SUSAN SMITH: CORRUPTED BY LOVE?

By Barbara Ehrenreich

It's the business of the courts to determine guilt and hand out punishment, but it's up to the rest of us to try to figure out what each sensational murder trial has to say about our culture and times--that is, about the rest of us. O.J. forced us to ponder the issue of domestic violence, with side trips into Hollywood decadence and the arrogance of male athletes. In the Susan Smith case, though, no one has come up with any grand themes other than mental illness and "evil"--both of which are ways of saying, "This is so unthinkable that we're not going to do any thinking."

But there is a theme implicit in the Smith story that ought to be familiar to every woman with a functioning heart, and that theme is love. Not the good kind of love, obviously, the kind that results in homemade cookies and all-night vigils with feverish children, but the ungovernable, romantic kind of love that the songs tell us about, as in "addicted to love" and "I would do anything to hold on to you." Whether Smith intended to kill herself or just wanted to win back her lover by getting rid of the kids, we will never know for sure. Either way, she was an extremist in the cause of love, and her sons, horribly enough, were human sacrifices to it. "Good" women put the children first. They forgo disruptive romantic entanglements; if necessary, they endure loveless marriages until the kids grow up. This is what Susan Smith would have done if she had any capacity for conventional feminine virtue: stuck by her philandering husband, and of course refrained from fooling around herself. Not that the children would necessarily have had an easy time of it. Women who sacrifice everything for the kids often make cold, embittered moms, or suffocating, emotionally overwhelming moms, or else they wither away from a depression for which the kids eventually blame themselves. Though at least, in those cases, the children live long enough to experience the concept of "eventually."

But Susan Smith was not programmed to be "good." Everything in her own sorry history taught her to put the pull of sexual, romantic love above the needs of little children. When she was six, her father killed himself in response to the heartbreak of divorce. Susan had been his favorite, but this didn't make her important enough for him to stick around.

It was her mother, though, who most clearly prefigured Susan's crime. In the wake of Susan's own suicide attempt at age 13, psychiatrists recommended that she be hospitalized for depression. Her mother and stepfather refused, and if we find it "unthinkable" that a mother could kill her own children, it is not a whole lot less unthinkable that a mother could reject a chance to help a child bent on killing herself.

Two years later, Susan got another vivid lesson in the priority of adult desires over children's needs. Her stepfather, a pillar of the community, started sexually molesting her. Susan reported the abuse, but she and her mother decided to drop the charges. Message to Susan from Mom: I'm willing to sacrifice you--your physical integrity, your self-esteem, if necessary even your life--in order to hold on to this man.

The creepy details are peculiar to Smith's case, but the message to girls is similarly demeaning: Love (of men) is the supreme adventure! The peak experience! The only possible redemption for a worthless little creature like you! And, needless to say, the love celebrated in songs and soap operas and romance novels is not the love for sticky-faced toddlers.

So we have, in the Susan Smith case, the female dilemma at its starkest: Not the pallid "family-vs.-career" predicament, but a zero-sum choice between romantic love and mother love, with guaranteed misery no matter which you chose. Novels like Anna Karenina taught us the "bad" woman's fate, which is ideally suicide. The Bridges of Madison County gives us the "good" woman's answer, which is to renounce romantic love for the sake of husband and kids. But the more disquieting message of that story is that four days and three nights with a sexy stranger can outweigh anything else that ever happens in a "good" woman's life.

One socially redeeming lesson we can derive from the Susan Smith case, then, is that girls need the possibility of some great adventures other than romantic love. Yes, love is a joy and a shining moment of transcendence in our life. But it is not the only one. If I controlled the nation's playlists, there'd be a lot fewer songs about "giving all for love," and plenty of danceable tunes about running for Congress or getting through community college as a single mother.

None of this is to excuse Susan Smith's crime. But if we're going to dwell on her case for anything other than voyeuristic thrills, we have to forsake the easy, self-distancing explanations like "evil" and acknowledge that the unthinkable is always lurking within the familiar. That the "love" we endlessly celebrate can be a source, sometimes, of endless sorrow.