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Friday
After having immersed myself in Victorian upper-class melodrama with Antony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, I now find myself reliving the Edwardian age with John Galsworthy’s Man of Property, the first book in the Forsyte Saga. I do so as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, and having that in mind has rendered certain passages in the book particularly horrifying.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has essentially told women that their pregnant bodies are the property of the state, not of themselves. (Some on the right even want to deprive women of the right to prevent pregnancy.) I agree with those who accuse the right, despite their “right to life” claims, of being far less interested in children than in controlling women’s bodies. After all, they lose all interest in caring for the children of poor mothers once they are born.
In short, they look upon women the way that Soames Forsyte looks upon his wife.
The Forsyte identity is based on owning property, and there are constant discussions in the novel of buying and selling plots of land. Sometimes, as with Nicholas Forsyte, family members do so with the money of their wives:
He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.
In Soames’s case, property consists of more than inert things. In the passage that appalled me, we learn that he regards his beautiful wife as one of his possessions.
He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her…Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing!
Soames at one point is frustrated that he does not own his wife the way he owns his dining-room table:
Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.
“Out of his other property,” the passage goes on to say, “out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.
And further on:
His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body—if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If anyone had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want…
In a telling episode, one of the Forsyte aunts expresses puzzlement over a sermon about soul-owning. It sounds as though the minister has resorted to subtle irony to tweak his property-obsessed congregants (perhaps to be more direct would put his salary in jeopardy), but he only confuses them:
Only last Sunday dear Mr. Scoles, had been so witty in his sermon, so sarcastic, “For what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul, but lose all his property?” That, he had said, was the motto of the middle-class; now, what had he meant by that? Of course, it might be what middle-class people believed—she didn’t know; what did Soames think?
Scoles has deliberately inverted Jesus’s rhetorical question, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” But his sermon doesn’t lead to any soul searching amongst the Forsytes.
Significantly, at this point Soames overhears his wife, in another conversation, quoting the inscription that greets sinners in Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The appropriate circle of hell for Soames would be the fourth, where groups of the avaricious incessantly push great bags of money against other groups.
Irene, who in a moment of weakness and poverty accepted Soames’s marriage offer, now finds herself trapped in this world. She is, as Galsworthy notes, “one of those women—not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race—born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living.” Ultimately, therefore, she must defy convention and break free. As Galsworthy observes in his preface, she is “a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”
I have strayed somewhat from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision but the relevance still holds. The extreme right wants to return to a time when, as in Edwardian England, men were patriarchs who controlled their wives. If abortion is now playing a major role in American politics—preventing a red wave in 2022 and perhaps ensuring the election of a Democratic president in 2024—it is because American Irenes are refusing to let the Soameses of the world dictate their lives and their choices.