Chapter One

Marriage and Morals

Among the Victorians

When Lytton Strachey was asked to propose a toast to his Eminent Victorians , he quoted an eminent Victorian biographer: "When I hear men called `judicious,' I suspect them; but when I hear them called judicious and venerable,' I know they are scoundrels." Strachey amended this to describe his own credo: "When I hear people called `Victorians,' I suspect them. But when I hear them called `Eminent Victorians,' I write their lives."

Strachey wrote their lives to expose them, to reveal the private selves behind the public façades, the private vices that belied their public virtues. His book, published toward the end of the First World War, was his personal declaration of war (he refused to serve in his country's war) against the Victorian pieties and hypocrisies, as he saw them, which still governed society--and which also governed the writing of biography, those multi-volume tomes that told everything about their subjects except the essential truth. A later generation, further removed from the Victorians and still more removed from the Victorian mode of biography, has learned to be wary of the "essential" truth conveyed by the Strachey technique: the derisory physical detail (Thomas Arnold's legs, which were "shorter than they should have been"); the revealing mîse-en-scène (the open Bible next to the open brandy bottle on General Gordon's table); the list of peculiar names ("St. Bega, St. Adamnan, St. Gundleus, St. Guthlake, Brother Drithelm ...") which made a mockery not only of the Lives of the Saints but of the very idea of sainthood. We are now as apt to be suspicious of Strachey's Eminent Victorians as he was of the eminent Victorians themselves.

For all his irreverence, however, Strachey did the Victorians the honor of dealing with those aspects of their lives that made them eminent; it was their moral earnestness, their military heroism, their social service, their religious piety that he ridiculed. And his ridicule was so patent that the reader knew it for that, knew that the public persona was being measured against the private, and by that standard found wanting. More recently it has become the fashion to dwell on the private lives of historical figures, not to illuminate or even to expose their public lives but to discover some essential truth that is essentially private, and that is as essentially true for a public or historical person as for an ordinary, private person. If the eminent continue to be the subject of study, it is because they are so eminently accessible; they have left so much more evidence about their lives, public and private, than the "anonymous masses." The biographer may not even have any conscious animus against the eminent, any desire to condemn or ridicule them. Yet they are inevitably diminished when that which is peculiarly great about them, which made them public figures in their time and historic personages for us, is ignored.

A case study in the new mode of inquiry is Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages , by Phyllis Rose. The title itself is suggestive. Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans , the author reminds us, was meant to instruct the reader about the "perils and pitfalls of public life"; the present volume is meant to do the same about domestic life. These five Victorian marriages, however, hardly typify the domestic life of the Victorians. They are, indeed, the most unrepresentative couples one can imagine, both because of their eminence and because of their peculiarities. The five are the Carlyles, the Ruskius, the Mills, the Dickenses, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. To anyone having the least acquaintance with Victorian literature, these couples are notorious for the "irregularity"--that wonderful Victorian word--of their relationships. Two pairs (the Carlyles and Ruskins) never consummated their marriage; one (Eliot and Lewes) lived together without benefit of marriage; another (the Mills) had a long-standing, intimate (if platonic, as they insisted) relationship while she was married to another man; and the fifth (the Dickenses) separated when he fell in love with another woman. These particular subjects were chosen, we are told, for their variety and narrative interest, which makes one wonder why there is no example of that other deviant variety not uncommon at the time, the homosexual. Or, for that matter, that still more common (but less commonly written about) variety, the properly married, sexually compatible, conventionally devoted couple who might even qualify as interesting (the Darwins come to mind).

The stories of these five couples are familiar enough; each has been the subject of long and detailed study. What is novel is the theme uniting them. Marriage--or "parallel lives," as Rose prefers, to emphasize the separateness of the partners--is presented as a political experience, indeed, "the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults." Like any political experience it involves power, the management and balance of power determining the "priority of desires" of the two partners. A marriage is sustained so long as there is a mutual understanding of the terms of the balance of power and mutual gains to be derived from it; it fails when the terms are violated or are no longer satisfactory, when "the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength." Love is the mask used to "disguise transactions involving power"; it is the "ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives." It may momentarily "inhibit the process of power negotiation," thus promoting the "illusion of equality so characteristic of lovers." If this inhibition comes from within, it is "one of life's graces and blessings." But if, as is often the case, it comes from without, if it is "culturally induced" or desired more by one sex than by the other, it is a "mask for exploitation."

It is a powerful thesis (the pun is irresistible), powerfully stated, with some interesting turns to redeem it from banality. Divorce, we are told, so far from ameliorating or correcting the inequities of marriage, compounds them which does not mean, Rose hastens to add, that she would like less divorce, only less marriage. "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." It was better in the old days, when indissoluble unions were combined with "a great deal of civilized behavior--in other words, secrecy, even lying--for the sake of harmony." Or better yet, the way of the future: "frankly personal unions entered into personally, with carefully articulated and individualized pledges of fidelity, if any."

In view of the boldness of the thesis, one may be surprised that it appears (intrudes, an unsympathetic reader might say) only occasionally in the course of the book. Yet it is precisely its boldness that makes it relatively unintrusive. If every kind of marriage--regardless of the peculiarities of character, circumstance, sentiment, or sexual disposition is a form of "sexual politics," it is enough to record the manifold ways in which these "imaginative projections and arrangements of power" reveal themselves. No judgment is called for because all such arrangements are equally political. Thus sexless marriages can be tolerantly described as "examples of flexibility rather than of abnormality." And sympathy can be extended impartially to everyone unwittingly caught up in these power relationships, the exploited and the exploiters being alike victims of an institution more powerful than they, which oppressed them even as they oppressed their mates.

There is another reason why the thesis is more prominent in the prologue than in the rest of the book and in some chapters more than in others, and that is that it is so often irrelevant to the case in point. If it appears hardly at all in the account of the Ruskins, it is because the only kind of power that is at issue here is sexual potency, in which Ruskin was sadly lacking--and this is not, presumably, what the author has in mind when she speaks of marriage as a "projection" of power. Ruskin did not even choose to use what legal power he had to prevent his wife from leaving him, or, later, to contest the annulment. Since there is no evidence of this kind of "political" power, the author makes the most of the conspicuous failure of sexual power. Ruskin's impotence thus becomes the occasion for generalizations about the sex life of the Victorians.

Ruskin's was a notorious case in his own time and continues to fascinate biographers. And for good reason--it is not often that the subject of a biography provides so many titillating details about his intimate life. In a letter to his lawyer, Ruskin explained that he did not consummate his marriage on his wedding night because he was repelled by the sight of his wife's body. There was something wrong with it, he felt; it was not as he had imagined it; it was "not formed to excite passion." One theory has it that he was especially repelled by her pubic hair and possibly by her breasts, his image of the female body having come from the highly idealized, de-sexualized nudes he was familiar with in paintings and statues. This would also explain his later attraction to little girls not marred by the unsightly evidence of maturity. Rose is intrigued by this explanation: it offers proof of the "radical innocence" of the Victorians, and, better yet, of the power of art over experience. Unfortunately, she adds, it was probably not true, Ruskin having told his parents that he had seen pictures of "naked bawds" while at Oxford. (And were those painted nudes--by Raphael or Rubens, for example--as asexual and immature as this theory supposes?)

Whatever the source of Ruskin's impotence (presumably paintings and statues were the least of it), Rose is less interested in what was peculiar about Ruskin's wedding night than in what was typical about it, the light it sheds on "Victorian sexuality." And what was typical was the ignorance and inexperience that made the Victorian wedding night a "barbaric trial" for at least the woman, and sometimes the man as well. That experience was all the worse because sexual relations, having been utterly forbidden before marriage, became an absolute requirement after marriage--a certain prescription for impotence and frigidity. While the Ruskins were not a representative couple, their plight was "probably less extraordinary and eccentric than one might think at first." Were it not for a footnote at this point, one might let this statement pass for the speculation it frankly is. But the note itself, raising the expectation of proof, only makes the generalization more dubious, for it cites a similar and even more unsubstantiated speculation concerning an equally unrepresentative and thoroughly un-Victorian figure, the American poet Delmore Schwartz.

The question of proof is almost irrelevant, however, for the thesis is so comprehensive it can accommodate itself to any form of sexual or domestic behavior, any symptoms of normality or abnormality, any kind of adjustment or maladjustment, any evidence of frigidity or fertility. If marriage itself is anomalous, if the legal commitment itself taints any relationship, then any of its manifestations must be equally anomalous. The footnote about Delmore Schwartz, for example, goes on to explain that even now, when premarital sex is the rule rather than the exception, there may be "wedding night trauma," although of a different kind. "Can society's sudden approval quench one's private pleasures as society's disapproval did before?" It is not clear what is meant by "society's sudden approval," if indeed premarital sex is so prevalent and acceptable. But one takes the point: a permissive society creates its own traumas--and not only, one may add, on the wedding night but also in that supposedly voluntary, spontaneous, premarital period unfettered by legal bonds.

If some Victorians were rendered impotent by the prevailing sexual code and marital fetters, others, brought up under that same code and bound by the same ties, were evidently sexually stimulated to a degree that could not be contained within marriage. Charles Dickens was one such. After twenty-two years of marriage and ten children, Dickens moved out of his home, arranged for a legal separation from his wife, and entered into a long-standing affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. The situation was one that might be expected to evoke the sympathy of a commentator who takes so dim a view of marriage, who thinks "personal unions" more meaningful than legal ones, and, in the absence of such an enlightened alternative, recommends marriage combined with "a great deal of civilized behavior"--i.e., clandestine affairs.

Dickens was twenty-four when he married, his wife twenty-one. Within nine months of their wedding, their first child was born and his first successful book published. Thereafter he sired as many books as children, each book taking him further away from a wife who was ineffectual even in the household, still more in the literary and social world (to say nothing of the private, creative world) inhabited by England's premier novelist. It was an all-too-familiar, and not peculiarly Victorian, situation, and Dickens handled it in the all-too-familiar way, with protestations of innocence and professions of outrage that he should be so maligned as to be accused of having an affair. Rose admits that Dickens's life after the separation was far happier than it had been before, and confesses some sympathy for his "flailing against middle age and domesticity," for "living as though no one had ever lived before." She nevertheless chastises him for his "ungentlemanly behavior" (as a Victorian would put it), and presents him as a "fine example of how not to end a marriage." The rebuke is worthy of a good Victorian, but it comes oddly from an opponent of marriage and a proponent of sexual liberty. One wonders whether she would have been so severe on a wife who exhibited such "unladylike behavior."

Another kind of double standard is evident in the discussion of the Mills. Here the wife was not the pathetic, vulnerable partner but the aggressive, dominant one. Rose does not conceal her distaste for Harriet Taylor, later Harriet Mill, who manipulated both of her husbands with as fine a disregard for their sensibilities as for the conventions, whose domestic bullying was matched only by her intellectual arrogance, and whose self-esteem was as inordinate as Mill's uxoriousness. It was she who read and approved of those extraordinary passages in Mill's Autobiography in which he praises her as superior to himself intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically, her mind the "same perfect instrument" in penetrating into the "highest regions of speculation" as into the "smallest practical concerns of daily life." Shelley was but a child "in thought and intellect" compared with her; Carlyle could only be interpreted "by one greatly the superior to us both--who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I"; Coleridge and the German poets and philosophers were an amalgam of truth and error, whereas in her, "I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of error"; his own father had no equal among men and "but one among women." After that it comes almost as an anticlimax to find Mill endowing her with "excellencies" so unique that "the highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, or art, seemed trivial by the side of her, and equal only to expressing some small part of her mind." Nor is it surprising to find him altering crucial passages in his Principles of Political Economy , against his own judgment and in spite of the logic of the argument of the book, "even if there were no other reason than the certainty I feel that I never should long continue of an opinion different from yours on a subject which you have fully considered."

This record of self-deception and self-abasement is, at first sight, disconcerting. "How splendid it would be," Rose observes ruefully, "if we could find in the Mills' marriage what they hoped we would find, an exemplary model." Instead, we find a reversal of the patriarchal model: "A female autocrat replaced the usual male." This was much the view of Mill's friends, one of whom described him as in a "state of subjection" to his wife (an ironic play on the title of Mill's famous essay, "The Subjection of Women"). But unlike his friends who thought this a violation of the natural order of things, and unlike later commentators who think it a violation of his own principle of the "perfect equality" of the sexes, Rose makes of it a higher principle, a more advanced form of equality. Mill must have been aware, she argues, that by claiming to be his wife's inferior he was "altering the usual allocation of power between the sexes." It was precisely because this "great experiment," the attempt to create "a true marriage of equals," was so unusual that it required unusual measures. Unwittingly echoing Orwell's Animal Farm , in which some pigs are more equal than others, Rose explains that "for Harriet to be anywhere near equal she had to be `more than equal.'" "Think of it," she suggests, "as a domestic case of affirmative action. To achieve equality, more power had to go to Harriet, in compensation for the inequality of their conditions."

It is curious to find, in this insistently political interpretation of marriage, so little concern for the actual political ideas (or, for that matter, ideas of any kind) of the individuals. Was there a correlation between liberalism and marital liberality? Between radicalism and sexual liberation? Between conservatism and domestic authoritarianism? Even within the limited scope of this book, in the lives and minds of these five couples, there is matter enough for speculation, if not for generalization. Ruskin, Dickens, Mill, Eliot, Carlyle--they were all people of strong political convictions. Yet only in the case of Carlyle does politics come to the fore, and then only in terms of a single incident, the famous Eyre case.

Edward Eyre was the colonial governor of Jamaica in 1865 when a riot resulted in the death or torture of dozens of white settlers. In suppressing the riot (which Eyre declared to be a rebellion), government troops killed almost a hundred blacks, court-martialed and executed hundreds more, and flogged and tortured still others. When news of the event reached England, it provoked a heated controversy that went on for years in the press and Parliament and that was not quelled by the appointment of a Royal Commission or by the dismissal of Eyre. In this account, the two sides in the controversy appear as a line-up of "two hockey teams ranged for the face-off." Opposing Eyre were the "liberals and scientific progressives": Mill, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lewes; defending him were the "romantic authoritarians": Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Tyndall, Kingsley. To a knowledgeable reader, the names themselves suggest the inadequacy of these labels. But Rose sees the affair as symptomatic of all the "great democratic movements" of the century--"emancipation, nationalism, universal suffrage, women's rights, even trade unionism"--in each of which progressives sought a redistribution of power while authoritarians regarded the status quo as "divinely ordained." Since marriage is also a matter of the distribution of power, political authoritarianism is said to have a natural affinity with patriarchy and domestic tyranny.

It is an intriguing idea, or would be if there were any serious attempt to demonstrate the correlation between sex and politics. Were trade unionists, for example, less tyrannical, as husbands, fathers, and lovers, than non-trade unionists? Or the supporters of Italian independence than those opposed or indifferent to it? Or little-Englanders than imperialists? Or, to be more specific, Gladstone than Disraeli? Is the correlation even true of the subjects of this book? Was Eliot being patriarchal when she opposed female suffrage, as she did? Or Ruskin when he permitted his wife to leave and gave her an uncontested annulment? Or Carlyle when he married so strong-minded a woman and made no attempt to curb her tongue and pen--indeed, urged her to read and write, and not casually but seriously?

And what of Jane Carlyle herself, who, in spite of her husband's encouragement, did not do any serious writing but did have trenchant opinions and was in the habit of expressing them incisively? She, it appears, was as vehement a supporter of Eyre as he was, and she evidently came to this position on her own. At a dinner party, in the absence of her husband, she found herself engaged in conversation with an irate man who would have liked to see Eyre, as she reported it, "cut into small pieces and eaten raw." He told her that women might patronize Eyre, because they were naturally cruel, but that no man would stand up for him. "I hope Mr. Carlyle does," she retorted. "I haven't had an opportunity of asking him; but I should be surprised and grieved if I found him sentimentalising over a pack of black brutes!" This is hardly the kind of "progressive" sentiment Rose might be expected to approve of. Yet it is Jane Carlyle who emerges, only a few pages after this quotation, as the principal "heroine" of the book, and this in the closing sentences where the statement carries the largest weight.

Feisty Jane went down fighting, demanding equal time, and writing about it all in marvelous prose which just might outlast her husband's. Because of her, the Carlyles' marriage seems, in the strange afterlife which literature grants, to be also a marriage of equals, where equality consists--as perhaps it must, in an imperfect time such as hers, or ours--in perpetual resistance, perpetual rebellion.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MARRIAGE AND MORALS AMONG THE VICTORIANS by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Copyright © 2001 by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians

9781566633703

1566633702

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