Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

There is in the park this afternoon a man whom Mr Gladstone once imprisoned – Michael Davitt; but Mr Gladstone is now on the best of terms with him. What do you suppose is the reason for this change? Why has the Liberal Party been so suddenly converted to Home Rule? Simply because the Irish people sent eighty members of the House of Commons to support the Conservatives; in the same way we must kick these Liberal and Radical members out if they refuse to support our programme.

  I am speaking this afternoon not only as a Trade Unionist, but as a Socialist. Socialists believe that the eight hours’ day is the first and most immediate step to be taken, and we aim at a time when there will no longer be one class supporting two others, but the unemployed both at the top and at the bottom of society will be got rid of. This is not the end but only the beginning of the struggle; it is not enough to come here to demonstrate in favour of an eight hours’ day. We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us.36

  At this concluding point Eleanor paused, then rolled out Shelley’s great thunderous invocation to working-class Englishmen and women in The Masque of Anarchy:

  Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number,

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you –

  Ye are many – they are few.37

  19

  Ibsenist Interlude

  After two years unpunctuated by rest, Tussy was thrilled by an unexpected summer holiday in 1890. Her last break had been a few wet days in Cornwall with some ‘rich folk’ friends of Edward’s. They were welcoming and charming but Tussy felt uncomfortable. Outspoken and argumentative on socially inappropriate subjects – all of which to her seemed to be the only things worth talking about – smoking, seamlessly comical and unconventionally dressed, Tussy was a tiresome guest in polite society – and she knew it. Ibsen would have recognised her predicament.

  For over a decade, Tussy’s most enjoyable leisure time had been spent with Olive but she had returned home to South Africa the previous October. They didn’t know when they would see each other again. Her most intimate friend and confidante was now on the other side of the world and Tussy saw less of the heartbroken Havelock Ellis after Olive had left.

  In July 1890, the General spent a few enjoyable weeks in Norway and wrote to Tussy urging her and Edward to do the same. It was time she took a break and, after all, he was ‘amazed that such zealous Ibsenites could bear to wait so long before setting eyes on the new Promised Land’.1 Tussy had recently been commissioned by the publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin to translate Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, written in 1888. It was due out in a separate volume later in the year, with an introduction by writer Edmund Gosse. Eleanor and Edward were also booked to co-produce the play in London at Terry’s Theatre the following May. In the context of all this Ibsenism, the General was right – it was time Tussy made pilgrimage to Norway and the translation work could pay for it.

  They took the prompt and set sail on 6 August. Tussy and Edward’s three-week tour of Ibsen’s Norway was in many ways a voyage around themselves and their troubled relationship. Tussy recognised in Ibsen’s work what she struggled with in herself. The perception that monstrousness can be vanquished by beauty or love or good housekeeping or satisfactory sex or having children is one that has kept women in bad marriages since the beginning of time. Means of escape are available but the methods and opportunities for survival are uncertain.

  This is one of Ibsen’s key themes.

  Ellida Wangel, protagonist of The Lady from the Sea, stays within the security of a marriage to which she finally becomes reconciled. Where Flaubert’s Emma Bovary exercises the suicide option, in A Doll’s House Nora Helmer, Ibsen implies, might get away without killing herself and even have a chance at forging a new existence. In her private, personal relationship with Edward there were many points of identification and resonance between Eleanor and Ibsen’s Nora Helmer and Ellida Wangel.

  The Lady from the Sea stages the dilemma of Ellida Wangel, who has to choose between a loving and devoted but boring, safe husband and a seductive but dangerous lover, a sailor who returns from her past to try and reclaim her. The lure of sexual desire is at the heart of the play. Ellida expresses her anguish over the presence of the unnamed stranger, the ‘horrible, unfathomable power he has over my mind’.2

  The audience experiences Dr Wangel’s gathering apprehension of the dilemma his wife faces: ‘I begin to understand little by little . . . Your longing and aching for the sea, your attraction towards this strange man, these were the expression of an awakening and growing desire for freedom; nothing else.’3 Once Ellida’s husband recognises and acknowledges to her that she is at liberty to make her own choice between them, she chooses him.

  George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and many of her close friends thought Edward’s hold over Tussy was predominantly sexual. But this was simplistic. Eleanor loved Edward. Edward loved himself. Of the two, he was the more content. His selfishness and egotism appalled Tussy but also fascinated and impressed her. She saw that his way of being inoculated him against her own virus of depression and world-weariness contracted from persistent empathy and over-identification with others.

  Edward’s marvellous immunity highlighted questions that remained unanswered by her family upbringing. What influences and factors, apart from the great structural edifices of capitalism, patriarchy, class inequality and the abstract forces of historical ma­terialism, make human beings prioritise self over others and, irrationally, individual over common good?

  A Doll’s House was Tussy’s favourite of all Ibsen’s plays. Edith Lees Ellis described its first public performance in Britain at the Novelty Theatre in London, on 7 June 1889:

  A few of us collected outside the theatre breathless with excitement. Olive Schreiner was there and Dollie Radford . . . and Eleanor Marx. We were restive and almost savage in our arguments. What did it mean? Was it life or death for women? Was it joy or sorrow for men? That a woman should demand her own emancipation and leave her husband and children in order to get it, savoured less of sacrifice than sorcery.4

  Even a conservative like Clement Scott of the Daily Telegraph, hostile to Ibsen’s ‘immoral universe’, acknowledged he was in the presence of great theatre: ‘the interest was so intense last night that a pin might have been heard to drop. ’5

  A Doll’s House had a more profound impact on British theatre than any other stage production of the late Victorian era. The actor Harley Granville-Barker described it as ‘the most dramatic event of the decade’.6 Ibsen’s unsparing study of the marriage between infantilised Nora and tyrannical Torvald electrified middle-class audiences into shocked recognition. Social conservatives said it would corrupt women, destroy the quietude and rule of men, and hasten the end of decent British morality founded on hearth and home, where middle-class women knew their place as subordinate to husband and children.

  Progressives saw the piece as holding out the possibility of social change if women could muster the courage to refuse their assigned domestic social roles. ‘Ibsenism’ was the label attached to new social movements – socialists, feminists, Marxists, Fabians – who interpreted Ibsen as a pioneer of the new theatre that radicalised classical theatrical forms and repertoire.

  By and large, the British press objected to Ibsen’s new vision by charging him with cheap obscenity. Ibsenism, declared the Evening Standard, was enjoyed only by ‘lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art’.7

  Shaw succinctly grasped the essential point of Ibsen. ‘It is in the middle class itself that the revolt against middle class ideals breaks out . . . Neither peer nor labourer has ever hated the bourgeoisie as Marx hated it, or despised its ideals as Swift, Ibsen and Strindberg despised them.’8 He saw that people driven fr
om conventional theatre by the ‘intolerable emptiness of the ordinary peformances’ started to enjoy theatre again when they encountered Ibsen, whose work was without ‘the conventional lies of the stage’:9

  The woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her husband left staring at her, helpless, bound thenceforth either to do without her (an alternative which makes short work of his independence) or else treat her as a human being like himself, fully recognizing that he is not a creature of one superior species, Man, living with a creature of another and inferior species, Woman, but that Mankind is male and female.10

  For Eleanor, A Doll’s House encompassed what she loved about those moments in art when individual human stories intersected with social contradiction and ethical struggle, that place where freedom prompts the individual to think about how things might be made different in the future.

  The Playgoers’ Club, originally formed in 1884, reassembled to debate the ‘Ibsen question’. Edward performed an excellent reading of Ghosts and Tussy gave a lecture on ‘Immorality on the Stage’. She and GBS always sat together at club meetings, and disrupted the seriousness of the proceedings. As he recalled, ‘Mrs Aveling and I being of course seasoned socialist mob orators, were much in the position of a pair of terriers dropped into a pit of rats.’11

  Several writers penned parodic sequels to A Doll’s House, Eleanor amongst them. In March 1891, Time magazine published A Doll’s House Repaired, co-written by Eleanor and Israel Zangwill.

  Zangwill, known as the ‘Jewish Dickens’, was born in London in 1864 to a Latvian father and a Polish mother. As a child, he attended the Jews’ Free School in Spitalfields, where he became a pupil-teacher. Next, he was admitted to the University of London. Zangwill later became well known as a writer in Britain and America as the author of Children of the Ghetto, published in 1892. He coined the phrase ‘the melting pot’, the title of his hit play that stormed Broadway in 1908. He was a moderate pacifist and steadfast supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. His association with Zionism began in 1895, when he introduced his friend Theodor Herzl to potential sponsors amongst his Anglo-Jewish intellectual friends. When he and Tussy met, he was at the start of his career, working as a cartoonist, humorist and journalist and, being nearly a decade her junior, somewhat in awe of her. He introduced her to several of his intellectual circles, including the Jewish Wanderers of Kilburn, and many of his friends believed he pined for Tussy’s romantic attentions.

  Israel and Tussy’s entertaining lampoon proposed modest alterations to the architecture of A Doll’s House, in order to repair its ‘manifestly impossible, nay, immoral conclusion’:12

  how ridiculous and hateful the conception of a woman deliberately abandoning husband and children must be to an English audience. In accordance with these clean, wholesome ideas of morality we have slightly altered the third act . . . alterations that . . . cannot fail to satisfy the English sense of morality and decency.13

  In their version Nora apologises for acting and thinking for herself, and admits to her error in having worked to earn money. Contrite, she stays on Torvald’s terms, and resolves to mend her wilful ways.14

  On their return from Norway, Tussy returned to lecturing, wage labour and political activism. She now experienced the patriarchal sexism within some sectors of the socialist movement that punished women who spoke up too loudly. Our Mother was becoming too powerful a public figure. She needed to be cut down to size. Eleanor’s first realisation that she was being targeted specifically as a woman was when she was excluded from the Trades Union Congress of 1890.

  By 1890, the Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers had a hundred branches around the UK and a paid-up membership of 60,000. The union sent nine delegates to the congress, from Bristol, Dublin, Leeds, Manchester, Birkenhead and Uxbridge. Eleanor was one of the three delegates elected by the membership to represent London. To her surprise, the national executive committee – of which she was a member – informed her that she would not be admitted as a delegate. She was even more shocked at the reason for the rejection. Her mandate, ‘conferred upon me by the representatives of the whole union – is rejected on the grounds that I am not a working woman!’15

  Clementina Black and Lady Emilia Dilke, the writer, art historian feminist and trade unionist, were both admitted to the TUC. ‘Miss Black, who has never done a day’s manual labour is admitted. I am boycotted!’16 Clementina, a friend, confirmed to Tussy that she had not been asked to be a delegate, especially as ‘I do not at the present time hold any position that would entitle me to have done so.’ In fact, she reported, she and Lady Dilke were merely ‘allowed by the special kindness of the president and vice-president to sit in a vacant place at one of the delegate’s tables’.17 This was exactly the evidence Tussy needed. ‘Now, to begin with, I am a working woman – I work a typewriter; and secondly it is surely preposterous for anyone except the Congress itself to declare who shall sit and who shall not.’18

  Will Thorne and other delegates brought the matter before congress on her behalf, without success. Tussy was stuck in a press seat, as reporter for four different international newspapers. Presumably being a journalist for four different publications in three languages didn’t make her a working woman either.19

  Due to Eleanor, the gas workers were so far the only union to have two women’s branches. With her leadership on the national executive committee, the entire gas workers’ union – not just the women’s chapters – supported the demand for equal pay for women workers doing the same work as men. The intervention by officials to overrule the representational rules of Congress and ignore the gas workers’ union mandate was an attempt to sabotage the challenge that equal pay for women brought to the predominantly skilled, worker-based, male-dominated TUC.

  Eleanor went after them publicly. She pointed out that the same stonewalling of democratically mandated women delegates had been tried on Edith Simcox and Annie Besant at the 1888 International TUC. Simcox and Besant were president and secretary respectively of the Matchmaker’s Union. The ‘old unionists’ were for keeping them out, but in that case were outvoted by new unionists Will Thorne, John Burns and – significantly – ‘foreigners’ from European unions. In the absence of universal male and female suffrage, the TUC was the labour parliament and the principle was one of labour representation:

  Passing over the fact that I am a worker, the important points are: – (1) That according to the standing orders any legal member of a trade union duly elected is eligible, this condition I fulfilled, having been elected not even (as most delegates) by a small Executive, but by a conference representing the whole Union. (2) A Union of men and women has the right to decide by whom it shall be represented, a principle recognized in Parliamentary representation.20

  Denied her elected place amongst the delegates, Eleanor angrily joined the press corps, where Cunninghame Graham watched her, observing that she was thoughtful, shortsighted, eloquent of speech and pen.

  The following year the executive of the French Workers’ Party invited Eleanor and Cunninghame Graham to attend their Lille congress in October. Eleanor was the only recognised delegate from a foreign country and the only woman officially listed. On arrival she was bounced into an unanticipated event:

  . . . think of my horror, General, when huge placards on the Lille walls calling for a meeting with a large white slip pasted across stared me in the face with the following announcement, ‘Sous la présidence de Eleanor Marx-Aveling’! I felt mightily inclined to clear out – but couldn’t very well, and the meeting went off all right under my ‘présidence’.21

  Her ‘présidence’ was, however short-lived. From Lille she took the overnight train to Halle in Germany to attend the German Social Democratic Congress. She got lumbered with three French delegates who, though charming, expected her – because she was the only woman – to look after them. She wrote to the General, ‘If I ever travel in “foreign parts” with one [Frenchman] – let alone
three – again, may I be damned. I would rather travel with two babies in arms and half a dozen others. They couldn’t be more helpless and they wouldn’t be nearly so troublesome.’22 They nearly cried, she told the General, when they didn’t get their meals soon enough.

  In November Tussy was called to Lenchen’s deathbed. Helen Demuth, her ‘second mother’, died aged seventy, from untreatable cancer, on 4 November 1890. Freddy Demuth was now motherless and, as far as Tussy knew, in the painful position of having a still-living father who, unaccountably, refused to openly acknowledge him or his grandson Harry.

  No one pressed Lenchen for final confirmation of Freddy’s paternity on her deathbed. Lenchen commanded a stoical silence that they dared not breach. It was obvious she would reveal nothing that might compromise the General whilst he was still alive. Yet here was a contradiction at the heart of her family that spoke directly to Eleanor’s thinking on ‘the woman question’. Engels was a freedom-loving libertarian who’d written more cogently than anyone she knew – including her own father – on bourgeois sexual hypocrisy. His refusal to acknowledge his paternity of Freddy seemed unfathomable.

  The accounts for the Bloomsbury Socialist Society and Central Committee for the Eight-Hour Day show that Lenchen continually donated money to these campaigns and the May Day demonstrations. She remained a socialist until the end of her life.

  Following Möhme’s instructions, Lenchen was buried with Karl and Jenny in their Highgate grave, in which little Jean Longuet also rested. Whatever the genuine bonds of love, trust and mutual respect between this extraordinary triumvirate, there was always a hierarchy in the triangle: Karl at the pinnacle, served by Jenny and Lenchen, who also served Jenny. As Tussy observed, if a wife can love devotedly a husband who subordinates and constrains her, so too can a servant love a mistress or master who does the same.