George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

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.