“We seemed to have lost you, but before long you will be one of us again, I mean you will be one of the women who are fighting in a women’s cause. You will prove by your life that we can be responsible human beings—trustworthy, conscious of purpose.”
Part of the wonderful balance of The Odd Women is that Monica cannot rise to Rhoda’s level of impersonal passion. Her heroism is in defying her husband to the extent that she does, understanding that “love needs freedom if it is to remain love in truth,” and in deciding to live apart from him. I see her, too, as a descendent of Isabel Archer, valuing freedom and refusing a controlling husband’s terms of subjugation, though Widdowson, unlike Gilbert Osmond, seems another victim, not a villain. Gissing’s sympathetic portrayal of his pathological jealousy is another of the book’s fine achievements. But Monica has been fatally wounded by her experience. The marriage plot having failed her—not just in its aspects of rescue and domesticity, but even in her aborted stab at adultery—she dies in childbirth, while Rhoda carries on. To Rhoda is given the last word of the novel. “Poor little child,” she murmurs, holding Monica’s motherless daughter in her arms and looking at its dark bright eyes. That she relates to the child feelingly reflects her evolution. One doesn’t know, though, if her pity is for the past or for the future.
The scene of Rhoda Nunn seated on a garden bench gazing at the child in her arms somehow softens the death of Monica as well as allowing Rhoda a kind of immaculate conception. But I also find myself wishing that we could see more of Rhoda at her typewriter, for, after all, isn’t that her destiny? At one point during their “courtship,” Barfoot, curious about her work, asks if it isn’t just “copying with a type-machine and teaching others to do the same.”
“If it were no more than that,” Rhoda counters. She feels she’s participating in “the greatest movement of our time—that of emancipating [our] sex.” From a contemporary perspective it’s easy to make fun of Rhoda’s ecstasy about typing. By the time I graduated from college in the mid-1960s, taking a job as a typist or secretary might still be an “entry-level” opportunity to rise in publishing or advertising or some other seemingly glamorous field, but to me it evoked sexually wry New Yorker cartoons as well as T. S. Eliot’s “typist home at teatime” who trysts with “the young man carbuncular,” and afterwards “smoothes her hair with automatic hand/And puts a record on the gramophone.” Yet it’s important to remember that typing in the 1890s offered women extraordinary new opportunities to enter public spheres from which they had been previously excluded—spheres such as commerce, publishing, advertising, banking, and law. One of Mary and Rhoda’s pupils lands a job in the publishing department of a weekly paper and hopes someday to start a paper of her own. Women’s access to office work can be seen as truly revolutionary, radically expanding women’s options and also cutting across class lines. Poor girls and even rich girls became secretaries and typists. Might not Jane Eyre have been delighted with such an option? I can imagine her reading the classified ads on a dreary day at Lowood, seeing in them more freedom than servitude, and packing her suitcase for London. Her Mr. Rochester might then have been her office boss.
My brother took a touch-typing course in high school. I purposely didn’t, though I’m not sure my lack of skill saved me. As an English major BA, the best job I could find was as an editorial assistant in the textbook division of Harper & Row, where I sat at a desk tapping out form letters with two fingers. “Enclosed you will find your examination copy of the sixth edition of Broom & Selznick . . . ,” the company’s best-selling introductory sociology text. The distinction that I wrote, rather than transcribed, these letters seems hardly worth insisting on. The boss still tried to seduce me. After a year I went back to school to get a PhD.
But perhaps all this is beside the point in thinking about Rhoda Nunn. She lives within Gissing’s text, and there the belief she holds in office work as a route to women’s liberation gives the chance to reject an Everard Barfoot and still be a fulfilled heroine. It’s interesting, though, that if office work offers such great new vistas for women, the very same kind of work, indeed any work at all, seems far less emancipating for Gissing’s men. Widdowson has been a clerk, Barfoot an engineer. Yet neither has found satisfaction in his work life. Widdowson confides to Monica the first afternoon they spend together how much he has hated “office work and business of every kind.” A clerk’s life strikes him as “a hideous fate.” Barfoot left Eton to become an engineer, worked hard for ten years, but ultimately found the profession uncongenial. Nor does he want to do anything else. “I’m not prompted to any business or profession,” he tells his cousin. “That’s all over for me. I have learned all I care to of the active world.” His conclusion is that “to work for ever is to lose half of life.”
Barfoot calls himself an “individualist” and sees Mary as standing “at the social point of view.” What this means is that Mary has a social purpose; Barfoot doesn’t. Mary, Barfoot, and Widdowson all inherit money at around the age of forty. Mary uses hers to start her school. Widdowson and Barfoot give up work but find nothing to engage with beyond their interest in the women they encounter—women more vibrant than themselves. Ironically, they are the “odd” men out. No wonder Mary Barfoot exclaims:
It’s better to be a woman in our day. With us is all the joy of advancing, the glory of conquering.
