Unusual women

It’s been a long time since I posted, and for that omission, my apologies. I don’t have an internet connection at home, so these posts have to be written for later posting, and I don’t often seem to have the time or energy these days. It’s been a particularly difficult six months or so on every possible level, and just getting through the day often seems to use every last bit of energy, not leaving very much for extraneous activities like blogging. To be brutally honest, I’m in need of some serious support, and the options seem to be very few. I will be trying to see the doctor in the next week or so, to see what counselling and support is available in my area. Once I have some backup, these posts might come a bit more frequently!

The subject of this blog normally comes back round to Love at some point or other – not just my preoccupation, but that of virtually every writer, musician, artist in history; one of the dominant preoccupations of human life, in fact. However, so much literature, art, music, portrays love as a simple thing. Films and other visual media are particularly inclined to this presentation; girl meets boy, boy meets girl. They fall in love, whether they know it themselves or not, overcome one or two challenges, and live happily ever after – or at least happily for the foreseeable future. As much as this Arcadian perception is attractive, I do not believe it to be the whole truth. In fact, increasingly, I begin to understand how difficult and complicated love can be. For those who actively think, who aspire beyond societal norms, who grasp life by the scruff of its’ neck and shake, Love is very far from simple. Without wishing to wave a giant feminist flag, I think the difficulties are even greater for those who are unusual women.

The experience that triggered this blog chapter, though the idea has been building for some time, was seeing Jane Campion’s new film Bright Star, about Fanny Brawne and John Keats. For those who don’t know, Fanny Brawne was the love of Keats’ short life, and the inspiration for several of his most beautiful poems, including the eponymous Bright Star. From all accounts she was also a rather extraordinary young woman – intelligent, gifted, intellectually combative – particularly so for an era which prized female docility very highly. Representations of historical figures in film are always subjective, but as a representation of a type, rather than a specific person, Campion’s film, and the acting of Abbie Cornish, is acute. Love is not easy for a woman like Fanny Brawne – it risks the sublimation of her soul, her intellect and gifts, beneath a flood of preconceived ideas and societal concepts. But I am getting ahead of my own thesis.

I do not believe that one can truly love, wholly, completely, selflessly, unless one loves one’s equal. For a woman like Fanny Brawne, by simple percentages, to find an equal in the first place is undeniably more difficult than for a more ‘normal’ female. For that equal then to be unencumbered by prior commitments or entanglements, to be pleasing and compatible in personality, intellect and appearance, and most difficult of all, for that equal to love back, must surely be a one-in-a-billion chance. When one looks at love from this perspective, it must surely be a miracle that Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler, Mary Shelley or Elizabeth Barrett Browning had fulfilled loves with men whose gifts matched their own, and for each of those successes, though they too had their costs, how many must never have met their proverbial match. Thinking of extraordinary women, very few have had happy, successful, committedly monogamous love lives, and of those few who have managed the miracle, the course of their loves have often been cut short by tragedy or ill health. Those whom the Gods love, indeed.

Say the miracle was to happen, as it did for Keats and Fanny, for Elizabeth and Robert, for Alma and Gustav. What then? Did those other women feel, as Abbie Cornish’s Fanny seemed to, that they risked everything they were, that Love was as destructive an emotion as a joyous one? Were their emotions and thoughts obsessive – getting hold of a new idea and wrestling with it, trying to bend the incomprehensible to the will of intellects used to total, effortless comprehension?

Again abjuring the feminist flag-waving, why is it that women seem so different to men in this regard? Why was love so easy for Keats or Shelley or Browning to accept, and to embrace, without trying to understand it? Each man faced obstacles to his suit – debt, an inconvenient wife, a controlling father – but these could be conquered. What they did not seem to do was to create internal obstacles for themselves. They loved. They did not question why or how, they did not seek to reassure themselves of their own spiritual endurance in this state. Perhaps it is because men have always been secure in their supremacy in marriage – millennia of male dominance, the importance ascribed to his career, his intellect, his ability, in the end, to provide for a family, has left little need or awareness of any need to question whether a man may love and remain wholly himself. Even now, many men seem to prefer to maintain the status quo. Subconsciously or otherwise, they do not seek to love their equal – many unusual or extraordinary men choose partners who are decorative, certainly, but docile, submissive and unchallenging, rather than a female whose gifts or intellect matches their own. Ego and laziness often seem to win over equality and the challenging, exciting, enervating effects of a true partnership. In contrast, an extraordinary or unusual woman whose love for an equal is spurned, or who does not achieve the miraculous confluence of circumstance to meet her match, rarely accepts an unequal pairing – Maria Callas is the first example to come to mind. Spurned by Onassis for Jackie Kennedy, Callas lived the rest of her life alone, rather than accepting a man not her equal. Mae West, Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontes – I could go on listing for a long time. These women may take a lover, or many, but they do not commit themselves to a man they know is not their equal. Is it because we know ourselves better, or are the risks so much greater, and our history, as women, so full of genius lost to the submission of inequality, that we have grown more wary? Is that why love is so difficult for an unusual woman?

I am fortunate, or cursed, depending on your point of view, to come from a long line of unusual women. There’s the great-great grandmother who was a major part of the Victorian literary scene – a close personal friend of both Dickens and Sir Walter Scott - the great-great aunt who attended Medical School before women could be granted degrees in medicine, the great-grandmother who was an early female member of the Royal Academy, the great-aunt who was one of the first women to gain a degree in Physics, the grandmother who ran an essential national industry during the Second World War, and the mother who was invited to the White House to advise the Clinton administration, and who may well be nominated for a Nobel Prize in any of at least three categories some time in the next decade or so. Quite a lot to live up to, when one thinks about it – even when one just takes the last few generations. That so many of these unusual women have had the fortune to meet similarly unusual, and really quite remarkably enlightened men, is a source of immense hope. However, against this legacy, I have to set the first-hand experience of what happens, one way or another, when an unusual woman is committed to a man who is not her equal, even though at first glance he may seem to be a perfectly good match. It seems inevitable – a pattern that repeats again and again, not just in my parents’ marriage. Initially, or even for a long time, the man is supportive, maybe even excited by his wife or partner’s endeavours. Eventually though, as her star rises, he becomes jealous of her success, even if he is also successful, he feels threatened by her enhanced earning capacity and the freedom that implicitly gives her – freedom that he fears, and which somehow emasculates him. Perhaps he feels lonely, or in some way abandoned, and his responses to this are rarely rational – controlling behaviour, unpredictable rage, infidelity. He behaves, in short, like a toddler or baby – incapable of controlling or analyzing his emotional impulses. If he is a particular type of man, he will endeavour to manipulate her, and others around them, whose complicity with his behaviour may eventually “cut her down to size” – a very small size, where she can be dominated, her achievements belittled, her self-worth destroyed and her freedom curtailed. Only the very strongest can escape, and the consequences are far-reaching and long-lasting.

It is over six years since my parents separated – my mother had to change the locks and leave my father’s car, complete with divorce papers, at the airport when he was away on another golfing holiday to be free, he having robbed her of her financial freedom, the company she had spent two decades building, her physical and mental health, and most of her indomitable spirit. It later emerged that he had been preparing too – transferring all assets out of her name, consulting a lawyer to find out exactly what his child-support liabilities would be. Heaven only knows what state she would now be in if he’d got there first. However much it clashed with her ideals – that marriage was for life, and that after over thirty years to give up seemed weak, not to mention the first divorce in family history – she acted. Six years later, my mother is still impoverished, her ability to trust is destroyed, and she will probably never have romance in her life again, while my father lives in luxury with his new wife. He still tries to control all of us, holding his financial superiority, and ability, though disinclination, to help my sister and me over our heads, and our mother’s, as the ultimate blackmail tool.

Some bitterness is inevitable, but Mama feels lighter, happier and more free than at any time in the last four decades, albeit after several years of reliance on numbing anti-depressants, at least three major medical procedures and endless financial trauma for her, and by extension, my sister, and to a lesser extent, me. If a woman like my mother – extraordinarily talented, educated to PhD level, a world-traveller, at the top of her field, with business acumen, family money and high earning ability – can be broken to this extent by an unequal match, is it any surprise that other similar women recognise, even if only subconsciously, the inherent dangers, and approach love with such caution. From a logical perspective, from my experience, I would say they are wise to do so – the same, or a similar scenario plays out over and over again, sometimes privately, sometimes in the public eye – but how overwhelmingly sad, and frankly, depressing, the necessity. And how can we even begin to know how many do not escape, and are lost?

Fanny Brawne was right to fight, right to doubt until she knew beyond doubt that her match was her equal, and that he would not seek to subdue her. An unusual woman, for whom love is more difficult than for most, but for whom, when it is right, when the match is equal and the spirit is whole, Love is inspirational - not just for the two most intimately involved, but also for the rest of the world, who can look on in wonder, and derive awe and pleasure from the miracle made real.