Commonplace 5  George & Women



The epitome of virility?

It is easy to load harsh criticism on George for the way he regarded women; the evidence against him is pretty damning and makes pretty vile reading. He always seems to find women inferior and dangerous to male sensibilities.

He was the husband to two poorly-treated women - one abandoned in her hour of need, the other driven mad - a bigamist to a third (I am not being judgmental, just putting Gabrielle in an 1898 context). He considered the majority of women as virtually uneducable, believed a man should rule his woman with a rod of iron, lurched between erotic animal desire and mystical female cult worship then on to a Darwinian loathing of the inferior creature who would lure a man to his doom and then renege on the child care plans.

Of course, he back-pedalled like stink when he tried to reassure Gabrielle Fleury he wasn't a misogynist: 'Gabrielle, let me tell you that I recognise no restraint whatever upon a woman's intellect. Don't judge me in this respect from my wretched books - which deal, as you know, with a contemptible social class, for the most part'*. It is hard to be sure if he means this or if it is all spin. George was no stranger to telling lies, disseminating propaganda and reconstructing his life story to suit his own ends, but, to be fair, with Gabrielle he was looking at what he knew to be his last chance of finding a woman who might care for him while he was ill, and he needed to move fast, hence the pathos of bombarding her with emotional blackmail-tinged love letters. *Initially here, you might think he means working class women, but 'for the most part' his female characters were middle class - Helen Norman from 'Workers' is middle class, for example. 

Workers in the Dawn on their day off

George claimed: 'My nature is a strange compound of bohemian and bourgeois; I am passionate but at the same time, I am very domestic. To the woman who loved me, I should be absolutely faithful...' Note he doesn't say 'to the woman I love...' Ever the egotist! George said once or twice that he needed to be loved but he never said he needed to give love. Even when he discussed his feelings for his children (particularly Walter), it was in terms of 'tenderness', not 'love.' As PD James so rightly says, 'What a child does not receive, seldom can he later give'.

George didn't have real flesh and blood advisors when it came to the world of romance. His closet male friend, Eduard Bertz, never married and despite his fondness for ladies who cycled, doesn't seem to have been close to any woman except his dear mama. Eduard gave conditional support to the discussion of rights for homosexuals (he wasn't so keen on the physical stuff), knew of Walt Whitman (and got into some pretty hot water over his obsession with the gay poet), had lived in a commune in the US, was a political exile for a time and a sort of socialist, so in many ways, he was an 'activist' to George's 'reflector' type. His attack on Whitman's homosexuality and the public debate it provoked was after George had died. All that exposing of people's private behaviour to the public microscope makes one think maybe he was doing a bit of reaction formation there.  Perhaps Eduard was gay, himself. Anyway, you could say the closest Eduard came to a life partner, was George. 

 

Schopenhauer wasn’t the only influence, but he seems to have been one of the most pernicious in the hardening of George's heart. It is worth recalling that Schopenhauer was prosecuted for being a ‘neighbour from Hell’ to a woman who was awarded a series of payments from him as compensation; he had been arguing with her when he pushed her over. And, Arthur’s marriage proposal was rejected by a woman 26 years his junior, a proposal he made just after dumping his long-term girlfriend 14 years his junior. This was the man who wrote: "Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties," and "Marrying means to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel amongst an assembly of snakes." Could he be any more vile? Have a look at Commonplace 4 for more.

 

Eros and a butterfly - which is a symbol of Thanatos, apparently.

Arthur wasn't alone in having ideas that any woman, then as now, might find offensive. Though at the opposite end of the spectrum, Jules Michelet, the French 'historian' and polemicist, gave the world his 'La Femme' in 1860, a work so uxorious it is almost too, too fabulous to read. He adored and revered women - somewhat obsessively - and wrote of them as 'the poetry of heaven that is fallen around you'. Michelet advocated the worship of women and the lifelong devotion to their wondrous ways. Do women want to be adored - or just respected as individuals?

If only George had dared to not been an uptight, introverted, repressed, anally retentive Eeyore, he might have had more girl action. If only he had taken some of the authors he admired as his role models! There was Alphonse Daudet, an author George enjoyed and admired, but he could never emulate in his work, as he lacked Daudet's unselfconscious zest for life or his bravura sexual appetite. Even if 'Mrs Grundy' allowed it, and with all constraints on free expression removed, I don't think George's secretive nature would allow him to write about fun, flirty, enjoyable delicious sex - we are back to the bohemian vs the bourgeois. Was he afraid of his own sexual drives, or, a deeply hurt, sensitive soul who found himself deeply traumatised from the punishment meted out to him after he gave himself entirely to the erotic impulse when he was a student? Incapable of resisting affection from Marianne aka Nell - her powerfully erotic combination of sexiness and neediness matched his need to be a valiant Pre-Raphaelite knight in shining armour. His punishment was more than banishment (from all that his life had been leading to); it was the sullying of a beautiful feeling, probably the only experience he ever had of 'making love' and not just sexually functioning. George's inability (and his unwillingness) to cope with Marianne's illness robbed them both of a happy life. Daudet once described himself ‘a real villain in matters of sex’ – he was rampant, he said, from the age of twelve – and claimed he needed about ten episodes of real out-and-out erotic debauchery a year to keep him on the straight and narrow. His wife, Julia, turned a blind eye because she adored him – it seems everyone adored him. George must have been jealous of his hero.

Alphonse

Like George, in his early days, Alphonse had to teach for a living and absolutely hated it, but he did not despise journalism, and made a start at his writing career as a journalist – he once worked for Le Figaro, the paper his brother ran. Famously, too, Daudet suffered from neurosyphilis and suffered greatly. Some Gissing biographers think George had syphilis and probably died of it, though it is clear he was also suffering from TB. These two great monsters were often mistakes for each other, because both often set up happy coexistence in the same body. I tend towards thinking he did have it, contracted very early in his life, before he really knew what he was doing with sex, or how dangerous it could be. There is no hard evidence, but what there is points towards it - such as the second letter from John George Black; the mention Henry Hick made of it with regard to a skin lesion on George’s forehead, for two things. 

Landscape with Daudet's Windmill by Vincent Van Gogh

George wrote this in a letter to his little sister Ellen, February 3rd 1883 (when she was 15 and he was 25):  'You girls nowadays have astonishing advantages over your mothers and grandmothers; it is only to be hoped you will make use of it for the only real end of education - improvement of character. If you only could know how much of the wretchedness of humanity is occasioned by the folly, pig-headedness, ignorance, incapacity of women you would rejoice to think of all these new opportunities for mental & moral training.'

A man with a criminal record is not exactly in a safe position to lecture on what goes into character improvement!

The Rapture of Psyche by dearest Bouguereau 1895

Sadly, George could not take a leaf out of dear Alphonse’s book by giving free rein to his sexual needs when the urge came over him (though I am suspicious of all those trips to the seaside!). Daudet was a sensualist who off-set his misdemeanours by coming to an arrangement (I hope this was mutually beneficial) with his wife, Julia, and she allowed him some freedom because he was such an adoring husband and excellent loving father. As much as he admired the writings of the likes of Alfred Musset, Flaubert et al, George wasn’t really up to living that sort of free life. It is an example of the chasm that sometimes exist between art and artist – it is easy to paint (or whatever your medium) about ‘the abyss’ but the best Art is constructed from outside the battle, from the side-lines. George was never immersed in the fleshy, dynamic action of sex and love – he always viewed it from the cold outdoors, somewhat enviously, no doubt. This makes for good reportage, but poor  Art, and so George was right to stick to what he knew about: characters thwarted and confounded by their own lack of assertiveness and ambition, who often lacked insight and honesty, and who were hamstrung and trammelled by a society in which they had no faith.

'Jings! I'm in a Gissing novel! Will I live alone and loveless or just kill myself?
Self-portrait by Gustave Courbet

 

 Alphonse Daudet's account of his battle with agonising tertiary syphilis is addressed in Julian Barnes' book In the Land of Pain.




Commonplace 4    George & How Schopenhauer Ruined Him for Love. 

Arthur 

George rarely had anyone wiser than himself to go to for advice on matters of morality and intellectual reasoning. Unfortunately, when he did find suitable mentors, some of those chosen avatars were - admittedly in the days before Freud sprinkled us in a blessed golden shower of insight - totally unaware of their own perverse inner mental workings.  
George complained he didn't have much moral guidance as a boy – was more or less left to raise himself, for his father was often absent because of business (and that included botanizing and political life) and his mother was what we now term ‘emotionally unavailable’ (like mother, like son?). Which is why he looked to the Greeks and Romans to lay down the ground rules for life – and to the poets he loved like Tennyson and Keats - as well as to Shakespeare and Hogarth.

Later, he turned to established systems to guide him through life’s labyrinth but only until he debunked them: early exposure to Christianity, Comtean Positivism and Socialism all went to the wall. Later, he described himself as religion-less agnostic (hedging his bets for a change haha) and leaning towards Manichaeism (oh, dear). He came under Darwin’s influence - the man who famously reasoned that a wife was ‘better than a dog’. However, Pessimism stuck: Arthur Schopenhauer moved in.
George no doubt absorbed what Arthur said about women - because you can see it in his treatment of his wives, in the characterization of his females (Alma in the Whirlpool??, all the others...), in his letters to his sisters and brothers and Eduard Bertz (his lifelong man wife), and in his general pronouncements on women. Everywhere, that peculiar hand of Arthur Schopenhauer is at work. 
Here is a small part of the famous work George no doubt read in the original German and then committed to his misogynistic heart. There are quite a few ideas George seems to have lifted directly - maybe only when he was feeling particularly angry with women for having the hold over him that they did. I will return to this in my next post. I've numbered the sections to facilitate future reference. Of course, it makes unpleasant reading if you are a female; I suspect most males will think it makes perfect sense. It certainly is an illuminating insight into our man Gissing's mindset. You will recognise some very familiar Gissing tropes, both in his Life and his Art - he seems to have followed his Master faithfully.

Pandora by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1881 
Of course, it's all about her box.

Extract From “On Women” by Arthur Schopenhauer.

1. One need only look at a woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work. She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers—by the pains of child-bearing, care for the child, and by subjection to man, to whom she should be a patient and cheerful companion. The greatest sorrows and joys or great exhibition of strength are not assigned to her; her life should flow more quietly, more gently, and less obtrusively than man’s, without her being essentially happier or unhappier.

2. Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place.

With girls, Nature has had in view what is called in a dramatic sense a “striking effect,” for she endows them for a few years with a richness of beauty and a, fulness of charm at the expense of the rest of their lives; so that they may during these years ensnare the fantasy of a man to such a degree as to make him rush into taking the honourable care of them, in some kind of form, for a lifetime—a step which would not seem sufficiently justified if he only considered the matter. Accordingly, Nature has furnished woman, as she has the rest of her creatures, with the weapons and implements necessary for the protection of her existence and for just the length of time that they will be of service to her; so that Nature has proceeded here with her usual economy. Just as the female ant after coition loses her wings, which then become superfluous, nay, dangerous for breeding purposes, so for the most part does a woman lose her beauty after giving birth to one or two children; and probably for the same reasons.

3. Then again we find that young girls in their hearts regard their domestic or other affairs as secondary things, if not as a mere jest. Love, conquests, and all that these include, such as dressing, dancing, and so on, they give their serious attention.

Ladies happily engaged in some underachieving trivia.

4. The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important. It is by virtue of man’s reasoning powers that he does not live in the present only, like the brute, but observes and ponders over the past and future; and from this spring discretion, care, and that anxiety which we so frequently notice in people. The advantages, as well as the disadvantages, that this entails, make woman, in consequence of her weaker reasoning powers, less of a partaker in them. Moreover, she is intellectually short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less degree than men. This is why they have greater inclination for extravagance, which sometimes borders on madness. Women in their hearts think that men are intended to earn money so that they may spend it, if possible during their husband’s lifetime, but at any rate after his death. 

 

The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt  1853 or  'I should never have bought those shoes with the housekeeping he gave me. Oh, why am I a feckless short-sighted woman?

5. As soon as he has given them his earnings on which to keep house they are strengthened in this belief. Although all this entails many disadvantages, yet it has this advantage—that a woman lives more in the present than a man, and that she enjoys it more keenly if it is at all bearable. This is the origin of that cheerfulness which is peculiar to woman and makes her fit to divert man, and in case of need, to console him when he is weighed down by cares. To consult women in matters of difficulty, as the Germans used to do in old times, is by no means a matter to be overlooked; for their way of grasping a thing is quite different from ours, chiefly because they like the shortest way to the point, and usually keep their attention fixed upon what lies nearest; while we, as a rule, see beyond it, for the simple reason that it lies under our nose; it then becomes necessary for us to be brought back to the thing in order to obtain a near and simple view. This is why women are more sober in their judgment than we, and why they see nothing more in things than is really there; while we, if our passions are roused, slightly exaggerate or add to our imagination.

6. It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them. On the other hand, women are inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness. Again, because their reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what is absent and remote. Accordingly they have the first and principal qualities of virtue, but they lack the secondary qualities which are often a necessary instrument in developing it. Women may be compared in this respect to an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder. So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice.” This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie. For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form. 

Cuttlefish Love is real love.

7. Hence, dissimulation is innate in woman and almost as characteristic of the very stupid as of the clever. Accordingly, it is as natural for women to dissemble at every opportunity as it is for those animals to turn to their weapons when they are attacked; and they feel in doing so that in a certain measure they are only making use of their rights. Therefore a woman who is perfectly truthful and does not dissemble is perhaps an impossibility. This is why they see through dissimulation in others so easily; therefore it is not advisable to attempt it with them. From the fundamental defect that has been stated, and all that it involves, spring falseness, faithlessness, treachery, ungratefulness, and so on. In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men. It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all. From time to time there are repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters.

Young, strong, and handsome and misogynist George: Women Beware!

8. Nature has made it the calling of the young, strong, and handsome men to look after the propagation of the human race; so that the species may not degenerate. This is the firm will of Nature, and it finds its expression in the passions of women. This law surpasses all others in both age and power. Woe then to the man who sets up rights and interests in such a way as to make them stand in the way of it; for whatever he may do or say, they will, at the first significant onset, be unmercifully annihilated. For the secret, unformulated, nay, unconscious but innate moral of woman is: We are justified in deceiving those who, because they care a little for us,—that is to say for the individual,—imagine they have obtained rights over the species. The constitution, and consequently the welfare of the species, have been put into our hands and entrusted to our care through the medium of the next generation which proceeds from us; let us fulfil our duties conscientiously.

But women are by no means conscious of this leading principle in abstracto, they are only conscious of it in concreto, and have no other way of expressing it than in the manner in which they act when the opportunity arrives. So that their conscience does not trouble them so much as we imagine, for in the darkest depths of their hearts they are conscious that in violating their duty towards the individual they have all the better fulfilled it towards the species, whose claim upon them is infinitely greater.

9, Because women in truth exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends here, they live more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual. This gives to their whole being and character a certain frivolousness, and altogether a certain tendency which is fundamentally different from that of man; and this it is which develops that discord in married life which is so prevalent and almost the normal state.

10. It is natural for a feeling of mere indifference to exist between men, but between women it is actual enmity. This is due perhaps to the fact that odium figulinum in the case of men, is limited to their everyday affairs, but with women embraces the whole sex; since they have only one kind of business. Even when they meet in the street, they look at each other like Guelphs and Ghibellines. And it is quite evident when two women first make each other’s acquaintance that they exhibit more constraint and dissimulation than two men placed in similar circumstances. This is why an exchange of compliments between two women is much more ridiculous than between two men. Further, while a man will, as a rule, address others, even those inferior to himself, with a certain feeling of consideration and humanity, it is unbearable to see how proudly and disdainfully a lady of rank will, for the most part, behave towards one who is in a lower rank (not employed in her service) when she speaks to her. This may be because differences of rank are much more precarious with women than with us, and consequently more quickly change their line of conduct and elevate them, or because while a hundred things must be weighed in our case, there is only one to be weighed in theirs, namely, with which man they have found favour; and again, because of the one-sided nature of their vocation they stand in closer relationship to each other than men do; and so it is they try to render prominent the differences of rank.

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.

11. This makes them incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything, and the reason for it is, I fancy, as follows. A man strives to get direct mastery over things either by understanding them or by compulsion. But a woman is always and everywhere driven to indirect mastery, namely through a man; all her direct mastery being limited to him alone. Therefore it lies in woman’s nature to look upon everything only as a means for winning man, and her interest in anything else is always a simulated one, a mere roundabout way to gain her ends, consisting of coquetry and pretence. Hence Rousseau said, Les femmes, en général, n’aiment aucun art, ne se conoissent à aucun et n’ont aucun génie (Women, in general, don’t like any art, …something untranslatable by google translate… and don’t have any genius). Every one who can see through a sham must have found this to be the case. One need only watch the way they behave at a concert, the opera, or the play; the childish simplicity, for instance, with which they keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks forbade women to go to the play, they acted in a right way; for they would at any rate be able to hear something. In our day it would be more appropriate to substitute taceat mulier in theatro for taceat mulier in ecclesia; and this might perhaps be put up in big letters on the curtain.

12. Nothing different can be expected of women if it is borne in mind that the most eminent of the whole sex have never accomplished anything in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original, or given to the world any kind of work of permanent value. This is most striking in regard to painting, the technique of which is as much within their reach as within ours; this is why they pursue it so industriously. Still, they have not a single great painting to show, for the simple reason that they lack that objectivity of mind which is precisely what is so directly necessary in painting. They always stick to what is subjective. 13. For this reason, ordinary women have no susceptibility for painting at all: for natura non facet saltum. 

Artemisia Gentileschi demonstrating her lack of painterly skills.
Judith Slaying Holofernes 1614-20, Go, girl!

And Huarte, in his book which has been famous for three hundred years, Examen de ingenios para las scienzias, contends that women do not possess the higher capacities. Individual and partial exceptions do not alter the matter; women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable philistines; and because of the extremely absurd arrangement which allows them to share the position and title of their husbands they are a constant stimulus to his ignoble ambitions. And further, it is because they are philistines that modern society, to which they give the tone and where they have sway, has become corrupted. As regards their position, one should be guided by Napoleon’s maxim, Les femmes n’ont pas de rang; and regarding them in other things, Chamfort says very truly: Elles sont faites pour commercer avec nos faiblesses avec notre folie, mais non avec notre raison. Il existe entre elles et les hommes des sympathies d’épiderme et très-peu de sympathies d’esprit d’âme et de caractère. (They are made to trade with our weaknesses with our madness, but not with our reason. There are between they and the men of the sympathies of the skin and little sympathy of mind soul and character). They are the sexus sequior, the second sex in every respect, therefore their weaknesses should be spared, but to treat women with extreme reverence is ridiculous, and lowers us in their own eyes. When nature divided the human race into two parts, she did not cut it exactly through the middle! 
14. The difference between the positive and negative poles, according to polarity, is not merely qualitative but also quantitative. And it was in this light that the ancients and people of the East regarded woman; they recognised her true position better than we, with our old French ideas of gallantry and absurd veneration, that highest product of Christian–Teutonic stupidity. These ideas have only served to make them arrogant and imperious, to such an extent as to remind one at times of the holy apes in Benares, who, in the consciousness of their holiness and inviolability, think they can do anything and everything they please.

15. In the West, the woman, that is to say the “lady,” finds herself in a fausse position; for woman, rightly named by the ancients sexus sequior, is by no means fit to be the object of our honour and veneration, or to hold her head higher than man and to have the same rights as he. The consequences of this fausse position are sufficiently clear. Accordingly, it would be a very desirable thing if this Number Two of the human race in Europe were assigned her natural position, and the lady-grievance got rid of, which is not only ridiculed by the whole of Asia, but would have been equally ridiculed by Greece and Rome. The result of this would be that the condition of our social, civil, and political affairs would be incalculably improved. The Salic law would be unnecessary; it would be a superfluous truism. The European lady, strictly speaking, is a creature who should not exist at all; but there ought to be housekeepers, and young girls who hope to become such; and they should be brought up not to be arrogant, but to be domesticated and submissive. It is exactly because there are ladies in Europe that women of a lower standing, that is to say, the greater majority of the sex, are much unhappier than they are in the East. Even Lord Byron says (Letters and Papers, by Thomas Moore, vol. ii. p. 399), Thought of the state of women under the ancient Greeks—convenient enough. Present state, a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalric and feudal ages—artificial and unnatural. They ought to mind home—and be well fed and clothed—but not mixed in society. Well educated, too, in religion—but to read neither poetry nor politics—nothing but books of piety and cookery. Music—drawing—dancing—also a little gardening and ploughing now and then. I have seen them mending the roads in Epirus with good success. Why not, as well as hay-making and milking?

16. In our part of the world, where monogamy is in force, to marry means to halve one’s rights and to double one’s duties. When the laws granted woman the same rights as man, they should also have given her a masculine power of reason. On the contrary, just as the privileges and honours which the laws decree to women surpass what Nature has meted out to them, so is there a proportional decrease in the number of women who really share these privileges; therefore the remainder are deprived of their natural rights in so far as the others have been given more than Nature accords.

17. For the unnatural position of privilege which the institution of monogamy, and the laws of marriage which accompany it, assign to the woman, whereby she is regarded throughout as a full equivalent of the man, which she is not by any means, cause intelligent and prudent men to reflect a great deal before they make so great a sacrifice and consent to so unfair an arrangement. Therefore, whilst among polygamous nations every woman finds maintenance, where monogamy exists the number of married women is limited, and a countless number of women who are without support remain over; those in the upper classes vegetate as useless old maids, those in the lower are reduced to very hard work of a distasteful nature, or become prostitutes, and lead a life which is as joyless as it is void of honour. But under such circumstances they become a necessity to the masculine sex; so that their position is openly recognised as a special means for protecting from seduction those other women favoured by fate either to have found husbands, or who hope to find them. In London alone there are 80,000 prostitutes. Then what are these women who have come too quickly to this most terrible end but human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy? 18. The women here referred to and who are placed in this wretched position are the inevitable counterbalance to the European lady, with her pretensions and arrogance. Hence polygamy is a real benefit to the female sex, taking it as a whole. And, on the other hand, there is no reason why a man whose wife suffers from chronic illness, or remains barren, or has gradually become too old for him, should not take a second. Many people become converts to Mormonism for the precise reasons that they condemn the unnatural institution of monogamy. The conferring of unnatural rights upon women has imposed unnatural duties upon them, the violation of which, however, makes them unhappy. For example, many a man thinks marriage unadvisable as far as his social standing and monetary position are concerned, unless he contracts a brilliant match. He will then wish to win a woman of his own choice under different conditions, namely, under those which will render safe her future and that of her children. Be the conditions ever so just, reasonable, and adequate, and she consents by giving up those undue privileges which marriage, as the basis of civil society, alone can bestow, she must to a certain extent lose her honour and lead a life of loneliness; since human nature makes us dependent on the opinion of others in a way that is completely out of proportion to its value. While, if the woman does not consent, she runs the risk of being compelled to marry a man she dislikes, or of shrivelling up into an old maid; for the time allotted to her to find a home is very short. In view of this side of the institution of monogamy, Thomasius’s profoundly learned treatise, de Concubinatu, is well worth reading, for it shows that, among all nations, and in all ages, down to the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was allowed, nay, that it was an institution, in a certain measure even recognised by law and associated with no dishonour. And it held this position until the Lutheran Reformation, when it was recognised as another means for justifying the marriage of the clergy; whereupon the Catholic party did not dare to remain behindhand in the matter.

It is useless to argue about polygamy, it must be taken as a fact existing everywhere, the mere regulation of which is the problem to be solved. Where are there, then, any real monogamists? We all live, at any rate for a time, and the majority of us always, in polygamy. Consequently, as each man needs many women, nothing is more just than to let him, nay, make it incumbent upon him to provide for many women. By this means woman will be brought back to her proper and natural place as a subordinate being, and the lady, that monster of European civilisation and Christian–Teutonic stupidity, with her ridiculous claim to respect and veneration, will no longer exist; there will still be women, but no unhappy women, of whom Europe is at present full. The Mormons’ standpoint is right

19. In India no woman is ever independent, but each one stands under the control of her father or her husband, or brother or son, in accordance with the law of Manu.

It is certainly a revolting idea that widows should sacrifice themselves on their husband’s dead body; but it is also revolting that the money which the husband has earned by working diligently for all his life, in the hope that he was working for his children, should be wasted on her paramours. Medium tenuere beati. The first love of a mother, as that of animals and men, is purely instinctive, and consequently ceases when the child is no longer physically helpless. After that, the first love should be reinstated by a love based on habit and reason; but this often does not appear, especially where the mother has not loved the father. The love of a father for his children is of a different nature and more sincere; it is founded on a recognition of his own inner self in the child, and is therefore metaphysical in its origin.

20. In almost every nation, both of the new and old world, and even among the Hottentots, property is inherited by the male descendants alone; it is only in Europe that one has departed from this. That the property which men have with difficulty acquired by long-continued struggling and hard work should afterwards come into the hands of women, who, in their want of reason, either squander it within a short time or otherwise waste it, is an injustice as great as it is common, and it should be prevented by limiting the right of women to inherit. It seems to me that it would be a better arrangement if women, be they widows or daughters, only inherited the money for life secured by mortgage, but not the property itself or the capital, unless there lacked male descendants. It is men who make the money, and not women; therefore women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it nor capable of administrating it. Women should never have the free disposition of wealth, strictly so-called, which they may inherit, such as capital, houses, and estates. They need a guardian always; therefore they should not have the guardianship of their children under any circumstances whatever. The vanity of women, even if it should not be greater than that of men, has this evil in it, that it is directed on material things—that is to say, on their personal beauty and then on tinsel, pomp, and show. This is why they are in their right element in society. This it is which makes them inclined to be extravagant, especially since they possess little reasoning power. Men’s vanity, on the other hand, is often directed on non-material advantages, such as intellect, learning, courage, and the like. Aristotle explains in the Politics the great disadvantages which the Spartans brought upon themselves by granting too much to their women, by allowing them the right of inheritance and dowry, and a great amount of freedom; and how this contributed greatly to the fall of Sparta. May it not be that the influence of women in France, which has been increasing since Louis XIII’s time, was to blame for that gradual corruption of the court and government which led to the first Revolution, of which all subsequent disturbances have been the result? In any case, the false position of the female sex, so conspicuously exposed by the existence of the “lady,” is a fundamental defect in our social condition, and this defect, proceeding from the very heart of it, must extend its harmful influence in every direction. That woman is by nature intended to obey is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; this is because she requires a master. If she is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest.

Obviously, Schopenhauer was terrified of this:

L'Origine du monde by Gustave Courbet 1866.

All of Schopenhauer's 'On Women' in English is available on google books for free. I feel soiled now; I'm off for a bath.

Commonplace 3          George & Tuberculosis.

Medusa as the implacable and
omnipresent monster of TB 

Early years surrounded by the sick and diseased of Wakefield may have started the fear of ‘Demos’ that so warped George Gissing's humane sensibilities, though an abiding lack of empathy of almost autistic proportions did its part to form the misanthropic tendency he so often displayed. However, fear of incapacity and illness itself shaped his attitudes to the world and informed all parts of what he termed his 'mental development’.

His father, Thomas Gissing, being a pharmaceutical chemist, would probably have been expected to examine his customers when they came for medicines 'over the counter'. Many chemists, like physicians, made up their own treatments from recommendations in well-regarded pharmacopeias, or invented cures from their own scientific research with plants and existing herbals. The rise of the chemical industry was giving pharmacists a range of new ingredients to make use of, such as strychnine, iodine, mercury, bromides, and hypophosphates. The rise of vivisection gave them plenty of ways to trial their cures. Physicians often administered treatments both in their consulting rooms and in a patient’s home; the chemist might have a curtained off area of the shop, or a small room where customers could be examined before a cure was recommended. Some of these illnesses must have been the major contagions of the day: diphtheria, cholera, smallpox, polio, syphilis and tuberculosis.

Heroin sold as a cure for TB

The complaint George referred to as phthisis, is also known as consumption or pulmonary TB.

Tuberculosis is still one of the most destructive and feared diseases, and one of the commonest causes of the spread of tuberculosis was the disgusting habit of spitting in the street. One, can assume some of that pavement spittle was red. Infected sputum came into contact with shoes and so the disease could be taken unwittingly into the home. The lowest servant in the house would be responsible for cleaning boots and shoes - or the lowly working class wife would do it; exposure to contamination must have been a risk.

Coughing and sneezing, kissing, sharing drinking vessels, public baths and drinking fountains were also ways to acquire the disease. Whole families could be infected from one exposure at work, from milk, at school, playing in the street, or social mixing. The malnourished poor, who tended to have compromised immune systems, dwell in over-crowded housing with a lack of facilities for hygiene, would have had few natural defences to protect them from the ravages of this wasting disease. 

Thomas Gissing died at age 41 from 'congestion of the lung' contracted after a chill, but he had been concerned about his health for some time. He complained of 'chronic inflammation of the windpipe' and a persistent cough - both indicators of tuberculosis. And, William, George’s brother, suffered what was probably a pulmonary or aortic aneurysm that ruptured, possibly caused by TB weakening the pulmonary vessels - which led to his sad death at age 20.  

Infection with mycobacterium tuberculosis comes in many forms, affects every organ of the body and causes destruction wherever it breaks out. We think of it as chest disease, but it also affects the skin, the throat, kidneys, liver, genitals, the heart and blood vessels, the bones the brain. Even today, about 50% of those with active TB, eventually die of it, and it is still one of the biggest threats to public health in many developing countries.

Weight loss, persistent cough, night sweats, and malaise accompanied by haemoptysis (coughing up blood-stained sputum) are the main symptoms. George mentions a fixation with checking his mouth after coughing in case he found blood in his sputum - William complained of sporadic haemoptysis and chest pain. 

Gissing’s Letters and Diaries frequently mention colds and bronchitis which could be attributable to phthisis but throughout the early 1890s, there were several outbreaks of influenza that laid low many communities. Anyone with a chest weakened by TB was likely to catch the ‘flu. We are used to thinking of this as a mild infection, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, free of TB, mentions in his autobiography how he nearly died of the 'flu – and he was a strapping man in the fullest of robust health, a vigorous sportsman (a football goalkeeper!) and used to exposure to various ailments at his Southsea GP practice.   
George mistakenly believed colds are caused by weather - warmth in particular seemed to flummox him. Obsessions with sandy foundations, altitude, damp, light and the lack of it seem to have affected his mood much as did the vile surroundings of the street. Pulmonary TB is known to improve markedly in high altitudes and dry climates - hence the prevalence for treatment centres in the Rocky Mountains and the Alps. Avoiding warm and wet climates was recommended. William also complained of the heat and damp affecting his chest complaint.

Image: Wikipedia

Of course, George was a heavy smoker. He experimented with giving it up, but could never quite break the habit. Later, he claimed his doctor advised against giving it up as it did him good to smoke. This echoes the (nowadays) outrageous claims made by the tobacco industry back in the twentieth century. I can remember in the 1950s smokers with 'smoker's cough' first thing in the morning saying they were convinced this cough was a healthful result of smoking because they believed without this hacking cough all manner of filth accumulated in the lungs. And this, despite the dangers of lung disease being caused by smoking made in 1912 and 1929.

Apart from cancer, smoking causes coronary heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a lung disease that often includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema in its wake. We know George thought he had emphysema because he mentions it several times. However, it would not be implausible to think this was George’s wishful thinking, even denial, about his consumption. A good deal of the letters to Gabrielle contain reassurances to her that he doesn't have serious lung disease - ie consumption - whilst clearly demonstrating that he does have some very serious defects. Sensing that he had almost left it too late to find a soul mate and nurse, he goes to great lengths to blame his condition on Edith and the hard life he'd had - a condition which could only be ameliorated by the love of a good woman. He later reiterates the popularly-held belief that good food and a robust body weight are signs he has no consumption - called 'consumption' because of its tendency to cachexia or drastic all-over weight loss. His subsequent obsession with food in his French household may have its roots in a fear of weight loss, but he may also have needed extra food to offset the actual wasting of TB. Mrs Wells knew how to fatten him up when he stayed with the Wellses and Nayland Clinic (a specialist sanatorium for consumptives) offered a food-centric cure that must have been quite mind-boggling. Of course, to have an adequate body weight was still a sign the ravages of consumption had not yet struck. 

Sleep and his Half Brother Death 1874
by John William Waterhouse is a tribute to the artist's brothers who died of TB 

Back in his days with Edith, George’s friend from the Wakefield days and sometime surrogate parent for young Walter, took George to see a lung specialist, Dr Philip Pye-Smith, who told his patient he did not yet have the active form of TB but if his living conditions did not improve, he soon would have. Perhaps the strain of his unhappy second marriage brought the physical defences so low that the TB broke out and developed into the pulmonary version. He wrote to Gabrielle that he was glad she realised emphysema could be caused by mental suffering. Of course, we now know what he was referring to is the psychosomatic response to stress, or even a veiled reference to something worse than TB.

Earlier, George’s physician, Dr Beaumont had diagnosed a ‘patch’ on his lung, after George went to see him about chronic coughing, bronchitis and shortness of breath, When he told Edith, she berated him for bringing TB into the house. However, as far back as 1890 when 

Nymphs and Satyr by William-Adolphe Bouguereau 1973

George was on his Ionian journey in the town of Cotrone, when he developed 'malaria', the attending physician, Dr Sculco, discussed with him 'congestion' and a patch on his right lung. Was it really malaria? Or something more insidious, shameful and incurable? Something like syphilis?

In the love letters, George sent to Gabrielle in the early days of his romantic suit, he claimed to have had 'weakness in the chest' for only two years, when in fact it was for a lot more. George was capable of  'economies of truth' and confabulation and downright lying, at times - though this tended to be from a position of weakness, not strength, As manipulative as he was, he was not aware of how much he deceived himself as much as he did so many others.  That he only suffered from the pulmonary form in his thirties is in keeping with a disease that could have been dormant for many years before overwhelming his immune system. As Marianne, his first wife, also known as Nell,  had been diagnosed with scrofula, a form on TB, it might seem entirely fitting that Gissing could have contracted it from her, but this is also equally unlikely – the streets of Wakefield, Manchester, London, Boston, Chicago would have been awash with infected spittle and thronged with infected people. Accepting fully that consumption carried a social stigma of dirt, was there anything else about this disease that made George ashamed of having it? Again, we must consider something just as sinister; maybe even more shameful - syphilis.

I recently read an interesting article on the Guardian's webpage. It was an edited version of a preface to a new edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence, and written by Doris Lessing. It has been well-established that there are many similarities between Gissing and DH Lawrence, not least in that they both suffered from the disease that determined so much of their lives. Ms Lessing, writing about Lawrence, gives this rationale:

'First, he was dying of tuberculosis, but he was, as we put it, in denial, though it had been properly diagnosed, and with part of his mind he knew the truth. He had always had "a weak chest": in those days this was often a euphemism for tuberculosis. Even as a young man he had suffered all kinds of pneumonia, bronchitis, colds, coughs. It looks as if he succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Yet he refused to admit to tuberculosis, talked of his bronchials, his colds, his coughs, he had caught a chill - anything but TB. And this was strange in a man who valued the truth, and clear thinking and speaking, particularly on physical matters.

He had the temperament that goes with tuberculosis: hypersensitive, excitable. Very irritable, are these sufferers, given to explosions of temper. They know their time is short. They are reminded of their deaths with every rattling breath, every cough. The incessant coughing of Lawrence's later years got him thrown out of hotels, meant he had to choose his lodgings with care. As a young man Lawrence had been proud of his body, his "weak chest" notwithstanding. What comes out of the earlier novels, particularly The White Peacock, is the picture of a youth at home in the countryside, with friends, alert to every bird, animal, insect, plant. He could have said with John Clare, "I love wild things almost to foolishness."…  This body-proud countryman with "a weak chest" became the man whose rotting body filled him with miserable self-loathing. So many weltering aggravating emotions were at work in this very ill man as he wrote and rewrote Lady Chatterley's Lover

His wife Frieda was having an affair with a lusty Italian, and Lawrence knew it. Never the most tactful of women, she did not go out of her way to conceal her assignations. She did not spare his feelings in anything. She is supposed to have told friends that Lawrence had been impotent since 1926 .... Tuberculosis does two unkind contradictory things: it heightens sexuality and its feverish imaginings, and it causes impotence.'


From the Wellcome archive

What was the impact tuberculosis had on George? Ms Lessing's take on Lawrence in some ways fits our man, George spoke of his own debilitating, unfulfilled longings which are generally regarded as sexual frustration. He wrote of the tyranny of expecting young men to have to marry to be sexually active. He longed for love until the keening drove him neurotic with desire - for any sort of intimate connection, I think he saw this need for sex as a sign of personal weakness as much as it was a Darwinian imperative. Either way, it contained very little joy.

He seems to be both attracted and repelled by the sex he makes his characters sign up for - do any of them ever spontaneously break out and ravish each other? 

So, intensified sexual longings coupled with the inability to perform sexual intercourse could have haunted George, and might have been the reason he did not appear to have a sexual relationship with Gabrielle. Lack of fully-potent sex experience - what Maud Lebowski refers to as a 'zestful' activity - dominates the relationships he draws as if he fails to feel real feelings for the topic of sexual love himself and so cannot accurately describe the process. George's men are always driven to sex like it is an inevitable doom - the price men pay for their innate dominance over women, and a hollow, soulless chore. Was it his own lack of knowledge of the simple joys involved in erotic sensual intimacy that makes George's fictional accounts of lovemaking so loaded with anomie, and unerotic? His characters over-think everything at the expense of action, not because they are not animal sexual but because they are superficially 'civilized' or live on the ethereal film above reality, not down in the depths - which is what George hated most about Demos, in his misreading of the working classes. Demos with its lascivious lust for life would be a harsh reminder of his own lack of robust manliness. He certainly did not experience erotic love with his second and third life partners - only with his first, back in the days before tuberculosis claimed them both. However, giving oneself up to the sex urge is to lose control and George was nothing if not a control freak. Maybe the panic this loss of control invoked in him when he had unfettered access to the erotic pleasures of his love with Marianne unsettled him so much he ran from it and never went back - which is why tuberculosis might have been a positive force, on an unconscious level: an acceptable reason for emotional impotence as much as sexual.