During the crisis in my marriage, it did not escape me that my dissertation’s focus on isolated unhappy wives had become rather gruesomely autobiographical. In Hawaii, where I, far more than Donald, felt far from our sustaining New York community, the marriage grew strained. We lived in Kailua, Oahu, on the windward side—the opposite side from Honolulu—of the steep-cliffed volcanic Na Pali range. Those were the cliffs from which the legendary King Kamehameha used to hurl his enemies. I would think about that sometimes on the drive home from work when, emerging in my little blue Toyota from the high tunnel that cut through the mountain, I took in the bright stretch of ocean below. Hawaii was interesting in so many ways—in its geography, geology, history, social culture, racial mix, arts, and politics. I lived there in the final years of the Vietnam War, when soldiers returned to Hawaii for R and R and dignitaries were always passing through. I wasn’t blind to all this, but in ways I now regret, I resisted fully being there. Sometimes I would look up at the mountains, so green and always cloud-covered—the same ones I had to drive through—and mutter to myself, “These mountains are igneous.” I took a childish relief in the harsh sound of the geologically correct word. On the more positive side, I made a few new friends, mostly other haoles (white people from the mainland), whom I liked spending time with, and I played a lot of tennis at the Kailua Racket Club, an informal and friendly club near my house. But Hawaii always remained unheimlich—not my landscape, not my true home. Perhaps it was too far from the world of English novels. Though it embarrasses me now to confess it, I couldn’t stretch.
Donald, meanwhile, was blending in far better than I. He had been hired by the American Federation of Teachers, engaged then in an intensive campaign to be the bargaining agent for the University of Hawaii faculty. This meant his working long hours, often until nine or ten or even later at night, while I stayed home with the children, but even on the evenings he was with us, he and I hardly interacted. He drank a lot, in a quiet way, then would stagger off to bed, leaving me to my own unhappiness. (George Eliot would here give his point of view as well as mine—why always “poor Wendy,” why not also “poor Donald?” Surely he felt unhappy, too.) Then came his affair with the administrative assistant from his office, his leaving me, a terrible blow, to move in with her (I’m afraid we’re back to “poor Wendy”), and after what for me were three most difficult months, his desire to return. The short version of this story is that I let him come back—I didn’t have the fortitude not to. Emily and Sean needed a father, I told myself, and I guess I still clung to hope of something from him, too, for myself. The marriage lasted another thirteen years, but I never felt again, as I had before, happy whenever he walked through the door. I realize, though, in saying this, I don’t know how he felt in that doorway. George Eliot speaks in Middlemarch of our being “well wadded with stupidity,” her metaphor for our obtuseness to others’ subjectivity.
I don’t, though, want to make too much of the dreary confluence of the themes of my dissertation and my life circumstances. That might suggest writing the thesis was depressing, and it wasn’t at all. George Eliot is not an especially cheerful author. But reading the novels and six volumes of her letters that, among other things, seem to detail every headache and toothache and other ache she and George Henry Lewes ever had, reading as well the biographies, literary criticism, and books about Victorian England, I had a steady and steadying activity that became a kind of anchor. To build my argument, day by day, chapter by chapter, to strive to understand Eliot’s novelistic universe and feel such understanding was possible, I had this to turn to, no matter what else was happening in my life. I’m not claiming the outcome was in any way extraordinary. The dissertation had an uninspired title, The Relationship of Heroine, Confessor and Community in the Novels of George Eliot. If I were to be the judge of it now, I would call it good but hardly great. Still, it represents my life’s most focused and sustained attempt to make sense of another’s sensibility. I was committed to figuring something out, a puzzle, a paradox, as I set out to analyze what the recurrent heroine-confessor-community plot in Eliot’s novels reflects of the author’s lifelong struggle to balance a determined idealism about the possibilities of human interaction and community with an unsparing penetration of human folly and weakness.
GEORGE Eliot wanted to improve the society
