Literature & the Single Woman

Why is this Book on the Shelf? Limited Book Reviews IV

Book miniatures, Photo by Holly

““For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”¹

My father is a father of daughters. As the eldest son of a family with a record of settlement in Canada going back over two and a half centuries, my father might have been supposed to want a son to carry on his family name. Or so my mother expected, knowing her own father’s pride in his eldest son. My father, however, did not see it that way. It is not because he doesn’t care about his family line - he treasures his family history and is proud of his fifteen grandchildren and one great-grandchild to date. It is simply that my father sees his daughters as gifts from God, both the three who married and are homemakers with children, and the one with a professional degree who is single and childless.

Due to the post-WWII economic decline in my father’s ancestral province, he moved to another province to find work, and there met and married my mother. My mother’s family all lived within a few hours’ drive, so I grew up knowing them well. My maternal grandparents had six children and twenty-one grandchildren. As the second youngest grandchild, I watched my cousins and then siblings marry and have children. In my youth, I naturally thought marriage and children were in my future. I am now completing my fourth decade of life and I am the only one of my maternal grandparent’s grandchildren who never married and had children.

Among the books my father read aloud in our childhood was the Little House on the Prairie series. We identified with the four Ingalls daughters. In adolescence, while part of the ultra-conservative homeschooling Program, when my siblings and I began wearing skirts to be demure young ladies, acquaintances suggested another literary comparison, L. M. Alcott’s Little Women. As the shy, musical, and asthmatic third born, I resisted analogies to Beth March. Alcott’s unattached main characters have a sinister tendency to die by the end of the book, but then the single do not fare well in much of classic literature. In Shakespearean comedy, uncoupled characters at play’s end are melancholy or misanthropic.² In Dickens and Eliot, single people are often portrayed as eccentric - Miss Havisham, Old Featherstone - or tragic-heroic - Sidney Carton, Seth Bede - and sometimes both - Betsey Trotwood, Silas Marner. Austen’s most prominent single character is Miss Bates, a garrulous and impoverished spinster meant to invoke compassion. It was Charlotte Bronte’s works that challenged my concept of singleness as incomplete personhood.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

My mother, who gardened, farmed, preserved and prepared food, and homeschooled us, did not have a lot of time to read. But her favourite novel, which she reread once a year when she was single, was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.³ When I first read Jane Eyre as a young teen, I was absorbed by its Gothic Romanticism. But when I reread it in my twenties, I realized the novel’s actual theme is Jane’s desire to be known as a thinking, feeling human by another person. When the man she loves wants her to be his mistress, she refuses, knowing she would cease to be herself if her moral code is violated. When the man she respects wants to marry her, she refuses, knowing he does not want her, only her abilities for his mission. Although Jane eventually gets her happy ending, the man she loves has been blinded. He can only recognize her by his knowledge of her voice and personality.

During my mid-to-late twenties, I read Charlotte Bronte’s other three novels. Shirley is an uneven book, worth reading for its setting and themes, but its many changes of voice obscure the characters. Bronte’s last novel, Villette, again takes up the theme of the human desire to be known. The narrator of Villette is Lucy Snowe who, like Jane Eyre, is an impoverished, orphaned, and plain young woman. Unlike Jane, Lucy has lost a loving family and happy home. Destitute, Lucy becomes a teacher in Belgium, where she does not share a common language or culture with those around her.

George Eliot and Virginia Woolf both considered Villette to be Bronte’s finest novel.⁴ Lucy is a complex character, an introvert with a vivid inner commentary, quiet with decided opinions, reticent and keenly observant, self-controlled and deeply sensitive. Her experiences realistically portray the solitary person’s sense of invisibility to others unless one is useful to them. Lucy struggles to maintain her autonomy with an indifferent, sometimes hostile female employer. She is both sought out by those who think she may serve their own ends and left alone to suffer through her own sicknesses and sorrows. When she encounters two families she knew in childhood, one with a son and the other with a daughter near her age, Lucy is thankful to renew their friendship.  She watches her childhood comrades fall in love with one another and marry, genuinely glad for them while accepting her own diminished and distanced importance in their lives. Lucy learns to maintain her own sense of integrity, even as she desires to be known and understood by others.

‘It kills me to be forgotten, monsieur.’⁵

Villette’s overall structure is a reworking of Bronte’s first novel, The Professor, but with the sex of the protagonist exchanged. The Professor’s first-person narrator is a lonely and obscure man who becomes a schoolteacher in Belgium, falling in love with a female Belgian teacher. The novel concludes with them happily married and working together in their own school. In Villette, a male Belgian teacher shows Lucy Snowe friendship, helping further her teaching career, but the ending of Villette is atypical of a Victorian novel. Lucy opens her own school, but does she also have the conventional happy ending? The reader is left to determine the answer. Villette was published in 1853. Charlotte Bronte did not become engaged and married until 1854, dying in pregnancy at age 38 in 1855.⁶ Villette conveys something of Charlotte’s own experience of the anonymity of singleness.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

As a young child, I was naturally independent, rejecting my older siblings’ assistance, insisting I could do things myself. In adolescence, the Program discouraged female independence. Working or studying outside the home was portrayed as dangerous; the sexes were strictly segregated; dating was condemned; teen girls were encouraged to vow not to think of marriage for seven years; the only safe way to contract a marriage was via courtship negotiated by a girl’s father. Reaching adulthood, I saw women trained by the Program still waiting at home in their thirties for a spouse. My family was low income. My father was nearing retirement age and would only have a fixed government-issued pension. With only a GED, I entered a post-secondary education system I knew nothing about, and eventually succeeded in getting not only a diploma but also a degree in nursing.⁷

In choosing nursing, I entered a traditionally female dominated profession. Florence Nightingale modernized nursing in the mid-19^th century, but its female roots run far back into the unrecorded past. Nightingale’s reforms included strict rules of conduct for nursing that limited the profession to unmarried women, rules that were not lifted in many places until the middle of the 20^th century. I know retired nurses from my mother’s generation who were not allowed to date during their training programs.⁸ The historical restriction of a profession to unmarried women was not limited to nursing – teaching and academics were also limited to single women.⁹

Dorothy L. Sayers places her mystery Gaudy Night on the campus of a fictional female College at Oxford University during the mid-1930s. Her recurring amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, takes a secondary role in the book. It is Harriet Vane, a mystery writer, who is given the main role. In a previous book, Strong Poison, Harriet was traumatized by a disastrous romantic relationship that ended in her being falsely accused of murdering her former lover, a manipulative and controlling man. Lord Peter proved her innocence, but the experience made Harriet wary of accepting Lord Peter’s proposal of marriage. In Gaudy Night, Harriet is asked by the dean of her alma mater to investigate a series of malicious disturbances at the College.

Sayers was herself a graduate of the female Somerville College at Oxford, completing her course of study with first-class honours in 1915. She did not receive her degree, however, until 1920, the year Oxford finally granted degrees to women.¹⁰ In Gaudy Night, the unmarried female dons of the college ask Harriet to investigate because they are concerned the disturbances could give the male colleges a reason to denigrate female education. The disturbances range from threatening messages and poison pen letters to vandalism and sabotage, gradually escalating in destructiveness. Harriet gathers evidence, and even thwarts one of the acts of sabotage, but struggles to draw conclusions. She has established it is one of the female faculty or staff, but cannot single out any one suspect.

With the college’s permission, Harriet consults Lord Peter Wimsey. He points out that she is assuming that the perpetrator must be one of the celibate academic faculty because she is buying into the stereotype that celibacy in women leads to hysteria or neuroses due to sexual repression:

“It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena – that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort… All these women are beginning to look abnormal to you because you don’t know which one to suspect, but actually even you don’t suspect more than one.”¹¹

Sayers asks many questions about individual women during the course of Gaudy Night. Was a brilliant mind wasted when this Oxford educated woman married a farmer? Can this widow be both dedicated to academia and a dedicated mother? Should Harriet choose a celibate scholarly life? The disturbances happen because an individual regards a group of women as all alike. Sayers suggests that the solution is for each woman, and man, to be regarded as a unique and valuable individual.¹²

Whether it be a modern Program trying to restore conservative values or pre-WWII society reluctantly allowing women professions, strict rules for female roles hurt individual women facing unique circumstances. My own set of life circumstances led me into the profession I now have. I certainly did not choose between a career or marriage – all three of my siblings married, but I have never been asked on a date nor was my father ever approached regarding courtship for me.¹³ As a woman of Christian faith, I am inclined to attribute my ongoing single state to the good will of God.

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Old Testament of the Christian Bible tells how female humans were created equal with male humans, but the shared choice of both sexes to disobey their Creator led to recrimination and misunderstanding between them. It is due to this that the woman desires unity with the man, but the man regards the woman as an inferior to be ruled over. Named women in the Old Testament are also usually identified by their husband’s name. Unmarried women who are obedient are rewarded with husband and children. When the Hebrew judge Jephthah foolishly vows to sacrifice his only daughter, she asks time to mourn, not her approaching death, but that she will die unmarried.¹⁴

It is into this context of a woman’s honour bound up in being a wife and mother, that Sayers’ male contemporary, C. S. Lewis, sets his retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Till We Have Faces. Lewis places a fictional pagan kingdom, Glome, on the edge of ancient Greek civilization, which was rising in influence when the historical kingdoms of the Old Testament were waning. In the myth, Psyche is a beautiful human maiden with whom the god of Love, Cupid, falls in love. He carries her away to his palace and marries her, but she cannot see him, as he visits her only at night. At her request, her sisters are allowed to visit. They, consumed with envy at Psyche’s palace, dare her to look at her husband. When Psyche lights a lamp to see her sleeping husband, he wakes. In punishment, Psyche is separated from Cupid until she completes a series of impossible tasks.¹⁵

Lewis hinged his retelling on his conviction that the sisters could not see Cupid’s palace.¹⁶ His central character is the eldest of Psyche’s sisters, Orual. The three sisters are the only children of the king of Glome. Orual’s facial ugliness means her brutal father decides she is not marriageable, so she pours all her care into her half-sister Psyche, raising the motherless girl from infancy. The people of Glome, enduring famine and plague, blame Psyche’s extreme beauty for provoking the anger of the gods. They demand she be exposed on the mountain as a sacrifice. Orual is unable to stop her father from carrying out the will of the people. When she goes to bury her sister’s body, she discovers Psyche alive and well, saying she is married and living in a palace. Orual fears her beloved Psyche is delusional. The events that follow are seen from Orual’s perspective.

There is a prophecy in the Old Testament which seems to turn the woman’s identity of wife and mother on its head:

“Rejoice, childless one, who did not give birth; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of the married woman.” (Isaiah 54:1, CSB)

One interpretation of this says childless women can still nurture spiritual children, perhaps as a teacher or a nurse. C. S. Lewis portrays such a woman, the Lady, in The Great Divorce: “Every young man or boy that met her became her son… Every girl that met her was her daughter… her motherhood was of a different kind.” But in Till We Have Faces, Orual’s surrogate mother-love pressures Psyche to destroy her own happiness. Orual inherits her father’s throne, reigning as a virgin queen while veiling her face. She is a better ruler than her father, but she blindly consumes the lives of those who love her.¹⁷ Until she recognizes her lack of love, she cannot reunite with her sister Psyche to see the god of Love.

In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus Christ is close friends with the sisters Mary and Martha, who, since they lived with their brother Lazarus, were unmarried and childless. Jesus defends Mary’s decision to learn with his disciples instead of doing female household duties. Comforting Martha over Lazarus’ death, Jesus entrusts her with the knowledge that he, Jesus, is the Resurrection and the Life, bringing Lazarus back to life. When Mary anoints Jesus with a precious perfume, he commands his disciples to remember her gift wherever his story is told. These sisters are known today to Christians, not because of to whom they were married or who their children were, but because they were known and loved by the Lord Jesus.¹⁸

In his letter to the church of Galatia, the Apostle Paul declares there that are no social divides between those who believe in Jesus. Isaiah’s prophecy of the unmarried and childless woman rejoicing, Paul says, is fulfilled in the Church of Jesus Christ. The strangest belief Christians introduced to the pluralistic religious landscape of the ancient Roman Empire was that of the Resurrection. Paul provoked derision among open minded Athenian philosophers when he brought up the Resurrection. Even the monotheistic Jews were divided over the idea. The Sadducees, the Jewish sect skeptical of the Resurrection, challenged Jesus with a conundrum of a woman who was married and widowed seven times without children, demanding who she would be married to in the Resurrection. Jesus replied, “In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” (Matthew 22:30, CSB)¹⁹

My parents are currently in their fiftieth year of marriage. My mother often says she loves my father more now than when she married him. My mother married unusually late for her early cohort of the baby boomer generation. As a public school teacher, she loved her students but longed for her own family. She watched her younger siblings marry before she did and before she met my father, was coming to the conclusion she would be an ‘old-maid’. Her mother, who as a young woman saw her husband go to war and come back, used to try to comfort my mother with old sayings such as “This too shall pass” and “It is better to be single than wish you were”. Dearly as she loves my father, my mother says the deep ache of loneliness that she felt as a single woman was not fully alleviated by marriage. No human, she says, can fully satisfy another human’s need to be known and loved. She concludes the human desire to be fully known can only be satisfied by knowing God, who already knows us.²⁰

“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”²¹

1. I Corinthians 13:12, KJV

2. See Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Jaques in As You Like It, the Duke in Much Ado About Nothing.

3. A couple of years ago, I gave my mother a copy of

Karen Swallow Prior

's annotated edition of Jane Eyre. My mother loved it.

4. George Eliot writing to a Mrs. Bray on Febuary 15, 1953: ‘I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading "Villette," a still more wonderful book than "Jane Eyre.” There is something almost preternatural in its power.' Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, refers to Bronte by her pseudonym, Currer Bell; Virginia Woolf. “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights”. The Common Reader. 1925. Harcourt, Brace & Co: New York.

5. Charlotte Bronte. Villette. 1853. London: Folio Society.

6. a) In my opinion, the evidence given indicates an answer in the negative. b) It is thought that Charlotte Bronte may have died from complications of hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe form of morning sickness that can cause dehydration and malnutrition. Modern treatment of HG may require intravenous (IV) fluid and electrolyte replacement and IV administration of anti-nausea medication, treatments not available in the 19th century.

7. a) I talk more about the Program here and here. b) My father was forced into early retirement by the private company he worked for when I was within a few weeks of completing my diploma in nursing.

8. a) Both Old and New Testaments of the Bible mention women engaging in nursing activities. Midwives are named in Exodus, while helping “the afflicted” is one qualification for a widow (i.e. unmarried woman) to be supported by the church in I Timothy 5. b) Nightingale had some practical motivation for the rules of conduct, as prior to her reforms professional nurses had a poor reputation in the 19th century - See also the drunken and corrupt character of Mrs. Gamp in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewhit; Charlotte Bronte also has an unfavourable depiction of a private nurse in Shirley. c) From a brief overview of Canadian nursing history: “A senior student at Vancouver General Hospital was temporarily suspended in 1959 for kissing a man outside the hospital.”

9. In the 8th Little House book, These Happy Golden Years, Laura stops teaching when she marries Almanzo, just as her mother stopped teaching when she married. My paternal grandmother taught in a one-room school, stopping when she married a local farmer.

10. Oxford only granted women degrees because of a 1919 British law passed preventing disqualification from offices or credentials based on sex or marital status.

11. Dorothy L. Sayers. Gaudy Night. 1936. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

12. Sayers expands on the idea of viewing women as individual humans in Are Women Human.

13. I have had more marriage proposals than my siblings. These proposals were made immediately upon meeting me by men in a polygamous culture who perceived my ethnicity as inherently wealthy. I learned a stock rejection phrase in their language, but what I really wanted to say was, “My family is low income so I’m not going to bring in the money you think I will, and your other wives would be seriously annoyed by my total inability to carry 10 gallons of water on my head from the well or to cook dinner for 8 to 18 people over an open fire.”

14. a) “Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16b, CSB) -Full account in Genesis 1:26-31, 2:15-25, and 3. b) Grim exceptions are Dinah and Tamar, both rape victims with dishonoured status. c) See the Hebrew midwives, Rahab the Canaanite, and Ruth the Moabite. d) Full account of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:29-40.

15. a) Sayers and Lewis were both Oxford graduates and skilled scholars, devout Anglicans, and Christian apologists. Lewis was an Oxford don while both a bachelor and a married man. Sayers, who was married, wrote copy for an advertising agency, an experience she drew on for Murder Must Advertise. b) The last historical books of the Old Testament are Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, relating how ancient Israel became a province of the Persian Empire during the Achaemenid dynasty that tried to conquer the Greeks. The Ahasuerus of the book of Esther is the same as the Xerxes who fought the Greeks at Thermopylae and Salamis in Herodotus’ Histories. c) The original source of Cupid and Psyche is the 2nd century Latin novel Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, by Apulieus. I attempted to read The Golden Ass in my teens, but the high level of obscene content proved a deterrent.

16. “The central alteration in my own version consists in making Psyche’s palace invisible to normal, mortal eyes - if ‘making’ is not the wrong word for something which forced itself upon me, almost at my first reading of the story, as the way the thing must have been.” - C. S. Lewis. ‘Introduction’. Till We Have Faces. 1956. London: Geoffrey Bles.

17. a) C. S. Lewis. The Great Divorce. 1945. London: Geoffrey Bles. b) Was Elizabeth I of England the model for the character of Orual?

18. a) Old Testament women living in their paternal household were either childless widows - Tamar, Judah’s daughter-in-law - or unmarriageable - Tamar, Absalom’s sister. b) The stories of Mary and Martha are in Luke 10:38-42, John 11:1-44 and 12:1-11, Matthew 26:6-13, and Mark 14:3-9. c) “It is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another… who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature.” - Dorothy L. Sayers. ‘The Human-Not-Quite-Human’. Are Women Human?. 2005. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

19. a) Galatians 3:27-4:31, CSB: “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.” b) The account of Paul speaking on the Areopagus, a marble outcrop opposite the Acropolis of Athens, is in Acts 17. Today, there is a plaque with Paul’s speech on the side of the Areopagus. c) Resurrection debate in Matthew 22. The Roman era Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions the division in Jewish belief on life after death in The Wars of the Jews.

20. This was written with my mother’s full approval.

21. John 17:3