Parallel Lives
Page 3
Neither in novels nor in biographical material can I find much evidence that people of the last century placed less emphasis on their personal relationships than we do. Romantic expectations seem to know no season, except the season of life. Dickens and Carlyle offer examples of one connubial dream: that an idealised woman will reward the young man for his professional labours. Of the five Victorian couples I have written about, the Mills and the Leweses, for various reasons, expected less out of marriage and found greater satisfaction in it than the others. Temperament and ideological bent seem more important in determining happiness than whether one lived in the nineteenth or the twentieth century.
We should remind ourselves, I think, of the romantic bias in Anglo-American attitudes towards marriage, whether of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. Effie Ruskin, travelling in Italy, discovered how much more comfortable Continental ways of being married were than English. For the English assumed you loved your husband and were loved by him and wanted to be with him as much as possible, whereas the Europeans made no such extraordinary assumption. They knew they were making the best of a difficult situation often arranged by people other than the participants and for reasons quite apart from love, and so they gave each other considerable latitude. One hardly knows whether the Victorians suffered more from their lack of easy recourse to divorce or from the disappearance of the brisk assumptions of arranged marriages. At least when marriages were frankly arrangements of property, no one expected them to float on an unceasing love-tide, whereas we and the Victorians have been in the same boat on that romantic flood.
In general, the similarities between marriages then and now seem to me greater than the differences. Then as now certain problems of adjustment, focusing usually on sex or relatives, seem typical of early stages of marriage, and others, for example absence of excitement, seem typical of later stages. In good marriages then as now shared experience forms a bond increasingly important with time, making discontents seem minor. And then as now, love also tends to walk out the door when poverty flies in the window. Conditions I would have thought unreproducible today – Ruskin’s total innocence of the female nude and consequent shock when confronted by one – turn out to have been reproduced in the lives of people I know. I have been reminded continually in these Victorian marriages of marriages of friends: strong women still adopt a protective colouring of weakness as George Eliot did; earnest men with strongly egalitarian politics are still subject to domination by shrews, as John Mill was; men like Dickens still divorce in middle age the wives they have used up and outdistanced; clever women like Jane Carlyle still solace themselves for their powerlessness by mocking their husbands. Moreover, attitudes towards marriage which I would have thought outdated prove not to be. Apparently it is still possible to assume that the man is without question the more important partner in a marriage. That is, the patriarchal paradigm still prevails. Indeed, as fundamentalist religion and morality revive in contemporary America’s ethical vacuum, we are likely to find ourselves fighting the nineteenth-century wars of personal morality all over again. Since we have not come so far as some of us fear and some of us hope we have, people who want to legislate morality back to an imagined ideal should, at the least, learn some humility in the face of the conservatism of human nature.
The following chapters on the marriages of Jane and Thomas Carlyle, of Effie Gray and John Ruskin, of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, of Harriet and John Stuart Mill and of Catherine and Charles Dickens are selective. That is, I do not attempt to cover the chronology of any marriage. If every marriage is, as Jessie Bernard puts it, two marriages – the man’s and the woman’s – a satisfactory treatment would require two books, one from his point of view and one from hers, or at least one novel with a high degree of complexity. So I have focussed on one period or problem per chapter, providing for the most part two chapters on each couple. These chapters are consecutive except for the ones on the Carlyles, which frame the others – the first on their courtship and Thomas’s ascendance, the second on the later stages and Jane’s. When read in sequence, the chapters offer a somewhat chronological spectrum of marriage. That it is a perverse spectrum I hardly need underline. Not all courtships are quite so epistolary as the Carlyles’, nor conclude with quite so dramatic a reversal of all the conventions of the preceding months. Not all wedding nights are so traumatic as the Ruskins’, and not all newlyweds have quite so much trouble adjusting to each other’s families. The Ruskins allow me to write about the triangle, that recurrent feature of marriage, although many triangles prove to be more stable arrangements than that of the Ruskins and John Everett Millais. In the chapters on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, I deal with the lassitude that develops after some years of marriage and one scenario for coping with it. Departing from chronology, I also deal with the issue of equality in marriage, which was important to the Mills and must be to anyone who thinks critically about marriage. Dickens comes next, as an example of what we would now call ‘mid-life crisis’ and one way of dealing with it – taking out his dissatisfactions entirely on his wife and ending his marriage. George Eliot and George Henry Lewes follow, providing an example of a couple who stayed together happily until death parted them. I admit this is my favourite couple, and I do not find it accidental to their happiness (or to my pleasure) that their marriage wasn’t a legal one. The book concludes with an exploration of the Carlyles’ marriage at a late stage, when tensions and jealousy had entered it, and an exploration of how, after Jane’s death, she avenged herself, through her diary, for all the wounds her husband gave her when she was alive.
I set out to choose my subjects on the grounds of variety and intrinsic narrative interest. My two goals were not entirely compatible, and narrative interest won out. Still, two of my subjects (Dickens and George Eliot) are novelists and three, in different ways, are social critics (Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill). Two are liberal (George Eliot and Mill) and three are what I would call romantic authoritarians (Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle). I wanted happy and wretched couples, stable and unstable couples, couples with children and couples without. I wanted examples of various configurations of power – dominant men, dominant women and, if it existed, equality. But my couples are more unhappy than happy, more unstable than stable, more childless than parental, more sexless than sexually fulfilled. Perhaps my own mythology appears in my choices, but I feel, too, that I discovered for myself the specific truth of Tolstoy’s generalisation: ‘happy families are all alike’ – in offering the world less interesting stories than the unhappy families. This rule of narrative is a shame, leading to the proliferation of images of misery and a paucity of models of happiness. For my part, to counteract it, I have included Mr and Mrs Darwin (about whom I had originally intended to write a long chapter) in the concluding chronology, Mrs Darwin regularly giving birth to another child with Mr Darwin, dear, loving, unable to witness her pain without pain to himself, hovering over her, anxious and concerned.
Finally, I have chosen to write about writers not because they live more intelligently – or less so – than other people, nor in the belief that they are representative. I expect, quite the contrary, that writers, like other people who must push their psychic development to extremes, are less able than most people to live comfortably within the constraints of the customary. But, however they live, writers tend to report on it more amply than most people – in their letters and journals and, to some extent, in their imaginative work. I wanted to work with couples about whom a lot was known so that I could direct my efforts, biographically, to the shaping of narratives rather than archival research. To Victorianists, no new facts will be revealed, yet I hope the work as a whole will suggest new truths, especially the extent to which all living is a creative act of greater or lesser authenticity, hindered or helped by the fictions to which we submit ourselves.
Although I began the book with no thesis to prove, merely with a feminist scepticism about marriage, a taste for the higher gossip, a distaste for the rh
etoric of romantic love and a desire to look at marriages as imaginative projections and arrangements of power, I ended with a bewildered respect for the durability of the pair, in all its variations. Perhaps predictably, I became more convinced than ever about the sterility, for men as well as women, of the patriarchal ideal of marriage and more sceptical about the chances of any particular marriage to escape its influence.
Psychologically, the purpose of marriage is not obscure. It provides limits within which one defines oneself, against which one can usefully rebel. It enforces depth. One’s relationship to a person known over years is unlikely to be ‘happier’ than one’s relationship with a stranger (hence the perpetual appeal of strangers), but it is qualitatively richer, deeper. As in the relationship between parents and children, meaning develops simply because of time and intimacy. The social purpose of marriage, however, has gotten increasingly murky since the mid-nineteenth century. (By the end of the century, George Bernard Shaw could get a laugh, in Misalliance, from the refreshingly simple idea that couples should marry for money. Shaw had no truck with the sentimental burden which the institution of marriage has been made to bear.) Divorce, far from clarifying things, makes marriage even more problematic. What does the promise of a permanent commitment mean when everyone knows it’s provisional?
I am tempted to say that divorce makes marriage meaningless – which doesn’t mean I would wish there to be less divorce, just less marriage. When divorce is possible, people no longer need to conform themselves to the discipline of the marital relationship. Instead the law is pressured to authorise more personalised and meaningful forms of relationship. This is the wrong way round. People should be able to hide within the thickets of the law, in Thomas More’s phrase. The attempt to make laws supple enough to accommodate the wrinkles of their personalities and desires may be quixotic. Since it was in the nineteenth century that the attempt was first made to humanise the marriage laws, it was in the nineteenth century that marriage as an institution began to lose meaning. Bad enough to choose once in a lifetime whom to live with; to go on choosing, to reaffirm one’s choice day after day, as one must when it is culturally possible to divorce, is really asking a lot of people. Perhaps better the old way, indissoluble unions with a great deal of civilised behaviour – in other words, secrecy, even lying – for the sake of harmony.10 Or the way of the future, frankly personal unions entered into personally, with carefully articulated and individualised pledges of fidelity, if any.
Late nineteenth-century feminists urged the public to accept the idea that all women were not made for marriage, that other ways of living should be encouraged. This was the point of George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women; the oddness of the protagonists consists in their not wanting to marry. But despite Gissing and feminist interest, remote and more recent, in unmarried lives, the pressure to marry has not much abated. Since the 1890s society has seen to it that it is easier and easier to get out of marriage, but it has made it only a little easier to avoid getting into it in the first place. My own feeling is that marriage still displaces too many other possibilities in our culture, at least in part because of its narrative appeal, the clear-cut beginnings and endings it offers, the richly complicated middle. As Barthes says, if we managed to suppress marriage, what would we have left to tell? Perhaps someday this will change, and our descendants, looking back at us from a marriage-less, anarchic, free-form or postmodern future, will find our attempts to live parallel lives deliciously quaint.
I hope this book will have a mirroring effect similar to the effect that Froude’s biography of Carlyle had on Leslie Stephen, but not exactly. For I do not want to move readers either to self-blame or the blame of others. I would like them to be prompted by these stories to question how the presumption of marriage, the fiction of marriage, has affected the shape of their lives, for I believe that marriage, whether we see it as a psychological relationship or a political one, has determined the story of all our lives more than we have generally acknowledged. The extent to which these particular marriages serve as parallels to lives closer to their own in time and place readers must of course decide for themselves.
NOTES
1.Sir Leslie Stephen, The Mausoleum Book, introduction by Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
2.It is possible to read Jane Eyre as a critique of the family along the same lines. Jane charges John Reed, the spoiled son of her foster family, with being a despot like Caligula and castigates herself for allowing him to treat her as a slave. Her adult encounters with Rochester are conscious attempts to re-adjust the usual balance of power between men and women. She is successful, at least in part, because of Rochester’s blinding and maiming in the fire which destroys his house.
Henry Kissinger has said that power in a man is aphrodisiac to women, but the absence of power may be equally alluring. Witness the perennial popularity of narratives about love between a woman and an attractive man who is suddenly maimed and made dependent, from Jane Eyre to the film Coming Home, in which the heroine prefers the paraplegic Vietnam veteran to her macho officer-husband. Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour, about an upper-middle-class Parisian who works in a brothel for kicks until her surgeon-husband is blinded and crippled by one of her clients, is virtually a case study of the connection between power, sex and marriage.
On women’s alliances with socially or economically disadvantaged men as conscious or semi-conscious attempts to redress the usual power arrangement in marriage, see also Jane Marcus on Virginia Woolf’s choice of Leonard and Beatrice Webb’s choice of Sidney: ‘The only solution for the woman who wanted independence, an intellectual and social partnership, instead of the slaveries and servilities of middle-class marriage, was to choose a mate who was an outsider, below her class, infatuated with her beauty and distinction, and indebted to her for her small income, which allowed him to pursue his own intellectual work.’ (Review of A Victorian Courtship: The Story of Beatrice Potter and Sidney Webb, in Victorian Studies [Spring 1981], 579.)
3.Despite our willingness to assert love’s importance in marriage, we seem to have some trouble in knowing exactly what it is. In my own effort to answer this question, I turned to a relatively sophisticated textbook on courtship, marriage and the family, which offers a chapter titled ‘What is Love?’ It tells me first that love is a relationship which progresses through various stages: rapport, self-revelation, mutual dependency and personality need fulfilment. It then instructs me on the difference between eros and agape, sexual and selfless love, with a considerable charge in favour of the latter. It then cites Fromm to the effect that love is an art, something to be practised and worked upon. It distinguishes at length between immature and mature love. (Immature love is born at first sight and is the sort you think will conquer all, demands exclusive attention, is characterised by exploitation, is built upon physical attraction and sexual gratification, demands changes in the partner to satisfy its own needs and desires but is itself static and egocentric, romanticises itself and refuses to face reality and is irresponsible, failing to consider the consequences of actions, whereas mature love is a developing relationship which deepens with realistically shared experiences, is built upon self-acceptance, seeks to aid the loved one without constantly striving for recompense, includes sexual satisfaction but not to the exclusion of other kinds of sharing, can accommodate the growth and creativity of the loved one, enhances reality, making the partners more complete and adequate, and is responsible, gladly accepting the consequences of mutual involvement.) Finally, the textbook provides me with a ‘Caring Relationship Index’. All this the textbook does so that I, and other anxious students like me, may know if we love, and if we do love, whether we love in the right (mature) way. I am put in mind of the perplexity of some of John Wesley’s followers, who, believing that love of God was the way to Heaven, as Wesley told them, wanted him to explain to them how they would know if they loved God or not.
On the repression of the subject of power as it affects human relat
ionships, see Robert Seidenberg, Marriage Between Equals (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1973. Orig. titled Marriage in Life and Literature [New York: Philosophical Library, 1970]). This intelligent and unpretentious book by a psychiatrist deserves to be more widely known.
4.See especially David Kantor and William Lehr, Inside the Family: Toward a Theory of Family Process (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976), which identifies three basic family structures, each with characteristic aspirations and mechanisms. The ‘closed’ family, the most traditional, values discipline, strong central authority, unity, clear roles and loyalty. The ‘open’ family seeks to gain the consensus of all members of the family for action and emphasises tolerance and cooperation. The ‘random’ family is a collection of individuals who acknowledge a minimal connection, making collective action difficult but offering considerable freedom and encouraging inventiveness. Families rarely exist in one form at all times but adopt one form or another for various aspects of life. I am simplifying Kantor and Lehr’s complicated and subtle model of family interactions, in which power is only one of a few valences. Nevertheless, their models of family systems are like political structures.
5.See, for a classic feminist exposition of Jane Eyre, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 336–71.
6.Robert Hurley, trans., The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
7. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), esp. 190–203.