…from an unexpected source, William Makepeace Thackeray — unexpected to me, that is, because, aside from Vanity Fair and the wacky fairy tale, The Rose and the Ring, I realized I hadn’t read much Thackeray. What did I know about his attitude toward women? The only Thackeray women I knew were Becky Sharp, a clever, greedy sociopath, and her counterpoint, the milksop Amelia Sedley.
After an ecstatic re-read of Vanity Fair, I thought to remedy Thackeray’s absence in my life, and bought Henry Esmond. It’s surprising me in a number of ways, the most noticeable of which is it’s not a satire. The characters are not painted in the dark-gray-and-dingy-white he applied in Vanity Fair; the adult male characters are more fully drawn here but are not heroic.
However, as I began to read, a woman character who appeared in the first pages promised to be as much of a wimp as Amelia. Even more of a wimp, actually. Her name is Rachel, she is not yet 20 years old, is a beautiful blonde, and is newly Lady Castlewood because she had married a man considerably above her station — although not when she married him, since he, like most other British aristocrats, had been in title-less exile during the rule of Cromwell.
But now it is 1691, the Restoration is flowering and Rachel’s husband, Francis Esmond, has now taken his Viscount title and moved into his somewhat shabby estate. He’s not a bad person, not at all. But he’s an English aristocrat, and being the Viscount is all he has to do with his life.
Rachel, who was virtually a child when she married him, adores him completely, worships him, fawns over him with infinite sweetness. He is her god and her master and a feminist reader can settle into every hope of rolling eyes and vomiting.
Her lord gets bored with her adoration and all-encompassing love. Of course. (We’ve gotten bored.) He talks harshly to her, gambles a lot, finds a mistress, doesn’t have any meaningful work, spends time away from home, the usual. She is deeply wounded.
Then a smallpox epidemic reaches the neighborhood. Rachel becomes sick and loses some of her great beauty. When Francis finally comes home, he’s as indifferent as he was when he left. And that’s when Rachel begins to surprise me. Instead of fading away, she turns away from her husband, begins to read, to study, to learn. She discovers her intellect. And her marriage shifts.
As Thackeray writes:
Much of the quarrels and hatred which arise between married people come in my mind from the husband’s rage and revolt at discovering that his slave and bedfellow, who is to minister to all his wishes, and is church-sworn to honor and obey him — is his superior; and that he, and not she, ought to be the subordinate of the twain; and in these controversies, I think, lay the cause of my lord’s anger against his lady. When he left her, she began to think for herself, and her thoughts were not in his favor. After the illumination, when the love-lamp is put out…and by the common daylight we look at the picture, what a daub it looks! what a clumsy effigy! How many men and wives come to this knowledge, think you? And if it be painful to a woman to find herself mated for life to a boor, and ordered to love and honor a dullard; it is worse still for the man himself perhaps, whenever in his dim comprehension the idea dawns that his slave and drudge yonder is, in truth, his superior; that the woman who does his bidding, and submits to his humor, should be his lord; that she can think a thousand things beyond the power of his muddled brains; and that in yonder head, on the pillow opposite to him, lie a thousand feelings, mysteries of thought, latent scorns and rebellions…
I think this is fucking marvelous of Thackeray so I’m saying “Thank you, Bill.”
