The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ physically, and enables him to grasp difficulties, and master them. The girl, on the contrary, has been guarded from over fatigue, subject to restrictions with regard to cold and heat, and hours of study, seldom trusted away from home, allowed only a small share of responsibility; – not willingly, with any wish to thwart her inclinations – but simply because, if she is not thus guarded, if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.⁸²

Dr James Burnett, in Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children (1895), assured his readers that a girl would, at puberty, always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement: her ‘disordered pelvic life’ guaranteed that she ‘must necessarily be in ill-health more or less [ever after] … Not one exception to this have I ever seen.’^*83

      Despite this consensus, many popular novelists deplored the lack of female education: Dickens, Thackeray and also Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot painted vivid pictures of the resulting misery of ignorance, for both sexes. Jeannette Marshall’s father, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, encouraged his daughters to attend lectures at University College. He even hoped they would sit exams. They refused to do the latter, and attended few lectures. It was not surprising. From the schoolroom onwards, girls were never tested, never matched against others, never socialized in any form. Jeannette and her sister Ada managed one term before the requirements of their social life supervened: they had made no friends with any of the other women attending the college; from Jeannette’s diary, it is not clear that they ever learned any of their names. For Jeannette, education was a matter of passing the time – she studied algebra in late adolescence as ‘a cure for boredom’ – or, more importantly, of prestige. She had piano lessons with the well-known pianist (and founder of the English Wagner Society) Edward Dannreuther, and noted of some new acquaintances, ‘I went up 100 per cent in their estimation when they heard Mr. Dannreuther was my [music] master. A good card to play!’⁸⁴ Jeannette enjoyed her music, and intermittently worked hard at it, while she never became one of those women condemned by the author of Maternal Counsels to a Daughter. ‘Who would wish a wife or a daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?’⁸⁵

      Ignorance was, in many ways, a desirable state. Knowledge was burdensome, and could overwhelm those unable to bear its weight. Mrs Gaskell worried about sending the toddler Marianne to school, where ‘she may meet with children who may teach her the meaning of things of which at present we desire to keep her ignorant’.⁸⁶ This need to protect girls from knowledge did not grow less when they became adult. Half a century after Mrs Gaskell expressed her anxiety, Gissing depicted his characters arguing about the same subject. Monica, a woman who had been forced to marry for economic security, disagreed with her new husband on whether or not a mutual friend was ‘nice’ for her to know. He responded:

      ‘… In your ignorance of the world’ –

      ‘Which you think very proper in a woman,’ she interrupted caustically.

      ‘Yes, I do! That kind of knowledge is harmful to a woman.’

      ‘Then, please, how is she to judge her acquaintances?’

      ‘A married woman must accept her husband’s opinion, at all events about men.’ He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman’s mind.’⁸⁷

      Knowledge of a fact could corrupt not because of the fact itself, but because of the gender of the mind it resided in. This was not to say that girls and women were expected to know nothing. It was just that their accomplishments and abilities were important in reactive ways: as Mrs Ellis said earlier, girls needed to know enough about science so that they could look intelligent while men talked. Equally, girls should be able to play the piano, not for the pleasure derived from music, but because it was useful. Mrs Panton thought that girls’ natural reason for learning to play the piano was ‘because they can be useful either to accompany songs and glees or to play dance-music’,⁸⁸ not love of music. Nearly half a century later the function of a daughter had not altered: ‘it is the daughter’s privilege … to act the part of sympathiser and interested listener in the home circle. No other claim is greater.’⁸⁹

      Girls were only to respond to others, not have thoughts of their own. It took Molly Hughes some time before her place as a reactive rather than an active family member became clear to her:

      the family pooled what gossip they had got from school … discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes … I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from [her brother] Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation.’ If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym [another brother] that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America.’

      That kidnap victims take on the ideology of their captors in order to survive is a well-known psychological effect, called the Stockholm Syndrome. Molly Hughes was a prime example. She used the word ‘chilling’ for her brother’s crushing retort, but she little appeared to recognize quite how chilling the scene related above was. She ended, ‘In short, I was wisely neglected’, and confided that ‘I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could.’⁹⁰

      Felix and Henrietta Carbury, the brother and sister in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, showed similar characteristics, albeit heightened for fictional purposes. Felix Carbury was a wastrel who had run through his inheritance and was now battening on his mother, who could ill afford to support herself and her daughter. Henrietta, however,

      had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance … That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses were curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was her mother’s, she never complained.⁹¹

      This deference to men was not a single hierarchical one: fathers at the top of the family pyramid, mothers next by virtue of authority vested in them by their husbands, and children at the bottom. The children were in their own little pyramid too, with boys, of whatever age, above girls. Eleanor Farjeon spelled it out:

      Whatever pains and penalties, whatever joys and pleasures, were dispensed to us by the parental powers in the Dining-room and Drawing-room … in the Nursery there was one Law-Giver who made the Laws: our eldest brother Harry.

       … he invented rules and codes with Spartan strictness; if they were to be enforced, he enforced them; if relaxed, only he might relax them …

      In our Nursery he exemplified Plato’s ‘benevolent despotism’ СКАЧАТЬ