And no wonder Widdowson and Barfoot can offer Monica and Rhoda so little. Monica’s marriage to Widdowson is worse than a mistake; it’s a debilitating downward spiral for both wife and husband. As for Rhoda’s romance with Barfoot, while Gissing makes it compelling, it suffices as the heroine’s detour, not her destiny. How could Rhoda Nunn be satisfied with a man whose only goal is to watch the “spectacle of existence?” Men in The Odd Women drift while women stride forward. Widdowson at the novel’s end is cut off from the future; he has given the charge of his baby to his dead wife’s tattered but still forward-looking sisters. Barfoot’s end is equally bleak, or at least equally ironic. Marrying a lovely upper-class wife, one of the Brissenden sisters, he becomes utterly conventional.
IN the late 1980s the feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson gave a talk at Barnard that I attended. A tall, blond Southern beauty and one of the great radicals of second-wave feminism, she mesmerized an audience of respectful undergraduates with a blistering diatribe against marriage—heterosexual marriage, that is, though we didn’t at the time make such distinctions—delivered in a lulling regional drawl. The students were stunned, but one of them gathered her courage at the end of the talk to ask a question. “You’re very hard on marriage, Ti-Grace,” she said. “I understand all that’s wrong with it. But what is the alternative to marriage?”
I recall how Ti-Grace pulled herself to an even more statuesque height and thought for a moment. “What is the alternative to cancer?” she replied.
I repeat this story to my students at Brooklyn College, using it to create a radical perspective on the marriage plot in fiction and, especially in a masters-level course in feminist literary theory, to demonstrate an ideological extreme of second-wave feminism. It surprised me at first but I’ve come, resignedly, to accept the fact that many of my female students—even in the feminist theory course—want distance from feminism. They see it as radical and uncompromising, as cutting them off from the men they live with or hope to marry or are married to already. They know and care that women face discrimination, but they don’t want to lead separatist existences. Many say they find men difficult and exasperating, but they nonetheless want them in their lives. I present myself in this class as someone who lived through second-wave feminism, a movement that made me happy to be a woman in my day. But I also make clear how my feelings about marriage are and always have been very different from Ti-Grace Atkinson’s.
Maybe I’m a little like Rhoda Nunn, whose feminism grows more vibrant because she has known love with a man. In my case, to have been married to a man and had children with him may be a very commonplace woman’s destiny. But despite the marriage’s failure and my ultimate liberation to move on from it, I don’t take for granted what it gave me, including important things beyond the children. My husband, oddly, was a lot like Barfoot. He worked because he had to and did not feel truly “prompted to any business or profession.” But, while rueful about his own failure to find direction, when it came to my professional life, he put himself wholeheartedly behind me. I’m not sure what I might have managed to be or do without him. Our reversal of traditional roles had its strains for us both. Yet I know my debt to him is as great as to any “sisters.”
iii
HOWARDS END, WITH THE urging of its famous epigram, “only connect,” pairs for me with The Odd Women not only because of its similar ending but because Forster, no less acutely than Gissing, understands the trenches of difference between men women, the privileged and the poor, and lays these out in his novel’s scheme. Howards End ranges from characters that have their choices of fine houses to those forced to settle for a dreary rented basement flat; it shows private affective life in tension with the world of work and establishes the masculine Wilcoxes and feminine Schlegels as not just opposing genders but almost archetypal alternatives. After Helen’s initial skirmish with the Wilcoxes, Margaret reflects on the two families:
“I suppose that ours is a female house,” said Margaret, “and one must just accept it. No, Aunt Julie, I don’t mean that this house is full of women. I am trying to say something far more clever. I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time. Now I’m sure you understand! Well, I’ll give you another example. It’ll shock you, but I don’t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner party and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you think that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens, no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn’t effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but won’t, sounds irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn’t brutal.”
Just as Forster’s later novel, A Passage to India, asks, “Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?” at the heart of Howards End is the question of relations between the two houses: the Schlegel house—cultured, continental, feminine—and the Wilcox house—the masculine world of “newspapers and motor cars and golf clubs.” Can their initial collision give way to cooperation? The marriage of Margaret Schlegel, dubbed a heroine by her younger sister Helen because she “means to keep proportion,” and Henry Wilcox, widower and captain of British industry, is Forster’s experiment in seeing if the energy of the Wilcoxes and the sensibility of the Schlegels can infuse one another so that the extremes of effeminacy and brutality are
