Commonplace 203 George & The Woman Question PART TWO
With images from Leonardo. All direct quotes from George are in blue.
George is often mistaken for an emancipator of women, despite evidence to the contrary in his writing, and the way he treated two legal and one common-law wife. The problem with George is that the evidence is so spread out in various sources - biographies, collected letter, diaries, mostly edited by one person whose love affair with George is so deep and so tunnel-visioned that any objectivity seems impossible. We have the written works and the biographical stuff but who is going to trawl though it all for a truth when a potted overview is offered with the same old half truths repeated ad nauseam for the casual reader to take at face value?
Take his writing on Dickens, specifically, 'Charles Dickens: A Critical Study' (1898). In chapter VII we have George's thoughts on how Dickens dealt with women and children. I urge anyone who wants to know what George really thought about women to read it. He starts innocently enough with an accusation that women are not able to appreciate Dickens. But, in his characteristic lack of insight style, it is actually an interesting insight into what feminists and women with fully engaged critical thinking processes find hard to like in Gissing himself. That is, the disconnect between his claim to be for women and the way he portrays them in his writing. This is not to be taken as a modern world disconnect felt by women who read Gissing now as a Victorian oddity. Gabrielle Fleury had trouble with the things George wrote about women and we find him telling her in one of his letters, not to judge him by his writing: 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. Of course, here he is trying to convince her to live in sin with him, so he was desperate to reassure her he was no misogynist, and that he was just misunderstood by a gormless reading public Was she so gullible as to believe him?? It seems so.
In the Dickens book, it is the vehement projectile explosion of bile that George exhibits when talking about women that is most shocking. He kicks off in his unconscious way by labelling this chapter as 'Women and Children', as if the two are joined at the hip. In fact, George regards women as large children - he certainly infantilised his first wife, Nell, and got rid of her when she tried to assert her full-grown self. He became a martinet of such cruelty to his second, that the image of a school bully running unchecked flickers into the mind's eye. Many times, he refers to women as 'undeveloped' and the women he puts centre stage in his stories are very often, to their creator, half-finished creatures requiring severe constraint and instruction - remember, he is the man who said women are not as intelligent as the average male idiot. And so they must be punished. In his stories, we have acid in the face of a beautiful flirt with attitude; suicide for a mother racked with guilt; the death of children following a moment's lapse of duty; fatal disease for a talented singer; unjust prison for a grissette who had the cheek to try and rise above her lot in life - it's George's way of punishing women hard because they both tempted him and shamed him, and never accepted his dominance.
In the Dickens book, George sees women as superficial, grasping, ignorant and intellectually inferior. He starts out saying that Dickens' women are never fully formed and so this makes it clear Dickens was writing for a predominantly male readership, who are more interested in the doings of the male characters. He elaborates that women, can't 'get' Dickens, based on his assertion that Dickens included humour, and very little of what is conventionally called tenderness, and a good deal of bloodthirsty violence. He reminds us that George Eliot couldn't fully revere Shakespeare because of what he did with and to his female characters, and so women will judge Dickens similarly because his women characters are nondescript, ludicrous and grotesque, and he doesn't flatter them.
George goes on: we need not be surprised that average members of her sex should see in Dickens something like a personal enemy, a confirmed libeller of all who speak the feminine tongue. And there we have it - George however facetiously, creating a chasm between men and women by claiming women speak another language to men. And, we know he means an inferior language, don't we? It's this kind of casual misogyny that undermines anyone's claim that he sported pro-feminist credentials.
He goes on to consider the gallery of foolish, ridiculous or offensive women and says Dickens places them in the lower middle class social strata. This was George's own class, it must be remembered, because his father was a petite bourgeois shop-keeper and the Gissing boys - and later, George's own sons Walter and Alfred included - would never have been as well-educated as they were if not for public funds being made available to pay for their schooling. George goes on to write: ...it is obvious that Dickens wrote of women in his liveliest spirit of satire. Wonderful as fact, and admirable as art, are the numberless pictures of more or less detestable widows, wives, and spinsters which appear throughout his books.
George is assuming that these Dickens women are rendered as figures of fun because their creator is looking down on them. But Dickens was a friend to the lower, and lower middle class and the grotesque men and women he mingled with in his childhood and early adulthood were what inspired him to write his books - so we have in Dickens, but never in Gissing, an affectionate tribute to the awfulness of human nature, much as the television soap opera and sitcom give us characters who are exaggerated for comic effect. George had very little humour in him (a sure sign of a stunted intelligence) and he certainly very rarely saw the funny side to anything. Dickens, however, knew that people love to laugh at the worst in themselves as long as it is presented as being in other people as well. George may not have wanted to take a side on any big social or political issue but his prejudices leak out in his misreading of Dickens' homage to the gruesome and grotesque because he, unlike George, never makes his observations female-centric - all his grotesques are gender-inclusive grotesques. For George, his misunderstanding is that he sees Dickens' women characters as grotesque because they are female; for Dickens himself, it is because they are human, and we are all, male and female, sometimes a little bit grotesque.
Of course, we must consider that George was really, first and foremost, afraid of women. He was scared of his mother both physically and emotionally - she was a believer in corporal punishment of children and she seems to have been emotionally indifferent to him (according to him). He was afraid of his first wife, Nell, because she was sexually attractive and he was powerless to resist either her real charms or the charms he conjured up and foisted upon her; the only way out of that was to kill her off by neglect, slowly, relentlessly, heartlessly, un-heroically. He was afraid of his second wife Edith because she knew his secret - he had syphilis - and because she was not the shrinking violet he had tried to make out of Nell. Edith stood up to his bullying and cavilling, but eventually was driven mad by it. He was afraid Gabrielle would not accept his proposal of faux marriage and told her a pack of lies to convince her to make the ultimate sacrifice for literature (and his nursing needs), whilst failing to deliver the goods in the literature and the marriage bed departments. He was afraid of Gabrielle's mother because she ruled the roost - a roost he saw very much as his and his alone - and whined on about the power struggle he hadn't the balls to win. The only time he isn't afraid is when he conjures women up out of thin air, and that is why he treats these characters so mean - revenge, with no consequences!
George will have been familiar with the 'woman question' Charles Dickens enjoyed, When he was first married to his legal wife, Catherine Hogarth, Dickens fell in love with his much younger sister-in-law, Mary, who sickened, grew worse, before dying in his arms. He was distraught enough to endure a bout of inertia and writer's block after that. Later, when on holiday in Broadstairs, he fell for Eleanor Picken, a friend's fiance. To demonstrate his love, he tried to drag her into the sea to commit suicide together - no doubt a romantic gesture - which, naturally, scared the bejesus out of her. Another sister-in-law came to live with his family, and he took a shine to her. In 1846, encouraged by the heiress to the Coutts banking dynasty, Dickens was asked to help found a home for fallen women. Oddly, this was known as 'Urania Cottage' - both words are terms used in the homosexual vocabulary. 'Uranian' love was a form of 'healthy, zestful' homosexuality, according to the Uranians themselves - see Commonplace 8 for more on the Uranians. Anyhoo, when Dickens was 45 he met and fell in love with 18 year-old Ellen Ternan, an actress. He dumped his wife and never spoke to her after he moved out to live in secrecy with Ellen, even though Catherine had the children to raise and she lived just round the corner from him and his common-law partner. Ellen bore a child who died in infancy, and when Dickens died, he left Ellen an annuity to see out her days in comfort.
Maybe George got his fatherly role model for how to treat his womenfolk from Dickens - both were attracted to younger models, not afraid to break their hearts and abandon them, hoping money would sort out any emotional disturbance. Both were attracted to the grissette, and dabbled in rehabilitating fallen women - though George's dabbling was possibly more 'hands on' - and the less sincere for that. And, like Dickens, George destroyed all his correspondence and diaries for the most powerful of his emotional attachments - the one he had with Nell.
With images from Leonardo. All direct quotes from George are in blue.
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| Leda and the Swan 1508 |
Take his writing on Dickens, specifically, 'Charles Dickens: A Critical Study' (1898). In chapter VII we have George's thoughts on how Dickens dealt with women and children. I urge anyone who wants to know what George really thought about women to read it. He starts innocently enough with an accusation that women are not able to appreciate Dickens. But, in his characteristic lack of insight style, it is actually an interesting insight into what feminists and women with fully engaged critical thinking processes find hard to like in Gissing himself. That is, the disconnect between his claim to be for women and the way he portrays them in his writing. This is not to be taken as a modern world disconnect felt by women who read Gissing now as a Victorian oddity. Gabrielle Fleury had trouble with the things George wrote about women and we find him telling her in one of his letters, not to judge him by his writing: 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. Of course, here he is trying to convince her to live in sin with him, so he was desperate to reassure her he was no misogynist, and that he was just misunderstood by a gormless reading public Was she so gullible as to believe him?? It seems so.
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| Lady With Ermine 1489-90 |
In the Dickens book, George sees women as superficial, grasping, ignorant and intellectually inferior. He starts out saying that Dickens' women are never fully formed and so this makes it clear Dickens was writing for a predominantly male readership, who are more interested in the doings of the male characters. He elaborates that women, can't 'get' Dickens, based on his assertion that Dickens included humour, and very little of what is conventionally called tenderness, and a good deal of bloodthirsty violence. He reminds us that George Eliot couldn't fully revere Shakespeare because of what he did with and to his female characters, and so women will judge Dickens similarly because his women characters are nondescript, ludicrous and grotesque, and he doesn't flatter them.
George goes on: we need not be surprised that average members of her sex should see in Dickens something like a personal enemy, a confirmed libeller of all who speak the feminine tongue. And there we have it - George however facetiously, creating a chasm between men and women by claiming women speak another language to men. And, we know he means an inferior language, don't we? It's this kind of casual misogyny that undermines anyone's claim that he sported pro-feminist credentials.
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| Belle Ferronniere 1493-4 |
He goes on to consider the gallery of foolish, ridiculous or offensive women and says Dickens places them in the lower middle class social strata. This was George's own class, it must be remembered, because his father was a petite bourgeois shop-keeper and the Gissing boys - and later, George's own sons Walter and Alfred included - would never have been as well-educated as they were if not for public funds being made available to pay for their schooling. George goes on to write: ...it is obvious that Dickens wrote of women in his liveliest spirit of satire. Wonderful as fact, and admirable as art, are the numberless pictures of more or less detestable widows, wives, and spinsters which appear throughout his books.
George is assuming that these Dickens women are rendered as figures of fun because their creator is looking down on them. But Dickens was a friend to the lower, and lower middle class and the grotesque men and women he mingled with in his childhood and early adulthood were what inspired him to write his books - so we have in Dickens, but never in Gissing, an affectionate tribute to the awfulness of human nature, much as the television soap opera and sitcom give us characters who are exaggerated for comic effect. George had very little humour in him (a sure sign of a stunted intelligence) and he certainly very rarely saw the funny side to anything. Dickens, however, knew that people love to laugh at the worst in themselves as long as it is presented as being in other people as well. George may not have wanted to take a side on any big social or political issue but his prejudices leak out in his misreading of Dickens' homage to the gruesome and grotesque because he, unlike George, never makes his observations female-centric - all his grotesques are gender-inclusive grotesques. For George, his misunderstanding is that he sees Dickens' women characters as grotesque because they are female; for Dickens himself, it is because they are human, and we are all, male and female, sometimes a little bit grotesque.
Of course, we must consider that George was really, first and foremost, afraid of women. He was scared of his mother both physically and emotionally - she was a believer in corporal punishment of children and she seems to have been emotionally indifferent to him (according to him). He was afraid of his first wife, Nell, because she was sexually attractive and he was powerless to resist either her real charms or the charms he conjured up and foisted upon her; the only way out of that was to kill her off by neglect, slowly, relentlessly, heartlessly, un-heroically. He was afraid of his second wife Edith because she knew his secret - he had syphilis - and because she was not the shrinking violet he had tried to make out of Nell. Edith stood up to his bullying and cavilling, but eventually was driven mad by it. He was afraid Gabrielle would not accept his proposal of faux marriage and told her a pack of lies to convince her to make the ultimate sacrifice for literature (and his nursing needs), whilst failing to deliver the goods in the literature and the marriage bed departments. He was afraid of Gabrielle's mother because she ruled the roost - a roost he saw very much as his and his alone - and whined on about the power struggle he hadn't the balls to win. The only time he isn't afraid is when he conjures women up out of thin air, and that is why he treats these characters so mean - revenge, with no consequences!
George will have been familiar with the 'woman question' Charles Dickens enjoyed, When he was first married to his legal wife, Catherine Hogarth, Dickens fell in love with his much younger sister-in-law, Mary, who sickened, grew worse, before dying in his arms. He was distraught enough to endure a bout of inertia and writer's block after that. Later, when on holiday in Broadstairs, he fell for Eleanor Picken, a friend's fiance. To demonstrate his love, he tried to drag her into the sea to commit suicide together - no doubt a romantic gesture - which, naturally, scared the bejesus out of her. Another sister-in-law came to live with his family, and he took a shine to her. In 1846, encouraged by the heiress to the Coutts banking dynasty, Dickens was asked to help found a home for fallen women. Oddly, this was known as 'Urania Cottage' - both words are terms used in the homosexual vocabulary. 'Uranian' love was a form of 'healthy, zestful' homosexuality, according to the Uranians themselves - see Commonplace 8 for more on the Uranians. Anyhoo, when Dickens was 45 he met and fell in love with 18 year-old Ellen Ternan, an actress. He dumped his wife and never spoke to her after he moved out to live in secrecy with Ellen, even though Catherine had the children to raise and she lived just round the corner from him and his common-law partner. Ellen bore a child who died in infancy, and when Dickens died, he left Ellen an annuity to see out her days in comfort.
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| La Scapiliata 1508 |
As a post script: George's work on Charles Dickens included the reworking of 'Forster's Life of Dickens', one of our man's late successes. John Forster was an influence on the Woman Question in his own sinister way. Join me in the next Commonplace to learn more about this man.
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