It’s all true!
On the relief of looking reality in the eye
Here’s a secret, readers. I don’t read all the time. In fact, these last several months, all posts have come from books read in previous seasons of fevered reading. IRL I have been nursing a single, not very long book (May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, post to come) and hoping that one day my pleasure in reading will return.
And now, it has, via Anna Funder’s book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life, and also probably via the arrival of Spring, and hormones? and the moon or something, since my zealous reading cycles tend to go on and off in six month seasons.
On Tuesday I read 100 pages of Wifedom, and I felt that electric pleasure that comes from a Good Book. I don’t know what sets off your Good Book electric pleasure sirens, but in my case it usually involves a very complex, interdisciplinary examination of a topic that matters to me, with rigorous research and thinking, and always contextualisation back to what is human, and to the big picture and little picture of what it is to be human, specifically. This is why most of the Good Books I’ve loved have involved elements of memoir - tell me why you, author, had to write THIS book, please.
And Anna Funder had to write this book, I’ve assumed, to soothe my child self who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, the one that intuited, from all of culture and hegemonic context, that women were not very important, that their work and concerns were not very important, that they were secondary always to men, and that, most importantly of all, none of that was actually true because everything had been fixed and everyone was equal and feminists were just annoying complainy ladies you rolled your eyes at.
Quick anecdote - at university I was friends with a number of Nice Guys who enjoyed engaging me in “Debate” (a favourite pastime of the Nice Guy) about why feminism was unnecessary because everything was fine. I would meet them in good faith, laying out the reality, with pieces of my own experience and the broader experience. And they would laugh and dismiss what I had to say while I tried not to cry.
You might think it would make me angry to see laid out in Funder’s book all the historical and contemporary and systemic ways that patriarchy persists, what it looks like, and what it takes from us. In fact it was more like taking a bath in a kind of ethereal, beautiful, water where I finally felt perfectly safe and seen. Funder’s gift is making that bath out of quick, reality-trapping sentences:
“Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view. Women are supporting cast - or caste.”
Feed that into my 2005-era veins, Anna!!!
But lest you think she’s out here doing context-less zingers, it’s all much more considered and integrated than that. Funder’s book is a multi-genre exploration of a complex topic over time, so let’s take just a taste from her examination of how women are treated in the biographies (ie the history making) of great men.
“The methods of omission started to fascinate me as I came to recognise them. When women can’t be left out altogether, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in 8-point font. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. What a woman does, or what is done to her, is only mentioned pages after the events themselves, which are described without her. This separates her actions from their effects, her bravery from its beneficiaries, her earnings from the man who lived from them, her suffering from the people who caused it. And when none of that works, women are imagined to have consented to what was done to them - in Eileen’s case, to a completely fictitious ‘ménage à trois’ or an invented ‘open marriage’.”
I love, too, that Funder has no need for so-called “cancel culture” in order to examine her subject. It’s so much bigger than the single man “Orwell”, and in any case, she is a lifelong fan of his work (and of the biographies about him that she’s referring to above). The book has no trouble looking his realities in the eye, including both his remarkable writing and his remarkable deficiencies, while also looking a much much bigger reality and context in the eye.
“Once I knew who should be in the text but wasn’t, the biographies seemed like oddly collaborative projects between biographer and subject, as if they belonged to the same unnamed club, the first rule of which is: don’t give women main roles. Don’t talk about what we (or our hero) might owe them (as mothers, teachers, editors, mentors or financiers), nor what we do to or with them (as girlfriends, prostitutes, lovers, wives and mistresses).
The more I saw the hidden methods, the more they seemed like the methods of patriarchy in microcosm, laid out in ink.”
I’m only a quarter of the way in, so maybe we have three more posts to come. I haven’t even mentioned the topic of “wifedom” itself, a reality of heterosexual marriage writ large, for which the particulars of Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s story stands in. But you get the picture, reader, and I always promise to keep these newsletters shorter than they ever end up being.
May we all find our ways to looking reality in the eye.
May we all thank my sister Anna (not this author Anna, although also an author Anna) for lending me her copy of this book so I could take a beautiful wordy bath.
May we all find our way to an electric Good Book, such that we’re moved to write about it when we’ve only read a quarter.
Until next time
Katie
Thanks for reading The Living Library, where we grapple with complexity and humanity and all the good stuff.
I am a coach, consultant and educator, working mostly with highly sensitive and gifted adults. I work with clients on whatever they need support with, from high sensitivity/giftedness itself, to crossroads decisions, to self actualisation and transformative change, to creative development, to leadership (and all the interconnect everything else inbetween).
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Oh my! How exquisitely you write about the writings of others. As you read 'Wifedom' I am reading 'How to think like a philosopher' and have become all self-conscious about how and what I think. And along comes 'Wifedom' as a shining example of my book's principles - Pay attention; Question everything; Follow the facts; Know what matters; and more. Thank you, Katie.
True, such a good book. Just wait til you get to the end, you might want to bring Orwell back from the dead just so you can unalive him again.