“THE ODD WOMEN” by George
Gissing (first published in 1893)
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you might know
of the interest I have taken in the late-nineteenth century English realist
novelist George Gissing (1857-1903). His novels may be dour, sometimes even
plodding, and certainly depressing in parts as he examines working class people
in complete poverty and middle-class or lower-middle-class people struggling to
survive and keep up appearances. Thus I have had posts on The Nether World (1889), reflecting the despair of slum dwellers; New Grub Street (1891), presenting the
struggles of hack writers and often regarded as his best book; Born in Exile (1892), a piece of
inspired literary self-pity, very much echoing Gissing’s own distress at being
dealt a cruel hand by life; and Will Warburton(published posthumously in 1905), about the class anxiety of a professional man
who is forced to go into “trade”. And by way of relief from all this I’ve also
posted on the last of his works published in his lifetime, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), being a fantasia of
the life he would like to have led as a retired literary gentleman in the
country.
Many
negative things can and have been said about the narrow focus of Gissing’s
work, and the tricks of long hack-writing he himself practised to make his
novels saleable to publishers who expected three-deckers. (Unnecessary
conversations as page-fillers; dips into melodrama after grimly realistic scene-setting
etc.). One quality you can never take away from him, however, is his sheer
readability – the clarity of his prose.
The Odd Woman is not the best of Gissing’s work, but it is an
interesting attempt to take on what he saw as an urgent social problem.
Its
short synopsis would read like this: A young woman of no fortune marries an
older man of some substance, but the marriage falls apart under the pressure of
the husband’s possessiveness. Meanwhile an independent man attempts to woo a
feminist, but they are never able to negotiate exactly what the nature of their
relationship should be, and so they never marry.
And
here is my longer synopsis: Dr Elkanah Madden, a widower, dies in the first
chapter, leaving his family of daughters with only a modest annuity and no real
education or professional training. Some years later, Alice Madden and Virginia
Madden are living hand-to-mouth in London. Their younger sister Monica Madden
earns a living in a sweatshop. She wishes to raise herself. She gets to know the
philanthropic feminist Miss Mary Barfoot and her more zealous feminist
assistant Rhoda Nunn, who make it their mission in life to raise young women to
independence by giving them secretarial skills. 21-year-old Monica seems set on
this path, when she meets and marries the wealthy Edmund Widdowson (aged 44).
One major strand of the plot thus concerns the marriage
of Edmund Widdowson and Monica Madden. He wants his wife to be submissive,
obedient, a companion and housekeeper for his quiet life, whereas she wants
social independence and her circle of friends. The strain grows. Monica was
aware, even upon marrying Edmund, that she was “selling” herself for social
ease.
The
other major strand of the plot concerns Rhoda Nunn and her relationship with
Mary Barfoot’s brother Everard Barfoot. Everard woos Rhoda. Rhoda is at first
absolutely convinced that she will never marry, so she accepts Everard’s
courtship as an elaborate means of asserting her independnce, when she will
eventually refuse him. Everard at first thinks of her in terms of an amusing
conquest (he has been around a bit), but gradually the relationship becomes
more intense. They are negotiating their relationship and on the pont of
working out their own form of marriage.
However,
the denouement comes from a meshing of these two strands of plot. As her
marriage has become more restrictive and intolerable, Monica has fantasised
about running away with a young bounder called Mr Bevis (who, having flirted
with her, deserts her and runs away at the first sign of trouble). By
confusions and mistaken identity, Rhoda Nunn comes to believe that Everard
Barfoot was the object of Monica’s adulterous desires. So Rhoda and Everard
part. Edmund Widdowson discovers his wife’s intrigue with Bevis. So Monica and
Edmund part.
Months
later, the confusions are sorted out, but Rhoda and Everard are unable to
rekindle the sort of trust that could lead to marriage. Monica dies shortly
after giving birth to Edmund’s daughter. Edmund now knows of her innocence –
she did not actually commit adultery -
and leaves his baby daughter in the care of Alice Madden as he returns
to comfortble bookish celibacy. Rhoda returns to her vigorous feminist
concerns.
Subplots concern Virginia Madden becoming an alcoholic and
having to dry out; Everard Barfoot’s scholarly mathematician friend Thomas
Micklethwaite, who marries only after years of scrimping and saving to afford
marriage; and one of Monica’s sweatshop companions Miss Eade who (if one can
decipher the novel’s 1890s euphemisms) appears to become a prostitute.
As
is always the case with Gissing, this novel would be a happy hunting ground for
those who see literature as a form of historical sociology. The “odd women” of
the title are, as the novel explicitly tells us, that surplus female population
that will never marry and yet are scarcely trained or educated to earn their
own way in the world. So this is one of Gissing’s 1890s works of
lower-middle-class anxiety (as opposed to his 1880s novels of slum-dwelling
subsistence). The Odd Women seems
designed to give a variety of perspectives on marriage and on the prospect of
women’s independence: – the man (Micklethwaite) who wears himself out earning
enough to afford a wife; the complete pragmatist (Edmund Widdowson’s widowed
sister-in-law who plays the marriage market to her own advantage); and of
course the feminist (Rhoda) and the forward-thinking man (Everard), who believe
they can work out their own substitute for marriage, respecting each other’s
independence, but in fact fail to do this as they find their own jealousies
intruding. Is Gissing implying that human nature is not as strictly rational as
reformers (in this case feminists) would like it to be?
There
are naturally many connections with similar interests in other novels by Gissing.
His next novel In the Year of Jubilee (which I have so far not
dissected on this blog) also has three sisters and a fourth woman trying to
re-negotate the concept of marriage. Curiously, though, despite the apparently
“progressive” tendency of Gissing’s theme, I constantly detect the “Henry
Ryecroft” bookish side of Gissing peeping through. Edmund Widdowson’s
bafflement that his wife will not submit to him and become a domestic helpmeet
is quite sympatheticaly observed; and given that Edmund Widdowson’s ideal life
is the quiet reading of books he is in some respects one side of Gissing
himself.
Is
this novel, then, the product of a conservative forcing himself to write
sympathetically about feminism? I wonder, too, how conscious Gissing was of the
irony of having his feminist characters (Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn)
explicitly disavowing any interest in working-class women?
Mary
Barfoot explains why they do not train working-class girls: “The odious fault of working class girls, in
town and country alike, is that they are absorbed in preoccupation with their
animal nature. We, thanks to our education and the tone of our society, manage
to keep that in the backgroun. Don’t interfere with this satisfactory state of
things.” (Chapter 6)
They
seem mainly interested in helping middle-class girls – and how ironical it now
seems to us that their highroad to independence is seen to be by becoming
typists. There is an unintentionally amusing moment when the zealous Rhoda Nunn
inveighs against romantic novels: “If
every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea, we should have some
chance of reforming women….. [of reading novels] The result is that women imagine themselves noble and glorious when
they are most near the animals.” (Chapter 6)
So
much for the sociology – unavoidable though it is in any book by Gissing. As
literature, The Odd Women is flatter
than other Gissing novels of the same period. Reading it, one is even more
conscious of abstract conversations going nowhere in particular. I was irritated
by the 1890s euphemisms for pregnancy (when Monica is pregnant) and I felt some
complications were tedious plot-spinning. The quality of “readability” is not
to be sneezed at, however. Gissing is very adept at neatly filling in a
character’s background in an introductory paragraph. But this as not as
spirited a book as New Grub Street or
Born in Exile.
Pehaps
it lacks the vivid involvement of self-pity that fired others of his novels?
Even so, there is a moment when Gissing appears to be thinking of himself as
Everard says to Rhoda: “We fall in love,
it is true, but do we really deceive ourselves about the future? A very young
man may; but we know of young men who are so frantic as to marry girls of the
working class – mere lumps of human flesh. But most of us know that our
marriage is a pis aller. At first we are sad about it; then we grow cynical
and snap our fingers at moral obligation.” (Chapter 10)
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