My personal situation in the fall of 1985 was a complex one. In the public sphere I was a rising, forty-three-year-old professional, headed, I thought in all likelihood, for the presidency of a small liberal women’s college. The job at Hollins represented a step in this direction, and my husband, Donald, never overly invested in his own career, had quit his work as a union organizer in New York to go with the children and me to Virginia. Hollins gave us a big free house that my mother, when she visited, said reminded her of Tara in Gone with the Wind, complete with the services of a black maid named Buttercup. Donald was able to find a half-time position at the college assisting the director of adult education, who, it so happened, reported to me. But I lasted as the school’s chief academic officer only two years before calling upon my interview skills to help me get back to New York. Going to Brooklyn College constituted what is called a lateral move. The school was much larger and more vibrant than Hollins, but there was no free house, I was one of several deans, and the chain of command had me reporting to the provost, not the president. Still, my mother could retain her bragging rights about “my daughter, the dean.” And that person remained someone with a bright future.
Behind this façade of success, however, lay a more troubled story. Forster exhorts his readers in the epigram to Howards End to “only connect,” but my life at that time was beset by extreme disconnection of its parts. In truth, I had come back to New York for mainly personal reasons and as my mother but not my employers knew, my private life was in shambles. Before leaving Barnard, I had become involved with a woman lover, a philosophy professor nineteen years older than I. For years I had known of my sexual feelings for women but done my best to repress them. Finally, this became impossible. My craving for the experience grew stronger than my fear of it, and I got swept up into an affair. Nothing seemed more urgent to me in those months before leaving New York than to slip out of our apartment on one pretext or another and take the bus down Broadway from where we lived on 113th Street to my lover’s place on 97th. I had assumed the affair would end when we left for Virginia, but it didn’t. Donald found out about it right at the time of our departure and was enraged. Our children, Emily and Sean, knew because Donald told them. I saw their unhappiness, yet, at once obsessed and guilty, I persisted in my double life, trying to hold onto my family and traveling to New York whenever possible.
In the fall of 1985 our family was still in crisis and in pieces. Donald had moved out from “Tara,” and when I left to begin at Brooklyn College, he stayed behind in the house he had bought in Virginia, and thirteen-year-old Sean, for the time being, stayed with him. Donald and I would get back together a year later in Brooklyn before separating for good, more deliberately and amicably, in the spring of 1988. Meanwhile, alone for the first time in sixteen years (the lover and I were winding down), I rented a small apartment in Park Slope, Emily, then fifteen, started as a tenth-grade boarder at Choate-Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and Sean, clinging to the familiarity of Virginia, was truculent when I visited him there or brought him to New York. In his eyes I’d messed up badly. And I didn’t disagree. I felt I’d taken a sledge hammer to my precious family life. My neck was stiff for a year.
How this debacle more or less righted itself to lead to my long, fulfilling career as a professor—no longer a dean—at Brooklyn College as well as to a less fraught personal life for me and greater stability for all of us is a story I will get to. I want, though, to linger in that fall of 1985 when my desires were at such cross-purposes: to be a professional success; to care for a family; to feel accepted by men and stay connected with them, yet at the same time be free to explore deeper relations with women.
Different books engage us at different junctures of our lives. For me, in the mid-1980s, a woman struggling to work out the terms of her adult life and finding conventional paradigms an inadequate fit, it makes sense I should be drawn to the texts of an earlier transitional era—the late nineteenth, early twentieth century—in which heterosexual marriage is questioned and women throw off, or at least loosen, traditional shackles. I was shifting in my fictional allegiance from the Victorian orphan to the turn-of-the-century new woman, and the force of my family background, education, aspirations, era, and sexuality led me on. But while I found quite thrilling every novel’s heroine who manages to liberate herself from a tyrannical or inadequate husband or lover, I personally wanted not so much to be freed from marriage as to have it expand its terms. Back in 1974 I had read Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage, the moving story of his parents’ acceptance of each other’s homosexuality within the framework of their marriage, and then dared to imagine such accommodations were possible, that loving women did not have to rule out an enduring bond with a man. It took a long time for me to act, but when I did, I still had that ideal in mind. Of course, Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson were both homosexual, they had Sissinghurst to hold them together, and they belonged to a milieu that tolerated their complex choices. In my own situation I could draw on no such supports, nor reasonably ask such tolerance of my husband. Many years later, when we again were friends, he told me he was sorry to have been so angry and wished he’d acted differently. I’m not sure what either of us could have done differently back then, but the collapse of our fifteen-year marriage, for all its ups and downs, was very painful for us both.
THE Brooklyn College Womens’ Studies talk on The Odd Women and Howards End began with a much clearer delineation of alternatives than I ever faced in my own life. I began by reviewing those final epilogue chapters that provide such comfort in Victorian fiction in which we hear how Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester have settled down, supremely blessed, and he has regained sufficient sight to see the color of his first-born’s eyes. Or how Esther Summerson in Bleak House is blissfully happy in her marriage to Allan Woodcourt, he serving as father both to his and Esther’s children and to Ada Clare’s fatherless one. Or how Dorothea and Celia in Middlemarch, reconnected despite their dissimilar marriages, visit back and forth with their husbands tolerating one another and their children forming the close bonds of a new generation. But how might a novel end, I asked, in which marriage no longer serves as any persuasive sort of paradigm for mutual fulfillment and the resolution of problems? What ongoing life, what future possibilities might it point to?
The Odd Women and Howards End preserve a variation of the epilogue Victorian chapter. Strife has been resolved; a peaceful mood prevails; the next generation has been born. But marital relations between men and women have failed, at least in terms of traditional gender roles. Men in these works who have tried to tame and dominate their wives are rendered as tyrants or fools and have failed, moreover, to bring off their exercise in mastery, just as wives have failed, if indeed they ever tried, to be submissive. And marriage itself as a legal and social institution does less to bring unity out of division, realized identity out of fragmentation as to coerce, codify, and kill. Some women really are killed by it; others survive, subvert, or avoid it, but in doing so they part company from lords and masters, actual or potential. The Odd Women is more severe in its critique of the institution of marriage than Howards End, but in both books the key participants in the epilogues are not marital couples but rather a couple of women, linked in familial and/or cultural sisterhood. A child is in their hands. Men are gone, dead, or debilitated. Women are the custodians of the future.
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“‘TOMORROW, ALICE,’ SAID DR. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs of Clevedon, ‘I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.’”
I quote the opening sentence of The Odd Women to show its novelistic energy and the way Gissing wastes no time setting up what even the dullest reader can perceive as a prelude to disaster. Nineteen-year-old Alice, “a plain, shy, gentle-mannered girl, short of stature, and in movement something less than graceful”—thus a girl with dim matrimonial prospects—is unaccustomed to her father’s confidences. Dr. Madden believes girls should be sh
eltered from worldly concerns. He reads Tennyson to his six daughters (their mother is dead), and, though it isn’t mentioned, he must also be given to quoting Ruskin and Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House.” By the end of the chapter, Dr. Madden is dead. Called to attend on a sick farmer, his horse has stumbled on the return drive home and thrown the poetry-loving pater familias from his cart. Exit Dr. Madden. The life insurance policy, of course, has not been signed.
I first read The Odd Women when looking for texts suitable to include in The Heroine’s Progress and within pages saw its potential for my course. After the father’s unceremonious elimination, we fast-forward fifteen years to a scenario of two impoverished spinsters, Alice, now thirty-five, loose fleshed and pimply, and her prettier, but equally downtrodden sister, Virginia, second to her in age, sharing dreary lodgings in London and economizing with meals of rice and a little cheese. One has been working as a governess, the other as a companion—traditional occupations for gentlewomen in distress. Their next three sisters are dead, Gertrude “of consumption,” Martha “by the overturning of a pleasure boat,” and “poor hard-featured Isabel,” an overworked Board school teacher, through succumbing to brain fever, then melancholia and drowning in a bathtub. It takes the novelist but a paragraph to dispatch the three of them. That leaves the youngest sister, Monica, whom Alice and Virginia, led by their own disappointments, believe better off in “business” than in “a more strictly genteel position.” She is apprenticed to a draper at Weston, but since Monica is pretty (as Virginia was), her sisters feel she “must marry.” Thus, Gissing covers the traditional options for impoverished gentlewomen and begins his problem novel, in which just about every character and every situation illustrates some aspect of the controversies of the day concerning women and marriage. His title, The Odd Women, refers specifically to England’s surplus of single women swelling throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—in 1878 the number was estimated at 800,000. I knew this was a book I had to teach.
It appealed to me, too, that Gissing has more subtlety than I may have suggested in recapitulating the book’s opening, a characteristic all the more remarkable in the context of a number of similarly themed novels of the times. The most damning diatribe I have ever read against marriage is Tolstoy’s intemperate novella The Kreutzer Sonata, published in Russia in 1889, in which the jealous husband Pozdnyshev kills his despised wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. The real culprit, though, is marriage, the institution that binds people together in incompatible, soulless unions, in which the corruptions of the flesh—late Tolstoy’s special target—pull them down in spirals of mutual hatred. The work was suppressed in Russia, but it circulated in Europe and America. Tolstoy’s vitriol shocks me even today. His rage against the flesh, and especially the power of the flesh of women to ensnare men, is terrifying in its extremity. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), another work that shocked its contemporary readers and that also explores the tragic gulf between human passions and marriage’s institutional rigidity, is tame in comparison.
Gissing is not as ferocious as late Tolstoy or as relentless as late Hardy. His interest in the psychological nuances of his characters’ interactions saves him from the extremes of the polemical. Nonetheless, The Odd Women is very dubious about the possibility of marriage bringing happiness. In the situations of even minor characters, women are seen as prostituting themselves to get husbands and then abusing or being abused by them when they’ve got them. The only conceivably happy couple in Gissing’s story, Mr. and Mrs. Micklewaite, lacking the necessary financial resources, have had to wait a mickle twenty years to marry until the lady’s cheeks are faded and sallow. The Odd Women unequivocally takes its stand against the institution of marriage as it exists in late nineteenth-century England. It is a cry against a situation in which a young woman like Monica “must marry” or suffer the fate of her spinster sisters while suggesting some intriguing new options for women brave and firm enough to choose them. What I have appreciated, though, is that it also promotes sympathy for women and men alike. Gissing himself suffered miserably in two failed marriages, the first to a young prostitute with whom he was infatuated, the second to a woman he had met casually in the London streets and who ultimately proved volatile and unstable. His unhappy life makes one feel for him, and I appreciate the way he feels for his characters. He renders brilliantly and without an iota of condescension the mutual loneliness that men and women can endure in their relationships. If Henry James proclaimed the need to get down into the arena and rub shoulders with his characters, Gissing seems to reside in the arena already, on an authorial level no higher or lower than the fallible yet intelligent men and women he gives life to.
The Odd Women has four entwining stories, two of them focused on women in relation to one another, two on women in relation to men. The relationships between women are more successful than the heterosexual ones, but in each of these stories there is a balance of suffering and relief.
The first story is that of the Madden sisters, Alice and Virginia and their younger sister Monica, the surviving trio of the original family cluster, women constrained by narrowness of conventional opportunity. George Orwell, commenting on the achievement of the novel at a point when it was out of print, praised Gissing for capturing the dreariness of lower-middle-class life and “the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability.” Certainly the Madden sisters are victims of their clinging to middle-class gentility. Gissing portrays their pinched circumstances, their dreary jobs, their fearful reluctance to spend their small capital, which holds them back from their dream of founding a school, their poignant conventional dreams for Monica, and Virginia’s sliding into secret drinking, a strain of the novel that puts Gissing on a par with Emile Zola or Frank Norris in the depiction of dipsomania. Stories of decline have always fascinated me, perhaps because my own family tried so unequivocally to live the counter-narrative to these. My mother told us of her dream in which Karl Marx himself spoke to her and said, “Sheilah, arise, you have nothing to lose but your mediocrity.”
But what if one doesn’t arise? Poor Alice and Virginia don’t give much promise of arising. They decline. Alice has those pimples and her Bible, and Virginia succumbs to her vice. We see her slip from brandy to gin, from the first furtive darts into the railroad station refreshment room to the secret nightly guzzling in her room. At last exposed in all her pathetic drunkenness, Virginia is described as “a feeble, purposeless, hopeless woman, type of a whole class—living to deteriorate.”
Yet despite all this, Alice and Virginia Madden still manage to show that sisterhood is powerful. They may not be Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, but the ties between them that Gissing delineates throughout the novel as well as their connection with Monica—their sister who marries so unhappily—are the underpinning for the hope poignantly expressed in the novel’s ending. Caring for Monica’s baby after its poor mother has died in childbirth, Alice is visited by the novel’s other key female protagonist, Rhoda Nunn. Rhoda notes that Alice seems transformed. Her “complexion was losing its muddiness and spottiness; her step had become light and brisk.” Alice is awaiting the return of Virginia, who is off drying out but hopes to be back soon. As soon as the baby can walk, the sisters plan to open their school for young children.
I had no sisters, but my mother had two, Iris and Sally, the sisters much older than herself, with whom she reestablished contact when I was a teenager and who led what seemed to me modest, respectable lives. Both had married, but I knew them as widows. Iris owned her own small house in the Sussex seaside resort of Hove and was proud her daughter had married a doctor and could go on continental holidays. Sally, the less prosperous, lived in a council basement flat in Brighton with her son Len, the unemployed barber, and had sent her daughter to the same orphanage my mother had been sent to, but she was unfailingly dignified in speech and demeanor. Unlike Alice and Virginia Madden, Iris and Sally were alienated from one another, but, separately, they dote
d on my mother and were enormously proud of her success. The sense I had of my family as led by women was reinforced by these aunts, who, in their own right, had persevered in the world. There had also been three sons in the family, but two of them were dead, and the third, Meyer, the brother who had revealed my mother’s Jewish past to a London tabloid, was someone we never saw. Whenever, though, we were in England, my mother would take us—once we knew of their existence—to visit her sisters. We would have lunch with one and tea with the other. My mother loved their good Jewish cooking.
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