![]() There are too many lines of tension, not just the assault but also identity, personality, race, class, gender, talent, ambition, and stress. None of her visions of the world and her place in it can incorporate everything she is and everything that’s brought her to this point. So she casts around desperately, grabbing on to cursory but highly regimented self-improvement programs and then abandoning them when they don’t help. It’s almost totally evaded her since, though. Mostly, Arabella tries frantically to get back to her writing, something she had at least some working rhythm for before she was attacked. She cannot decide, because both visions appeal to her and she just doesn’t know. She vacillates between denying that her assault was serious and finding power in declaring what happened to her. She and her friend Terry devote themselves to superficial self-care activities yoga and painting parties become easy achievements rather than meaningful changes. She falls deep into social media and fashions herself as an icon of hard-line anti-abuse truth-telling, causing her to almost wholly dissociate from the physical world. That’s the most pressing and obvious gap for Arabella, the absence where her memories of that night should be.īut that missing vision comes on top of, and then fuels, lots of other stories Arabella tells, other misapprehensions and underexamined ways of seeing herself. She’s left with a few disconnected images in her head - images that appear to her in incomplete flashes and leave her incapable of piecing together a full, ordered story of what happened to her. The most direct, immediate version of this is that Arabella gets drugged and raped in the first episode and then cannot piece together a full memory of what happened. Throughout the season, Michaela Coel’s protagonist, Arabella, has been struggling with her own incomplete visions of the world. I thought about “Araby” as I watched the penultimate episode of I May Destroy You. I wrote “epiphany” on the page and circled it. The narrator discovers something fundamental about the world, and his whole viewpoint changes. This, I remember my teacher explaining, is an example of an epiphany. The world is not opening for him the way he imagined his fantasy collapses. The shopgirl is unhelpful and resents his presence. The market has almost closed, and his vision of the magical opportunities of the Araby market falls to pieces. When he gets there, finally, after wrangling with his caretakers and scraping together the money, it’s nearly too late. In seventh grade, an English teacher assigned me “Araby,” the story from James Joyce’s Dubliners about a young boy who wants to buy a present for a girl he loves at the fantastic, exotic Araby bazaar.
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