Havana Thursdays Book

The main impression I have as I read The Woman Who Did is the imposition of a male writer upon the supposed thinking and development of a woman's thoughts and philosophy. In particular it conjures for me, a memory of a teacher who I would have to say was selfish in setting an essay topic on why people marry. I was in fifth form (now called Year Eleven) and she was still studying Sociology at university and sharing some of her texts and work there with our class. She was also just engaged.

It seems to me now, as it did then, that she was using the class to question herself about the choices she was making. She certainly did not appreciate my conclusion that marriage was a social convention that had not been particularly long-lived. Nor that it was largely based on economics rather than love.

I don't even know where my ideas came from in 1975 to be writing as I did. If I had a text such as Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did, I may have been able to make better points, or more compelling arguments, than I did. I merely wrote from my own mind and my own observations - and more than likely conversations I had overheard through my family without being old enough to partake or be appreciated as hearing what was being said by such adults.

Whatever I thought was as unformed after the response from this teacher as it had been before it. She was operating from a personal perspective despite being challenged in her own studies to step beyond a personalised view of the world, and invited to accept the many views that make up our world. I was aware of the many views but still uninformed about how to place them side by side for more appropriately guided consideration and guidance, for myself or for others, in understanding how they could all co-exist and yet still somehow form "majority views" of morality and acceptability without managing to crush alternatives completely.

Now, after many years of Women's Studies and actions and debates, I read a book such as Allen's The Woman Who Did, and realise there are many more views out there in written form than any of the forums I have attended have allowed to be included in their own discussions.

I feel the lack the moreso for the understanding I developed within myself about how each personal choice is from within, whatever range of ideas and conventions you feel comfortable to access and align with, whichever details you choose to reject and deny for yourself.

The clash between the individual choice and the sense of social responsibility is the one that most strongly comes across in Grant Allen's work. It is presented as a male social convention against a female convention. It is shown as a challenge to economic structures as well as social decorum. But it fails to appreciate that the economic necessities of industrialisation were part of the social imposition of the Churches upon other social and parochial conventions. It does not speak to these issues because it is so busy with the male/female divide, which in many respects was quite a new convention in itself.

Thus when we consider a person "a product of their times" we must include their place and relationship to other groups, ideas and places as well as noticing the streams they seem to be unaware of that must have lingered through other means at the same time!

It is not so much a product of time as a product of relationship that makes or counter-makes a person what they propose themselves to be. For each self-selected apportionment there co-exists the recognition or interpretation of its aspects by those around that person. Some are concurrent, many are only later interpreters who have finally got what was earlier said (or done) without such recognition or appreciation.

What endures the most in the short-term is the tendency to not understand - or to misinterpret. Endurance in a longer sense is the ability to have alternate means of interpretation re-applied to earlier conditions, thus drawing out their alternative meanings. This applies equally to a maturing person changing over time and a range of individuals who are also looking for predecessors for their own developments against whatever majority tide they choose to swim against.

To marry or not to marry is presented very clearly by Grant Allen as a question of slavery or freedom - from his female protagonist's point of view. However, I don't believe this is a realistic interpretation of her actual view of herself (if she was a real women rather than a character in his false projection).

Marriage is ultimately a pre-written contract. Law being the realm of men makes it appear to be a form they have imposed. Social convention however proves that it is beyond gender. Trying to alter it through gender alignments is necessarily a limit to any such proposed amendments.

Enter the extra-gender framework of twenty-first century politics and marriage becomes a sought-after state for others previously precluded. Increase the franchise and the dissent within those already included in its purview is diluted. The potential of dissent seems weakened by the louder voice of alternate dissenters.

At the base of Allen's book is his own parentage by a clergyman. He presents his female protagonist in a similar position. Yet he argues against her through the male "suitor" who she both denies interest in finding, and yet accepts her lot "as a woman" to go on being prepared for, despite her own commitment to freedom from the contract that would allow her an operative position within marriage.

Thus every representation of her position becomes a further compromise toward something that is not her own true commitment at all. Even the premise that she is making this choice publically so that other women will have her as an example is immediately thwarted by her public silence of both her true "illegitimate marriage" and her failure to tell anyone other than the man she has aligned herself to about her own motivations. It is unbelievable because it is so inconsistent to demand such a commitment from him, who she is attempting to convince, and yet fail to continue her own stance.

The DNA/RNA of this literary setup thus dilutes the issues the writer is trying to present as true freedom. Of course, he was not in a time and place where DNA/RNA imagery was possible. Life is a blending and separation of these two strands as chemistry that did exist socially through conventions of dance - even persisting to more modern times as "the Hokey Pokey" ("put your whole self in, put your whole self out").

Freedom is ultimately based upon such connections and the ability to extract and realign.

The scandal of Victorian Britain toward Grant Allen's book could only be a Victorian scandal. The institution of Victorian marriage conventions necessarily hinged on the royal lineage. The alignments of European royal families through marriage being more than a personal choice, and very much connected with alignments of "property" and alliances of whole social networks, is not something the ordinary person could necessarily influence. But the slavery of such conceptions was more about the reliance of every underling to the choices of their "masters" more than the freedom of individuals to live within a household with a person of their own choice for practical daily purposes.

Here the more relevant theme of Allen's book appears: the socialistic movement against the hierarchical imposition of values.

The segment of society likely to read Grant Allen's book was just the segment from which he arose. The approaching demise of Victorian times was the time against which such conventions could bare themselves as still present despite the long rein of that royal personage. The long reign in itself could be confused with "tradition" as if no innovations had been made during that reign. The questions considered by the female character over a prolonged period, within her own mind, hinge upon the legalities developed within this same extended period of assumed consistency.

And yet the examples given of Mary Godwin (who married Shelley) and George Eliot (who lived with George Lewes) should, in a sense, be no more remarkable than previous royalty having houses set up for mistresses. The woman having a choice in her own lifestyle is still presented as "particularly for one male" while the male is considered to be polygamous while retaining the rights of bachelorhood. This monogamy was imposed upon the Queen when it had not been imposed upon her male antecedents. Therein lies the slavery of women - even if it was Queen Victoria's own personal choice it became assumed womanhood.

Meanwhile there was Catherine The Great in Russia who practiced the male model of royalty by having a range of lovers when her husband proved so inadequate to her needs or wants. Perhaps this is also why the shifts were that much greater within Russian society for the socialist and communist movements to arise there with the added judgment-from-a-distance that the English novelists provided, as commentary from the sidelines.

The frame of this novel is not so much the social setting of the times, as a reaffirmation of the marriage of the writer and his chosen woman - as the dedication shows. By highlighting the tensions of an alternative, the strength of their own endurance of and with each other is assumed to be the more complete. I would have to do some research to find out if this was so from his wife's point of view as much as he presented it from his own. But such research is, quite frankly, irrelevant to me.

I live in a time when family history research is becoming more generalised. Previously it has been used by specific individuals to increase their hold on particular versions of history that increase their ability to manipulate those around them for the "sake of the story of family". Just such an attitude persists because of the seeming attack on the contract of marriage that the push for increased franchise of it by gay and lesbian partners makes.

If a contract is no longer exclusive, how can it retain its strength of purpose?

The dilution of dissention is an alchemical process which strengthens the convention rather than weakening it in the longer term. The question for each individual partaking of this process remains: is it right for me, is it possible for me to continue to be myself within this particular version of the social convention?

When the answer seems right, the action will follow. When the answer is not a solution but a sediment, all other participants will begin to question the purity of the social form they espouse. When the failure to merge settles so obviously on the surface rather than in the depths of such an attempted union, the horror of it draws more attention in those who are unsettled within themselves than it does to those for whom such "solutions" are amenable.

The personal choice and the social convention of acceptability of variations upon the theme are constantly in flux. The degree to which they seem to challenge people reflects more back to the personal verity than the social one.

Thus the form of a book to contemplate one's own position, allows the choice between keeping one's own council on such matters or finding a book group to share it with, to tease out alternative choices one may not yet have processed to bring thought and action into alignment within one's own life.

Of course, marriage requires a partner of some sort to be aligned with as well. It takes each of us however long it takes us to find ourselves, as well as it takes to find another willing to join us, on our own personal journeys.

This book may prove an adequate aid for some. For many it will appear too Oxford intellectual. Perhaps they might find a way to write their own version worth sharing in current times, and places, with the living institutions rather than the manipulative older ones which have yet to realise their control is secondary to how people really live.

The great tragedy of this particular story is in a "seeming individual choice" meaning social exile, leading ultimately to suicide. The think line of connection to others of supposedly like mind is so peripheral within this novel that it seems as if it never existed. Presumably it was from some connection with these "people of ideas & ideals" that the individual drew up their own ideal to the point of living it as fully as they possibly could - even despite the indications of less commitment from the person most closely chosen for their own commitment to such action.

The greater challenge to marriage would surely be those who refuse outright to marry anyone in any sense of the word, rather than simply withholding from an institutionalised version of it. The position of the Singular Woman within society is so challenging to everyone that it still has not been written about effectively by anyone. Only the fallen or the purified pseudo-marriage to the Church gains attention from time to time. The truly free individual is still an anomaly too great for public consideration.