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by Wendy W. Fairey

  In the nineteenth-century-novel seminar Alice drove us hard, expecting us to read two major novels each week. This was, of course, completely unrealistic. How can one, for example, read Dombey and Son and Bleak House in one week? I can’t remember now what I actually managed to read, but I did tackle Middlemarch, falling completely under the spell of its breadth and intricacy, its melancholy and its moments of great tenderness, the author’s wise and vast understanding of human nature, and her sardonic wit, as uncompromising as her sympathies are broad.

  Daniel Deronda followed, even more mesmerizing in its wise, cynical understanding of society and human nature. I remember being struck by the way Grandcourt’s entry into the novel echoes the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Austen’s irony is unsurpassed. Yet Bingley, the man in possession of the fortune at hand, proves the socially and morally appropriate husband for Jane Bennet, and his even richer and more aristocratic friend Darcy the supremely right husband for Elizabeth. In Grandcourt, the social and the moral part company. Coming on the scene at the archery meet at Arrowwood, Sir Hugo’s heir to the baronetcy is described as “good looking, of sound constitution, virtuous, or at least reformed,” an irony then extended as the perspective of Gwendolyn’s worldly cleric uncle, the Reverend Gascoigne:

  He held it futile, even if it had been becoming, to show any curiosity as to the past of a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable. Whatever Grandcourt had done, he had not ruined himself; and it is well known that in gambling, for example, whether of the business or holiday sort, a man who has the strength of character to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character.

  The effect on me of reading such a passage was to feel the strengthening of my own moral anchor and sound judgment. George Eliot led me to understand the intricate social maneuvers of her provincial world, and somehow that put me on the author’s plane of perspicacity. Characters in the novel may be willfully or naively obtuse about Grandcourt, but George Eliot is wise to him, and so am I, her reader. I join the author in penetrating the ways of the world and also share, through my discernment, in the linguistic tools at her command—her irony, her apt metaphors, her well-controlled sentences. If Eliot fails to find interesting gestures for Daniel, who can pull only at his shirt collar, she creates wonderful ones for Gwendolyn and Grandcourt: Gwendolyn beating the rhododendron bushes and dropping her riding whip to ward off Grandcourt’s proposal; Grandcourt teasing his dog to arouse its jealousy.

  When it came time to enlist a faculty member to direct my dissertation, I turned to Alice Fredman. She was not Columbia’s foremost nineteenth-century novel scholar—that was Steven Marcus, the disciple of Lionel Trilling, who had recently published a well-received book on early Dickens, From Pickwick to Dombey, which combined close textual analysis with Freudian insights, and who would later write on Victorian pornography in The Other Victorians. But my awe of him was too great to imagine myself as his student. I had sat through two years of his lectures on Victorian literature, which after one week in a regular classroom had been shifted to an amphitheatre in the Law School to accommodate his following. At the end of the first year we were only halfway through the syllabus, so Marcus said he would assume the privilege of European lecturers and continue the course the next year. I still have his notes and use them in my teaching. But despite my sense of receiving, almost like Leda from the swan, his brilliant insights and interpretations, Steven Marcus still seemed a god and I a lowly mortal. Gender as well as rank entered into my sense of the gap between us, for Columbia in those years right before second-wave feminism was not an encouraging environment for women. When female students applied to be preceptors—graduate students who taught freshman English—it was rumored that we were chosen on the basis of our legs. I’m not sure that’s true, but the culture was one of male luminaries and their male acolytes. Of the four young women in our first-year proseminar in the modernist period—my major period through my PhD orals—I was the only one who finished the degree. Two dropped out at the end of the first year—one choosing the alternative of a career in music and the other drifting to London where she got a low-paying job in publishing. Today the musician is a well-known conductor and the woman who went to London a successful poet, courted by academic institutions. Probably they made good decisions. The fourth woman, whom I’ve lost track of, completed the M.A., then married her boyfriend and took a teaching job in a private day school in New Jersey.

  I alone persisted, as much from doggedness and lack of interest in other possibilities as from any sense of talent or calling. To myself I was the opposite of a George Eliot heroine. Rather than needing my ego to be scourged, I saw it as needing to be bolstered. As I write, I can hear my friends and children laughing at this notion. Perhaps I was already more strong-willed and strong-minded than the person I remember being. It’s hard to reconstruct the reality of one’s earlier self. Nonetheless, I wonder how I would have fared without Alice Fredman, the tough-talking, cigar-smoking New Yorker with her family tucked away on Long Island, whom I knew I could turn to and count on. She sagely steered me through Columbia politics, guided the dissertation, and later wrote generous references to help me get a job. Or perhaps it was the most help of all that I knew she liked me. She and Freddy even came to my wedding. I have a wedding-album photo of her dressed in a no-nonsense checked spring suit and smoking, as best I can make out, not a thin cigar but a cigarette that is held out in one hand. Freddy is in the background of the photo, standing a bit diffidently behind her.

  iii

  THE FOUR YEARS I spent researching and writing about George Eliot coincided for me with the early years of marriage. In a sense this is a random link, but given everything that happened, it’s one that became filled with meaning.

  In the fall of 1970, I was twenty-eight years old. I had been married for a year and a half to Donald Fairey, given birth to my first child, Emily, passed my PhD oral examinations, as it turned out, with distinction, and, despite short legs inherited from my father, been now teaching for two years as a Columbia preceptor. It was a time of great turmoil for the university and the nation, as we protested the Vietnam War, grieved the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and supported the SDS university strikes and shut downs. And yet it was a settled and harmonious time for me personally. Donald and I were tenants on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, owned by one of my Bryn Mawr classmates, who had married an architect. My classmate and her husband lived on the first two floors, and another couple rented the garden apartment. Susan Suzman, the garden-level neighbor, and I gave birth to our daughters within weeks of one another. That meant all three families were raising small children, and we fell into easy semi-communal living. Susan and I traded off babysitting with her taking care of Emily the two mornings a week I went to teach. One day, up at school, having scheduled an appointment with Alice Fredman to discuss a thesis topic, I decided, only as I walked across the campus to her office, that I would propose working on George Eliot. I didn’t yet have a specific focus other than a general interest in Eliot’s heroines. I didn’t know then, because feminist criticism was not yet a formulated literary approach, that feminist critics would be angry with George Eliot for not giving these heroines their author’s own options and that other feminists would defend her for her compassionate sense of fellowship, not just with all women, “even those still in ‘bondage,’” but “with men as well” (See Zelda Austen—surely a renaming—“Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George Eliot,” 1976.) Eliot simply seemed an author whose novels gave me the satisfactions I’ve described and about whom I thought I might be able to write a few hundred pages. It wasn’t yet apparent—because I had not yet had to suffer in ways that make you doubt your own choices—she had anything acutely personal to say to m
e.

  I look back on this period, our two years in the Brooklyn Heights brownstone, with a great swell of nostalgia for a happy time. Two decades later I heard the critic John Bayley discuss a passage in Anna Karenina in which Vronsky sees a street sign and knows he will go home and describe it to Anna. “And that,” said Bayley, “is ordinary happiness.” Yes, I thought. I recognized what he was talking about. We had had it in Brooklyn—ordinary happiness—something I think I valued all the more because I hadn’t really known it growing up in Hollywood. Donald and I shopped together for groceries and cooked meals out of Craig Claiborne and Julia Child. Having a baby enriched our life together, and living in the building provided community. I remember everyone, especially the Suzmans and us, as always laughing. I liked going to work, and I liked coming home.

  Yet a more soberly nuanced narrative also asserts itself, one less tinged by nostalgia or that gathers pace and clarity as nostalgia subsides. I need only imagine how George Eliot would have probed and even pitied us as characters in her fiction. Poor Wendy, poor Donald, she would have begun her paragraph of sympathetic but relentless analysis, piercing into the shadows and the secrets of our idyll. I say that I was happy to be married, but it’s also true that I married impulsively, not sure what I was fleeing or seeking, though eager for some ill-defined transfiguration. A brief romantic entanglement with a woman classmate in Alice Fredman’s seminar, sexual though not quite consummated, had frightened me. Donald was one of several men I was going out with at the time of this involvement. He was amiable, kind, and emotionally undemanding. I appreciated that he didn’t pressure me, for similar to Gwendolyn, I recoiled from “being made love to” and was often on the run from male ardor and insistence. Donald fell in gracefully with my friends, my mother liked him though he wasn’t rich or on much of a career path in his job as assistant foreign student advisor at Columbia, and I sort of slipped into loving him. At Bryn Mawr, we had quoted our founder, M. Carey Thomas, “Only our failures marry.” What she really had said, I learned only years later, was that “our failures only marry.” This may seem a consequential corrective, but in a practical sense it hardly mattered. Whatever her words, most of my classmates got married—the pull of conventional aspirations trumping a spinster’s aphorism. Soon Donald and I were engaged—I think that was my idea (so much for my vaunted immunity to the charms of the marriage-plot in fiction). Then it all seemed to work out well—a nice wedding, the brownstone, the baby, the circles of colleagues and friends. In many ways we suited one another, though sometimes, especially if Donald were late coming home, I’d have a flash of fear that I hardly knew him.

  What followed was harder. In February 1971, almost as a joke to imagine escaping winter, I signed up for an interview with a recruiter from the University of Hawaii’s main Manoa, Oahu campus. The University of Hawaii was seeking ABD—all but dissertation—instructors to teach for a three-year stint. To my surprise I was offered a position, and without much worry or even much thought, we opted for adventure. Donald quit his job; we sold our furniture, most of which came from my mother, shipped our books and wedding china with the dubiously reputable Seven Santini Brothers, and flew off with one-year-old Emily to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I remember looking down from the plane at a small island, my new home, dwarfed in the vast expanse of glittering blue water, and wondering if I hadn’t made a terrible mistake.

  In the three ensuing years in Hawaii, I gave birth to our son, Sean; my husband left me for another woman four months after the baby was born and three months later came back; my mother visited at least twice a year, expressing her wonderment each time she stepped off the plane that anyone could work in such a tropical paradise. And no matter what else was happening, I taught my three courses a term, listened a lot to Toscanini’s recordings of Brahms symphonies, and, sitting at a table on the screened porch, or lanai, of my rented suburban house and looking out onto a garden of plumeria blossoms and banana trees, I wrote my dissertation on George Eliot. It was one of the hardest times of my life but also, oddly, one of the most productive.

  The thesis I developed, which today would probably fall under the rubric of cultural studies, was to trace a recurrent plot in Eliot’s fiction in the context of the author’s outlook and values. Always attuned to narrative patterns and structure, I saw the novels repeatedly telling the story of a woman caught in personal distress and isolated from the community around her. Her success or failure to find release from her crisis in a reunification with the surrounding world seemed to me to form the central dramatic action in books ranging from George Eliot’s first published work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, to her last, Daniel Deronda. When the heroine succeeds, it is with the help of a sympathetic man, often a religious leader, to whom she confesses her distress and who in turn has connections with the community. In the later novels the notion of community becomes more problematic; still, the plot is never resolved as a personal love story. The relationship of heroine and confessor may be erotically charged, but it does not lead to marriage. Usually the heroine is unhappily married already. Though George Eliot obligingly kills off a number of inconvenient husbands, from Dempster in the early “Janet’s Repentance” to Tito in Romola to Casaubon and Grandcourt in the later works, this is not to free the heroines for further romance so much as it is to allow them some greater scope for egoless altruistic activity. Granted Dorothea marries Will Ladislaw and Gwendolyn’s nice cousin Rex Gasgoigne is still hovering in the background at the end of Daniel Deronda. But if George Eliot advised her friend Barbara Bodichon to be “greatly dissatisfied with the ending of Middlemarch,” I presume this is because marrying Will is seen by George Eliot as Dorothea’s lot when greatness eludes her. As for Gwendolyn, whose fate is crueler still—she sees her insignificance but doesn’t yet know how she may change this—her only deep bond at the end of Daniel Deronda is to her mother, though in this I believe George Eliot wants us to see the seed of her redemption. Scourged by suffering, the heroine is ready to lead that “wider” less self-absorbed life. George Eliot confided her intention to have her be “saved,” “but as if by fire.”

  During the crisis in my marriage, it did not escape me that my dissertation’s focus on isolated unhappy wives had become rather gruesomely autobiographical. In Hawaii, where I, far more than Donald, felt far from our sustaining New York community, the marriage grew strained. We lived in Kailua, Oahu, on the windward side—the opposite side from Honolulu—of the steep-cliffed volcanic Na Pali range. Those were the cliffs from which the legendary King Kamehameha used to hurl his enemies. I would think about that sometimes on the drive home from work when, emerging in my little blue Toyota from the high tunnel that cut through the mountain, I took in the bright stretch of ocean below. Hawaii was interesting in so many ways—in its geography, geology, history, social culture, racial mix, arts, and politics. I lived there in the final years of the Vietnam War, when soldiers returned to Hawaii for R and R and dignitaries were always passing through. I wasn’t blind to all this, but in ways I now regret, I resisted fully being there. Sometimes I would look up at the mountains, so green and always cloud-covered—the same ones I had to drive through—and mutter to myself, “These mountains are igneous.” I took a childish relief in the harsh sound of the geologically correct word. On the more positive side, I made a few new friends, mostly other haoles (white people from the mainland), whom I liked spending time with, and I played a lot of tennis at the Kailua Racket Club, an informal and friendly club near my house. But Hawaii always remained unheimlich—not my landscape, not my true home. Perhaps it was too far from the world of English novels. Though it embarrasses me now to confess it, I couldn’t stretch.

  Donald, meanwhile, was blending in far better than I. He had been hired by the American Federation of Teachers, engaged then in an intensive campaign to be the bargaining agent for the University of Hawaii faculty. This meant his working long hours, often until nine or ten or even later at night, while I stayed home with the childr
en, but even on the evenings he was with us, he and I hardly interacted. He drank a lot, in a quiet way, then would stagger off to bed, leaving me to my own unhappiness. (George Eliot would here give his point of view as well as mine—why always “poor Wendy,” why not also “poor Donald?” Surely he felt unhappy, too.) Then came his affair with the administrative assistant from his office, his leaving me, a terrible blow, to move in with her (I’m afraid we’re back to “poor Wendy”), and after what for me were three most difficult months, his desire to return. The short version of this story is that I let him come back—I didn’t have the fortitude not to. Emily and Sean needed a father, I told myself, and I guess I still clung to hope of something from him, too, for myself. The marriage lasted another thirteen years, but I never felt again, as I had before, happy whenever he walked through the door. I realize, though, in saying this, I don’t know how he felt in that doorway. George Eliot speaks in Middlemarch of our being “well wadded with stupidity,” her metaphor for our obtuseness to others’ subjectivity.

  I don’t, though, want to make too much of the dreary confluence of the themes of my dissertation and my life circumstances. That might suggest writing the thesis was depressing, and it wasn’t at all. George Eliot is not an especially cheerful author. But reading the novels and six volumes of her letters that, among other things, seem to detail every headache and toothache and other ache she and George Henry Lewes ever had, reading as well the biographies, literary criticism, and books about Victorian England, I had a steady and steadying activity that became a kind of anchor. To build my argument, day by day, chapter by chapter, to strive to understand Eliot’s novelistic universe and feel such understanding was possible, I had this to turn to, no matter what else was happening in my life. I’m not claiming the outcome was in any way extraordinary. The dissertation had an uninspired title, The Relationship of Heroine, Confessor and Community in the Novels of George Eliot. If I were to be the judge of it now, I would call it good but hardly great. Still, it represents my life’s most focused and sustained attempt to make sense of another’s sensibility. I was committed to figuring something out, a puzzle, a paradox, as I set out to analyze what the recurrent heroine-confessor-community plot in Eliot’s novels reflects of the author’s lifelong struggle to balance a determined idealism about the possibilities of human interaction and community with an unsparing penetration of human folly and weakness.