Today I hope we can explore during how society’s attitudes toward sex and marriage have changed over the years by talking about some early best-selling American novels that dealt with those topics.
We all know that novels, magazines, movies, and TV reflect reality – even when they’re fantasies, because fantasies tell us about what we’d like, or think we’d like. But at the beginning of our history as a country, there were no movies or TV or magazines as we know them today, so unless we’re historians or sociologists, we can only get a sense of what people’s lives – women’s lives – were like through the mainstream, popular, or critically well-received novels of their time.
So I’d like to talk briefly about some of these novels and then have a discussion about how different – or how much the same – things are today. So if something occurs to you that you disagree with or want to add to or have a question about, just jot down your ideas and save them for later.
Between 1789 and 1797 – the first 8 years of our country – three novels were published about the seduction of an innocent young woman by a lecherous libertine. The first wasn’t around very long because it was based on a true story about a leading Boston family, which was so upset by it that it bought up all the copies and persuaded the author not to reprint it.
The second was Susanna Rowson’s novel, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, which was the country’s first blockbuster. Rowson was born in England, but she’s considered an American author because she lived the longest and most famous part of her life in this country, both as a child and as an adult. This novel was published in England in 1791 then republished here in 1794 and became a phenomenal success.
Charlotte Temple, an innocent and gullible English girl in a boarding school, attracts the attention of handsome British soldier Montraville, who becomes obsessed with seducing her. She falls in love with him, and he’s able to persuade her to run away to America (which is still a colony) with him, where he says he’ll be able to marry her without his family’s approval. She’s uncomfortable about this, but agrees when Mlle. LaRue, an immoral French teacher who has her own reasons for wanting to go to America , persuades her that it will be perfectly proper since she, the teacher, would be an adequate chaperone. (By the way, this is the beginning of a long tradition of untrustworthy French villains or villainesses!)
Needless to say, naive Susanna has made the wrong decision. Once in New York, Montraville seduces her, then refuses to marry her – partly because he doesn’t want to, but also because of subplots involving Mlle. LaRue and Montraville’s truly evil friend, Belcour. Charlotte is not only loving, kind, and faithful, but she still believes in Montraville’s essential goodness – and for this she’s rewarded by poverty, the contempt of respectable people, and the inevitable pregnancy. By the time her father arrives to rescue her, she’s about to die in childbirth, and all Papa can do is promise to take care of her baby daughter – the subject of a sequel.
All the villains are punished, though none as severely as Charlotte. La Rue’s plans fail and she has to return to England, where she dies a pauper’s death. Belcour is killed by Montraville in a duel. And Montraville can never forgive himself – but he nevertheless marries well and is received everywhere.
The moral is clear. If Susanna had obeyed the rules set down for female behavior by parents, school, religion, and society, if she had not thought she could decide her life for herself, she would never have run away, which should have been a clear sign that what she was doing could only lead to a bad end. The moral that girls must learn how dangerous it is to go against the conventions of religion, family, and society. is made very clear in Rowson’s Preface: “If the following tale should save one hapless fair one from the errors which ruined poor Charlotte. . . . I shall feel much gratification.” Fiction was only tolerable in those early days of our country if it taught a Christian moral.
This story was also based on that of a real woman, but luckily for Rowson, Charlotte Stanley was dead and no one ever confirmed or denied the facts. Stanley had been buried in Trinity churchyard, and thanks to the novelization of her life, her grave was a popular tourist attraction. After Trinity was destroyed by fire in 1846 and a new one built, her tombstone disappeared and was replaced by one inscribed Charlotte Temple – which is still there because I checked after 9/11. The novel went into more than 200 printings. My own copy is from 1864, so it was still in print 70 years after its publication. Not bad.
I’ll just say a few words about the third of these novels to deal with the perils of unmarried sex, which was also a very popular bestseller. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette came out in 1797 and is the story of Eliza, who deliberately rebels against society’s restrictions on her freedom and puts herself into danger by flirting with an unsuitable man who proceeds to have his way with her and then refuses to marry her, explaining to his friend that “It would hurt even my delicacy, little as you may think me to possess, to have a wife whom I know to be seducible.” It’s what mothers continued to tell their daughters for many years to come : “He won’t respect you if you do.” And Eliza also dies in shameful childbirth: the wages of sin – at least for women – were disgrace and death.
Now fast-forward a hundred years, during which time not one single mainstream novel featured a seduced and abandoned heroine! The country was busy expanding westward, battling Indians, homesteading, building railroads, becoming a commercial powerhouse, enduring financial panics, and fighting a Civil War: middle-class men had no time for casual dalliance, and there were many fewer European-style aristocrats. And real life was changing for women, as well: the first women’s rights convention in 1848; active suffrage, temperance, and abolition movements in which they played major roles; the war itself; the creation of women’s colleges; and the slow entrance of middle-class women into professional and white-collar work. One novel about a woman who acknowledged that she had sexual urges did come out in 1862, but the Civil War was on and no one paid any attention. It wasn’t till 1899 that there was a novel about a woman’s sexual awakening – and it created a scandal!
The book is The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. Edna, the heroine, is 26, married to Leonce, who is 40. They have 2 young children and live a proper upper-middle-class life in New Orleans till they rent a summer cottage on an island and Edna begins to think about her life. She decides, in the first of a series of awakenings, that she’s not one of those women who “worshipped their husbands and esteemed it a privilege to efface themselves as individuals,” and that she’s not even a “mother-woman,” because when the children are being taken care of by other people, she feels free “of a responsibility for which nature had not fitted her.” She will not be defined as either a wife or a mother.
Her second awakening is her recognition of a strong physical attraction to Robert, the son of the owner of the island colony. Because he realizes what’s happening and is an honorable man, he leaves the island. She’s unhappy, but summer is almost over and the family returns to the city at the end of the season. Edna finds it difficult to resume her old life and decides that from then on she will only feel and do what she likes, not what is expected. So she withdraw from friends, social obligations, concern about the children, and especially the marital bed, which confuses poor Leonce no end. But that’s only the beginning.
When Leonce leaves on a business trip and the children are sent to the country to be with their grandmother, she’s free to take up with a group that’s very different from her old friends: she gambles, goes to the races, and encourages the advances of Alcee, a man who isn’t received by many “proper people” because he has a reputation as a rake. Out of curiosity, she allows him to kiss her and realizes that it’s the first kiss “to which her nature had really responded.” She then goes to bed with him – though she doesn’t even like him – and this too is a revelation of ecstasy. Though she’s sorry it isn’t with Robert, whom she now thinks she loves, she nevertheless sleeps with Alcee again before dismissing him.
And then she runs into Robert, invites him to the little cottage she’s moved to, and offers herself to him. Instead of rushing her to the bedroom, he tells her that he loves her too and has prayed that Leonce would free her. At which she draws herself up proudly and announces “I’m not one of my husband’s possessions. I give myself where I choose” – and Robert disappears forever. These are not the words one wants to hear from a prospective wife!
The final awakening occurs back on the island where it all started and where she goes to think about what she’s learned – which turns out to be the very modern, existential conclusion that one is basically alone, and that nothing is permanent: not marriage, not children, not sex, and not even love, because she realizes that even if she and Robert had gotten together, there would come a time when that passion too would pass. At which point, with no more illusions, she deliberately walks into the sea, never to return.
Just think of the woman Chopin chose as her heroine after a century of novels featuring pure and innocent women who never mention or even think about sex – at least not in the novels! She leaves a kind and loving husband, she has adulterous sex with a man she doesn’t even like and loves it, she immodestly offers herself to the man she loves, and she then commits suicide – the ultimate sin – as a result of a final awakening that nothing in life lasts. There had never been anything like this in American fiction before: it was positively French, and that wasn’t a recommendation! The novel was banned in her home town of St. Louis and from many libraries, and this previously highly acclaimed and very popular author wasn’t able to find a publisher for her final collection of short stories. Of course she’s a modern classic now.
It took a hundred years for sex to reenter the American novel, but after that it was there to stay. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie was published the following year and his Jennie Gerhardt in 1911, but it wasn’t until 1917 that we had the next real shocker – Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, by David Graham Phillips, who was killed in 1911 when he was murdered by someone who thought one of his female characters was based on his – the killer’s – sister. The manuscript Phillips left behind – and remember its full title! – was the 1100-page, enormously complex Susan Lenox,which wasn’t actually published until 1917, and then in a version censored by The Society for the Suppression of Vice! Let me give you a very short and very inadequate outline of the plot.
Susan is illegitimate, so people in her small town think she’s an unsuitable companion for their daughters and a danger to their sons, and she’s treated with scorn. At 17, she’s caught through no fault of her own in a compromising situation and forced to marry a drunken brute from whom she runs away after her wedding night. After a brief interlude with Spenser, a man she falls in love with but loses, she ends up in Cincinnati, where she finds that no honest job pays enough to live on and turns to streetwalking to survive. She’s temporarily rescued by the kindly director of an acting troupe, but when the group disbands, she returns to prostitution to support herself and the dying old man who had been kind to her.
When she runs into Spenser again, they go to New York, where he hopes to write the great American play. Naively, she tells him about how she’s lived, and he treats her with contempt. Realizing that he’s a hypocrite, she leaves him, but is miserable and begins to drink, do drugs, and sell herself, finally ending up as part of a prostitution ring run by Palmer, a gangster. Meanwhile, Spenser has also become a drunk, and when she sees him, she pulls herself together in order to help him. Both conquer their habits, and though he still treats her badly, she stays with him and through him meets Brent, a successful playwright who sees her potential as an actress and begins to train her.
When Brent leaves for Europe, she’s left with no psychological or professional support, at which point Palmer re-enters her life. Now a wealthy man who wants to join “respectable” society, he offers to pay her to go with him to Europe and “polish” him, for she’s turned herself into a cultured young woman – and also one who knows her worth and insists on this being acknowledged as a strictly business proposition. Once there, she runs into Brent, who again offers to train her – but this makes Palmer, who has fallen in love with her, jealous, and he arranges to have Brent killed. It doesn’t do him any good because Brent has left her his money and she plans to use it to become the great actress he had wanted her to be. Years go by, and she succeeds, becoming a famous actress – and a woman who is now secure enough to have her publicity information openly proclaim that she is the “natural daughter of Lorella Lenox.”
What made this novel, which doesn’t use “bad” words or have explicit sex scenes, so shocking is that Susan’s experiences allow her to challenge every conventional idea of morality as it applies to women. Society says she has to be punished because her father betrayed her mother by promising and not delivering marriage, but she knows that’s not fair. Society says “be virtuous,” but she learns that virtue has no more to do with success for a woman than for a man. Society says only religion can keep a woman from turning “bad,” but she knows that hunger is a stronger pull in the other direction. Society says any kind of work is better than selling one’s body , but she, who has experienced both kinds of efforts to stay alive, knows that it’s better to sell only one’s body than to sell both body and soul – which is the fate of a poor working girl living in the dirt, promiscuity, and debasement of factory and tenement life. Society says men and women are different, but she knows that a woman trying to make her way must use her weapon of “sex appeal” just as a man uses his of physical force. And her final conclusion is that no woman should enter any relationship, marital or other, unless she can walk away from it when it’s no longer satisfactory.
There are two aspects to this novel. The first is the personal, which turns upside-down every platitude about women’s nature, the wages of sin, etc. Susan demonstrates every step of a woman’s deliberate – because necessary – fall into vice and rise into regeneration by using her body to get bread, clothes, education, and independence. From beginning to end, the author emphasizes the irony of the real meanings of “fall” and “rise.” The second aspect is the social. Phillips began as a muckraking journalist familiar with every aspect of the different worlds he described , and he lays bare the usually hidden relationship of pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, alcoholics, and gangsters to the so-called respectable society that condones, uses, and encourages their existence. A hard message – though the book was a success just because of its scandalous nature – and 1931 it was made into a very popular movie starring Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. . . .
Did this mean that after 1917 the country’s view of women and sex changed forever? Of course not. The 1920s were of course known as the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the age of the flapper, of Prohibition, of gangsters, of speakeasies, and of free-love, and that world was described by Fitzgerald and Hemingway and many others. But there were also plenty of good novelists who wrote about more “ordinary” people with somewhat different problems, and there were even a few older-generation writers who looked at this new world with horror and preached a need to return to earlier standards. One of those authors was Edith Wharton, and I’d like to say a few words about a very minor novel by this major author.
Kate, the heroine of The Mother’s Recompense (1925), gets fed up with her socially impeccable but narrow-minded husband and his family, so she leaves him and their 3-year-old daughter Anne to run off to Europe with another man – who soon turns out to be as unsatisfactory as her husband. Her stodgy mother-in-law refuses to allow her to see her daughter, so she spends many lonely years in shabby boarding houses until she meets Chris, a younger man with whom she has a passionate 3-year affair even though she knows there can’t be anything permanent about their relationship.
When her mother-in-law dies, Anne, now grown and the head of the house, invites her to return to New York and live with her. She’s astonished to find that no one cares about her past anymore, and she’s deliriously happy to be reunited with her daughter – until Anne tells her she’s fallen in love, and the man turns out to be Chris! Kate decides not to say anything because it would destroy her daughter’s happiness, so she stays for the wedding and then tells them that she’s returning to Europe.
It’s understandable that Kate can’t bear living near her daughter and the son-in-law she had been intimate with. But Wharton goes further. There’s a very sympathetic and nonjudgmental man who knows Kate’s story and wants to marry her anyway – and she refuses him because she can’t allow herself happiness. After all, Anne wouldn’t have married her mother’s lover if her mother hadn’t had a lover, and she wouldn’t have had a lover if she hadn’t left her husband in the first place! So Kate is punished almost as severely as Charlotte Temple had been – though she does her own punishing – and for the same kind of transgression, doing what she felt like doing instead of doing the right thing.
Wharton’s point of view was quite unfashionable and out of tune with her time, and she had certainly written better books about renunciation and atonement – but this one is interesting just because it’s such an unsubtle, black-and-white look at a problem that wasn’t nearly so black-and-white anymore. .
Which brings us to the last of today’s books, Christopher Morley’s 1939 novel Kitty Foyle, which is like a bookend to our old friend Charlotte Temple. Not only were both must-read novels in their day – Kitty was on the bestseller list in both 1939 and 1940 and was also a very popular movie starring Ginger Rogers – but each makes very clear the way their different eras felt about women and sex – and its consequences.
In a first-person narrative, Kitty describes growing up in working-class Philadelphia and what happens to her as a young woman when she meets blue-blooded, Main-Line Wyn Strafford just before the 1929 Crash. They’re immediately attracted to each other, and Kitty is pleasantly surprised to find that Wyn enjoys talking to her, isn’t ashamed of her lack of polish or social standing, and openly introduces her to his friends and family. He has a token job in his family’s bank but feels vaguely guilty about not being able to do anything real in the world, so she encourages him to follow his dream of beginning a literary magazine. Unfortunately, after the crash, the family money dries up, and the magazine folds.
Meanwhile, they work together on the magazine and fall in love. After they become lovers, he proposes. When he tells his family, they aren’t very happy but offer to stake Kitty to a year in college and then a “finishing” year abroad, which she finds very offensive. So does Wyn, but not enough to override his family’s plans, so Kitty accepts a job offer in the cosmetics field in New York and gets an apartment. Wyn says he understands her feelings and still loves her, but he obviously can’t bring himself to leave his world, his family, his token job. He comes to the city as often as he can, and when she realizes she’s pregnant, she plans to tell him at their next meeting. But as she waits in their regular meeting place for him to arrive, she reads an announcement in the paper of his engagement – and leaves without seeing him.
Because she doesn’t want him to feel pressured into marrying her, she tells him nothing, writes him a note congratulating him, and decides after much hesitation to have an abortion. In the future, she becomes quite successful professionally and financially even during the midst of the Depression, and at 28, she meets a young doctor who loves and wants to marry her. She’s reluctant to commit herself because she will never love anyone as she loved Wyn (and also perhaps because he’s Jewish!), and the book ends with her realizing that she has to give her beau an answer – but neither she nor the readers knows what the answer will be.
Both Kitty and Charlotte sleep with men they are not married to, but Charlotte is tricked into it and Kitty does it deliberately. Charlotte’s man will not marry her because she’s “soiled”; Kitty’s man has no moral problem but is just too weak to leave his well-feathered nest. Charlotte dies in shameful childbirth; Kitty has an abortion and lives a successful future life, and though she may not be enormously happy, she’s not ruined by guilt or shame.
On the other hand, Kitty, though she lives a “modern” life, is in many ways a 19th century heroine. She loves helping Wyn with his manuscript without letting him know how she’s improved it; she loves doing the “domestic chores” in the office because she knows she can be both professional and “womanly,” her heart will always be faithful to her first and true love even if she decides – as she probably will – to marry someone else, whereas it is very clear that Wyn has had no hesitation in dumping his true love and getting on with his life.
Now onto marriage: not for most of the 19th and a lot of the 20th century, the usual order of things! Actually, I think marriage is the more interesting topic, partly because, unlike sex, it intersects with many other issues: women and work, women and divorce, women and gender roles, women and the kind of marital relationship they want, and the very basic issue of how women are defined during different historical periods.
Let’s start with the last point. Until after the Civil War, almost everyone agreed that women were by their nature pious, self-sacrificing, submissive, modest, and incapable of rational thought. I’d like to quote from the last novel of world-famous James Fenimore Cooper – who wrote many books about upper-class New York society as well as about scouts and Indians. A man advises his nephew that a “true woman” is a “kind, gentle creature whose heart is so full of you, there is no room in it for herself.” And the heroine – a true woman – agrees, saying there’s “nothing humiliating in a woman’s submission to her husband. It is the law of nature …it is the part of woman to be affectionate, mild, patient . . . if necessary, forgiving.” Since the choice for a woman was marriage, which was forever, or life as a pitiful, dependent spinster, the heroine’s conflicts in most early mainstream novels usually ended with her presumably happily-ever-after marriage.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War, which like all wars turned society upside-down, that novels began to consider that a heroine’s problems might begin afterthe wedding ceremony. And because marriage was a religious sacrament, never to be dissolved, those problems were potentially serious, especially since everyone assumed that if a man deserted or cheated on his wife, it was her fault; and if she left or cheated on him, it was even more her fault. Which brings us to our first novel, and my reminder that these books are better and more serious than they sound from what I can say about them in this brief time.
Phemie’s Temptation appeared in 1870. The author was Marian Harland, a pseudonym for Virginia Hawes Terhune, who was at the height of her great fame and popularity.
Phemie is 17 when her father dies and she becomes the sole support of a blind younger brother, two selfish sisters, and an inept mother. She finds that the work available to her is hard, boring ill-paid, and often humiliating, and begins to write about the life of women like herself. Her stories are published, and she develops a reputation as a good and serious writer. Robert Hart, a well-known editor, first admires than falls in love with her and proposes. At first she refuses, because she thinks she’s not his equal, but he persists and eventually she accepts, giving up her writing without a second thought. They go to London, she meets his friends, and they soon realize she’s better read and more intelligent than he is. He’s furious, but he can’t say anything because she’s been a “true woman,” never opening her mouth unless she’s asked a direct question. The crisis occurs when she tells him that she’s written a book and arranged to have it published anonymously because she wants to educate her blind brother and doesn’t want to put the financial burden on him. Instead of being proud, he’s hysterical with envy and rage, worrying that people will soon begin to refer to them as “Mrs. Hart and husband.”
Unhappy, they return home, he loses his job, and instead of looking for another, he takes their savings and abandons her to return to Europe. Pregnant, she works as a bookkeeper at home and does hack writing to support herself because she hopes that when he returns the baby will bring them together. He does return when the money runs out, still doesn’t look for work, and assumes his role as master, taking all the money she earns. The reaction of this “true woman” is to say, “the law gives it to you. . . . If it did not, I should still regard it . . . as due to you.” She never thinks of divorce because as she says and believes she owes “duty to my husband while I live. No quibble of man’s law can free me from my marriage vow.”
Only when he hits their daughter does she change her mind, because she feels she can’t allow her child to have a father who does that and a mother who accepts it. Harland, who had been brought up to believe as Phemie did, reluctantly accepts the necessity for Phemie’s action but knows that most of her readers won’t. She gives the last words on the subject to one of Phemie’s sisters, who after having benefited from Phemie’s early fame, says now that her “present condition is . . . proof of the punishment that, even in this world, waits upon such a flagrant violation of natural laws” – the law in question being the subordinate walk of life in which Providence intended women to remain.
Let me say a few words about another novel about divorce, one by the most famous author of the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe. In Pink and White Tyranny, which came out a year after Phemie, Stowe wrote about John, a wealthy, serious man who falls in love with and marries Lillie, a superficial bit of pink and white fluff. Because he thinks she’s so womanly – that is, soft and yielding – and he’ll be able to mold her as he wishes, he’s surprised to find that by nagging and arguing, she’s able to make him live a life of fashionable and selfish conspicuous consumption. After years of trying to persuade her to change, especially for the sake of their daughter, he decides to divorce her. He’s persuaded not to by his equally moral sister, who points out that he’s partially responsible for Lillie because his sex likes and admires that kind of “weak and foolish” doll. She then reminds him that it is more important to be a “good man than to be a happy one” and that how he fulfills his duties to his wife will determine what kind of person his daughter will be. He decides to remain, and is rewarded by Lillie’s deathbed acknowledgment of her errors and the harm she’s done him, and the devotion of his daughter. The moral is that the good of the child, which Harland felt made a divorce necessary, is for Stowe exactly what forbids a divorce – even when the victim of the bad marriage is the man.
With a few exceptions like Edith Wharton and Margaret Deland, those two authors represented the last of the old guard. The true woman was being replaced by something called the new woman, who was often college-educated after the 1870s and who had a different self-image than the pre-Civil War true woman. Mostly what this upper-middle-class women wanted was a significant change in the marital relationship – to be valued as a person rather than a wife, to share her husband’s life as well as his bed, to work or have some place in the world other than that of her old sphere of influence, the house and family. To achieve these ends, she sometimes did things that couldn’t even have even been described in earlier novels, as you’ll see from the book I’d like to talk about next.
It’s by our old friend David Graham Phillips, who wrote the Susan Lenox we discussed earlier. Phillips was very sympathetic to women’s problems and aims, and he described them with as much empathy as any woman novelist could. He was a little short on practical solutions, but then so were the women. . . . He wrote many novels during the first decade of the 20th century that were considered very daring at the time because they were about the dissatisfaction of upper-middle-class wives who have no work of their own, serve no function in their households, yet resent being regarded as what they really were, their husbands’ ornaments. Typical of these books is The Hungry Heart, published in 1909. Though it’s almost a hundred years old, it has a very modern feel.
Newly wed Courtney, who’s taken chemistry in college, wants to help husband Richard in his laboratory but is told to keep out of the man’s world, and no matter how hard she tries to prove her serious wish to work with him, he continues to refuse. Depressed because she’s been educated as well as a man yet “condemned to . . . a life no man would endure,” she hopes a child will fill the void. It doesn’t, and her reading in the women’s rights literature of the day doesn’t help because it’s focused on suffrage and not on the fact that women like herself – rich enough to have servants and nursemaids – contribute nothing, as homemakers or as mothers, that entitle them to oppose their husbands’ wishes. They are dependents.
She meets Basil, an intellectual dilettante who treats her mind with respect and falls in love with her. Because she thinks she’s in love with him, they begin an affair, and she must decide whether to ask for a divorce and lose her child, or take her son and go to Basil, which would mean public disgrace. The first is impossible for her, but so is the second, because she realizes she’d be just as dependent on Basil as on Richard, feeling “that since she took bread she must give body.” So she talks to Richard, begs for both a divorce and custody, and even promises not to see Basil again if Richard allows her to keep the child.
Up to now, for the first 400+pages of this 500-page novel, this has been a wonderful, detailed portrayal, from a woman’s point of view, of a marriage gone wrong, mostly because Richard insists on seeing her as the old-fashioned true and ideal woman rather than as a human being. Unfortunately, the final hundred pages are a novelist’s cop-out. Richard listens to Courtney’s grievances, says he has to think about it, decides to allow her to divorce him and keep the child, goes off to Europe and has an affair himself, learns there’s life outside the lab, and returns home a changed man who is her friend and never impinges on her freedom. Meanwhile, Basil comes to claim her, but she refuses to marry him till she’s independent, and when he doesn’t understand why, she recognizes that he’s as bad as Richard was and sends him away.
Richard then offers her a paying job in his lab, admits he was wrong to think women didn’t have any brains, and tells her that they both needed their experiences to learn to love in the right way. They remarry and go off to his lab hand in hand, and the author assures us that they make several joint discoveries for which she gets equal credit. Believe the solution or not, the problem was a real one, mirrored in many novels of the time. The novel was shocking, and Courtney herself explains why: “She . . . had taken a lover and . . . it had made her better than she had been when she . . . tried to live by rule of duty to husband. And now – instead of her husband killing her or of her killing herself . . . her husband had acted like a civilized human being. . . . And instead of …disaster and death in punishment for religion’s scarlet sin of sins for woman, there was a prospect of a life in which she could profit by the experience she had gained.”
There were several such groundbreaking and avidly read novels about what the new woman wanted and did – novels by mainstream authors, not crazies. The earliestis Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) by Hamlin Garland, in which the hero writes a love letter/proposal to the heroine that sets forth how the most advanced young people of the time envisioned an ideal marriage. The High Priestess (1915) by Robert Grant is about a woman who tries for 20 years to live a rational life in which she balances home, husband, children, and career and thinks she’s managed to have it all – only to almost lose everything until she realizes that love is the most important thing. In The End of Desire (1932), Robert Herrick also took on what he saw as the emerging problem of his time: the ambitious woman who wants to pursue a profession, raise a family, and do whatever she wishes, including taking serial lovers to further her career, while she pays no attention to the harm she does to the more sentimental men who love her or even to her children.
There’s no time even to mention all the novels that dealt with this particular aspect of marriage, so let’s get to one that treats what is still an unsolved problem: gender roles within a marriage. Dorothy Canfield was one of the most intelligent, acclaimed, and popular authors of her day. Most of her novels dealt with the usual upper-middle-class heroine facing the usual problems of work, sex, marriage, and fidelity that were often themes in pre-World War I novels, but in The Home-Maker, which came out in 1924, she wrote about a lower-middle-class family in Middle America. with no money or social position and whose problem had not previously been treated in fiction.
Canfield begins by describing a family in which everyone is unhappy. Lester, a dreamer, hates his work as an accountant and knows he’s a failure in his male role as a breadwinner. His wife, Eva, is Mrs. Clean, a practical, unimaginative woman who spends her days fighting a losing battle against dirt, disorder, and undisciplined children and feels she can’t fulfill her female role as a good home-maker because they have no money for help. Their three children are also all unhappy in their different ways.
One day Lester is fired, and is badly hurt in an accident on the way home. Because he’s paralyzed and is told he’ll never walk or work again, Eva must support the family, so she gets a job in the same department store Lester had worked for, and complains to everyone that she hates leaving the children but has no choice. A new way of life starts for the whole family.
Eva‘s managerial talents are appreciated in the store, she’s soon promoted, her eczema disappears, she makes more money than Lester ever did, and though she’d die rather than admit it, she’s happier than she’s ever been. Lester, now in a wheelchair, learns to cook and darn from books, and adores spending time with the children and learning their individual natures and needs. The children themselves are stunned to find a parent who wants to listen to them and who says something other than “don’t do that!” There are no more discipline problems.
Though Eva is obviously happier this way, she won’t admit it even to herself because as the whole world agrees, it isn’t natural for a woman to be separated from her children – so when the doctor tells them there might be a cure, she feels doomed to return to her former misery. Actually, nobody is happy. Eva knows that even if they both agree to keep their new roles, people would laugh at her for deliberately going against what she had always said was her deepest and truest desire. Lester is also at the mercy of public opinion because he knows the world would treat him with “scorn” and “stupefaction” for doing “woman’s work,” and he isn’t strong enough to face that humiliation for himself or the children. They can’t hire someone to care for the kids while they both work because he knows it wouldn’t be good for them and also that it wouldn’t solve Eva’s image-problem. Even the kids, though they don’t verbalize it, are miserable at the thought of being handed back to a mother who sees them only as creators of dirt and mess after having had the experience of being cared for by someone who sees them as individuals. . . .
Luckily the doctor comes to understand the problem, and after a private conversation with Lester, announces to the whole family that he was wrong and that there is no cure. What’s happened is that Lester agrees to give up having a healthy body because he doesn’t have the courage to do what’s best not only for himself but for everyone else. Again, as in most novels, the setting out of the problem is better than the solution. Eva isn’t smart or lovable, but many women must have identified with at least part of her response to the monotony and repetitiveness and loneliness of the home-maker’s day.
This didn’t become a major fictional theme until very recently, but two years later, in a novel called I Am a Woman – and a Jew by Leah Morton, the hero, who is also a house-husband while he’s convalescing and his wife is working, tells her when he’s ready to go back to work that no man would have a problem choosing “between digging ditches in the company of a dozen other men and scrubbing floors and scraping pots in a lonely kitchen.” More than premarital or extramarital fidelity, this is the problem du jour,a problem that is these days regularly discussed in magazines and newspaper columns as well as on TV talk shows. It’s interesting to see how long – and how interrupted – a history the topic has had.
There are many other fascinating marriage novels written in the 1920s, but by the 1930s, writers were more concerned with larger social issues like labor, politics, the Depression, impending war, etc. By and large, realistic novels about marriage didn’t reappear in fiction till the 1950s, after World War II. And they haven’t stopped since.
— Book talk at Makor, undated.
