Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  So this book began with a desire to tell the stories of some marriages as unsentimentally as possible, with attention to the shifting tides of power between a man and a woman joined, presumably, for life. My purposes were partly feminist (since marriage is so often the context within which a woman works out her destiny, it has always been an object of feminist scrutiny) and partly, in ways I shall explain, literary.

  I believe, first of all, that living is an act of creativity and that, at certain moments of our lives, our creative imaginations are more conspicuously demanded than at others. At certain moments, the need to decide upon the story of our own lives becomes particularly pressing – when we choose a mate, for example or embark upon a career. Decisions like that make sense, retroactively, of the past and project a meaning onto the future, knit past and future together, and create, suspended between the two, the present. Questions we have all asked of ourselves such as Why am I doing this? or the even more basic What am I doing? suggest the way in which living forces us to look for and forces us to find a design within the primal stew of data which is our daily experience. There is a kind of arranging and telling and choosing of detail – of narration, in short – which we must do so that one day will prepare for the next day, one week prepare for the next week. In some way we all decide when we have grown up and what event will symbolise for us that state of maturity – leaving home, getting married, becoming a parent, losing our parents, making a million, writing a book. To the extent that we impose some narrative form onto our lives, each of us in the ordinary process of living is a fitful novelist, and the biographer is a literary critic.

  Marriages, or parallel lives as I have chosen to call them, hold a particular fascination for the biographer-critic because they set two imaginations to work constructing narratives about experience presumed to be the same for both. In using the word parallel, however, I hope to call attention to the gap between the narrative lines as well as to their similarity.

  An older school of literary biography was concerned to show how ‘life’ had influenced an author’s work. My own assumption is that certain imaginative patterns – call them mythologies or ideologies – determine the shape of a writer’s life as well as his or her work. I therefore look for connections between the two without assuming that reality is the template for fiction – assuming, if anything, the reverse. In first approaching this material, I looked for evidence that what people read helped form their views of their own experience. Some emerged. Jane Welsh, for example, being courted by Thomas Carlyle, derived her view of their relationship from reading La Nouvelle Héloïse. Dickens’s management of his separation from his wife seemed influenced by the melodramas in which he was fond of acting. But what came to interest me more was the way in which every marriage was a narrative construct – or two narrative constructs. In unhappy marriages, for example, I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting, even if, as was the case with Mr and Mrs Mill, their own idea of their relationship is totally at variance with the facts. I speak with great trepidation about ‘facts’ in such matters, but, speaking loosely, the facts in the Mills’ case – that a woman of strong and uncomplicated will dominated a guilt-ridden man – were less important than their shared imaginative view of the facts, that their marriage fitted their shared ideal of a marriage of equals. I assume, then, as little objective truth as possible about these parallel lives, for every marriage seems to me a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent.

  That, sketchily, is the ground of my literary interest in parallel lives, but there is a political dimension as well. On the basis of family life, we form our expectations about power and powerlessness, about authority and obedience in other spheres and in that sense the family is, as has so often been insisted, the building block of society. The idea of the family as a school for civic life goes back to the ancient Romans, and feminist criticism of the family as such a school – the charge that it is a school for despots and slaves – goes back at least to John Stuart Mill.2 I cite this tradition to locate, in part, my own position: like Mill, I believe marriage to be the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults, and so I am interested in the management of power between men and women in that microcosmic relationship. Whatever the balance, every marriage is based upon some understanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between its two partners. Marriages go bad not when love fades – love can modulate into affection without driving two people apart – but when this understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength.

  People who find this a chilling way to talk about one of our most treasured human bonds will object that ‘power struggle’ is a flawed circumstance into which relationships fall when love fails. (For some people it is impossible to discuss power without adding the word struggle.) I would counter by pointing out the human tendency to invoke love at moments when we want to disguise transactions involving power. Like the aged Lear handing over his kingdom to his daughters, when we resign power or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power. Like an enzyme which blocks momentarily a normal biological process, what we call love may inhibit the process of power negotiation – from which inhibition comes the illusion of equality so characteristic of lovers. If the impulse to abjure measurement and negotiation comes from within, unbidden, it is one of life’s graces and blessings. But if it is culturally induced, and more particularly desired of one segment of humanity than another, then we may perhaps find it repugnant and call it a mask for exploitation. Surely, in regard to marriage, love has received its fair share of attention, power less than its share.3 For every social scientist discussing the family as a psychopolitical structure,4 for every John Stuart Mill talking about ‘subjection’ in marriage, how many pieties are daily uttered about love? Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives? Only millions of romantics can resist it – and other millions who might see it as the bone thrown to men to distract them from the bondage of their lives.

  In unconscious states, as we know from Freud, the mind is astonishingly fertile and inventive in its fiction-making, but in conscious states this is not so. The plots we choose to impose on our own lives are limited and limiting. And in no area are they so banal and sterile as in this of love and marriage. Nothing else being available to our imaginations, we will filter our experience through the romantic clichés with which popular culture bombards us. And because the callowness and conventionality of the plots we impose on ourselves are a betrayal of our inner richness and complexity, we feel anxious and unhappy. We may turn to therapy for help, but the plots it evokes, if done less than expertly, are also fairly limiting.

  Easy stories drive out hard ones. Simple paradigms prevail over complicated ones. If, within marriage, power is the ability to impose one’s imaginative vision and make it prevail, then power is more easily obtained if one has a simple and widely accepted paradigm at hand. The patriarchal paradigm has long enforced men’s power within marriage: a man works hard to make himself worthy of a woman; they marry; he heads the family; she serves him, working to please him and care for him, getting protection in return. This plot regularly generates its opposite, the plot of female power through weakness: the woman, somehow wounded by family life, needs to be cared for and requires an offering of guilt. Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, is a fairly spectacular example.5 The suffering female demanding care has often proved stronger than the conquering male deserving care – a dialectic of imaginative
visions of which the Carlyles provide a good example – but neither side of the patriarchal paradigm seems to bring out the best in humanity. In regard to marriage, we need more and more complex plots. I reveal my literary bias in saying I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely. In a pragmatic way, we can profit from an immersion in the nineteenth-century novel which took the various stages of marriage as its central subject.

  We tend to talk informally about other people’s marriages and to disparage our own talk as gossip. But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding. We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying. If marriage is, as Mill suggested, a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national elections. Cultural pressure to avoid such talk as ‘gossip’ ought to be resisted, in a spirit of good citizenship. In that spirit, then, I offer some private lives for examination and discussion. I will try to tell these stories in such a way as to raise questions about the role of power and the nature of equality within marriage, for I assume a connection between politics and sex. In the interests of objectivity, I offer the joint lives of some Victorian men and women for whom the rules of the game were perhaps clearer than they are for us.

  To many people the word Victorian means prudish, repressive, asexual and little more. This popular understanding has been wholly unaffected by over two decades of scholarship which have tried to destroy the notion of a monolithic Victorian culture in Britain, pointing out, to begin with, that a span of over sixty years (Victoria ruled from 1837 to 1901) is highly resistant to responsible generalisation. It has also been unaffected by a surge of memoirs, biographies and scholarly studies, led off by Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians, whose goal as a group has been, speaking crudely, to show the kinky side of Victorian life. (More accurately, I’d describe Marcus’s study of pornography and sexuality as aiming to suggest the tremendous amount of sexual energy which the Victorians were sublimating in the interests of civilisation.) Strange and marvellous stories have come to light, a remarkable number having to do with double or hidden lives. Arthur Munby (Munby: Man of Two Worlds), a respectable barrister, was obsessed with working-class women, collected their life stories and photographs, and was secretly married to his household servant for many years. J. R. Ackerley (My Father and Myself) discovered that his father, another person of seemingly irreproachable respectability, had maintained a separate household, with second wife and children, a few blocks from the family home. But even more important to Ackerley, a homosexual, was the discovery that his father, like many other Guardsmen, had been enthusiastically homosexual in his youth.

  Such books (I have mentioned a couple I found particularly absorbing) get talked about now in the amused or astonished tones children use for discussing evidence of their parents’ sexuality. The comparison is appropriate, since the Victorians – or more precisely our imagined condensation of Victorian culture – still constitute our parental generation in the largest sense and we rebel against a partly real, partly invented nineteenth-century sexual code. But we are the flip side of the same pancake. If Marcus began the process of resexualising the Victorians by suggesting the power of what they repressed, Foucault has more recently and from a more radical perspective attacked the whole notion of Victorian prudery.6 Whether one talks about sex encouragingly (as we do) or discouragingly (as the Victorians did) is of no significance to Foucault; the Victorians, like every generation since the eighteenth century, participated in the transformation of sex into ‘discourse’.

  When I said that the rules of the game were somewhat clearer for the Victorians than for us, I had in mind primarily the difficulty of divorce. Before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, divorce was possible in England only by Act of Parliament, a process so expensive and unusual as to place it virtually out of reach of the middle class, although, in special cases such as non-consummation, annulments were possible through the ecclesiastical courts. Even after 1857, when secular courts were established to grant divorces, relatively few people could bring themselves to submit to the scandalous procedure: adultery had invariably to be one of the grounds. So these unions, however haphazardly undertaken, were intended to last for life. Comparatively, our easy recourse to divorce seems – to adopt Robert Frost’s image – like playing tennis without the net. John Stuart Mill, who advocated divorce, nevertheless believed that re-marriage was an inefficient remedy for certain kinds of marital distress, those caused by the human tendency to grow unhappy in the course of years and to blame this unhappiness on one’s spouse. The sufferer, after the initial elation brought by change, would reach the same point eventually with a second mate, said Mill, and at what a cost of disrupted life! It has become a story familiar enough today. But the Victorians, with no easy escape from difficult domestic situations, were forced to be more inventive.

  Few were more inventive than Mill’s eventual wife, Harriet Taylor, who, for twenty years, arranged to live in a virtual ménage à trois with her husband and Mill, a companion to both, lover to neither. Her inventiveness depended on a de-emphasis of sexual fulfilment which it requires effort to perceive as useful rather than merely pinched. But I think the effort must be made. Of the five marriages I discuss, at least two of them, and possibly a third, were sexless, and it will not do just to say ‘How bizarre.’

  In fact, scholars in our own post-liberated age who interest themselves in innovative living arrangements are beginning to discover that people a hundred years ago may have had more flexibility than we do now. Lillian Faderman, for example, has described with great sympathy the nineteenth-century American practice of the ‘Boston marriage’, a long-term monogamous relationship between two women who are otherwise unmarried.7 The emotional and even financial advantages of such a relationship are immediately evident, whether or not – and this is something we shall never know – sex was involved. The important point is that such relationships were seen as healthy and useful. Henry James, for one, was delighted that his sister Alice had some joy in her life, in the form of her Boston marriage to Katherine Loring. But what seemed healthy and useful to the nineteenth century suddenly became ‘abnormal’ after the impact, in the early twentieth century, of popular Freudianism. With all experience sexualised, living arrangements such as those Boston marriages could not be so easily entered upon or easily discussed; they became outlaw, suppressed, matters to hide. By the mid-1920s, it was no longer possible to mention a Boston marriage without embarrassment. By sexualising experience, popular Freudianism had the moralistic result of limiting possibilities.

  I prefer to see the sexless marriages I discuss as examples of flexibility rather than of abnormality. Some people might say they are not really marriages because they are sexless; it’s a point I’d want to argue. There must be other models of marriage – of long-term association between two people – than the very narrow one we are all familiar with, beginning with a white wedding gown, leading to children and ending in death or, these days increasingly often, in divorce.

  Many cultural circumstances worked against the likelihood of sexual satisfaction within Victorian marriages. The inflexible taboo on pre-marital sex for middle-class women meant, among other things, that it was impossible to determine sexual compatibility before marriage. The law then made the wife absolute property of her husband and sexual performance one of her duties. Imagine a young woman married to a man she finds physically repulsive. She is in the position of being raped nightly – and with the law’s consent. The legendary Victorian advice about sex, ‘Lie back and think of England’, may be seen as not entirely comical if we realise that in many cases a distaste for sex developed from a distaste for the first sexual partner and from sexual performance which was essentially forced. In addition, the absence of bir
th control made it impossible to separate sex from its reproductive function, so that to be sexually active meant also the discomforts of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth and the burden of children. For men, the middle-class taboo on pre-marital sex meant sexual experience could be obtained only with prostitutes or working-class women, an early conditioning which Freud said breeds dangers in the erotic life, by encouraging a split between objects of desire and objects of respect.8

  We would seem to have a greater chance of happiness now. Theoretically, men and women can get to know each other in casual, relaxed circumstances before marrying. More young people feel free to sleep together, to live together before marriage. They do not have to wait until they are irrevocably joined to discover they are incompatible. Nor are they so irrevocably joined. If we discover, as we seem to, early and late, that despite all our opportunity to test compatibility, we have married someone with whom we are not compatible, we can disconnect ourselves and try again. Perhaps most important, women can hold jobs, earn a living, own property, thereby gaining a chance for some status in the family. Birth control is reliable and available, so women needn’t be, quite so much as formerly, the slaves of children. Nor need men be so oppressed by the obligation of supporting large and expensive families. We can separate sex from reproduction; it can be purely a source of pleasure. If all this does not ensure that, cumulatively, we are happier in our domesticity than the Victorians, then perhaps we expect even more of our marriages than the Victorians did – perhaps we place too much of a burden on our personal relationships, as Christopher Lasch, among others, has suggested.9 Or perhaps the deep tendency of human nature to unhappiness is even harder to reach by legislation and technology than one might have thought.