Sex, Scandal and Sanctions

By Patricia Blake

PARALLEL LIVES: FIVE VICTORIAN MARRIAGES by Phyllis Rose; Knopf; 336 pages; $16.95

Victorian writers, observed G.K. Chesterton, "were lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other." That remark has been amplified by Phyllis Rose in her lively study of five 19th century couples. The title, Parallel Lives, has two meanings: the disparate views of marriage held by husband and wife, and the juxtaposition of twittering romantic expectations and tragic neuroses. Reading Rose's work is like turning a valentine to find graffiti underneath: not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. The couples could not have been better chosen. Each contains one famous waiter: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, nee Marian Evans. Three of the unions were devoid of passion, one degenerated into widely publicized scandal, and the sole happy one was the most shocking of all. George Eliot dared to live with a man without the sanction of either religion or the state.

Little of the information about these literary celebrities will be new to students of Victorian letters. But Rose's anecdotes and insights provide a fresh view of the circumstances that bedeviled relations between the sexes a century ago. Take the piteous marital saga of John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the age. On his wedding night, the 29-year-old Ruskin was paralyzed with disgust when confronted with the first naked female body he had ever seen. Promising to consummate the marriage six years hence, Ruskin told his bride Effie Gray that childbirth would ruin her beauty as well as interfere with their traveling in Europe so he might look at art. When the six years were up, Ruskin reneged, accusing the distraught Effie of insanity. She countered by obtaining an annulment on the basis of her husband's "incurable impotency." Ruskin presumably never again took the risk of encountering a naked woman; Effie married the painter John Everett Millais and lived happily ever after.

Sex was also rare, if not utterly absent, in the conjoining of the Carlyles and the Mills, although these marriages were fruitful in other respects. During the Carlyles' 45-year relationship, Jane Welsh indefatigably cosseted her historian husband, screening him from "tiresome visitors, hapless servants, bedbugs, maddening noises." At the same time, she managed to write thousands of witty and reflective letters to her husband and friends that count among the best in the English language.

Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor collaborated on some of the 19th century's most radical and influential philosophical works, including On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. During their 28-year attachment, says Rose, Mill sought to be dominated by his brilliant, aggressive wife because he had been tyrannized as a child by his father. Although Rose's psychiatric argument is well reasoned, it is hard to accept; if ever a man prevailed over tyranny it was Mill, who became one of his era's most eloquent champions of freedom for the individual and the rights of women.

There can be no doubt about who held the power in the Dickens' doomed household. The prodigiously energetic writer had been happy with his pretty wife Catherine Hogarth in the early years of their marriage. But he became disenchanted and finally furious with her as she grew fat and listless. A few years after the birth of their tenth child in 1852, he moved out, taking all but the oldest of the children with him, as he had a legal right to do. The scandal caused by his action was compounded when Dickens took the extraordinary step of publishing a statement about the separation in the London Times. In tones of outrage he denied that another woman was involved; in reality he was having a secret love affair with a young actress. Had it not been for his public statement, few newspaper readers would have heard of the Dickens marital debacle, Rose points out. "Dickens was foundering in the fantasy that his private life was public, uniquely visible, centrally important to his readers."

Rose is hard on Dickens for his responsibility in this, the most modern of the bad marriages described in Parallel Lives. Her conclusion: "It is a story of survival merely and proves only, as Jung said about his own reprehensible behavior to a young woman, that sometimes it is necessary to be unworthy in order to continue living."

The 24-year liaison between George Eliot and George Henry Lewes shows how difficult it is to generalize about the conjugal lives of the great Victorians. Though society considered their relationship depraved, the couple found remarkable serenity and creativity in their union. Eliot had scarcely written a line of fiction in 1854 when she went off with Lewes, a much respected critic whose legal wife had produced three children by another man.

As soon as Eliot moved in with Lewes she began writing Scenes of Clerical Life. Lewes coaxed novel after novel out of Eliot, while buttressing her self-esteem and shielding her from bad reviews. Even the ostracism she suffered gave her time to work. As Rose points out, the author of Middlemarch did not have to give dinner parties or entertain weekend guests. Ellot's was a fate that women, especially those who write, may envy in any era.

Rose's earlier book, A Woman of Letters, a study of Virginia Woolf, led her to examine Woolf s passionately propounded notions of sexual equality. Seeking a unifying principle that would link the couples in Parallel Lives, she looked for the dynamics of power within Victorian marriages. Not surprisingly, she concluded that "traditional marriage shores up the power of men in subtle ways." Eliot and Lewes, Rose hypothesizes, may have achieved equality because "sanctioned marriage bears some ineradicable taint which converts the personal relationship between a man and a woman into a political one." An interesting thesis, but no one, not even a gifted biographer, can generalize from the lives of geniuses. The Victorian giants portrayed in Rose's book prove too large to be contained by a single formula.

Excerpt

For both the Carlyles the quintessential expression of Jane's role within the marriage was her continuing battle to protect her husband from the crowing of cocks. He was extremely sensitive to noise. A dog barking kept him from work; a cock crowing kept him from sleep. Beyond that, the noises aroused in him a fury which in itself upset his work. Noise was an insult to his creativity and genius. 'A man has work... which the Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two-and-sixpence worth of bantams,' he said, and she agreed. 'We must extinguish those demon fowls or they will extinguish us.'

Jane understood the way in which the cocks were an obsession with her husband, involving a question of his ego and status. Usually a letter or a conversation with the owner of the cocks was enough, but Jane was prepared to go to even greater lengths: she once considered buying the house next door to theirs to silence the cocks. Even in her dreams, she fended off cocks. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.