Clio Muses on Women's Lot

CM: Oh, hello, Clio. Where have you been lately? You've left me high and dry for days now.

Clio: I've been to London to visit the Queen. I've been lying here waiting, waiting. I've been everywhere, man -

CM: All right, all right! I get it. That last one was an allusion to my uncompleted India posting, wasn't it?

Clio: It was what you make of it, darling. You have a few other projects in mind, I believe, anyway. Why aren't you doing anything about them?

CM: It's my Johnsonian inertia again. Speaking of which -

Clio: Ah, now we're coming to it! That old touch of the Muse works every time. [Aside: I really must find a way to spend a little more time with her.] Come on, dear, spit it out.

CM: I've noticed that among certain conservative writers (that Roger Devlin fellow, for instance), there's a movement afoot to defend marriage in the West as it used to be, before various women's rights movements, including feminism, took over. The ideas that offend me most are the suggestion that women in the past didn't contribute to the family economy, which is a libel on the women of the past, and the idea that women should be prepared to resign themselves to male infidelity, which is a great burden to place on the women of today. Oh, and of course I'm also annoyed by the suggestion that women are exceptionally self-centred and always have been, that this is dictated by evolutionary biology. But I've written about that one before, and about the contribution issue, so I'll leave them for the moment. Perhaps.

Clio: I believe you've argued yourself that female infidelity within marriage is more of a threat to the social order than male infidelity.

CM: Yes, indeed I have. Historically, when women's fidelity could not be guaranteed, when men could not be certain who their children were, or children know the identity of their fathers, female infidelity was a more serious threat to the social order. But why should that rule us now, when a simple test can determine a child's paternity? I don't mean to offer license to women to be unfaithful. What I wonder is why men who call themselves conservative think they can claim a right to have their infidelities overlooked by their wives, by appealing to a past so different from the present? I can understand if some couples settle on this as a private arrangement amongst themselves, formally or informally. That's up to them. But I really don't like to hear men bandy about this idea as if it were natural and right. By all means let's change laws that compel men to support all their wives' children, no matter who actually fathered them.

Clio: Doesn't your hero Johnson share that view?

CM: Yes, he does, and I find it something of a blot on the great man's reputation. What to make of passages like this one in Boswell's Life, in which Boswell speaks to Johnson of a friend who "had maintained [infidelity] was by no means as bad in the husband, as in the wife." Johnson's response? "Your friend was in the right, Sir. Between a man and his Maker it is a different question: but between a man and his wife, a husband's infidelity is nothing. They are connected by children, by fortune, by serious considerations of community. Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands."

Clio: Ha! Yes, well, that's certainly what the gods thought. Notice, though, that they weren't as successful at wringing fidelity out of their women as mortal men have been.

CM: I always forget that you're so retro, Clio my love. Anyway, Johnson added "My wife told me I might with as many women as I pleased, provided I loved her alone...Consider, Sir, how gross it is in a wife to complain of her husband's going to other women, merely as women; it is that she has not enough of what she would be ashamed to avow." Notice the implication of that last point. Women's acceptance of male infidelity in the past depended upon embracing a kind of modesty that did not allow them to acknowledge their enjoyment of sexual relations. If modern conservative men want this kind of license, they might have to accept the kind of wife who professes no interest in sex except as a duty. Although some men do complain that this is what all wives eventually come to in any case, it seems unlikely that they would want their marital relationships to start out on that footing. [n.b. that in John Wain's Samuel Johnson, Wain explains that Boswell cancelled this passage in the published edition of his Life.]

Clio: Yes, interesting. It's funny, though, that Johnson doesn't really emphasize the idea of the importance of men being able to guarantee the paternity of their wives' offspring, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes that part for granted. His whole argument really rests on female modesty.

CM: That's it exactly. And perhaps on his inability to sympathize with women's emotional needs. Here's what Wain writes about their friendship:

With sentiments like these, Johnson was perfecty prepared to allow to Henry Thrale a licence that he certainly would not, with his tender conscience, have allowed to himself. Thrale's being a whoremaster seems to have made no difference at all to Johnson's regard for him. The pain of being neglected for a succession of girls was one that Hester had to bear alone.

More: she had to conceal her grief and depression as much as she possibly could. All men, in the end, make impossible demands on women, and Johnson's demands on Hester Thrale were no exception. He told he of his own anxiety and misery, but he did not like having to hold still while she told him of hers. He clutched at her hand while walking through the valleys of his own private Inferno; she had to walk through hers alone. This is the great contrast between Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale and his relationship with Boswell. Johnson listened for hours at a time to Boswell's confessions and emotional outpurings. But when he was with Mrs Thrale it was his turn to do the talking. When he was in one of his fits of depression, he resented it if she was slow to pull him out. Once, when he was lying in bed in a state of gloom, she came into the room in a gown of some drab colour. He snarled at her, asking if she were trying to depress him still further.

Perhaps it's true, as some conservative men say, that women now make impossible demands on men. If so, surely it's no answer to say, with Wain, that men historically have made impossible demands on women. The question is, what to do about it now?

Clio: I never comment on the future, darling, you know that. My business is the past.

CM: I'm not certain you're always consistent about that, Clio, but I'll let it go this time. I just don't want to see men trying to recreate the past in response to the disorders of the present. In the first place, it's impossible, because the conditions of the past no longer prevail and we cannot recreate them without grave injury to ourselves. In the second place, our ancestors, though not the thorough-going villains they have been painted to be by postcolonial literary theorists, were not angels either. The best you could say about them was that they did what they could with the limited materials available to them.