George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 42  George & His Mama 

'A boy's best friend is his mother' - said Norman Bates click . And we all know which way that went.

The House By The Railroad by Edward Hopper 1925
The original of Psycho's Bates Motel.

George claimed he had a conflicted relationship with his mother. She was a remote but immensely powerful presence throughout his life, and, after his father died, she was the one he would naturally turn to for validation of his innate good qualities. If she were the sort to withhold affection that facility for giving positive feedback might not have poured forth freely. However, that is not an exclusively female problem - many fathers find it hard to admit affection or are never spontaneous in their skill with praising offspring. George, being one of five will have had to compete with others for what their mother had of affection to give, but from the Henry Hick account of the boy in the cupboard, she was a strict disciplinarian, and George might have been physically frightened of her, as many children are when parents assault them in the name of doing them good.


Mother.

She was also a woman of staunch Christian religious views, but the tolerance of Jesus towards transgressors does not seem to have percolated down to her child-rearing attitudes. When Jesus talks about not hurting others, Mrs Gissing must have pencilled in 'unless they are helpless children' into her copy of the Bible. We must be careful not to confuse this with a tendency to backwardness or reactionary zeal: we all know many religious people work tirelessly for the benefit of the disadvantaged, often going into environments requiring a broad mind - for example, Annie Besant and Josephine Butler - George's contemporaries - were both mothers and social activists and religious. As for corporal punishment, it is still a cultural norm in some modern-day families to assault children, despite being frowned on among we more enlightened souls. The 'spare the rod and spoil the child' brigade were as ecumenical in their religious beliefs then, as now. Still, it is hard to reconcile the claim to piety with a tendency to cruelty. But, Christians do worship torture and cruelty, don't they, in their preoccupations with the sufferings of their main man, hideously murdered and publicly displayed as so much dead meat. Images of the Crucifixion (including jewellery) don't represent the dead man - they focus on the one being hurt, endlessly down the ages. Anyway, that is the view of this atheist.

What sort of a woman was she? She married Thomas Weller Gissing on February 7th 1857. George came along nine months later. She was the daughter of a solicitor's clerk, he was a shop-keeper chemist with aspirations. George's biographers are hard on her, assuming her life was drab and mundane and that she was ill-educated. The life of a lower middle-class woman in the late nineteenth century is often mistaken as being some sort of cultural wasteland or intellectual limbo, but how true is this? Women who did not have to work for a living - because those who worked lacked the energy for a fulfilling inner life - had to make a world within a world of their homes, so it seems a little bit shallow of biographers to think this was a waste of a life, or criticize a woman for being a home-maker when there weren't any other options.

The Child's Bath
by Mary Cassatt 1893

Running a household is never easy. In an age before domestic electricity and labour-saving gadgets, much of the housework was hard and constantly in need of being repeated as coal or even gas are the enemy of cleanliness. Servants did the bulk of the work, especially the heavier stuff, but running a house well was no mean feat and required eternal effort. The finances would have been the mother's domain; getting value for money, and knowing how to budget were key roles in which a husband would never have involved himself. The burden of pregnancy and childbirth would have been a priority, as would nursing ailing children and caring for the family's general health and wellbeing. Crafts such as needlework, gardening, decorative arts and elements of the cooking and cleaning would have occupied her time. Only someone who underestimates how much work goes into running even a modern home would think she frittered away whatever qualities and skills she had on meaningless activity. Supporting the education of the five children and church activities would have taken up time and energy; there is no reason to suspect Mrs Gissing did not have a role in the wider social needs of the Wakefield poor, even if she was not as much of a Liberal as her husband. But she would not have been unmoved by the Christian duty she was signed up for - it was all part of the 'noblesse oblige' of the aspirant middle-class. Furthermore, such charity work sends a clear message to your peers that you are in a strong position over the weak, and not likely to be confused with them. A point to remember, is that she read and praised New Grub Street so perhaps she was not the uncultivated mind some prefer us to think she was.

Her relationship with her offspring seems to have been close, inasmuch as it was willingly maintained by all of the children. The girls, obviously, were the ones who spent most of their time with her, but William and Algernon probably got their fair share of attention. Mrs Gissing hastened to William's side to nurse him in what was to become his final illness - of the boys, he was likely to be her favourite as he was always doing his best to be an upright and independent decent young man, and Algernon had a touch of George in him, making him a constant source of worry, mainly because he seems to have been disabled by low self esteem and anxiety. What, then, was her relationship with George?

Portrait of Florence Owens Thompson and Her Children by Dorothea Lange 1936

In this informative piece about the mother/son relationship click, Patricia McBroom suggests men have to distance themselves from their mothers in order to conceive of themselves as 'real men' and not 'mama's boys'. This forces men into denying the bond they have and the emotional needs they feel for their mother - is this what George was going through when he told Mrs Gaussen he hardly knew his mama? Of course, this might have been making a play for Mrs Gaussen's sympathy or even a veiled request she step into the role as surrogate parent. But, perhaps he closed his heart to his mother, and from an early age. In a desperate attempt to identify with his father - who spent so much time out of the house and away from his wife that he was almost an absence - he might have told himself her input didn't count; likewise, neither did her opinion of anything George and Father valued.

The Sleepy Baby by Mary Cassatt 1910

When their father passed away, sending the boys away to school, starting with George, was not the work of a monster, but borne out of the reality of knowing they stood a better chance for a decent aspirational future if they could get a more focused and academic training. Mother will have been relieved to see how well George did at school - and then to be accompanied by his two brothers must have been a source of pride in a job well done in raising three such healthy, able children.

Whatever the state of their early relationship, Owens must have driven a horse and cart through it. First, there was the unforgiveable act of stealing. This will have been a great source of shame to every member of the family (in Commonplace 11, I suggest it was the root of Algernon's failure to launch). The gossips of Wakefield may have never known what happened, but there was always the fear of someone finding out about the jailbird in the family. When George was an established writer, this fear would have been stronger as he was a celebrity of sorts and people would be extra curious about him, maybe even seeking Mrs Gissing out to discuss her son's books.

It is understandable (if not something lacking of Christian charity) for Mother to blame Marianne aka Nell for the fall - probably the college account so coloured her view in that direction she was never able to address the subject fairly. However, she does not seem to have chosen to exert pressure on either William or Algernon to have nothing to do  with Marianne - unless there was a cabal of deceit between the boys to stop her finding out about it, which I very much doubt. Now, if Mrs Gissing (mother) thought Mrs Gissing (daughter-in-law) was a reformed prostitute, do you not think she might keep her boys away from this bad influence, or at least do her best to prevent them forming a positive view of her? Algernon stayed in the house with the daughter-in-law; William helped nurse her; both corresponded with Marianne, exchanged gifts, and asked to be remembered to her. Surely if Mother thought Marianne was a fallen woman - with the added allure of considerable physical charms - would she not put her foot down and demand Will and Alg avoid all contact? 

Mother and Child by Henry Moore 1953

Did George's mother ever look to him to become the man of the house? That might not have happened, as George was (according to Gabrielle) deeply impractical and generally useless at dealing with small challenges. William seems to have been the one to adopt that role, despite George having to take it on after Will died, albeit only in the symbolic act of financial and academic support to his siblings. You have the feeling with William that he was forced to grow up very quickly. That year when George was gallivanting in America would have shown Will he had to sublimate his own desires for a career and get a dreadful job in a bank, not to bring money into the house, but to be one less of a burden on his mother, and to prove to one and all he was the responsible patriarch of the family, and not a wrong 'un to anyone in Wakefield who judged the Gissings by what happened at Owens. Subconsciously, Will had to demonstrate he could be trusted with other people's money. We should not underestimate the symbolism of Will in a bank being honest with money, and Alg being a solicitor and upholder of the law. And it probably accounts for why Will worked in Manchester and nowhere near Agbrigg, and Alg became a nomad.

Mother and Child With An Apple by Angelica Kauffman 1763

It is hard for anyone who hasn't experienced something similar to fully grasp how disabling it was for the whole family to have George known as a disgraced jailbird thief. There is an immense level of fear of exposure, added to the shame at the amount of lying you have to do to cover your historic tracks. The family will have contracted and become inward-looking, probably choosing to socialise with very few known and trusted friends, rather than branch out and form new attachments. In addition to this, George's mother will have been concerned at the long-term influence it might have on his siblings, being especially fearful that all their marriage prospects may have been compromised. With George gone so spectacularly off the rails, she may very well have wondered who would marry her children, because whoever it was would have to be taken into the family secret. Is this why Madge and Ellen never married?

Madonna of The Book by Sandro Botticelli 1480

George might have had to grapple with the shame of making his family suffer for his transgressions, but did he worry about losing his mother's approval with the Owens incident? I tend to think not. We are all taught that to win the approval of our parents is the right thing to do, but George, if he genuinely had no rapport with her and was trained by his father into dismissing her modest aspirations as parochial, might, as a very young man, have unconsciously sought out opportunities for rattling her complacency.

George seems to have always battled with Motherhood. There were the years spent battling Maman Fleury over dinners - which was George doing battle with the Dragon of Motherhood in general. Much of his wrangling with Edith was about her style of mothering their children and her failure to mother him as man-child. Gabrielle was a mother substitute and that is very apparent in the infantile way he reacted to her and demanded unconditional love from her, which eventually developed into petulant resentment on his part; Marianne must have mothered him or she would not have asked Will to write to him (whilst she was staying in Wilmslow) about where his socks could be found, and when to water the plants. HG Wells famously said he never met a man who needed mothering more than George (unless that was a typo and there is a missing 's' haha!). Much as George always feared his mother, when she hadn't written for a while he always asked Algernon to prompt her into action - 'I would be grateful for a line from mother', he once wrote, plaintively.

Mother and Child by Gustav Klimt 1905