Human pain
Edward Neill
Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction Jenni Calder (Thames and Hudson £5.00 cloth £2.50 paper)
This book is a gleefully emancipated backward half-look at a time when women did not have jobs or contraception and were not expected to behave like normal human beings. Lord Acton assured us in 1857 that 'a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself'. And thete was no release from frenetic fecundity. The Lancet assured her in 1869 that, in the presence of a contraceptive, 'she has only one chance [one chancel, depending on an entire absence of orgasm, of escaping uterine disease . . . As regards the male the practice, in its actual character and its remote effects, is in no way distinguishable from masturbation'. ( I like the gloating penumbra of those 'remote effects'. It was Santayana, [think, who defined Puritanism as 'the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy'.
D. W. Harding said forty years ago that the phrase 'The Poetry of T. S. Eliot' had begun to have the intimidating sound of a Tripos question. Perhaps the modern equivalent of his queasy sense of superfetation is Women in Victorian Fiction, or for that matter Women in Anything. This book is one of a series ringmastered by David Daiches designed to correct the posture of the New Critics. But the phrase has a pleasantly musty smell, as of some agreeable antiquarian cul-de-sac. As Mark Vonnegut saw an end to hippiedom because hippiedom had diffused, what the New Critics had to give has been gratefully received by all but the most dim and torpid, waiting in the staff common room for the whirligig of taste's justification for their sloth.
In fact this book, very much to its credit, though it gestures significantly towards 'history', remains well within hailing distance of the dreaded New Criticism. Indeed, the history is occasionally that intuitionist's social history we seem to be getting so much of at the moment, which can actually be written without any historical information whatsoever. The kind of thing I have in mind goes like this: 'The lower middle class, imitating as well as they could the patterns set by the more socially elevated, could only afford smaller versions of wealthier housing.' Did it really take a writer of Ms Calder's ability to produce that sentence?
The subject, substantially, is actually 'Women in the England of the Victorian Novel', cunningly boxed in by an analysis of Tolstoy's Family Happiness at the beginning and The Kreutzer Sonata at the endthe Houyhnhnms' solution ['true moral happiness lies in the quiet performance of domestic duty'] appear to have preceded the Yahoo problem ['because man is a victim of his sex drive, because man must have woman, the woman has a position of immense power at the same time as being degraded'].
'In good society, the heart is remarkably prudent, and seldom falls violently in love without a sufficient settlement'—thus Lord Lytton, looking before and after in his Englandand the English(1836). Nice one, Bulwer. Ms Calder reaches back into the eighteenth century to chronicle the unnatural history of what George Sand called 'tine des plus barbares institutions'. A circtimambient social pressure lured women into an alleged 'delicious dependence', which supposedly rescued them from a fate worse than it.
Thackeray was 'the first novelist to reject marriage as a happy ending', partly, perhaps, because his wife went mad as a result of the (perfectly normal) circumstances of his own. Jane Eyre is a cunning contrived corridor leading to a paradoxical, if apposite, domesticity—vicarious life with a chastened Old Byronian. There is, I think, an obvious connection between this and the strange 'mixture of hubris and acquiescence' common to George Eliot's surrogates— Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth. Perhaps we should regard them as victims of the British Workwoman, counselling sternly : 'Remember your first earthly duty, and whatever the temptations to go out to work, STAY AT HOME!' Dickens, correlatively, 'did not like his women to be either interesting or dynamic'. Mid-Victorian women trembled on many verges, but the norm was to submerge in a rigidly patriarchal authoritarianism.
Hence the false dawn of the New Woman, whose 'maximum weight of underclothing (without shoes) should not exceed 7lbs,' the Rational Dress Society, and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895)—which was not only against marriage, not only against the whole notion of setting up a domestic union, but (mirabile dictu) made a great deal of money. (Gissing, who presented women as cosy, domestic, limited beings, didn't.) Finally, the wonderful coutra-marital verve of Jane Welsh Carlyle's: 'The victims are expected to go about perpetually together, as if they were a pair of cart-horses; to be for ever holding claims over one another, exacting or making useless sacrifices, and generally getting in one another's way'. The trouble is, as Eliza Lynn Linton—no George Eliot, but equally no fool—remarked, women could not partake simultaneously of 'the courtesy claimed by weakness and the honour due to prowess'.
I quite like Jenni Calder's substance, but I occasionally object to her tone. 'Motherhood is regarded as the supreme achievement, and caring for the young the most exalted activity,' she says, sneeringly. No doubt the Great Victorian Adventure floated off on an ocean of humbug, but should we, In an era of baby-battering, have the right to smile? The Victorians failed to cope with the demands and the pain of being human. So have we
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