of his routine so as to provide a seamless service which extends to reading to him in the bath and even washing him. An age-old power dynamic is suggested. Masculine dominance subjugating the female. But just as the plot subverts expectation, so too does Bernstein refuse us the comfort straightforward relationships. Because though the historical systems of oppression are clearly present, she allows her characters to bend the logic of their outcomes. Like the certain delight the narrator takes in what appear to be demeaning tasks. As she admits at one point, “I did like to dress him.”
The youngest of many siblings, the narrator has existed within a state of servitude to her siblings since before she could speak. “I attended to their every desire,” she states in the opening, “smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine.” This sense of exchange is important to the novel, and slowly revealed to be bidirectional. For the narrator comes to realise that just as the desires of the oppressor are imprinted on the oppressed, so too does the suffering of the exploited worm its way into the oppressor. A strange transfer which upends power dynamics as we know them, and allows the persecuted a more ambivalent image.
The idea is encapsulated by the Paula Rego quote which serves as an epigraph to the novel. “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” This duality dawns upon the narrator and she embraces the contradiction. The subservient actions she performs for her brother—dressing and bathing and brushing him—come to feel almost like weapons she wields over him. Her epiphany is that the victim is more complicated than we might realise. That they can have strange agencies, even power, within even the worst treatment.
The opposite proves true of the narrator’s brother. A man who had “always despised weaklings, detested victims, found self-pity, personal grief and collective mourning abhorrent,” he represents the antithesis of narrator, not only disliking weakness but finding himself drawn to cruelty in its presence. “If he himself had to choose between resentment and self-pity, he would choose the former any day, any day,” as the narrator states. To see weakness in another is to be reminded of his own, to be dragged at some subconscious level towards the belittled state of victimhood, so better to hate it, lash out in disgust. But this proves his undoing, because violence begets suffering, meaning a vicious circle emerges. Weakness provokes cruelty, cruelty causes weakness, and so the wheel turns.
The brother’s gradual deterioration across the second half of the novel is symbolic of this phenomenon. The idea exploitation is a mutually destructive force. That the powerful will be infected by a rot regardless of how much they stand to gain from the relationship. To enter such a bargain, to force another to be obedient for your benefit, is to destroy yourself slowly, invoke a curse that cannot be broken. Violence will always bend back upon itself to decimate the hand which holds the whip. Just as the narrator’s obedience becomes its own clandestine form of agency, so too does the brother’s dominance transmogrify into a curious form of subjugation. As if, in providing every demanded service and luxury, she helps him inadvertently dismantle himself, piece by bloody piece.
The gendered reading of this sibling relationship is obvious, and against the backdrop of a wary townsfolk it becomes an allegory for xenophobic distrust too. But as the narrator’s background reveals itself in small flashes, the meaning extends to history. For she belongs to “an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits,” and her new home is revealed to be the site of this persecution. The spectre of the Holocaust haunts the novel, a ghostly echo within every interaction, a shadow puppet on the far wall. The ultimate form of taming is to eradicate, but any power attempting genocide, that is attempting to create an absence, is doomed to internalise this absence and be consumed from within.
Appearing to understand this on some level, the narrator embraces this destructive potential and fear it instils. Several scenes see her enter public spaces despite the clear hostility towards her, and she even takes to fashioning strange effigies to leave around the town as though to further provoke suspicion. The animosity she faces becomes its own form of validation, and she positions her ostracized status as a kind of social necessity. “I sensed dimly the outline of complex networks of exchange and relation that structured the society one lived in,” she explains, “structures that in certain cases required the presence, or more appropriately the exclusion, of a particular individual or object, to enable the cohesion of the whole. One played one’s part, everyone did.”
Thus, Bernstein’s protagonist settles as neither a victim or bogeyman, but instead in the murky middle ground. The central achievement of a novel where the subjective nature of the narrator’s voice, be it unreliability or embellishment, forces the reader to question the apparently objective image of victimhood so often put forward. Why must we demand our victims be innocent, and what does it say of us? Can the dominant order of the world be challenged from within? “Did it follow, then, that I had achieved some measure of grace after all?” as the narrator ponders:
That, after all this time, and completely unbeknownst to myself, I had passed into the role of a teacher, a kind of spiritual guide, who own motions of the spirit were so powerful as to be able to influence the thought and action of others? No, no, surely not […] Nothing could have induced me to take on a leadership role of any kind, I was a faithful and perennial servant, and yet, and no one could have found the situation more impossible that I did, it seemed to me that my obedience had itself taken on a kind of mysterious power. And if I had been granted this power, by some grace, against my wishes, must I not then make use of it in some way?
Study For Obedience is out now via Granta Books.