The slightest and most seemingly insignificant
utterance may in fact be a window on an entire world-view, and therefore worthy
of reflection. For example, when leafing through a literary magazine recently
that consisted entirely of book reviews, my eye alighted on a brief notice of a
recently-discovered pre-World War II crime novel by C S Forester, best-known
for his Hornblower stories.
The review was only 113
words long, and contained the following:
It is the story of a brutal husband who is murdered by his wife and mother-in-law. It’s not really credible, but grippingall the same – and a salutary portrait of marriage beforewomen’s liberation.
Note that the reviewer does not state that it is a portrait of a marriage, or even of some marriages, but of marriage, that is to say marriage in general, before women’s liberation. This is a pretty large claim, with important practical implications.
Although the plot of the
book, according to the reviewer, is implausible, the portrait of the terrible
marriage that gave rise to the murder is claimed to be in some way emblematic,
typical or representative of pre-war marriage as a whole. Association between
men and women is not like that any more, implies the reviewer, thanks to
women’s liberation.
Now let me describe an
actual, not a fictional, recent case from England. A man of the name of Shane
Jenkin strangled his girlfriend, Tina Nash, to the point of unconsciousness,
gouged her eyes and broke her nose and jaw. He then went to sleep, his work
done. Tina Nash was permanently blinded.
Nash had called the police
nine times before the blinding because of Jenkin’s previous violence, but had
declined to press charges against him. ‘But this time,’ she said on television,
weeping copiously from her sightless eyes, ‘he went too far.’ She was the
mother of two children, not by Jenkin, and from my experience of having worked
in the social milieu from which both she and Jenkin almost certainly came, I
should have been surprised if Jenkin were the first violent boyfriend she had
ever known.
My question is this: will
the reviewer of a future book about this terrible case (surely one is in the
process of being written) write:
It’s not really credible, but gripping all the same – and asalutary portrait of sexual relationships after women’sliberation….?
I rather doubt it; and it is interesting to speculate why.
If someone were to take the
case of Shane Jenkin, who seems to have been a monster of jealousy, an
Othello-figure quite without a positive side, as being emblematic of
relationships between men and women in our time, he or she would almost
certainly be accused immediately of golden-ageism: that is to say, the
unwarranted and rather naïve belief that at some time in the recent past things
were so much better that such terrible things were never done by men to women.
He or she would be accused of wanting to return to that supposedly golden age,
either openly or surreptitiously, of wanting to roll back the reforms of, say,
the past half century.
But of course the reviewer
of the book by Forester is guilty of a mirror-image attitude, that until those
reforms all was horribly violent and repressive from the woman’s point of view.
Thanks to those reforms, nothing like it is known today. This is not the
historiography of the golden-age, but of the leaden-age.
How might one assess the
competing and indeed diametrically opposed historiographical claims? The first
thing to say is that, when it comes to human wickedness, there is no new thing
under the sun, that practically no hideous act is totally without precedent.
The second is that one swallow doesn’t make a summer; remarkable cases are
remarkable precisely because they are out of the ordinary.
Nevertheless, remarkable
cases may be (if I am allowed to mix a metaphor) the tip of an iceberg.
Forester might have been using his murderous wife and mother-in-law to make a
general point about the marriage of the time; and Shane Jenkin might just be
the worst of a very large cohort of violent, jealous men.
Let us suppose that both
cases are in some sense emblematic of the relationships of their time: which
would be worse? It depends partly on statistics, of course: how many women were
subjected to brutal husbands in such a way that murder was their only escape,
and how many are now subjected to Jenkin-type violence?
I confess to a prejudice
that in certain respects the arrangements of the past, far from perfect and
necessitous of reform as they undoubtedly were, were better than those today,
at least for those in the lower half of society – that is to say the half upon whom
the effects of reform can safely be disregarded by reformers.
Certainly the Shane Jenkin
story was all too familiar to me from my work as a doctor in an inner city.
There marriage as an institution had collapsed entirely, to the extent that no
child, except if it were of Indian subcontinental descent, was born legitimate.
What had replaced marriage was a kind of Brownian motion of the affections:
couples came together and split up in an almost random fashion.
Unfortunately, this was not
accompanied by any loss of the desire for the exclusive sexual possession of
another person, a desire that had more to do with the maintenance of
self-importance than with love. Where relationships are inherently unstable,
and can break at any moment, but the desire for exclusive possession remains,
it is only natural that there should be an overgrowth of insensate jealousy.
Such jealousy is the cause, or at any rate the occasion, of the worst violence
between sexual partners. Where social arrangements increase jealousy, therefore,
they increase violence.
So when the reviewer of the
book by Forester implied that it was a portrait of marriage before Women’s
Liberation, she was willfully ignoring the unpleasant consequences of the
changes of which she was no doubt strongly in favor. What one must always
remember, of course, is that no human arrangements will ever produce bliss
without a residue of misery.
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