FOREIGN STORY
BY REBECCA MEADMAY 6, 2013
In an early chapter of “The Portrait of a Lady,” Isabel Archer fends off Caspar Goodwood, her persistent American suitor, by declaring an intention to remain unmarried. “If there’s a thing in the world I’m fond of,” Isabel says, “it’s my personal independence.” She is shortly to embark for Italy, with her aunt as chaperone, in order to “affront her destiny,” as Henry James later characterized it. When Goodwood asks how he might figure in that destiny, Isabel insists that the most useful thing he can do is “to put as many hundred miles of sea between us as possible.” He is appalled. “One would think you were going to commit some atrocity!” he tells her. “Perhaps I am,” Isabel replies. “I wish to be free even to do that if the fancy takes me.”
According to Michael Gorra, James’s most recent biographer, Isabel is “all too liable to trip over her own imagination, a young woman who has no sense of what her freedom might be for.” And so, judging from the evidence of a highly anticipated memoir, was Amanda Knox, when, in the late summer of 2007, she arrived in Perugia from Seattle, as a twenty-year-old student. “I knew I hadn’t become my own person yet, and I didn’t quite know how to get myself there,” Knox writes, in “Waiting to Be Heard,” which comes out this week. Two months into her stay, Knox was accused and, thereafter, convicted of having used her freedom to commit an atrocity: the killing of her English roommate, Meredith Kercher, who was discovered, half-naked, with her throat slit, in their apartment. Knox spent four years in prison before her conviction was overturned, in 2011. (In March, Italian authorities announced that the case would be retried, after prosecutors and lawyers for Kercher’s family challenged the acquittal; Knox, who is now studying creative writing in Seattle, is unlikely to be in attendance.)
Knox describes herself as an American naïf: innocent not only in the legal sense but in the moral dimension, too. She arrives in Perugia a well-meaning, quirky girl unaware that the social codes of the American Northwest will be perceived in her host country as aberrant and even malign. (She says it wasn’t a cartwheel that she performed in a police-station corridor, as widely reported, but a split, perfected in her yoga practice.) “I still had a childlike view of people,” Knox writes. She reads not Henry James but Harry Potter. At a café, she tells a bewildered barista how to make a chocolate-milky mocha, as if she were at a Starbucks back home and not in the land of the severe ristretto. The most troubling aspect of her legal story—a written statement pinning the crime on an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba—she explains as the product of disorientation, triggered by bullying police officers who “made me believe I had trauma-induced amnesia.” When, finally, she was handcuffed, she volunteered to an officer that she could slip her hands free. The cuffs were promptly tightened—an incident that serves as a microcosm of her experience, in which her eagerness to please rebounded on her.
She could not anticipate that “my private, uncertain experiment would become my undoing”—as it did in court, when those brief encounters were placed on an erotic continuum with a purported scenario in which she and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend of a week’s standing, along with a man named Rudy Guede, killed Kercher in a marijuana-fuelled sex game gone awry. (Guede was separately convicted of the crime.) Having been subjected to slut shaming in the press, Knox repudiates the premise. “I hadn’t sought out men because I was obsessed with sex,” she says. “I was experimenting with my sexuality.”Even her notorious nickname, Foxy Knoxy, has an innocuous origin, she says; it’s the legacy of her time in a kids’ soccer league, bestowed for her swiftness and dexterity. Still, it seems unlikely that Knox remained oblivious of the connotations of the name; and it is in relation to questions of sexuality that “Waiting to Be Heard” is at its most suggestive—at least, to a reader not invested in Knox’s multiple trials. In making the argument that she was simply an innocent abroad, affronting her destiny, Knox details a concerted effort to shed her innocence by pursuing sex uncoupled from commitment. “Casual sex was, for my generation, simply what you did,” she writes. On a train from Milan to Florence, she meets a partner for her début one-night stand. She contracts oral herpes, but that doesn’t discourage her from the next opportunity, with a new acquaintance in Perugia. Unlike Isabel Archer, the guileless American in search of knowledge but debauched by European wiles and cynicism, Knox went to Europe with the guileless project of seeking to be debauched. She argues that what was later held up as evidence of depravity was only another aspect of artlessness.
In this respect, if in no other, her experience is not so different from that of many young American women now, caught in a post-post-feminist narrative in which it is proposed that sexual emancipation may be achieved through emotional disengagement. Whatever light “Waiting to Be Heard” does or does not shed on the awful death of Meredith Kercher, it offers a dispiriting account of prevailing mores. It is not new for students to “give casual sex a chance.” (Today’s twenty-year-olds may be surprised to learn that even their parents might have tried it.) It is new for girls to strive to adopt the sexual behavior of the most opportunistic guy on campus. “I wanted sex to be about empowerment and pleasure, not about Does this person like me? Will he still like me tomorrow?” Knox writes. But if empowerment, that much abused and much diminished term, means anything it means being able to say no as well as yes, without censure or shame. It means neither being reflexively condemned as a volpe cattiva—a wicked fox, as the Italian press translated her nickname—nor submitting unthinkingly to contemporary pressures.
It means the freedom that Isabel Archer claims for herself at the outset of “The Portrait of a Lady,” when her aunt tells her that she has transgressed English social norms by sitting up late talking with the gentlemen. “I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do,” Isabel says. “So as to do them?” her aunt asks. “So as to choose,” she replies. That freedom remains the common desire of young women; it is elusive now, as it was then. ♦