That my mother, the youngest of six children in a struggling immigrant family, found better options than Monica Madden, the youngest of the six daughters in The Odd Women, can be attributed to her luck and her spirit, but also to the impact of the first-wave feminists who preceded her. Even less respectable than Monica in origins and early employment (after leaving the orphanage, Lily Shiel worked as a skivvy cleaning a five-story house in Brighton, in a factory where she was fired for dancing in the washroom, and in a department store demonstrating a toothbrush that cleaned only the back of your teeth), she nonetheless could rise to embrace new opportunities. When the toothbrush company, perhaps predictably, went bankrupt, she reviewed the cards left by various men and called upon one whom she remembered as a gentleman. At twenty she married forty-four-year-old John Graham Gillam, a man not so different in age and respectability from Monica’s choice of Edmund Widdowson. But Johnny, unlike the miserably jealous and possessive Widdowson, encouraged the woman now renamed Sheilah Graham to enter the world. To improve her accent and her manners, he sent her to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and she became a chorus girl—a Cochran Young Lady, the British equivalent of the Ziegfield Girls. I have the cup she won as the most beautiful chorus girl of 1927. All this perhaps still fits within familiar paradigms—the stage as a venue for a striking, ambitious young woman. But my mother’s next step seems more remarkable. She began to publish newspaper articles about her chorus girl experience, and soon she left the stage completely for journalism. I am not suggesting she was groundbreaking as a woman in this field—far from it. Women wrote for magazines throughout the nineteenth century; my mother in her orphanage loved reading the “penny dreadfuls” of gossip and advice to girls and women, often penned by women writers. But nineteenth-century women writers were predominantly middle class. My mother’s path to her career from her disadvantaged beginnings, her sense that nothing was closed to her, needs to be linked to the efforts of a sisterhood. This sisterhood surely includes her own two sisters, who must always have hoped for more for her than they realized for themselves. It also includes her sisters in history and in literature, whose efforts and stories changed woman’s lives.
When I try to give a summary description of The Odd Women to someone who doesn’t know it, I say it’s about a heroine who turns down marriage to the hero so that she can continue to run a typing school for women. The wonderfully named Rhoda Nunn, the heroine who engages in an intricate play of passion and sexual politics with her suitor, Everard Barfoot, but ultimately rejects him to continue her work with the typing school, is a quintessential “new woman” of the 1890s. Rhoda strikes me as a kind of gritty poor relation to Isabel Archer. Like Isabel, she values her independence, which in her case she secures by learning shorthand and bookkeeping. (Might not Isabel have been better off to have had such an option?) But Rhoda is distinguished from Isabel in finding a cause beyond the shaping of her personal destiny. By working for the advancement of women, she aligns her life with a great movement. It is no longer enough to say as Jane Eyre does, “I care for myself.” Already Dorothea in Middlemarch understands the need to link her “ardour”—one of Eliot’s favorite words—to something beyond the self, although she can never find what that thing might be. Rhoda has ardor, too. It is outer-directed but at the same time reflects currents of repressed passion in her nature. She makes a cameo appearance in the first chapter as a “thin, eager looking” fifteen-year-old budding bluestocking with a crush on a thirty-five-year-old widower. When she reenters the novel as a rather stern unmarried woman of thirty, working for and with the fortyish Mary Barfoot to run the school, she is in need of some yet-to-be-defined experience to become her best self. But what should that experience be? In her interactions with Mary Barfoot, the center of the second of the novel’s stories “between women,” Mary is the more conventional figure, a kind-hearted idealist, who combines “benevolence with business” and who would take back into the school one of the girls who has “fallen” by living with a married man. She and Rhoda argue about this, and the strain on their friendship when Rhoda’s more puritanical point of view prevails but the girl later kills herself, shows Gissing at his psychologically nuanced best.
Rhoda needs a lover. But here’s the odd twist. She needs him to complete herself; she doesn’t need to marry him. The experience with Barfoot teaches Rhoda what passion is. It gives her the experience of desiring and being desired. She is sincere in her belief that she has found true love. But ultimately Everard Barfoot is expendable, an important passing chapter in the heroine’s progress.
Again, Gissing’s rendering of the dance of calculation and desire between Rhoda and Barfoot strikes me as superb in its understanding of human complexity and perversity. The protagonists contend, each seeking the other’s “unconditional surrender.” He, a freethinker as well as bit of a roué, tries to get her to live with him without marrying; she, in turn, wants to subdue him into an agreement to marry, and she prevails. Brilliantly, the chapter after their engagement begins, “But neither was content.” The fact that shortly they fall out in a misunderstanding about Monica and part is almost inconsequential. Both are too stubborn to put love above pride—or above prejudice. And what could marriage be for them? The travel on the Orient Express that he offers her? What would either of them do when the trip was over? Home for Gissing, as seen most compellingly in the terrible claustrophobic marriage of Monica and Widdowson, has essentially no appeal.
To resolve the conflict between Rhoda and Barfoot, Gissing writes a scene in which Monica, depressed, pregnant, and embarrassed, but eager to clarify that she sought involvement not with Barfoot but with his upstairs neighbor, the callow Bevis, comes to Rhoda to tell her story. The scene is so reminiscent of the one in Middlemarch in which Rosamond Vincy sets Dorothea straight about Will Ladislaw that one wonders if Gissing had it in mind. The effect on Rhoda, however, is not to throw her back into the arms of her suitor but for her to come into her inspired feminist self. “Herself strongly moved, Rhoda had never spoken so impressively, had never given counsel of such earnest significance.” She offers encouragement to Monica. “My dear girl, you may live to be one of the most contented and most useful women in England” (echoes of Daniel Deronda exhorting Gwendolyn Harleth?). But Rhoda has a different idea in mind from Deronda’s vague vision that Gwendolyn may live to “make others glad they were born” while he himself leaves England to work for Zionism. Rhoda is exhorting Monica to engage with her in a very specific social and political battle to be waged on English soil.
“We seemed to have lost you, but before long you will be one of us again, I mean you will be one of the women who are fighting in a women’s cause. You will prove by your life that we can be responsible human beings—trustworthy, conscious of purpose.”
Part of the wonderful balance of The Odd Women is that Monica cannot rise to Rhoda’s level of impersonal passion. Her heroism is in defying her husband to the extent that she does, understanding that “love needs freedom if it is to remain love in truth,” and in deciding to live apart from him. I see her, too, as a descendent of Isabel Archer, valuing freedom and refusing a controlling husband’s terms of subjugation, though Widdowson, unlike Gilbert Osmond, seems another victim, not a villain. Gissing’s sympathetic portrayal of his pathological jealousy is another of the book’s fine achievements. But Monica has been fatally wounded by her experience. The marriage plot having failed her—not just in its aspects of rescue and domesticity, but even in her aborted stab at adultery—she dies in childbirth, while Rhoda carries on. To Rhoda is given the last word of the novel. “Poor little child,” she murmurs, holding Monica’s motherless daughter in her arms and looking at its dark bright eyes. That she relates to the child feelingly reflects her evolution. One doesn’t know, though, if her pity is for the past or for the future.
The scene of Rhoda Nunn seated on a garden bench gazing at the child in her arms somehow softens the death of Monica as well as allowing Rhoda a kind of immaculate
conception. But I also find myself wishing that we could see more of Rhoda at her typewriter, for, after all, isn’t that her destiny? At one point during their “courtship,” Barfoot, curious about her work, asks if it isn’t just “copying with a type-machine and teaching others to do the same.”
“If it were no more than that,” Rhoda counters. She feels she’s participating in “the greatest movement of our time—that of emancipating [our] sex.” From a contemporary perspective it’s easy to make fun of Rhoda’s ecstasy about typing. By the time I graduated from college in the mid-1960s, taking a job as a typist or secretary might still be an “entry-level” opportunity to rise in publishing or advertising or some other seemingly glamorous field, but to me it evoked sexually wry New Yorker cartoons as well as T. S. Eliot’s “typist home at teatime” who trysts with “the young man carbuncular,” and afterwards “smoothes her hair with automatic hand/And puts a record on the gramophone.” Yet it’s important to remember that typing in the 1890s offered women extraordinary new opportunities to enter public spheres from which they had been previously excluded—spheres such as commerce, publishing, advertising, banking, and law. One of Mary and Rhoda’s pupils lands a job in the publishing department of a weekly paper and hopes someday to start a paper of her own. Women’s access to office work can be seen as truly revolutionary, radically expanding women’s options and also cutting across class lines. Poor girls and even rich girls became secretaries and typists. Might not Jane Eyre have been delighted with such an option? I can imagine her reading the classified ads on a dreary day at Lowood, seeing in them more freedom than servitude, and packing her suitcase for London. Her Mr. Rochester might then have been her office boss.
My brother took a touch-typing course in high school. I purposely didn’t, though I’m not sure my lack of skill saved me. As an English major BA, the best job I could find was as an editorial assistant in the textbook division of Harper & Row, where I sat at a desk tapping out form letters with two fingers. “Enclosed you will find your examination copy of the sixth edition of Broom & Selznick . . . ,” the company’s best-selling introductory sociology text. The distinction that I wrote, rather than transcribed, these letters seems hardly worth insisting on. The boss still tried to seduce me. After a year I went back to school to get a PhD.
But perhaps all this is beside the point in thinking about Rhoda Nunn. She lives within Gissing’s text, and there the belief she holds in office work as a route to women’s liberation gives the chance to reject an Everard Barfoot and still be a fulfilled heroine. It’s interesting, though, that if office work offers such great new vistas for women, the very same kind of work, indeed any work at all, seems far less emancipating for Gissing’s men. Widdowson has been a clerk, Barfoot an engineer. Yet neither has found satisfaction in his work life. Widdowson confides to Monica the first afternoon they spend together how much he has hated “office work and business of every kind.” A clerk’s life strikes him as “a hideous fate.” Barfoot left Eton to become an engineer, worked hard for ten years, but ultimately found the profession uncongenial. Nor does he want to do anything else. “I’m not prompted to any business or profession,” he tells his cousin. “That’s all over for me. I have learned all I care to of the active world.” His conclusion is that “to work for ever is to lose half of life.”
Barfoot calls himself an “individualist” and sees Mary as standing “at the social point of view.” What this means is that Mary has a social purpose; Barfoot doesn’t. Mary, Barfoot, and Widdowson all inherit money at around the age of forty. Mary uses hers to start her school. Widdowson and Barfoot give up work but find nothing to engage with beyond their interest in the women they encounter—women more vibrant than themselves. Ironically, they are the “odd” men out. No wonder Mary Barfoot exclaims:
It’s better to be a woman in our day. With us is all the joy of advancing, the glory of conquering. Men have only material progress to think about. But we—we are winning souls, propagating as new religion, purifying the earth!
And no wonder Widdowson and Barfoot can offer Monica and Rhoda so little. Monica’s marriage to Widdowson is worse than a mistake; it’s a debilitating downward spiral for both wife and husband. As for Rhoda’s romance with Barfoot, while Gissing makes it compelling, it suffices as the heroine’s detour, not her destiny. How could Rhoda Nunn be satisfied with a man whose only goal is to watch the “spectacle of existence?” Men in The Odd Women drift while women stride forward. Widdowson at the novel’s end is cut off from the future; he has given the charge of his baby to his dead wife’s tattered but still forward-looking sisters. Barfoot’s end is equally bleak, or at least equally ironic. Marrying a lovely upper-class wife, one of the Brissenden sisters, he becomes utterly conventional.
IN the late 1980s the feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson gave a talk at Barnard that I attended. A tall, blond Southern beauty and one of the great radicals of second-wave feminism, she mesmerized an audience of respectful undergraduates with a blistering diatribe against marriage—heterosexual marriage, that is, though we didn’t at the time make such distinctions—delivered in a lulling regional drawl. The students were stunned, but one of them gathered her courage at the end of the talk to ask a question. “You’re very hard on marriage, Ti-Grace,” she said. “I understand all that’s wrong with it. But what is the alternative to marriage?”
I recall how Ti-Grace pulled herself to an even more statuesque height and thought for a moment. “What is the alternative to cancer?” she replied.
I repeat this story to my students at Brooklyn College, using it to create a radical perspective on the marriage plot in fiction and, especially in a masters-level course in feminist literary theory, to demonstrate an ideological extreme of second-wave feminism. It surprised me at first but I’ve come, resignedly, to accept the fact that many of my female students—even in the feminist theory course—want distance from feminism. They see it as radical and uncompromising, as cutting them off from the men they live with or hope to marry or are married to already. They know and care that women face discrimination, but they don’t want to lead separatist existences. Many say they find men difficult and exasperating, but they nonetheless want them in their lives. I present myself in this class as someone who lived through second-wave feminism, a movement that made me happy to be a woman in my day. But I also make clear how my feelings about marriage are and always have been very different from Ti-Grace Atkinson’s.
Maybe I’m a little like Rhoda Nunn, whose feminism grows more vibrant because she has known love with a man. In my case, to have been married to a man and had children with him may be a very commonplace woman’s destiny. But despite the marriage’s failure and my ultimate liberation to move on from it, I don’t take for granted what it gave me, including important things beyond the children. My husband, oddly, was a lot like Barfoot. He worked because he had to and did not feel truly “prompted to any business or profession.” But, while rueful about his own failure to find direction, when it came to my professional life, he put himself wholeheartedly behind me. I’m not sure what I might have managed to be or do without him. Our reversal of traditional roles had its strains for us both. Yet I know my debt to him is as great as to any “sisters.”
iii
HOWARDS END, WITH THE urging of its famous epigram, “only connect,” pairs for me with The Odd Women not only because of its similar ending but because Forster, no less acutely than Gissing, understands the trenches of difference between men women, the privileged and the poor, and lays these out in his novel’s scheme. Howards End ranges from characters that have their choices of fine houses to those forced to settle for a dreary rented basement flat; it shows private affective life in tension with the world of work and establishes the masculine Wilcoxes and feminine Schlegels as not just opposing genders but almost archetypal alternatives. After Helen’s initial skirmish with the Wilcoxes, Margaret reflects on the two families:
“I suppose that ours is a female house,” said Margar
et, “and one must just accept it. No, Aunt Julie, I don’t mean that this house is full of women. I am trying to say something far more clever. I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time. Now I’m sure you understand! Well, I’ll give you another example. It’ll shock you, but I don’t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner party and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you think that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens, no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn’t effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but won’t, sounds irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn’t brutal.”
Just as Forster’s later novel, A Passage to India, asks, “Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?” at the heart of Howards End is the question of relations between the two houses: the Schlegel house—cultured, continental, feminine—and the Wilcox house—the masculine world of “newspapers and motor cars and golf clubs.” Can their initial collision give way to cooperation? The marriage of Margaret Schlegel, dubbed a heroine by her younger sister Helen because she “means to keep proportion,” and Henry Wilcox, widower and captain of British industry, is Forster’s experiment in seeing if the energy of the Wilcoxes and the sensibility of the Schlegels can infuse one another so that the extremes of effeminacy and brutality are avoided.
The suggestion that the two houses need at least a good dose of the other seems tolerant, wise, and appealing. It’s also noteworthy, given the fatigue of the marriage plot at this modernist juncture, that Forster chooses marriage—granted a highly symbolic and rather bloodless marriage—as the way to bring them together. He would seem to be more optimistic than Gissing, or at least less cynical, in still looking to the institution of marriage as a way to overcome profound societal divisions and bring harmony out of discord. The best thing Margaret as our heroine can do is not run a typing school, nor even keep attending those afternoon concerts, at which Beethoven”s Fifth stirs her so deeply, but marry Henry. She marries John Bull Henry Wilcox—moreover, is still married to him at novel’s end. Marriage still serves here, as the critic Tony Tanner so brilliantly defines it, as bourgeois society’s “means to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property.”
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