Commonplace 35 George & the Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time. PART ONE.
There are many myths about George's first wife, Marianne aka Nell. One of the most damning is that she was an alcoholic. I happen to believe what is offered as evidence for this claim is nothing of the sort - it is lazy re-writing of other people's work mixed with good old-fashioned misogyny and a sprinkling of well-meaning, if partisan, Gissing cult worship - biographical legerdemain generally delivered with such authoritative tone as to be taken by the gullible as gospel. The fable of The Emperor's Clothes springs to mind.
 |
| Repose by Edouard Manet 1870 |
'My first wife was a hopeless drunkard, & died miserably in 1881 or 2, I forget the year.' On the last one alone, he proves himself to be a liar and propagandist of immense proportions - o, the colossal moral expedience of rewriting history with such skill proves he could be, at times, nothing short of a Machiavellian schemer blackguard!
Think about it - how could he get it wrong? He might be a year out, but seven???? Why, to win Miss Collet's sympathy and manipulate her emotionally and practically (he needed help with Edith), of course. After all, he famously said, 'More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.' And the worst, it seems.
However, I think the seeds of this truly shocking piece of dissembling had its origins in... The Curious Incident of the Police Sergeant in the Night-Time.
 |
| Woman With Fans by Edouard Manet 1873 |
But first...
I believe George originally set out to suggest his first wife was a heavy drinker to justify his heartless abandonment of her and to draw down sympathy for himself from gullible well-wishers (see above).
I think he chose to present her as a drunkard for these reasons:
1) By labelling Marianne a drunk George was able to squirm out of his responsibilities to her, and to suggest to his Positivist friends - big fans of Charles Darwin - that she was, in some fundamental way, defective. Alcoholism was a scandalous cliché easily understood by the middle-class set with whom he began to fraternise: his nascent social ascendency runs parallel with his decreasing willingness to support Marianne.
2) Labelling her as a drunk to himself - to his own mind - would justify why he felt he could not foresee a life with her. How could he take an ailing, epileptic working class girl to high tea with the Frederic Harrisons? He obviously didn't factor that in at Owens when he chased after a chronically unwell girl from the working class. An ambitious networker and acclaim junkie like George always knew his new friends would judge him as being non-U if his wife was seen that way: his new bezzies were more bourgeois than demi monde, and George. himself, was never a true bohemian.
3) His shameful past (prison for theft) might catch up with him if Marianne ever met anyone outside a situation he could control. Having to explain how he came to be living with a working class woman and admit it was his selfishness that had dragged Marianne out of her milieu and forced her into his - for his own wilful purpose - might have to include details from the Owens days, Better by far to keep his influential friends from knowing he had already failed in his own personal experiment in social engineering. All he had to say, was: 'My wife is indisposed', or 'My wife is unwell' and they would all know what to think, and feel sympathy for him, then he could have the best brought out of him. Bless. Isn't this the one-sided inference Morley Roberts drew when he paid George and Marianne a visit and noted the dirty boots under the sofa?
4) An habitual drunk was not seen as a victim of substance dependency; they were viewed as someone morally weak, indulging in the behaviour of an inferior being with a weakness of the mind and flesh, lacking in social breeding and self-control - and probably indicative of a person from evolutionary backward stock. Special opprobrium was reserved for a woman who drank to excess, because women are supposed to be better than men on the moral, self-control level. Women are still expected to not succumb to temptations of the flesh - after all, God gave us the wombs because He clearly couldn't trust men with childbearing duties. This means we have always to act better than, and to accept being treated worse than, you chaps. So it goes I suppose.
5) Alcoholism was (inaccurately) viewed as entirely self-inflicted - after all, no-one holds the glass to the alcoholic's lips, do they? Who could blame a husband for the morally degenerate behaviour of his foolish wife if she turned to drink? In fact, wouldn't he be the one to warrant the sympathy, and not her? Isn't that the typical biographer's stance? Poor George - it's always Poor George. Isn't the party line: He did the right thing in ditching her; she was dragging him down to her level and interfering with his Art. Wouldn't any right man do the same'...? Darwin might have slapped him manfully on the back; Schopenhauer would have nodded, philosophically - much as philosophers do. Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer would have cringed. In an age when women could be institutionalised for so-called deviant behaviour such as dysmennorhoea, being orgasmic and wanting to walk out minus a bonnet, any woman embarrassing her nearest and dearest by daring to succumb to substance dependency faced exile of a real kind, for life and not just for a gap year bumming round the States. In reality, you could be as drunk as a skunk 24/7, parade around in the nude and off your face on laudanum all the live-long day as long as you kept it behind closed doors - much as did the Empress of India, herself. Public displays of loss of control - such as those experienced by epileptics - were what scandalised your Victorians: Marianne's epilepsy caused a public display of loss of control: George was a Victorian.
6) Who was there to argue with it? Who was there who could stand up for Marianne? William was dead; Algernon was unlikely to disagree with Big Brother, busy rewriting history. To coin a phrase George used about Edith, Alg knew which side his bread was buttered.
7) George did not take kindly to being thwarted in anything - remember, the word he used on Marianne when reporting her death in the faked Diary entry of March 1st was 'balked'; chosen to make it look like he wrangled with Marianne over her behaviour, but lost the contest to 'Fate' - that old Get Out of Jail Free card he liked to play. Failure to cooperate; things not going his way; expressions of ideas with which he disagreed... a control freak is a control freak is a control freak. Marianne's health was beyond his control and so he began to resent the time and money these cost him - he knew she was an incurable invalid, but he did not want to waste his valuable reading and writing time on her. Art was his calling and how he resented any diversion from it! But, it was his moral weakness and selfishness that did for their relationship every bit as much as her illnesses. George framed what ailed her as 'alcoholism' to deflect his moral responsibility and to stop his smart friends (and posterity) from thinking, 'What a cad - he should have stood by her.' However: what a cad you were - you should have stood by her, Mr Gissing.
 |
| Berthe Morisot (the artist's true love) With a Bouquet of Violets by Edouard Manet 1872 |
There is, of course, the chance George genuinely (if mistakenly) thought Marianne was a drunkard. I think there was a sort of arrogance to early George that assumed he was always right about things, and this is why he distanced himself so fiercely from his failures. This is a feature of his single-minded ambition to succeed in academic attainment, but this drive was not all it was cracked up to be in the real world - with real people. When he began to suspect life with Marianne was going to be too much of a challenge, he would be on the lookout for things to hold against her (his nit-picking with Edith is a heads-up to this sort of malarkey). Letters to Algernon show him becoming increasingly hard and selfish - more worried about himself than her. This would become a vicious circle - the more he found to criticize in her the more he criticized, and the more he thought of Marianne as a rebel if she did not comply. He seems to have crossed a line when he wrote to Algernon saying he had locked her in the house to stop her going out (January 1882) - and, yet, he never says she put up a fight or argued with him or slandered him or complained. And there is no evidence in the Letters to suggest drunkenness was the cause of her 'balking' him. She does not appear to have 'balked' him with malice aforethought or intent to annoy - because he would have told us if she was in any way 'uppity'. Uppity women were not George's thing (see Marianne; Edith; all landladies; Maman; Madge and her devotion to her God; Ellen, when it suited her; most women, in fact). She fussed over the right gloves with her costume; she wanted to go out to meet friends; she was miserable and unhappy and wanted to convert to Catholicism; she went shopping when he forbade it. This is not the work of a dissipated alcoholic hell-bent on securing another drink! When she lived apart from him, she associated with women he didn't like. This is an ordinary woman wanting to be free to make her own choices about the most mundane of things and to have some autonomy. By his disapproval and controlling actions, he lays claim to be morally entitled to make Marianne's decisions for her. Biographers are the ones who frame Marianne's small attempts at freedom of choice as examples of wantonness and dissipation without acknowledging the unreasonableness of George's treatment of her. George hated to be thwarted with anything, and so a woman who did not comply with his regime would be a threat to his fragile male egotism. He was an egotist as much as an egoist!
 |
| A Portrait of Madame Levy by Edouard Manet 1881 |
'Epilepsy' is an umbrella term for a series of brain wave events, rather than a single condition. The episodes of unconsciousness and insensibility in public places brought about by the convulsions Marianne suffered would likely have had a fugue state - a build-up to the actual fit - and a post-fit phase of automatism both producing a wide variety of signs and symptoms many of which, like the fits themselves, might be mistaken for drunkenness. Because neuroscience was in its infancy, knowledge of the nervous system, especially to the lay person, was basic. George might not even have realised the convulsions belonged to a specific diathesis in its own right, requiring very specific treatment and management. He could have misinterpreted episodes of insensibility as signs of drunkenness and so might the neighbours and shopkeepers in the areas where they lived.
Marianne had been unwell ever since George first met her in Manchester, when she was about sixteen or seventeen. For years, there had been a debate in the medical profession about the causes and prognosis of both scrofula and epilepsy: some thought the former was a stand-alone disorder; others saw it (rightly) as a precursor to systemic tuberculosis. The latter was taken as a sign of moral turpitude. I think the condition of her physical state was one of the things that attracted George to her, but ultimately, repelled him. George's brother, William, died in April 1880, and George would have known about the debate connecting scrofula to phthisis. His father had died of some chest weakness, too, and it was believed TB ran in families. In 2010 click a familial link was discovered for pulmonary TB (phthisis aka consumption).
In the connection George made, he might have seen all Marianne's sufferings and decided he wanted to abandon her so as he could avoid TB himself. Her declining health both exasperated and frightened him. The monitoring of his health was a life-long preoccupation and despite lying to Gabrielle about it, George suffered many of the signs of impending consumption: bouts of colds, 'flu, coughs, sore throats, fevers, and malaise. Finally, there came the diagnosis of phthisis that he was dreading, back in the days when he was married to Edith. Earlier, knowing Marianne was scrofulous might have alerted him to the fact he was living closely with a disease that he rightly feared and so getting rid of her was simple act of primeval self-interest.
 |
| Portrait of Eva Gonzales (Berthe's rival in love) by Edouard Manet 1870 |
 |
| Portrait of Berthe Morisot Reclining by Edouard Manet 1873 |
 |
| The Railway by Edouard Manet 1873 |
Marianne's health seems to have deteriorated fairly quickly in her time living with George, requiring from him strength of character, a bucket-load of empathy and some heroic unselfishness. None of these, alas were George's strong suits. It's plain to see Marianne was the 'behind every successful man there stands a woman' kind of a gal: when she was on holiday with William in Wilmslow, she had to send George a reminder to water the plants and information about where to find his socks. This is very much what George cried out for - a mother-figure (as HG Wells put it); a home-maker with benefits, who made no demands on him whatsoever. In a middle-class world, a husband would never be expected to nurse a sick wife - all that gunge to clear up and the endless giving out of sympathy, and the sheer effort of trying to come up with practical solutions to physical problems. Every illness Marianne evidenced must have reinforced his general uselessness. The deal was supposed to be that the wife looked after the husband - this role reversal I suspect undermined George's innate sense of masculine superiority. This led him to resent Marianne and think in disciplinarian terms when his rational, inflexible, inept approach failed. To be fair, a young man who has led a sheltered life in the real world, and who focuses on the (male) Greeks for guidance in matters of married bliss has no practical skills to bring to the table of altruism. George focused too much on the higher notions of life and less on the fundamentals that might have helped him organise his responses to Marianne' sufferings. And, he had the selfish genie living in his soul - never a good tenant to my lily-livered do-gooding-philanthropic-once-a-hippie-always-a-hippie mind. Added to that must have been the feeling he had sacrificed too much to gain too little.
Gabrielle described him as impractical and useless in even trivial, mundane mini crises, so the burden of having a human disaster to deal with most days must have been a threat to his mental equilibrium. There is an old saying (I think I read it first in Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa') that 'Those who can bear great trials generally get them'. George provides the exception to that rule.
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 36 FOR
PART TWO - and that contemptible police sergeant
No comments:
Post a Comment