I recently revisited some of the Francis Bacon essays that were assigned as reading in the first year of my literature degree and was having a grand old time enjoying the transhistoricity of Bacon’s thoughts until I got to a line in ‘Of Envy’ that made my heart drop to my feet. In a single sentence from a man long dead, written at a time when the foundations of the British empire were being laid and ruffs were still all the rage in fashion, the hostility, schadenfreude, and fixation on my current activities and future plans that I had struggled to understand for a long time had finally been given a name, and that name was envy.
I’ve always been hesitant to label inexplicably hostile behaviour from another woman jealousy for three reasons. One is my awareness of my own sensitivity. By nature I tend to the introspection that usually characterises students of the arts so my first thought in response to perceived slights tends to be ‘It’s nothing, you’re being a bit precious’. (One of my dad’s favourite memories of me is how as a little girl of around 2-3, having absolutely nothing to lament, I sat on a tree stump outside our house and sang a Zimbabwean lament song with the sincerity of a world-weary woman — let that be an indication of my character.) Two is that because of how reductive it is, I have always found it extremely conceited to conclude that somebody dislikes me because they are jealous of me, as though that is the only possible reason I might not endear myself to another person. Three is that because of the weaponisation of female intrasexual competition in misogynistic discourse by men and women alike, I’m uncomfortable with reinforcing envy as a potent reality of the female experience. Because of these three things, when jealousy towards me has unmasked itself in increasingly undeniable ways in the past, I’ve generally tried with all my might to attribute the behaviour to anything other than what it is showing itself to be. Unfortunately, reality isn’t undone by our denying it.
In recent years, my sister has criticised me for my hesitance to call a spade a spade, or perhaps more accurately, to say a spade is just a spade. A running jokes between us is that I think she is overly hasty in forming conclusions about situations and people and she thinks my tendency to hang on for dear life to the possibility that you might be misreading a situation (no matter how crystal clear it appears) is pure idiocy, which is why I went the route of Literature and she went the route of Law. A sensitivity to the fact that your reading of something, although you may be able to substantiate it very well, is certainly not the only valid one, will serve you well in a degree in which success is largely dependent on your ability to critically engage with positions that differ from yours. It may, however, serve you less well in your personal life when somebody is repeatedly exhibiting behaviours that signal one thing and you always want to say ‘Yes, but…’. If I learnt anything at all from being twenty-two, it’s that interpersonal relationships are not the arena to be an English Literature student. While there is value in a cautious approach towards your own perceptions, I am ready to yield to the truth that there is also great value in calling a spade just a spade sometimes. Shannon Lee, you have been vindicated.
For many reasons, female intrasexual competition, like its male counterpart, is a real thing. Because of the ways women are socialised in the West, however, it often manifests in insidious, subtle ways and is thus characterised by passive aggression rather than direct confrontation. When I spoke to three trusted women about the behaviours I’d found troubling in another woman —unfriendly looks in clothes I’d received compliments from others about, a constant need to reiterate the unexceptionalness of my physical appearance when a man showed any interest in me, comments that seemed intent on diminishing my achievements and interests and the constant comparison of them with their own, sporadic cold-shouldering in group settings, difficulty complimenting me that didn’t extend towards others and visible discomfort when somebody else did, notable quietness during the highs of my life followed by intense interest during what they perceived as the lows, and the classic incessant one-upping that we’re all familiar with—two told me outright that those behaviours were manifestations of envy and the other hinted at it. I was resistant to labelling it what it was for the reasons mentioned above, but more than all of those, because I just didn’t want to believe that anybody close to me would harbour those feelings towards me and mistreat me with an increasing intensity because of it. But even as I dismissed it, I knew it was exactly that. I knew the face of envy amongst women well because I had seen it in my sister’s “friends” growing up who seemed uncomfortable about her successes, in the girls I observed over the years who seemed to find it necessary to point out this failing and that flaw in another woman who just so happened to be conventionally attractive, intelligent or personable, and because I’d seen it in myself in my teenage years.
Between sixteen and seventeen, while doing my A-Levels, I was the most stressed I’d been in my life. I was predicted 3 A grades, which were the entry requirements for my university of choice and was starting to feel very acutely the effects of a parental separation that had occurred four years prior. In those two academic years, my relationship with my parents left a lot to be desired and I was beginning to develop problematic eating habits and a very militant attitude towards exercise. I had always generally achieved highly in school so the self-imposed pressure to maintain that ‘streak of excellence’ was already there, but it was sent into overdrive by the (then) desperation to get away from home. So I set myself to wringing the life out of (in analysis, of course) Othello, Death of A Salesman, Keats’ poems, Hamlet, Atonement, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner, learning everything I could about Functionalist, Marxist, Feminist, and New Right theories on all societal institutions studiable, and committing to my brain what felt like every nook and cranny of the history of the French Revolution and the social, political, religious and foreign policy changes in Britain from James I’s first kingly act in 1603 to the establishment of the British Bill of Rights in 1689. If you had cut me open at that time, I would have bled obscure seventeenth century French and Englishmen’s words, which depending on who you are, might have won you over to me. In those two years, there was a girl in one of my classes who irritated me to no end, for reasons I just couldn’t place. That she was seemingly happy, healthy and unperturbed by the demands of sixth form life (not to mention in possession of parents with an in-tact marriage) seemed to have nothing to do with that dislike for me at sixteen. However, years later, once far removed from the mental space I had been in at sixteen, I could see it had everything to do with it. In my suspicion that the hostility I’d experienced from somebody I had laboured intensely to show kindness to was envy, I knew that I understood the situation to be so because I had been the exact same girl, as many of us have been at some point.
Days before I started rereading Bacon’s essays, I revisited 1 Samuel and found it noteworthy that Saul’s murderous rage towards David, although directly caused by an evil spirit that God had sent upon him, was propelled by the jealousy already present in Saul’s heart towards David. 1 Samuel 18:9 tells us that prior to the evil spirit coming upon him, Saul, who had once been friendly with David, hated David as soon as he saw that David was more popular with the people, concluding: ‘from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David’.1 The spirit sent by God only aggravated what was already in Saul’s heart, which is a testament to James’ words that we are each tempted by our own evil desires primarily.2 That I, as emotionally brittle as I am, could speak in the way that I did at sixteen and seventeen about another girl, saying things which would without question shatter me were I to receive the same, as this woman’s words towards me did, shows the ugliness of jealousy and how unbelievably violent it can be when left untamed.
When I first became a Christian, having grown up without any real understanding of the person of Jesus Christ, the recognition that God had been with me from before my conception to nineteen despite my ignorance of Him absolutely blew my mind. As I read more and more of the gospels, what I noticed most was that all the people Jesus had called to Himself had led lives of varying circumstances but each person had responded to the call to follow Him in the time God had appointed. As I read, it became clear to me that my entire life had never really been my own and that the things I had found less than ideal in my own life, such as some of the experiences I would rather not have had between twelve and twenty, had not been outside of God’s sovereignty. As I continued reading the rest of the Bible, seeing the intentionality of God reflected in people’s individuality also opened my eyes to the fact that the personality and passions that I had always taken for granted (my predilection towards the arts, my hobbies of reading and writing, my interests in history and social issues, my girliness, my ability to make friends easily, and my curiosity, for example) were not incidental: they had been given to me by the God who made me (Psalm 139:13-16). That every other human in existence had been made with the same care and attention by Him helped me understand that I didn’t need to look to the left or to the right at another person’s life in a comparative way because God had very specific things in mind for every single one of His creations. In the two years I was unchurched after coming to Christ, God helped me cultivate contentment in my life and wholehearted trust in Him for my future, which came from the wonder at the individuality of my own relationship with Him and the things He had prepared for my life before I even knew anything of Him (Ephesians 2:10).
But under unrelenting criticism, even someone with a previously stable sense of self can become self-conscious. Envy in the church in the way it manifested towards me showed me the extent to which the flesh does not discriminate between people—whether in Christ or not—in its need to be indulged. This was a very necessary lesson for me as a Christian who, having not yet been part of a church since putting her faith in Jesus, had yet to see the ways in which the principles we lived by as Christians did not always determine our conduct towards one another in practice. It was through the destructiveness caused by envy in those who had been Christians longer than I had been that I came to understand in a visceral way what it looks like to quench the Spirit and subject yourself to your flesh in relating with another believer. It’s through those same experiences that my naivety about the realities of relational living among other believers was swiftly dealt with.
We are jealous of those we believe are better than us in some way for having the personality traits, the giftings, the possessions, the lifestyle, the educational level, the life experiences, the attention, admiration or popularity we wish we had. (I also came to understand that if we derive our self-worth from how much we are “doing for God”, our involvement in church activities, the praise of others, and our current circumstances, all of which often lead to a life characterised by anxiety because of their fluctuating natures, we can be jealous of the joy of another—the joy in the knowledge of the fulness of Christ that releases us from performance-based Christianity or joy despite uncertainty of circumstances.) Whether or not the object of our jealousy actually is ‘better than us’ in these areas is inconsequential. What matters is that we think they are, that they occupy an elevated position in our minds, and that we desire to topple them from it by any means possible. I learnt that a person enslaved to envy ——like the person enslaved to any other manifestation of the flesh — is not above diminishing the very gospel they would ordinarily proclaim if doing so will satisfy their flesh’s desire to be the most accomplished, godliest, or smartest person in a room, even if that means endeavouring to get their target to doubt their redemption, justification, and sanctification in Christ. Bacon calls it ‘the vilest affection, and the most depraved’ that ‘worketh subtly and in the dark, and to the prejudice of good things’ for good reason.3
Towards the beginning of the essay, Bacon writes that a man who is overly inquisitive (in the sense of prying rather than intellectual curiosity) is often an envious man:
for to know much of other men’s matters cannot be because all that ado may concern his own estate: therefore it must needs be that he taketh a kind of play-pleasure in looking upon the fortunes of others. Neither can he that mindeth his own business find much matter for envy. For envy is a gadding passion, and walketh the streets, and doth not keep home. (Bacon, ‘Of Envy’, pp. 83-84)
Saul’s preoccupation with David’s life comes to mind. A spirit at peace does not have eyes that dart to the right and left to look for faults in others, inspect their achievements, catch them out for having the ‘wrong’ opinions, or for unfortunate turns of phrase to condemn them by. Constant denigration of other women’s choices — to cover their heads or to not, to wear makeup or to not, to use social media or not etc — seeking to diminish the successes and giftings given to them by God, constantly undermining their judgement or decision-making as though we’re not fully convinced that God has also given them His Spirit to convict and counsel them as He wills, indicating their ungodliness through snide comments to position ourselves as more godly than them in the minds of others (often those whose affections or attention we view them as rivals for), and a general preoccupation with the goings on of other women’s lives are all indicative of envy. Galatians 5:19-21 identifies envy, fits of anger, rivalries and ‘things like these’ as the works of the flesh in contrast to the works of the Spirit, and Romans 8:10 shows that through the power of the Spirit, by allowing Him to govern us, we are able to put to death the works of the flesh. When we submit to our flesh, the result is the animosity that manifests in the behaviours above.
If we look at the wider picture (at God’s desires for us and our world at large) we won’t feel the need to belittle the woman who has what we want or is where we would like to be because we won’t be thinking about her as our rival. We are each God’s ‘workmanship’, a word that denotes extremely attentive care, created for the good works that He prepared for each of us in advance.4 As someone who feels deeply about words and their power as as an illustration of a person’s interiority, every single time I submitted an essay during my undergraduate degree, the feeling was as though I had given away an entire portion of myself to the lecturer or tutor who would mark it, not only in the argument itself, but in the argumentation as well. Whenever I write a poem, every word, every bit of punctuation, every line break, every image—any other detail you can think of—has been chosen with complete intentionality. That single word in a designated space, or the absence of a word in another space, is to me what every single believer is to God. If we truly believe this in our hearts, even when we don’t feel great about our own circumstances, we won’t look at what God has done or is doing in the life of another woman with envy. We can rejoice in our own blessings, the greatest being that by the blood of His Son, we can stand completely blameless before Him as though we had no sin at all, and continue to give God our desires, knowing that He withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly (Psalm 84:11), good being defined by His wisdom, not our own. We can submit ourselves to His Lordship, acknowledging that He is the Potter and we are His clay, which empowers us to accept both our getting and our not getting with the humility and reverence He asks of us.
By looking at Jesus—the person through which and for which that woman we see as our rival was made—we are able to recognise that the traits one woman has that we may feel we are lacking are things God has given her for the furtherance of His kingdom and for the edification of His church, which is no bad thing. This empowers us to celebrate rather than seek to make other women feel less than through our demeanour towards them. If we don’t really trust in God’s trajectory for us and if we place our confidence in ourselves, then when we find ourselves either humbled by unforeseen circumstances or in the proximity of someone who has the things we long for, or possesses the same traits as us to a greater measure (or the deadly combination of all three of these at the same time), we will fall prey to jealousy, to our own detriment and to the detriment of those we mistreat as a result.
