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Wednesday
Have you ever found yourself immersed in four novels simultaneously. (It was five but I’ve completed William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) For the record, the novels are Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Anyway, I came across a wonderful passage in Braddon’s novel that I must share. It reminds me of a well-known Winston Churchill anecdote.
While probably apocryphal, the anecdote gets at the outsized role Clementine Churchill played in her husband’s political success. (A History Channel article summarizes her impact.) The story goes something as follows:
In their nightly walk around their villa, the Churchills come across the caretaker tending the garden. (In some versions of the story, the man they encounter is a street sweeper.) When Winston notes that the man seems interested in Clementine, she notes that they have known each other for a long time.
“Well, if you had married him, you would have been the wife of a caretaker, not the wife of a prime minister,” Churchill says, to which Clementine replies, “Dear, if I had married him he would have been prime minister, not a caretaker.”
Like most stories too good to be true, this one probably is. Still, I thought of it when reading today’s passage in Braddon’s 1862 novel.
Lady Audley’s nephew-in-law is on the verge of solving a mysterious disappearance that will, if the facts prove to be what he fears, break his beloved uncle’s heart. Before he can walk away from the case, however, he encounters a very determined woman who renews his resolve. I imagine that Braddon got great satisfaction out of writing the following passage, which describes the impact an iron-willed woman can have on a man’s life:
I am in it, and I can’t get out of it; so I better submit myself to the brown-eyed girl, and do what she tells me patiently and faithfully. What a wonderful solution to life’s enigma there is in petticoat government! Man might lie in the sunshine, and eat lotuses, and fancy it ‘always afternoon,’ if his wife would let him! But she won’t, bless her impulsive heart and active mind! She knows better than that. Who ever heard of a woman taking life as it ought to be taken? Instead of supporting it as an unavoidable nuisance, only redeemable by its brevity, she goes through it as if it were a pageant or a procession. She dresses for it, and simpers and grins, and gesticulates for it. She pushes her neighbors, and struggles for a good place in the dismal march; she elbows, and writhes, and tramples, and prances to the one end of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late, and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government, and knocks and buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until somebody, for quiet’s sake, makes him something that she wanted him to be made. That’s why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and interpose their poor, muddled intellects between the things to be done and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity. The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joans of Arc, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharines the Second, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamor and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills, and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maidservant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.
Braddon’s novel appeared eight years after Coventry Patmore’s famous (or infamous) poem Angel in the House, which paints a far different picture of the supportive wife—strongly supportive, to be sure, but also sweet, docile, and submissive. I can imagine Braddon thinking, “If you’re not going to grant us full equality, then we’re going to have to use you men as our surrogates. Don’t blame us for what happens.”
It’s enough to turn Robert Audley into a suffragette.
Side note: The lotus reference in the Braddon passage is to Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters,” which imagines men lolling around doing nothing all day. The poem ends,
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
No such slumbering for married men, Braddon threatens.