All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (22 page)

A Doll’s House
didn’t have a British or American production until ten years later, but Nora’s slamming door resonated in pamphlets and on platforms, her cause taken up by liberal males as well as by campaigning women. Interrogated, the sanctified institution of Victorian marriage with its well delineated separate spheres began to crumble under the weight of its own self-sacrifices.

In 1888, the Scottish feminist novelist and essayist, Mona Caird wrote an article entitled ‘Marriage’ for the
Westminster Review
. She pronounced the institution a failure because it made the wife a piece of property, wholly subservient to her husband, and initiated a bond in which her virtues and honour, or dishonour, became his. The
Daily Telegraph
invited readers to respond. Over the next two months twenty-seven thousand replies came in from women as well as men, even a few from the working class, detailing the tragedies and successes of marriage. They included portraits of drunken, abusive husbands, plaints of growing incompatibilities, stories of desertion and pleas for simpler means of separation. They also included portraits of marriages made happy by the patience of wives, the joy in children and grandchildren, and a reiteration of the willing subjection and frailties of woman–backed up by God and science–which necessitated her protection by the paternal male. Today’s blogosphere could not have done better.

The increasing championing of education and rights for women; the insistence that women were not inferior beings ever best served by pleasing and by obedience to a superior masculine will and intelligence; the agitation of highly placed women in the public sphere, as philanthropists, suffragettes or campaigners for moral and social reform; the growing ranks of both single and married women demanding greater access to the professions and economic independence–all played a crucial part in the slow shift towards a different vision of marriage. So, too, did the very presence of an increasingly vocal and visible working and underclass who presented patterns of love, sex and marriage radically different from the ideal. Women constrained by the need to work and by poverty could hardly, whatever their aspirations, be pleasing reproductive household angels, buoyed by the labour of servants. Nor could the wages allotted to their husbands alone sustain a family.

Growing agitation by workers and by women fed into the anxiety about degeneration and the decline of the race that plagued the last years of the century. Men, it seemed, were cracking under the burden of duty–to work, to business, to nation, to God–alongside family obligations. Household violence, recourse to drink and illicit sex spread, and not only through the labouring classes. The clenched lips and fists of respectability and empire-building were taking their toll on the male psyche.

The prolific writer and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, too often wrongly attributed to Darwin, is a case in point. Spencer, whom George Eliot had once wanted to marry, served as the model for the petty, dictatorial Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, forever in search of a complete system of knowledge. He was a vocal opponent of John Stuart Mill. In Spencer’s vision, the patriarchal family was the model favoured by nature. Women were designed for domesticity. Their submissiveness, intuition and skills in deception, he wrote, were specialized functions, arming them for the business of rearing healthy offspring. Any deviation from that course, any move on their part towards education or intellectual aspiration, would inevitably lead to nervous ills and to the decline of the species. But that very ‘nature’ which underpinned the Victorian domestic arrangements Spencer championed didn’t seem to extend to his own. He never married or fathered children. He also suffered from numerous breakdowns, those unspecific neurasthenias so characteristic of the time.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, birth-rates fell sharply in Western Europe and America. Eros and reproduction were becoming unbound. Ideals of sexual purity for middle-class women played their part in this, shadowed, as they were, by the growth of prostitution. In the US in the 1890s almost half of women with husbands in the professions or in business had two or fewer children. By 1910, almost two-thirds of families had no more than two. In France, the government instituted pro-natalist programmes to reward mothers.

The sense of cultural decline which plagued the period was palpable across Europe. Thomas Mann’s great saga of German life,
Buddenbrooks
(1900), breathes its very essence. Charting four generations of a Lübeck merchant family which rises with great competitive aplomb to the summit of wealth and prestige only to succumb to a mysterious failure of vitality, almost a love affair with its own dissolution,
Buddenbrooks
has as its central character Thomas, the scion of the third generation. Rigidly conscientious, cultivated, Thomas leads the family to its greatest successes. Yet he cannot shed the sense that he is only wearing a mask of duty, while the energy of maintaining it in place saps his core. His activity is meaningless, his doll-like musical wife an eccentric extravagance who prefers another man, his only son overly sensitive and sickly. His sister Tony, the princess of the family, is urged, against her instincts, into a marriage with a rich suitor that goes wrong, only to engage in another which similarly ends in divorce. At the age of thirty-four, she pronounces her life a waste. Thomas, too, succumbs to failure and weakness; his heir, too frail for life, dies. Migraines, bad teeth, blue shadows beneath the eyes, sickly pallor, nervous exhaustion, suffuse the novel. A once vibrant, meaningful world, bolstered by what the great sociologist Max Weber called ‘the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic’, has come to its end. The dynamism that characterized an epoch has been drained from within: society has grown sick under the weight of its own mores.

In the early 1900s Sigmund Freud drew on his experience of the consulting room to pen his analysis of what ailed bourgeois civilization from within. In ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’(1909) he declared that the marital and sexual mores of the bourgeoisie were exacting a toll on Western health. Underpinning his analysis was the then radical notion that ‘In man the sexual instinct does not originally serve the purposes of reproduction at all, but has as its aim the gaining of particular kinds of pleasure.’ As Freud would more particularly state elsewhere, the objects of that sexual aim were diverse, both hetero-and homosexual.

The majority, Freud claimed, were constitutionally unfit to face the task of abstinence that was demanded of them before entering on a late marriage, or indeed throughout life if marriage didn’t occur. ‘Experience teaches us that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victims to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good…’ Sublimation, that deflecting of the sexual instincts to higher cultural aims, was open only to a minority–that intermittently, and least easily ‘during the period of ardent and vigorous youth’.

Then, too, the promises of love that marriage held out, after the celibacy of long engagements, were regularly disappointed. Often entered on with too little knowledge of the other sex, shrouded in worries about repeated conception, entailing methods of contraception that hampered satisfactory ends, marital happiness foundered:

Pioneering sex surveys backed up Freud’s analysis. In the United States Katherine B. Davis, over a period of almost ten years, explored the sexual and marital lives of 2200 women through lengthy questionnaires. Her wide-ranging sample came from women who had reached marriageable age before the First World War, two-thirds of them born before 1890. The results, published in 1929 in a thick volume entitled
Factors in the Sex Lives of Twenty-Two Hundred Women
, showed amongst other things, that a quarter of her sample were ‘repelled’ by their initial sexual experience. Little instruction about sex before marriage had been received, and Davis found a high correlation between this, a distaste for sex and unhappiness in marriage.

After five or so years of marriage, Freud pointed out, men often resorted to the sexual freedom that a ‘double sexual morality’ allowed them. Doubling carried a burden of lies, deceit and self-deception. It was ‘the plainest admission that society itself does not believe in the possibility of enforcing the precepts which it itself has laid down’. For women, the effects of ‘civilized’ sexual morality were even more severe: ‘women, when they are subjected to the disillusionments of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives’. Marriage had ceased to be a panacea for their nervous troubles. Indeed, Freud elaborated:

Bourgeois society had been made sick by its sexual and marital arrangements.

The readiness with which Freud’s ideas were taken up immediately before and increasingly after the First World War points to an underlying dissatisfaction with the ‘sacrifices’ demanded by the late nineteenth century’s prevailing codes of love and marriage. It also indicates that a general erosion of patriarchal power and of the demands of ‘civilized’ double standards had been taking place–sometimes quietly and from within, sometimes more noisily in activism. Women were hardly alone: the bourgeois marriage had been under scrutiny and attack by socialists as well. Engels in
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
(1880) had argued that with capitalism had come ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also, the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for breeding children.’ For progressives, woman’s rightful place had become the new standard of civilization.

All this was attended and abetted by a growth in secularism. The Church’s aegis was under attack during the Third Republic in France, when republicans attempted to secularize education and wean wives away from the dominance of priests, bearers of a paternalism that the Republic’s reformers understood as antithetical to constituting a responsible citizenry. Revolutionary and socialist movements throughout Europe questioned the Church’s reactionary power. Darwinism and the ascendancy of science challenged first principles. ‘God is Dead,’ Nietzsche proclaimed in
The Gay Science
and again in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, pointing to the death of received wisdom and with it any absolute values.

Increasingly the individual, rather than any paternally dominated family group, had become the measure of both happiness and despair. That individual had also acquired a new and complicated depth in which sexuality played a prominent part. Conjugal settlements were poised for reinvention.

Unconventional Arrangements

The Victorian marriage could never encompass the entire variety of conjugal arrangements that people lived. Writers, artists, actors, revolutionaries, those members of what the French had in the 1840s begun to call Bohemia, had always strained against convention in searching to satisfy the needs of love and individual happiness. Even the redoubtable George Eliot, now seen as a bastion of the more capacious Victorian values, had, as Marian Evans, engaged in a radical marital configuration. In 1854 she had bravely and openly started to live with her lover, the writer George Henry Lewes. A radical, he had an ‘open’ marriage with his wife, with whom he had fathered three children, and took on the care of the three others she had with other men. Needless to say, the Eliot–Lewes intimacy was hardly looked on with favour. Social acceptance was a long, slow process. Thirty-three years on, when Eliot’s work had earned her fame, the couple was finally recognized by ‘society’, in the form of a meeting with Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise who was an admirer of Eliot’s fiction.

But as the century moved towards its end and the new, more unbuckled Edwardian era dawned, a flurry of unconventional intimate relations began to be
openly
lived. Most of those that have been recorded are still in artistic, literary and progressive circles, but they do signal a gradual undermining of older codes of love and marriage. Torn between tradition and innovation, love had begun to take on an experimental edge. The balance between being faithful to one’s feelings and desires and faithful to one’s spouse and social convention tips in the direction of the first, as if the greater morality lay there.

In court during his notorious trial in 1895, Oscar Wilde delineated the classical delights of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’: all the while his wife, Constance, hovered in the background and never altogether ceased to support him. She didn’t sue for divorce, though she did constrain him, while he was in prison, to give up his rights over their two children. Among its many after-effects, Wilde’s trial brought to public awareness the existence of an illicit homosexual subculture that had largely been invisible to the outside world. The exposure had the perverse consequence of forcing homosexuals to rein in their activities, fearful as they now were of being ‘recognized’ in the glare of limelight.