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“‘TOMORROW, ALICE,’ SAID DR. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs of Clevedon, ‘I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.’”
I quote the opening sentence of The Odd Women to show its novelistic energy and the way Gissing wastes no time setting up what even the dullest reader can perceive as a prelude to disaster. Nineteen-year-old Alice, “a plain, shy, gentle-mannered girl, short of stature, and in movement something less than graceful”—thus a girl with dim matrimonial prospects—is unaccustomed to her father’s confidences. Dr. Madden believes girls should be sheltered from worldly concerns. He reads Tennyson to his six daughters (their mother is dead), and, though it isn’t mentioned, he must also be given to quoting Ruskin and Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House.” By the end of the chapter, Dr. Madden is dead. Called to attend on a sick farmer, his horse has stumbled on the return drive home and thrown the poetry-loving pater familias from his cart. Exit Dr. Madden. The life insurance policy, of course, has not been signed.
I first read The Odd Women when looking for texts suitable to include in The Heroine’s Progress and within pages saw its potential for my course. After the father’s unceremonious elimination, we fast-forward fifteen years to a scenario of two impoverished spinsters, Alice, now thirty-five, loose fleshed and pimply, and her prettier, but equally downtrodden sister, Virginia, second to her in age, sharing dreary lodgings in London and economizing with meals of rice and a little cheese. One has been working as a governess, the other as a companion—traditional occupations for gentlewomen in distress. Their next three sisters are dead, Gertrude “of consumption,” Martha “by the overturning of a pleasure boat,” and “poor hard-featured Isabel,” an overworked Board school teacher, through succumbing to brain fever, then melancholia and drowning in a bathtub. It takes the novelist but a paragraph to dispatch the three of them. That leaves the youngest sister, Monica, whom Alice and Virginia, led by their own disappointments, believe better off in “business” than in “a more strictly genteel position.” She is apprenticed to a draper at Weston, but since Monica is pretty (as Virginia was), her sisters feel she “must marry.” Thus, Gissing covers the traditional options for impoverished gentlewomen and begins his problem novel, in which just about every character and every situation illustrates some aspect of the controversies of the day concerning women and marriage. His title, The Odd Women, refers specifically to England’s surplus of single women swelling throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—in 1878 the number was estimated at 800,000. I knew this was a book I had to teach.
It appealed to me, too, that Gissing has more subtlety than I may have suggested in recapitulating the book’s opening, a characteristic all the more remarkable in the context of a number of similarly themed novels of the times. The most damning diatribe I have ever read against marriage is Tolstoy’s intemperate novella The Kreutzer Sonata, published in Russia in 1889, in which the jealous husband Pozdnyshev kills his despised wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. The real culprit, though, is marriage, the institution that binds people together in incompatible, soulless unions, in which the corruptions of the flesh—late Tolstoy’s special target—pull them down in spirals of mutual hatred. The work was suppressed in Russia, but it circulated in Europe and America. Tolstoy’s vitriol shocks me even today. His rage against the flesh, and especially the power of the flesh of women to ensnare men, is terrifying in its extremity. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), another work that shocked its contemporary readers and that also explores the tragic gulf between human passions and marriage’s institutional rigidity, is tame in comparison.
Gissing is not as ferocious as late Tolstoy or as relentless as late Hardy. His interest in the psychological nuances of his characters’ interactions saves him from the extremes of the polemical. Nonetheless, The Odd Women is very dubious about the possibility of marriage bringing happiness. In the situations of even minor characters, women are seen as prostituting themselves to get husbands and then abusing or being abused by them when they’ve got them. The only conceivably happy couple in Gissing’s story, Mr. and Mrs. Micklewaite, lacking the necessary financial resources, have had to wait a mickle twenty years to marry until the lady’s cheeks are faded and sallow. The Odd Women unequivocally takes its stand against the institution of marriage as it exists in late nineteenth-century England. It is a cry against a situation in which a young woman like Monica “must marry” or suffer the fate of her spinster sisters while suggesting some intriguing new options for women brave and firm enough to choose them. What I have appreciated, though, is that it also promotes sympathy for women and men alike. Gissing himself suffered miserably in two failed
