A History of the Wife (28 page)

The high moral tone so characteristic of middle-class Victorians often colored the exchange of love letters. According to prevailing eti- quette, a young man would write the first letter and the young woman could then reply, if her parents approved. Caution was the order of the day, especially for the woman, who was not supposed to indicate her true feelings until the man had declared his. In that spirit, Thomas Trol- lope wrote to Frances Trollope (the future parents of the novelist, Anthony Trollope) that he did not know if it were more “expedient for a man to make an avowal of his attachment to a lady
viva voce
. . . or by epistolary correspondence.” Having chosen the latter, he proceeded to declare “that my future happiness on earth is at your disposal. It is impossible but that I must feel every anxiety till I am favoured with your reply to this note.” He suspected that Frances was “not entirely unaware” of the delight he found in her company, and that there might be a “degree of mutuality in this delight,” but before Frances could express her sentiments candidly they both knew he had to make an

official proposal. He considered it proper to explain that his annual income was about 900 pounds. Although he gave Fanny three weeks “for passing a sentence,” Fanny replied the very next day. Now that he had made an official proposal, she could be similarly frank: she responded with “pride and gratitude” and the news that she had only 50 pounds a year from her father and 1300 pounds in stock.
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Despite the fact that Fanny was almost thirty and Thomas almost thirty-five, both conducted themselves strictly according to the rituals devised for young lovers, and Fanny held back from avowing her feelings until she had been asked to speak. Certainly women had more to lose in a soci- ety that condemned female forwardness, especially since there were more eligible women than men—estimates run as high as 100 women in their twenties for 90 men of the same age.

Letters were supposed to be held in strict confidence, and to be returned in the event that an engagement was broken off. An engage- ment of four to eight months was considered long enough for lovers to determine if they suited each other. Long engagements were discour- aged because they might lead a couple into physical intimacy.

The letters of John Austin and Sarah Taylor, who were engaged for five years before they married, offer an extreme example of Victorian high-flown rhetoric and moral introspection. Sarah, a lively, flirtatious girl from a fine English family noted for its dissenting (non-Anglican) leadership and civic service, received stilted epistles from John, asking her to examine her past conduct for “slight stains” on her reputation and to consider whether her soul was “really worthy to hold commun- ion” with his.
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Sarah wrote to one of her cousins that her love for John would “do more for the elevation and improvement of my character than anything in the world could.” Love was the path to moral regener- ation. During the period of their engagement, while John studied law in London, Sarah remained in Norwich and read from a list of modern and ancient authors suggested by her fiancé. She saw this period as “five years feeding only on love, and severe study, in order to become worthy of being a wife.” Eventually she made the grade, and they were married in August 1819.

But what really made the marriage possible at this stage in their lives was not her moral improvement, but John’s father’s contribution of 300 pounds annually and her father’s promise to provide 100 pounds as well. In marriage considerations, the rapture of love, even when com-

bined with moral aspirations, could never be entirely divorced from economic realities. The basic question was whether the husband could provide for his wife. Love and money were not just the themes of great English and American fiction from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton; they were the fundamental underpinnings of nineteenth-century society. While the high-minded poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning condemned marriages of convenience as a form of “
legal
prostitution” that some people conducted “as of setting up in trade” (letters to Miss Mitford, January and February 1846) and the novelist Dickens created thor- oughly despicable characters marrying
only
for money (for example, Mr. and Mrs. Lammle in
Our Mutual Friend
), it was generally agreed that marrying
without
any money at all was at the least “imprudent.”

Contemporary advice literature warned the young not to marry until they had a reasonable income—300 pounds a year according to a cor- respondence that appeared in
The Times
in 1858.
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Without expecting such a relative fortune, working-class members also waited until they could be self-sufficient. This meant that English men and women mar- ried at a comparatively late age—around twenty-six years for females and slightly higher for males.

A woman contemplating marriage did not have to be reminded that her material well-being would depend on the financial situation of her husband. She was not allowed to count on her own resources as a worker or as a property holder. Whatever property a wife brought to marriage and whatever income she earned belonged by law to her hus- band.

Moreover, in middle- and upper-class families, wives were not expected to earn income. The male head of the household had the sole responsibility for providing for his family. Gone were the premodern days when the labor of wives and children entered into the middle- class family economy and a respectable wife could work alongside her husband in his shop. The hallmark of the lady was that she did not have to work for pay. Only members of the working class and small farmers continued to depend on their wives for joint production and supplemental income.

What, then, were the responsibilities of middle-class wives sup- ported by their husbands? These fell into three major categories: 1) obeying and satisfying one’s husband, 2) keeping one’s children physi- cally and morally sound, and 3) maintaining the household (cleaning,

washing, preparing food, etc.). Much of the third category was per- formed by paid domestics, which meant that the privileged matron had to be what Mrs. Beeton in her popular
Book of Household Management
(1861) called a “commander of an army” of servants. Aristocratic fami- lies in their country estates might have as many as twenty or twenty- five, while a middle-class urban wife would make do with one, two, or five, depending on her circumstances.

Outside activities for privileged wives consisted largely of attending church and visiting friends. Another permissible outside activity was philanthropy, which became increasingly diverse as the century pro- gressed. Philanthropic ladies devoted time to such charities as schools, reformatories, and “benevolent” societies for the old, the invalid, and the poor, with special attention to the plight of unwed mothers and prostitutes wanting to reform, some of whom were enabled to emigrate. A few privileged women, like Sarah Taylor Austin, also pursued intel- lectual, cultural, and even political interests.

If love provided the gateway through which brides and grooms marched together into conjugal life, the aftermath of marriage placed them in what historians have called “separate spheres.” Most middle- class women stayed at home, while most men went out to work. Theo- retically, these spheres were of equal worth, assigned on the basis of gender to serve family, business, and civic needs. Practically, as later feminists would argue, the ideology of separate spheres kept women from realizing their full potential, whereas men, active in both public and private realms, were able to experience fuller lives. But feminist protest was not the order of the day in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Instead, a burgeoning advice literature began to tell women how they should fulfill their domestic responsibilities. The flood of British and American manuals directed toward wives and mothers that began in the 1830s and 1840s has continued into our own time. Long before
Good Housekeeping,
Dr. Spock, and Dr. Ruth, experts in household and family management were selling women the idea that they, and they alone, were responsible for the well-being of their homes. They, and they alone, were responsible for the moral and physical health of their sons and daughters. They, and they alone, had the power to inspire men in the direction of the greater social good. No longer the daughters of Eve associated with man’s undoing, Victorian wives and mothers

were elevated to the position of spiritual guides. The dual influence of romanticism and evangelical Protestantism valorized women’s “emo- tional” nature and turned it to the purposes of wifehood and maternity. Yet however elevated they had become, wives were never to forget their dependence on men. Sarah Stickney Ellis called women “relative crea- tures” in her 1839 book
The Women of England;
it was an appropriate term, as French historian Françoise Basch demonstrated 135 years later in the English title of her own analysis of Victorian women. Women simply did not exist in their own right. The “essentials of a woman’s being,” according to the Victorian man of letters W. R. Greg, required that “they are supported by, and minister to, men.” John Ruskin stated the paradox of women’s powerless power without the slightest ironic intent: “A true wife, in her husband’s house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen.”
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One way of serving one’s husband was sexually, for men (rather than women) were now considered the more lustful creatures. In keeping with the new view of woman as angel, she was stripped of all physical desire. The distinguished English doctor William Acton opined that “woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him.”
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Even when physicians recognized that women, too, were capable of sexual pleasure, they were advised to please their husbands first and foremost. Listen to the advice of Dr. Auguste Debay, whose marriage manual was one of the best-selling books published in his native France: “O wives! Follow this advice. Submit to your husband’s needs . . . force yourself to satisfy him, put on an act and simulate the spasm of pleasure; this innocent deception is permitted when it is a question of keeping a husband.”
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Faking orgasm was just one more way of sacrificing oneself for the good of the family.

More typical British and American manuals focused on the wife’s duties outside the bedroom. She was expected to set the standard for goodness in her family, to rise to the level of a “household fairy,” to instill within her home an aura of sweetness, good cheer, love of God, and love of country. Advice-givers like Sarah Stickney Ellis and Mrs. Beeton, paralleled in America by Lydia Sigourney (
Letters to Mothers,
1839) and Lydia Maria Child (
The Mother’s Book,
1844), among others, helped transform the cult of domesticity into something of a secular religion.

Queen Victoria herself embodied for the masses the apotheosis of wife-and-motherhood. With Prince Albert at her side and surrounded by her nine children, Victoria became a regal icon of domesticity throughout Britain and the world. Victoria’s youth had coincided with the ascendancy of love in marriage. She must have read some of Jane Austen’s six novels, published early in the century, which depicted mar- riage as the single-minded goal of every unattached woman. While Vic- toria was never in the predicament faced by Austen’s women, whose fate would be determined by whether they did or did not find suitable husbands, Victoria did absorb the discourse of her day. Marital happi- ness was a necessity for everyone, including the Queen. And to judge by her letters, public statements, and demeanor, she did enjoy an exceptionally felicitous marriage, until her beloved Albert succumbed to an early death and left her a grieving widow for half a century.

Jane Austen’s early–nineteenth-century novels depicted the mutual nature of the mating game within the comfortable middle class, where women as well as men endeavored to choose spouses on the basis of love. There was, however, one significant difference between Austen’s heroes and her heroines: a woman could not openly express her feel- ings until the man in question declared himself. The medieval conduct books that warned women against making the first move would not have been out of place in Austen’s time.

Even so, Austen’s women did have ways of indicating their desires. They tried to be as physically attractive as possible, enhancing their appearance with the latest fashions, walking in a “feminine” manner, and literally putting their best foot forward. They sang and danced so as to present themselves advantageously in the marriage market, and at least in Austen’s books, they were allowed to be intelligent. As Mr. Knightley says in
Emma,
“Men of sense do not want silly wives.” Even if this were not true of all men (Austen has given us some notably silly wives, such as Mrs. Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
), polite society was beginning to accept the view that “sense” was not an exclusively male prerogative and that a well-read wife could do no harm. Austen’s heroines were all concerned with finding husbands, and most of them did . . . which corresponded to the reality of early-nineteenth-century England. Nevertheless, approxi- mately 10 to 12 percent of British women remained unmarried through- out their lives, including Austen herself.

A generation after Austen’s death in 1817, another woman novelist,

Charlotte Brontë, also faced middle age as a spinster. In her early years, she had rejected not just one, but two proposals—one from a very suit- able clergyman because she did not love him. Her letter to his sister stated her reasons unambiguously: “. . . though I had a kindly leaning towards him because he is an amiable and well-disposed man, yet I had not, and could not have, that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and, if ever I marry, it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband.”
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Granted, Brontë’s vision of marriage bears the hallmarks of the overwrought Romantic imagina- tion, but—rhetoric aside—how far is it from the letter to “Dear Abby” cited at the beginning of this book?