Commonplace 43 George & The Emancipation of Women.
'It's all very well to be womanly, but don't be womanish', Dyce Lashmar, the eponymous Charlatan tells his betrothed Iris, when she seeks reassurance that he loves her. She carries on asking for the words that will prove he is totally committed to their marriage. 'You're not sorry you're going to marry me?' she asks, forlornly. 'You're getting hysterical, and I can't stand that', he replies. When scholars say George put himself into his novels, don't forget a large chunk of him went Dyce Lashmar's way.
George had some fairly awful things to say about women. Despite his claim to be
for their emancipation, his ideas for this centred on doing away with regional accents (norf click London, in particular) and getting wives to agree to living apart from husbands whilst still making themselves available as facilitator for a husband's sexual needs, or whatever else they could be used for (sewing, housework, an effective wind break).
He was hard on his heroines in ways he wasn't on his heroes and always made sure their story arcs involved some sort of comeuppance. Here is a random selection:
Clara and her destroyed beauty (the vile act done by another woman) in Nether World; Adela having to marry beneath her in Demos; Iris (see above) and the run-around from Dyce Lashmar in Charlatan; Alma Rolfe humiliated over her dream of being a concert violinist and then being treated as a whore by Cyrus Redgrave in Whirlpool; Ida Starr for being a working girl in Unclassed; Rhoda Nunn for thinking she was above marriage, and Monica for marrying above her station in Odd Women; Marian Yule being rejected by the odious Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street. Read any book of George's, and there you will find these poor, abused females - even Henry Ryecroft has this description of a non-person housekeeper: '... she is low-voiced, light-footed, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I require, and not afraid of solitude'. Some men compartmentalise women into functional categories, based on usefulness more than any other factor. Looks and sexuality are useful functional categories. The advantage to this system is that a new model can always be acquired when the old one no longer performs its function to the man's approval. Although I refute the claim Marianne aka Nell was ever a prostitute, you can see why George might have found the grisette fantasy (or, tyranny, from the woman's perspective) so appealing. If George had visited Japan, he would have visited the geisha and thought he was following some ancient tradition worth endorsing.
What did he look for in a female companion? In his youth, George's ideal woman was a slender, dark-haired slip of a girl preferably with an independent income or the capacity to earn a living, who worshipped the ground he walked on, and who kept in the background with her mouth firmly shut. He didn't want her educated, because clever girls would have seen through his faked macho act of being the one to (literally and metaphorically) 'wear the trousers' in the relationship, but if she were, she would be smart enough to know her place. She had to be biddable - he couldn't bear dissent. She had to be unassuming, modest and retiring; so as not to draw attention away from his importance as Great Man of Letters, and she had to be content to be left at home while he went off socialising his way up the greasy pole of social class. I'm not saying George was cruel, but that he would dole out affection as a reward more than as a right to be expected from a husband. You only have to read some of his Letters entries about Walter to know George's love was conditional.
Consider the housekeeper remark in Henry Ryecroft (Spring II) regarding his ideal housekeeper, which serves as a job description for the job of wife. Everything he despises about women in encapsulated in that statement. Perhaps only a woman feels the offence. You can see what Marianne and Edith were up against. Oh, and a wife had to be grateful to him: Marianne - for relieving her poverty; Edith - for relieving her class inferiority; Gabrielle - for relieving her spinsterhood.
He specialised in damaged goods or second best (in his eyes, not mine!) because there was a much richer seam of self-pity to be had in bemoaning his fate to his friends about an unsuitable wife. Just imagine if George had ever said to Roberts et al: 'I have a lovely wife; she is the best thing that ever happened to me; I am a lucky sod' - the man who always needed sympathy would have had to forfeit that childish nonsense! Of course, having a 'trouble and strife' for a wife was always a good excuse for his lack of literary success, and he could always blame her for his paucity of artistic excellence, and not being able to get on with the task of producing the goods.
To George, a wife was a cross to bear, not a best friend with benefits. And, I wouldn't be surprised if he was more concerned about what other men thought of his wife, so she had to have some 'trophy' credentials - hence keeping poor Edith invisible. Being George, these womanly ways would have to be negative traits to gain him sympathy. Marianne's illness was initially useful because it got him sympathy from those who saw him martyring himself - not that he kept that up for long! Edith's scorn got him sympathy but this he eventually exploited to make her the reason for his creative constipation and emotional biliousness (after the early surge of Born in Exile and The Odd Women). There is every reason to think George exaggerated her bad side to win that slimy sympathy he so desperately craved, but HG Wells - a man who liked women (perhaps in the wrong way? I'm no Wells expert, but I've read the press!) - thought George was too hard on Edith; Gabrielle got him sympathy because she didn't feed him enough, gave him a controlling mother-in-law (just like his own mama) and then kept him prisoner away from England in France like some medieval knight waiting to be ransomed.
He also didn't want a fully-formed woman. He wanted one he could 'finish off' (no, not murder haha - but I bet it crossed his mind), but one he could fashion into the woman he wanted her to be - he did not accept a woman as she was in a natural state. George was always blind to this supreme piece of arrogance: that he thought he always knew best about a gender he so radically failed to understand or could claim to genuinely like. There are very few people who could survive this sort of crushing critique of their personalities, character and souls.
And, then there are the non-fiction writings. Why, oh why does he do it? We are not speaking of the random thoughts of a seasoned ladies' man here - at most he will possibly have slept with someone before Marianne, probably Marianne, definitely Edith (twice) and possibly a landlady and maybe Mrs Gaussen, though I tend to think not. He certainly never slept with Gabrielle. Add to this the women he knew but not as partners - three family members, in his two sisters and mother, and Clara Collet, a woman of indeterminate sex to him as she was not his type. Peppered along the way will have been literary men's wives: half a dozen at most. This is the basis on which George could say he had made a serious study of the female psyche and had emerged as an expert. Reading about women was probably the most common source of his information - despite what he says about journalism, George was an avid reader of all kinds of newsprint, and many of the incidents in his books may have been lifted from real life or its equivalents as reported in the press, which is why some of them are almost said in passing with very little emotional affect attached.
Let's look at some of the entries George made in his Commonplace Book under the heading 'Women'. We presume these were the meaningful to him noodlings he jotted down to keep for future reference, very much as one might do if she devised a witty and informative, slightly irreverent, highly entertaining and visually absorbing blog intended for the serendipitous reader to fill an idle five minutes. Oh, dear. You just remember these the next time someone tries to tell you he wasn't a misogynist!
'Hatred between men is not common, & when it exists is due to the most various causes. Hatred between women is universal, & always due to one common cause - wounded vanity.'
'Herodotus begins his history with a search for original cause of quarrel between Europe & Asia, - and finds it in Woman. Perhaps, as Heine suggests, symbolical of all history.'
'I have never discovered any greater tenderness in women than may be observed in men, but I have often been struck by the superior energy and pertinacity of their hatred.'
I want to be kind, because I have a great affection for the annoying old fart, but, really... George what can you have been thinking of? Which goggles were you wearing when you wrote these egregious things? Where do we start?
'Hatred between men is not common'. I actually had to reread this the first time I saw it because I thought there was a typo, and should have read 'Hatred between men is not uncommon'. Even in his cloistered surroundings, George would have been aware of the various conflicts besetting his World. In George's lifetime the British were involved in 16 wars or military campaigns. As most of these involved us Brits stealing land off indigenous peoples, might we not assume hatred was engendered, and have we not been reaping some of that whirlwind ever since? What sort of hatred is he talking about? Didn't Roman and Greek men hate their foes? Maybe he feels covered by the vagaries of 'various causes', but that makes for a paltry argument.
We move on to hatred between women. I am wary of any claim to an absolute in opinions - rank total generalisations say more about the speaker than the subject. Is there hatred among women and is it 'universal'? And, if it exists, does it ever involve 'wounded vanity'? I hate no-one, but, if I allowed myself to imbibe, I can't think of a single woman who would be in my 'Top 10 People To Hate' list - because those places would be taken up by men. Cruel men. And, if what George says were true, why do so many women have lifelong female friendships of deep mutual trust and joy? Besides, women are too busy hating their oppressors to hate other women; and their torturers and their victimizers - these are invariably men require what hatred is left over. I think wounded vanity is the last thing that comes into the rape victim's mind when she hates the rapist. I think this is a case of George loquens stercore.
'Women are to blame for the woes of Europe and Asia'? Yeah, right. ISL and the Worldwide Caliphate are about women, aren't they? click
Women no more tender than men? Possibly, because compassion is not a gender-biased trait. But women having superior energy and pertinacity of their hatred? Do women hate for longer and with more vigour? Well, women have a great deal to hate men for; but we know we don't have exclusive rights to being kept in servitude, or being regularly abused, tortured or murdered, treated as inferiors and betrayed by powerful men who are vicious, inadequate, arrogant, violent, cruel and spiteful. We know some men are in a similar position. Do women have much longer memories for transgressions against us? Was Edith's hatred stronger than George's? Or, maybe it was that she was an authentic communicator who felt entitled to speak her mind, whilst George was... not. She did have a lot to hate him for. She was married under false pretences, he no doubt destroyed her self esteem, threw her off when it suited him, deprived her of her child, used strangers as a means of control over her life, and he eventually drove her insane... good reasons to hate a man, I suppose. But did she hate him or was she just angry with him? I doubt if George ever listened to her feedback or complaints in a constructive way or credited her with much feeling - being as how he saw her as an inferior on every level, and really not mother material, just sex recepticle. As we only have George's account of his time with her, how can we know what really happened? Never be fooled into thinking Edith was anything but collateral damage in George's so-called heroic life, and thus genuinely deserving of our sympathy.
It was easy for the weak George to mistake Edith's anger for hatred, and for any man to mistake a woman's assertiveness for aggression. I think George was scared of Edith because her power over him - which he probably actively encouraged being as how he was a masochist - and she reminded him of his mother. And mother could be violent and cruel, even though she might believe she was doing the right thing in locking a small child in a dark cupboard. Perhaps this subliminal identification of Edith as his mother-figure was strong enough for Freud's castration anxiety to kick in; and perhaps Edith's scorn - as he failed to treat her lovingly - added to his unconscious sense of emasculation, which he would have resented. He complained Edith belittled him, but this has to be taken in the context of his constant criticism of her and his apparent disgust at her lower middle-class roots, a state of affairs for which he was entirely to blame as he knew he hated the sort of background she came from and the people who issued forth from it. He separated her from her family and denied her social outlets - as said in Commonplace 38 he was often a tyrant, a man who used psychological, not physical means of control - though let's not forget he locked Marianne up when it suited him. George and Edith employed different means of communication, with poor Edith at an eternal disadvantage. But, men do not like to be belittled - women, of course, have to pretend to accept it. In a recent UK BBC tv drama, the female protagonist (a police detective) gave an account of asking men and women what they feared about the opposite sex: 'They might laugh at us', was the reply from the men. 'They might kill us', was the women's response.
 |
| The Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do For the Rent? by Walter Sickert 1907 |
George had some fairly awful things to say about women. Despite his claim to be
for their emancipation, his ideas for this centred on doing away with regional accents (norf click London, in particular) and getting wives to agree to living apart from husbands whilst still making themselves available as facilitator for a husband's sexual needs, or whatever else they could be used for (sewing, housework, an effective wind break).
 |
| Figure by Walter Sickert 1906 |
Clara and her destroyed beauty (the vile act done by another woman) in Nether World; Adela having to marry beneath her in Demos; Iris (see above) and the run-around from Dyce Lashmar in Charlatan; Alma Rolfe humiliated over her dream of being a concert violinist and then being treated as a whore by Cyrus Redgrave in Whirlpool; Ida Starr for being a working girl in Unclassed; Rhoda Nunn for thinking she was above marriage, and Monica for marrying above her station in Odd Women; Marian Yule being rejected by the odious Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street. Read any book of George's, and there you will find these poor, abused females - even Henry Ryecroft has this description of a non-person housekeeper: '... she is low-voiced, light-footed, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I require, and not afraid of solitude'. Some men compartmentalise women into functional categories, based on usefulness more than any other factor. Looks and sexuality are useful functional categories. The advantage to this system is that a new model can always be acquired when the old one no longer performs its function to the man's approval. Although I refute the claim Marianne aka Nell was ever a prostitute, you can see why George might have found the grisette fantasy (or, tyranny, from the woman's perspective) so appealing. If George had visited Japan, he would have visited the geisha and thought he was following some ancient tradition worth endorsing.
 |
| Baccarat or The Fur Cape by Walter Sickert 1920 |
Consider the housekeeper remark in Henry Ryecroft (Spring II) regarding his ideal housekeeper, which serves as a job description for the job of wife. Everything he despises about women in encapsulated in that statement. Perhaps only a woman feels the offence. You can see what Marianne and Edith were up against. Oh, and a wife had to be grateful to him: Marianne - for relieving her poverty; Edith - for relieving her class inferiority; Gabrielle - for relieving her spinsterhood.
He specialised in damaged goods or second best (in his eyes, not mine!) because there was a much richer seam of self-pity to be had in bemoaning his fate to his friends about an unsuitable wife. Just imagine if George had ever said to Roberts et al: 'I have a lovely wife; she is the best thing that ever happened to me; I am a lucky sod' - the man who always needed sympathy would have had to forfeit that childish nonsense! Of course, having a 'trouble and strife' for a wife was always a good excuse for his lack of literary success, and he could always blame her for his paucity of artistic excellence, and not being able to get on with the task of producing the goods.
To George, a wife was a cross to bear, not a best friend with benefits. And, I wouldn't be surprised if he was more concerned about what other men thought of his wife, so she had to have some 'trophy' credentials - hence keeping poor Edith invisible. Being George, these womanly ways would have to be negative traits to gain him sympathy. Marianne's illness was initially useful because it got him sympathy from those who saw him martyring himself - not that he kept that up for long! Edith's scorn got him sympathy but this he eventually exploited to make her the reason for his creative constipation and emotional biliousness (after the early surge of Born in Exile and The Odd Women). There is every reason to think George exaggerated her bad side to win that slimy sympathy he so desperately craved, but HG Wells - a man who liked women (perhaps in the wrong way? I'm no Wells expert, but I've read the press!) - thought George was too hard on Edith; Gabrielle got him sympathy because she didn't feed him enough, gave him a controlling mother-in-law (just like his own mama) and then kept him prisoner away from England in France like some medieval knight waiting to be ransomed.
He also didn't want a fully-formed woman. He wanted one he could 'finish off' (no, not murder haha - but I bet it crossed his mind), but one he could fashion into the woman he wanted her to be - he did not accept a woman as she was in a natural state. George was always blind to this supreme piece of arrogance: that he thought he always knew best about a gender he so radically failed to understand or could claim to genuinely like. There are very few people who could survive this sort of crushing critique of their personalities, character and souls.
 |
| New Home by Walter Sickert c 1905 |
 |
| La Hollandaise by Walter Sickert 1906 |
'Hatred between men is not common, & when it exists is due to the most various causes. Hatred between women is universal, & always due to one common cause - wounded vanity.'
'Herodotus begins his history with a search for original cause of quarrel between Europe & Asia, - and finds it in Woman. Perhaps, as Heine suggests, symbolical of all history.'
'I have never discovered any greater tenderness in women than may be observed in men, but I have often been struck by the superior energy and pertinacity of their hatred.'
 |
| The Camden Town Affair by Walter Sickert 1909 |
'Hatred between men is not common'. I actually had to reread this the first time I saw it because I thought there was a typo, and should have read 'Hatred between men is not uncommon'. Even in his cloistered surroundings, George would have been aware of the various conflicts besetting his World. In George's lifetime the British were involved in 16 wars or military campaigns. As most of these involved us Brits stealing land off indigenous peoples, might we not assume hatred was engendered, and have we not been reaping some of that whirlwind ever since? What sort of hatred is he talking about? Didn't Roman and Greek men hate their foes? Maybe he feels covered by the vagaries of 'various causes', but that makes for a paltry argument.
We move on to hatred between women. I am wary of any claim to an absolute in opinions - rank total generalisations say more about the speaker than the subject. Is there hatred among women and is it 'universal'? And, if it exists, does it ever involve 'wounded vanity'? I hate no-one, but, if I allowed myself to imbibe, I can't think of a single woman who would be in my 'Top 10 People To Hate' list - because those places would be taken up by men. Cruel men. And, if what George says were true, why do so many women have lifelong female friendships of deep mutual trust and joy? Besides, women are too busy hating their oppressors to hate other women; and their torturers and their victimizers - these are invariably men require what hatred is left over. I think wounded vanity is the last thing that comes into the rape victim's mind when she hates the rapist. I think this is a case of George loquens stercore.
'Women are to blame for the woes of Europe and Asia'? Yeah, right. ISL and the Worldwide Caliphate are about women, aren't they? click
Women no more tender than men? Possibly, because compassion is not a gender-biased trait. But women having superior energy and pertinacity of their hatred? Do women hate for longer and with more vigour? Well, women have a great deal to hate men for; but we know we don't have exclusive rights to being kept in servitude, or being regularly abused, tortured or murdered, treated as inferiors and betrayed by powerful men who are vicious, inadequate, arrogant, violent, cruel and spiteful. We know some men are in a similar position. Do women have much longer memories for transgressions against us? Was Edith's hatred stronger than George's? Or, maybe it was that she was an authentic communicator who felt entitled to speak her mind, whilst George was... not. She did have a lot to hate him for. She was married under false pretences, he no doubt destroyed her self esteem, threw her off when it suited him, deprived her of her child, used strangers as a means of control over her life, and he eventually drove her insane... good reasons to hate a man, I suppose. But did she hate him or was she just angry with him? I doubt if George ever listened to her feedback or complaints in a constructive way or credited her with much feeling - being as how he saw her as an inferior on every level, and really not mother material, just sex recepticle. As we only have George's account of his time with her, how can we know what really happened? Never be fooled into thinking Edith was anything but collateral damage in George's so-called heroic life, and thus genuinely deserving of our sympathy.
 |
| Woman Washing Her Hair by Walter Sickert 1906 |
 |
| Jack the Ripper's Bedroom by Walter Sickert 1907/8 |
