Poetic Justice by Natalka Husar (2016)

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Natalka Husar’s Poetic Justice shows a young woman in an airplane’s hallway with a cheery, blushed face, but her hands rest on a rolling cart before her with a man’s head in a pool of blood acting as the main dish that she is serving. She emerges from the darkest opening from the drab and fading yellow walls, the blackness of her eyes being accented by the vermillion shadows beneath them. If there had been another dish, she looks as if she would have been very proud of what she had on the cart.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎While Husar, by the normalcy of everything else besides the head on the plate, contrasts sanity and insanity on one canvas, in Patrick Watson’s non-fiction broadcast manuscripts The Canadians: Biographies of a Nation featuring the biographies of prominent Canadians explore the shallow roots of the dark alter egos and how they develop in harmony with the socially acceptable side of individuals, and finally, the delusion that overwhelms them to abandon their sane identities.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎As the young woman in the photo smiles with an excited, fiery glare from her eyes. She wears her light blue blouse nearly unbuttoned and unabashed, and her deep blue jacket, matching scarf, and bold makeup resemble the uniform of a flight attendant, whose work is associated with diligent customer care and service. Whether she is the one who executed the man or someone else did the job seems irrelevant as to how she feels about it – her expression shows no sign of sickness or nausea while she confidently poses with her prize.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎However, Husar creates a setting that makes the background as bold as the woman’s figure. As bold as the blue of her uniform is the scarlet red of the flight attendant seats behind her. The clear greens and browns of whiskey bottles fill the top of a trolley next to her, defying the abnormality of the head that sits on her own. The typical setting around her represents another part of her conscience – the peaceful, dutiful attendant – while the striking shades of horror on her cart depicts the savage mentality attempting to coexist in her nature.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Ultimately, no matter how balanced the forces of the conventional setting wrestle with her macabre presentation, for the audience, everything around the woman fades away as she emerges into the spotlight. Likewise, In the woman’s mind, she casts out the identity she nurtured with every social value she learned to integrate into her life when she begins embracing slaughter with the proud smile she has stricken on her face. She no longer knows guilt as her murderous alter ego takes over her entire mentality.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Contrastingly, part four of The Canadians: Biographies of a Nation testifies of how the alter ego of Alma Pakenham, the wife of British Columbia’s parliamentary architect Francis Rattenbury, drove her demurely complexion to face her deceptive, unforgiving, and suicidal character.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎When Pakenham moved with her husband to England after her husband was shunned for mistreating his previous wife to be with the ten years his junior singer and songwriter Pakenham, their love grew cold and Alma began to have an affair with their young servant George Stoner. While Pakenham was truly a dignified lady of class and mannerism, Stoner was not, so when Stoner began complaining to her that he did not enjoy being both a lover and a servant, Pakenham was worried that he would act out and asked her husband for 250 pounds for a “woman’s operation.” With the money she drove out with Stoner to Kensington and shopped, drank, and took him to bed at the Kensington Palace Hotel.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Upon their return, Pakenham was relieved to find her husband feeling well, and when she saw that he was drunk, she felt some of her old affection for him and helped him into his bedroom. When she closed the door, Stoner, who was stoned, was livid and full of jealousy. The next morning, he took a carpenter’s mallet up behind Rattenbury in his room and brought down the mallet onto his head three times. He was not killed immediately, but the blows hurt him badly and he died later that day.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Immediately after smashing Rattenbury’s head, Stoner rushed to Pakenham’s bed and implicitly told her that he had murdered her husband, and by the time the doctor arrived, she was sitting next to her dead husband, got drunk, and deludedly claimed to have murdered her husband. Whether she intended to protect Stoner from being charged out of her love for him or she felt that it was her decisions that murdered Rattenbury, Pakenham blamed herself for his death by pleading guilty in court.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎However, when she was before the jury, she seemed to be in her right mind. Rather than the seductive girl they expected to see, they were met with a well-behaved, respectable lady. Yet she continued to plead guilty until Stoner turned himself in, and Pakenham was proven to be innocent while Stoner was convicted of murder.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Pakenham did not let the murder go. Her distress drove her into depression, and she committed suicide by taking a day out to go shopping, buying a knife, and plunging it into her chest at the edge of a riverbank.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Although it was unlike her known social character for her to end her life in that way, what she did not reveal to others was the exhausted and hopeless self-condemnation that ebbed away at her conscience each time she acted against her standard code of conduct. And while standards like marriage and infidelity became numb to her moral sense, murder was not a crime she was prepared to be associated with. To cope with her lover’s homicide of her husband, she needed to abandon her virtuous judgement and turn to her insanity.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎Therefore, despite the difference in the backgrounds of Husar’s woman and Pakenham, both of them become unfeeling to the violation of their values, and when they begin to embrace the more immoral and wrongful alter ego, they find themselves having to turn to it completely as it does not tolerate compromise with virtuous thoughts and actions. While the ending leads to a tragic death or the death of one’s compassion, the conclusion is that they no longer embrace their sane character. Holding onto the virtuous and refusing for the two sides to balance is the only way to keep from self-destruction.