(no subject)

[skygiants]

When I'm reading nonfiction, there's often a fine line for me between 'you, the author, are getting yourself all up in this narrative and I wish you'd get out of the way' and 'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!

Rose starts out her book by explaining that she's interested in the idea of 'marriage' both as a narrative construct developed by the partners within it -- "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent" -- and a negotiation of power, vulnerable to exploitation. She also says that she wanted to find a good balance of happy and unhappy Victorian marriages as case studies to explore, but then she got so fascinated by several of the unhappy ones that things got a little out of balance .... and she is right! Her case studies are fascinating, and at least one of them (the one she clearly sees as the happiest) is not technically a marriage at all (which, of course, is part of her point.)

The couples in question are:

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Carlyle -- the framing device for the whole book, because even though this marriage is not her favorite marriage Jane Carlyle is her favorite character. Notable for the fact that Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty, and then published after his death, making everyone else feel like he ought to have been feeling incredibly guilty. Rose considers the secret postmortem diary gift a brilliant stroke of Jane's in Triumphantly Taking Control Of The Narrative Of Their Marriage.

John Ruskin and Effie Gray -- like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage. non-consummation! parent drama! art drama! accusations that Ruskin was trying to manipulate Effie Gray into a ruinous affair so that he could divorce her! Effie Gray's family coming down secretly to sneak her away so she could launch a big divorce case instead! my favorite element of this whole story is that the third man in the Art Love Triangle, John Millais, was painting Ruskin's portrait when he and Gray fell in love instead, and Ruskin insisted on making Millais keep painting his portrait for numerous awkward sittings while the divorce proceedings played themselves out and [according to Rose] was genuinely startled that Millais was not interested in subsequently continuing their pleasant correspondence.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy. Harriet Taylor was married to John Taylor but was not enjoying the experience, began a passionate intellectual correspondence with John Stuart Mill who believed as strongly as she did in women's rights etc., they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours", nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was. (Meanwhile the Carlyles, who were friends of John Mill, nicknamed Harriet 'Platonica,' which I have to admit is a very funny move if you are a bitchy 19th century intellectual and you hate the married woman your friend is having a passionate but celibate philosophical romance of the soul with.) Eventually John Taylor did die and Harriet Taylor and John Mill did get married -- platonically or otherwise is unknown but regardless they seem to have been blissfully happy. Rose thinks that Harriet Taylor was probably not as brilliant as John Mill thought and John Mill was henpecked, but happily so, because letting his wife tell him what to do soothed his patriarchal guilt. I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!

Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens -- oh this was a Bad Marriage and everyone knows it. Unlike all the other women in this book, Catherine Dickens did not really command a narrative space of her own except Cast Aside Wife which -- although that's probably part of Rose's point -- makes this section IMO weaker and a bit less fun than the others.

George Eliot and George Henry Lewes -- Rose's favorite! She thinks these guys are very romantic and who can blame her, though she does want to take time to argue with people who think that George Eliot's genius relied more on George Henry Lewes kindling the flame than it did on George Eliot herself. It not being 1983 anymore, it did not occur to me that 'George Eliot was not primarily responsible for George Eliot' was an argument that needed to be made. "Maybe marriage is better when it doesn't have to actually be marriage" is clearly a point she's excited to make, given which one does wonder why she doesn't pull any Victorian long-term same-sex partnerships into her thematic examination. And the answer, probably, is 'I'm interested in specifically in the narrative of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual power dynamics and the ways they still leave an imprint on our contemporary moment,' which is fair, but if you're already exploring a thing by looking outside it .... well, anyway. I just looked up her bibliography out of curiosity to see if she ever did write about gay people and the answer is "well, she's got a book about Josephine Baker" so I may well be looking that up in future so I can have fun arguing with Rose some more!

Comments

[pedanther]

Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty

Is it explained why she didn't tell him how unhappy she was before her death, when there was some chance of him being able to do something about it?

[sholio]

I also wondered this, but then I realized that I know a number of people IRL who would rather complain to their friends/social media about their partner than actually have a conversation with said partner about "things you are doing that makes me unhappy and how we can fix them" (considerably more of those than people who actually would have that conversation, imho).

Although composing a to-be-posthumously-delivered book of Ways You Suck is definitely next level.

[evewithanapple]

Their whole marriage was very weird, she apparently did not want to get married at all and rebuffed him repeatedly, then changed her mind because . . . I'm not entirely sure why, but Rose speculates that it was a purely platonic relationship and they never consummated the marriage at all. Jane seems to have resented playing second fiddle to her husband's literary genius, especially as her own ambitions never amounted to much, and it seems like she hoarded grievances a fair bit even as she stayed in the role of Thomas's caretaker (doing battle with the neighbour over the neighbour's noisy roosters keeping Thomas awake, for example.) She also had a friend, Geraldine Jewsbury, who was 100% in love with Jane (Jane did not reciprocate: "[she is] always in a state of emotion! dropping hot tears on my hands, and watching me and fussing me") and Geraldine definitely did her part contributing to the public perception of the marriage as a bad one, but there seems to have been some good times too.

[edit] oh, and Jane also got upset over Geraldine's close friendship with Charlotte Cushman. If one were being ungracious, one might suggest that she wanted people devoted to her on her terms, but objected strongly to her friends and loved ones having their own emotional lives outside of her.

[skygiants]

I think Rose's argument is that Carlyle essentially sold her on the marriage by getting into a Platonic Tutor-Student relationship with her and then really leaning into playing up the resemblance to a literary tutor-student relationship that he already knew she found romantic ... part of her narrative argument iirc is that he developed a narrative of what their relationship could be like based on one that he already knew she liked and that did not in fact have much resemblance to what their relationship would be like in reality.

[aella_irene]

Given that one of their contemporaries said "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."she may have thought he already knew.

Which contemporary does one admire for that

[jesse_the_k]

Sick burn?

Re: Which contemporary does one admire for that

[evewithanapple]

Samuel Butler!

[skygiants]

yeah, Rose's assessment at least of the vibe is that she enjoyed being in the moral high ground and coming across to her husband as the Valiant Defender of his Genius, and she also enjoyed working on her secret misery book calculated to make him feel extremely bad when she was dead and ensure that she posthumously won the entire marriage. which Rose at least thinks that she did do!

[sovay]

they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours, nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was.

That is an absolutely amazing example of putting one's utilitarianism where one's heart is and I am delighted they actually managed to get together.

[skygiants]

an undeniable happy ending!! & you would think her children with John Taylor could not help but be annoyed by all this but they apparently loved Mills as well and her daughter continued on her work with Mill on reform and women's rights after Taylor died, which really tells you something about everyone involved IMO

[sovay]

hey apparently loved Mills as well and her daughter continued on her work with Mill on reform and women's rights after Taylor died, which really tells you something about everyone involved IMO

That's awesome.

[landofnowhere]

That sounds like a fun book!

I've known the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor since I was a freshman and I read On Liberty for class, and it was explained that one of the reasons that Mill was so insistent on focusing on public shaming as a threat to individual liberty was because he'd been shamed for his relationship with Taylor. (Also, coincidentially, the New Yorker ran an article on them that I read when I was home for Thanksgiving.) This is one of the things that led to my having a huge crush on Mill at the time, which in retrospect is somewhat embarrassing (but also this was in 2004 when various forms of homophobia were more socially acceptable, and it was nice to have the intellectual tools to push back).

[skygiants]

I kind of feel like I should read some of Mill's writings now (or at least a more serious and comprehensive biography) rather than just getting to know the charming-gossip version of him, but on the other hand the charming gossip is so very charming!

[landofnowhere]

Well, I have been saying for the last 20 years now that I should reread On Liberty, so I'm not one to talk! (Though I can suggest trying the Autobiography and stopping when you get bored.)

[ethelmay]

The only thing I recall from that book is the Muff Myth (it is not true that Ruskin didn't know about women having pubic hair). At least I am pretty sure it was from that book.

[skygiants]

The book definitely discusses the Muff Myth and why it seems pretty implausible that Ruskin would not have known about pubic hair!

[kore]

Jane Baillie Carlyle is my secret angry favorite.

[lirazel]

Have you read the Kathy Chamberlain biography?

[skygiants]

Rose paints an incredibly vivid and compelling picture of her!

[evewithanapple]

The way this book - a history of a bygone era - becomes, by virtue of being 40+ years old, a relic of a bygone era in and of itself (and oh, how second wave it all is) is fascinating. Rose is clearly arguing from the position of "is marriage a prison? Is sex oppressive? Should we unshackle ourselves from the prison of heterosexual relationships?" in a way that doesn't wholly translate now (especially since, as you say, she doesn't seem to remember gay people exist) but it is very interesting to read.

And I did think her analysis of Dickens as a man who hated his wife, not just because he had a midlife crisis and decided to chase an actress half his age, but because her existence reminded him of the dents in his own self-image as A Good Person was very incisive.

[lirazel]

And I did think her analysis of Dickens as a man who hated his wife, not just because he had a midlife crisis and decided to chase an actress half his age, but because her existence reminded him of the dents in his own self-image as A Good Person was very incisive.

Agreed! God, I felt awful for Catherine.

[skygiants]

Yes! There's such an extra layer of interest in reading nonfiction books written From a Time that are aware of and engaging with the time that they're written in -- the simultaneous pleasure of history and historiography.

Yeah, I think it's a very sharp and incisive portrait of Dickens, and I appreciate the effort that Rose is putting in to show the ways that the marriage did at one point seem to be functional and affectionate and how that gradually altered. And I guess the Eliot section is as much primarily a portrait of Eliot as the Dickens section is primarily a portrait of Dickens -- but she's just so happy to be writing about Eliot that I can't really mind.

[uskglass]

Oh, I've heard of this book and I've long been interested in John Stuart Mill's life (and George Eliot's, for that matter) but I had no idea that they were connected: for some reason I assumed Parallel Lives was a study of four marriages of, like... non-famous or less-famous people, like Barbara Tuchman's chosen focus in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. That sounds incredibly fascinating! I've gotta pick it up; I know very little aside from biographical-blurb-level summaries of any of these relationships and this sounds like an interesting juxtaposition.

[skygiants]

Honestly I think it's pretty funny of her to try to make any general arguments about Marriage As An Institution based on the lives of ten notably famous, dramatic, and largely iconoclastic individuals, but the experience is so much fun for both her and me that I'm not going to fight her about it. Who needs people to be representative when they're so undeniably interesting?

[mrissa]

When I'm reading nonfiction, there's often a fine line for me between 'you, the author, are getting yourself all up in this narrative and I wish you'd get out of the way' and 'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.'

This is a conversation we have gloomily around my house ALL THE TIME:
T or M: How was the book you had earlier?
me: It said it was about TOPIC but really it was about THE AUTHOR'S INMOST SOUL.
T or M: Dammit.

[skygiants]

EXACTLY. I don't care about the author's inmost soul! I do care about their opinions, in the sense that I want them to tell me when an opinion is an opinion and then we can have a nice debate about my opinions, but they should be opinions about the topic, please and thank you.

[littlerhymes]

The Mill/Taylor situation sounds incredible... The ethics of it all!

[skygiants]

the ethics of it all! god damn it we are going to undertake this emotional affair in a fashion that accords with our intellectual ideals!!

[newredshoes]

Okay, my undergraduate education clearly robbed me, because while we read Mill and I really enjoyed him, I had NO IDEA he had such a thriving personal life!!!

[skygiants]

There's a really fantastic anecdote of Mill and Taylor dropping on at the Carlyles like WE'RE SO SORRY, YOU WILL NEVER FORGIVE US, and the Carlyles are like oh no ... they've finally eloped for real ...... this is socially unrecoverable, the worst news possible ..... and then Mill and Taylor are like WE ACCIDENTALLY BURNED THE ONLY COPY OF YOUR WIP THAT YOU GAVE US TO READ IN DRAFT and the Carlyles are like "oh thank god! it was only that! ... wait WHAT."

[raven]

I am so happy for you to be discovering the incredible romance of Mill and Harriet Taylor! A friend of mine at uni absolutely adored Mill - in the sense that she was writing her doctoral thesis on On Liberty but also she was just his biggest fan - and was supervised by my pol theory tutor who was then teaching the utilitarianism papers, which is how a bunch of us went to see the play she'd written about him! About, naturally, the tragic love triangle John and Harriet and Harriet's inconvenient husband. It was great.

[skygiants]

Everyone who's ever studied Mill really does seem to have transitioned from being a scholar to being just his biggest fan and even from this little glimpse I can see why; he seems so charming! AS DOES YOUR FRIEND'S PLAY

[osprey_archer]

On the one hand keeping a diary about your misery that is given to the spouse who caused said misery after your death IS an amazing act of having the last word, spouse CANNOT argue with this document now that you are dead, on the other hand perhaps it would be more useful to discuss with spouse beforehand when your life might be made less miserable...? However I don't know the specifics of Jane Carlyle's situation. Perhaps part of the point of the diary is that Thomas Carlyle is simply incapable of change.

The Ruskin-Millais triangle is SUCH an experience, though. Ruskin is such a bizarre human being? His wife is divorcing him to marry Millais and Millais is painting a portrait of Ruskin and Ruskin sees nothing awkward in the whole situation? Also, incredibly awkward of him to get married and then not consummate the marriage resulting in the world's most embarrassing annulment suit. Just make like an Oxford don and stay single, my dude.

I recently read a book which took the position that Harriet Taylor was exactly as brilliant as John Stuart Mill thought, which may be the difference between 1983 and 2019. Surely someone in the interim has argued that Harriet was actually the brains of the operation and John Stuart Mill simply rode on her apron strings?

If "what do same-sex unions suggest about Victorian marriage" is something you're interested in, you might enjoy Sharon Marcus's Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. The last chapter or two are all about this question.

[lirazel]

Oooh, what was the Harriet Taylor book?

[osprey_archer]

Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities.

[lirazel]

Oh that looks interesting! Thanks!

[skygiants]

Frankly Jane Carlyle seems to have been the sort of person who would enjoy majestically having the last word more than she would enjoy having a genuine and honest conversation with her husband .... there seem to have been Problems in Various Directions.

I knew the Ruskin Situation was wild but frankly had not realized just how wild. Surely had to be one of the top ten most embarrassing divorces that had ever happened at that point in history. (There have probably been more embarrassing divorces now but less competition then!)

Honestly, John Stuart Mill seems to have largely taken the position that Harriet was actually the brains of the operation and John Stuart Mill simply rode on her apron strings! And good on him!! Also, I am indeed interested in this question, so thank you for the recommendation -- I'll be adding it to my list for sure.

[lirazel]

'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!

Yessssssssssssssssssssssss. That's exactly how I felt! And I really appreciated that she didn't even try to pretend like she didn't have that point of view--so many writers pretend to be objective and it's frustrating.

like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage

It's so true. I came into this book only really familiar with this particular marriage (having read an Effie biography some years before) and I had a great time knowing that Rose agreed with me that Ruskin was THE WORST OMG I HATE HIM.

I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy.

SAME!

I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!

Agreed! My biggest disagreement with Rose!

I am super glad you enjoyed this book too!

[skygiants]

Yes! She's got her thesis and her point of view and she's not afraid to argue it, she's not trying to sneak it past me as fact! Thanks so much for writing this book up, which was definitely the largest contributing factor to me actually reading it.

[lirazel]

Yay! I'm so glad!

[bloodygranuaile]

I recently picked up a copy of this at a used bookstore because the friend I was at the used bookstore with handed it to me and said "I read this book back in [year] and it made me realize I had to break up with [mutual friend she was dating at the time]" and that is probably one of the few things someone could say to really pique my curiosity about a book about five heterosexual marriages. I will read it... *looks at TBR bookcase* eventually!

[skygiants]

omg, I am delighted to hear this and I am 100% sure Phyllis Rose would be too. Excited to hear what you think of it whenever you get around to it!

[happydork]

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy.

I am so wildly into you learning of John Stuart Mill through his relationship with Harriet Taylor - and I like to imagine he would have been very into that too.