Agenbite of inwit
Agenbite of inwit
In Brief
As Haines tries to ingratiate himself with Stephen, Stephen thinks sullenly that the friendly overtures are motivated by guilt: "Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here's a spot." He reads into Haines’ solicitude about all things Irish a conscience desperate to atone for all the blood on English hands. Two different literary evocations of the gnawing action of conscience, one medieval and one early modern, inform his thoughts.
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Thornton traces "Agenbit of inwit" to a moral treatise
compiled by a Dominican friar named Lorens (aka Laurentius
Gallus) for the use of King Philip II of France. His French
work, Le Somme des Vices et Vertus (1279), was
translated into Kentish Middle English by Dan Michel of
Northgate under the very different title Ayenbite of
Inwyt (1340). Ayen or agen (the Middle
English alphabetical character ʒ, or yogh, could be rendered
either way) is the same word as our modern "again," and wyt
or wit in medieval times meant mind, thought,
consciousness, awareness, knowing, understanding. Friar Lorens
must therefore have intended something like "the again-biting
of inward-knowing."
Stephen quite sensibly connects the notion that bad
conscience returns to graw at the offender again and again
with Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare’s play shows the two murderers
tortured with guilty hallucinations about the acts they have
committed. Macbeth is visited at a dinner party by Banquo's
ghost and Lady Macbeth scrubs her hands as she walks in her
sleep, trying to erase the “spots” of Duncan’s blood: "Yet
here's a spot.... Out, damn'd spot" (5.1.31,
35). Both characters comment poignantly on what their thoughts
are doing to them: “Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?” (5.1.39-40); “O, full of
scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” (3.2.36).
In Scylla and Charybdis, a chapter filled to bursting
with Shakespearean allusions, Stephen applies the phrase to a
widowed Anne Hathaway: "Venus has twisted her lips in prayer.
Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience." He applies
it also to himself, thinking of the pound that George Russell
lent him when he was hungry: "Go to! You spent most of it in
Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter. Agenbite of
inwit." His remorse here seems mild, but at the end of Wandering
Rocks, the self-punishment implied by the phrase becomes
overwhelming as he thinks of his sister: "She is drowning. Agenbite.
Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me
with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
my heart, my soul. Salt green death. / We. / Agenbite of
inwit. Inwit’s agenbite. / Misery! Misery!"
Lady Macbeth, possibly played by Vivien Leigh in a 1955 Stratford production. Source: macbethmuskanaulakh.weebly.com.