George Gissing's Thyrza:
Romantic Love and Ideological Co-Conspiracy
CONSTANCE HARSH, Colgate University
This paper was read at the meeting of the
Northeast Modem Language Association in March 1993 and published in the Gissing
Journal, XXX (1) January 1994. It is published here by permission of the Journal
and the author. All rights
reserved.
George Gissing's
novels present difficulties in appreciation for critics of all sorts.
Uninterested in formal experimentation, unconvinced
of the possibility of genuine social
change, possessed by a passion for monuments of antique culture, Gissing is
most commonly seen as a pessimistic fuddy-duddy. For feminists in particular,
his personality presents serious hurdles. How can one find an ally in the man
who wrote in an 1893 letter that "The average woman pretty closely
resembles, in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot"?1
Yet feminist critics, among others Karen Chase and Deirdre David, have found
Gissing of interest, most notably in The Odd Women. A brief glance over
the rest of his fictional output reveals a preoccupation with that atypical
being the intelligent woman. Gissing demonstrates a consistent respect for the
mental life of his sympathetic female characters; in such works as In the
Year of Jubilee and Our Friend the Charlatan women best exemplify
the idealism chastened by bitter experience that Gissing admires. The typical
Gissing novel takes a keen interest in those problems that women uniquely
experience because of their place in a patriarchal society.
Thyrza (1887), my immediate concern, is unlike much of
Gissing's other work in its lack of emphasis on the wandering paths of human
consciousness. But this novel does, typically, use the analysis of gender
divisions to structure a critique of English society. Here Gissing uses women
to expose a cultural system that is intrinsically hostile to the human
self-development its official ideologies ostensibly promote. Society's
propensity for suppressing women becomes the principle that unites the
apparently widely separated realms of the ideal and the material.
Since it is
possible that not everyone here has read this novel, I will offer a very brief
plot summary. Thyrza depicts the
efforts of Walter Egremont to uplift the workingmen
of Lambeth by bringing them culture. His initial lectures on English literature
divert his small audience for a time, but his subsequent, misbegotten talks
entitled "Thoughts for the Present" are a disaster. Egremont plans to open a free library in the district and
chooses as his librarian Gilbert Grail, the only man who has truly benefited
from his lectures. However, when Egremont and Thyrza Trent, Grail's fiancee,
fall in love, this scheme as well disintegrates. Thyrza
leaves Lambeth and pursues a program of self-culture for two years, while she
awaits Egremont's return from
As in many other
Gissing novels, a central concern of Thyrza
is the tug of war between idealistic aspirations and compelling material
circumstances. The clearest figuration of this struggle comes in the
narrative's contraposition of Egremont and James Dalmaine. Egremont, repeatedly
called "The Idealist," has an altruistic desire to lift up the people
of Lambeth. Dalmaine, a cynically pragmatic Member of
Parliament, wishes to advance his own career through a political advocacy of
social reform. He owes allegiance only to what Egremont
calls "the spirit of trade"2 -- the every-man-for-himself ethic of
capitalist competition that sees only self-interested actions as valuable.
Narrative sympathy clearly rests with Egremont.
Gissing is always aware of the power of physical conditions, and he always
acknowledges the inevitability of a struggle for existence. But, here as
elsewhere, he is looking for a way out of the brutality of a materialist
approach. In Thyrza he explores three forms of
idealism that might offer an alternative: religion, culture, and love.
The novel
dispenses with traditional Christianity almost summarily. Religion is a
superseded form of spiritual aspiration, to which only the conventional or unintellectual can subscribe. Mary Bower's evangelical
faith is an irrelevant curiosity, while Lydia Trent's final embrace of Christianity
is an anachronism from which Thyrza averts her eyes.
Gilbert Grail observes to Egremont that
"religion has no hold upon intelligent working men in
But in the very
next sentence, Egremont indicates that a new ideal
will replace religion: "And yet it is a religious spirit that we must seek
to revive. Dogma will no longer help us. Pure love of moral
and intellectual beauty must take its place" (93). Like Matthew
Arnold, Egremont proposes to have culture do the
former work of religion. He sets out in his program of lecture to workingmen
"to inspire them with a moral ideal" (14) and to create in them
enthusiasm for "spiritual advancement" (15).
In Culture
and Anarchy
the moment,
1 say, culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn
[a knowledge of God's universal order], but as the endeavour, also, to make
it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture
becomes manifest.3
Egremont anticipates
that in time his own efforts as well will lead to material change.
"It seems to me that if I can get them to understand what is meant
by love of literature, pure and simple, without a thought of political or
social purpose -- especially without a thought of cash profit, which is so
disastrously blended with what little knowledge they acquire -- I shall be on
the way to founding my club of social reformers." (16)
With this
program Egremont clearly means to provide an
alternative to a materialist ethic, represented in the preceding passage as the
"thought of cash profit." Indeed, he explicitly rejects Dalmaine's suggestion that the education of the working
classes serves immediately pragmatic ends, such as making them better citizens
(135) or more competitive workers (8-9).
Egremont's new form of
religion, however, proves no more successful than the one it replaces. Except
for Gilbert Grail, no listener is responsive to his message. Paradoxically,
exposure to culture leads two of the working men, Bunce
and Ackroyd, "to offer opposition to everything
savouring of idealism" (409). In one especially telling passage, Gissing
explicitly holds up Arnoldian language to scorn,
while showing that Bunce will not respond to Egremont's paeans to the aesthetic beauties of Christian
legend:
It was his very humaneness which brought him to this pass; recitals of
old savagery had poisoned his blood, and the "spirit of the age"
churned his crude acquisitions into a witch's cauldron. Academic sweetness and
light was a feeble antidote to offer him. (171)
"Culture"
is inadequate to the task of disarming a passionate atheism that
sterns from something in human nature more fundamental than aesthetic
sensibility.
And, not
surprisingly, Egremont's lectures on English
literature do not turn out to be the most direct route to social improvement.
It becomes increasingly evident that, for all his insincerity of purpose, Dalmaine is a more effective social reformer than Egremont. Dalmaine has no belief
in culture, and utter contempt for his working-class constituents, but, as his
future father-in-law observes, he benefits society.
"How much do you think he cares for the factory-hands he's always
talking about? But he'll do them many a good turn; he'll make many a life
easier; and just because it's his business to do so, because it's the way of
advancing himself. . . . There's your real social reformer. Egremont's
an amateur, a dilettante." (140)
Even Egremont, upon his return from
Yet the
narrative has not abandoned "the ideal," but replaced it with another
that seems to supersede that of culture. Significantly, the explanation of Egremont's failed lecture on the aesthetic beauties of
Christianity concludes with the following assertion of its unintelligibility to
the majority of his auditors: "To the others it was little more than the
sounding of brass and the tinkling of cymbals" (174). With this allusion
to 1 Corinthians 13, Gissing suggests that Egremont's
words fail in charity, or love. And indeed love, especially romantic love,
emerges as the highest form of idealism. When Egremont
explains to Mrs. Ormonde that his love for Thyrza has led him to abandon his social projects, his
language may be over-passionate, but his meaning seems consistent with a
pervasive valuation of love:
"[What of
The library?" [Mrs. Ormonde asks].
"Gone. I can give no thought to it, for I am suffering a
greater loss. Be human! Be honest! Would you not despise me
if, loving her as 1 do, I came to you and puled about
the overthrow of my schemes for founding a public library? Let it go!
Let the people rust and rot in ignorance! I am a man of flesh and blood, and
the one woman that the world contains is lost to me!" (343)
Romantic love
has no perceptible connection to social reform, but it is productive of that
self-awareness and self-perfection that were the promises of Arnoldian culture. The centrality of love to Egremont's self-realization is clear enough. Before the
opening of the novel, he has wandered over the sea "in search, he said, of
himself. . . . Some there were who said that the self he went so far to
discover would prove to have a female form. Perhaps there was truth in this;
perhaps he sought, whether consciously or no, the ideal woman" (10). At
the close of the novel, Annabel asserts that his loss of love for Thyrza was the profoundest failure of his life and the
determinant of his future mediocrity: "The crisis of your life was there.
There was your one great opportunity, and you let it pass. She could not have
lived; but that is no matter. You were tried, Mr. Egremont,
and found wanting" (489). Other characters, such as Luke Ackroyd, reach their moments of highest self-realization
through acts of devotion to a beloved. Thyrza herself
provides the strongest example of the power of love. Her two years of waiting
involve diligent reading in history that will prepare her to become Egremont's mate; this program of self-improvement involves
the activation of an intelligence that she has always known she had (398). The
music lessons that she loves have value for her because they will enable her to
express herself perfectly-- she imagines communicating the full depth of her
nature to Egremont in song: "So 1 can sing, and
no one can sing like me; but only because 1 sing for you, and with my soul 1
love you!" (399).
So romantic love has come to seem the transcendent ideal in a
novel that has been desperately searching for some form of transcendence. Thyrza's faithful love for Egremont is a kind of apotheosis of romantic love: a
passion that ennobles her and could have elevated him. Gissing reported weeping
as he wrote her final scenes4; the narrative encourages us to mourn her tragically
inevitable death. Yet Gissing's particular delineation of romantic love proves
crucial to the demystification, not only of love itself, but the whole sociocultural system of which it is a part. And here
Gissing's deployment of female characters becomes indispensable to his
critique. For it is women's experiences of victimization in a
patriarchal society that provide the telling evidence for the interconnection
of oppressive material conditions and supposedly transcendent ideals.
Romantic love is implicated in culture and in capitalism, and cannot do
anything but ensnare and exploit its victims.
Paradoxically,
Gissing enables his critique by gendering the concept of romantic love with
observations of almost mawkish sentimentality. The first edition of 1887
contained passages Gissing would delete in 1891; one of these editorializes
about Thyrza's self-reliant friend Totty Nancarrow.
I have wrought
very imperfectly if you do not like Totty Nancarrow, if you do not feel that she is really a woman,
and therefore not unworthy of our attention. . . . Nay, it is true you must be
the reader whom 1 have in mind, he who cares not where
a woman live, or what form of language be on her lips, so that she look out of
womanly eyes and have in her that something which is the potentiality of love.5
So true womanhood is equated with this "potentiality of love"
that Totty is said to have. That love is intrinsic to femininity is suggested as
well by an anonymous singer at the "friendly lead" -- an informal
concert at a Lambeth pub that is the most authentic expression of working-class
experience in the novel. Gissing's lingering glance at this otherwise
unimportant woman indicates his sense of the particular poignance
of unrealized female dreams of romantic transcendence.
The girl had a
drunken mother, and spent a month or two of every year in the hospital, for her
day's work overtaxed her strength. She was one of those fated toilers, to
struggle on as long as any one would employ her, then to fall among the
forgotten wretched. And she sang of May-bloom and love; of love that had never
come near her and that she would never know; sang, with her eyes upon the
beer-stained table, in a public-house amid the backways
of Lambeth. (43)
The strength of
the association between women and love is sufficiently powerful that Gilbert
Grail plays a surprisingly subordinate role in the narrative. His intense love
for Thyrza makes him an excellent exemplar of love;
his impoverishment makes him an excellent example of frustrated
self-development. Yet Gissing's presentation of love so foregrounds female
experience that Grail swiftly subsides into insignificance in the last half of
the novel.
The
identification of love as a particularly female experience informs, whether
directly or indirectly, the narrative's use of Thyrza
at once to exemplify and explode romantic love. The novel uses Thyrza's strong bonds with her community, particularly her
love for her sister, to call into question the development of self that
romantic love initiates. The self-culture that Thyrza
undertakes comes at the expense of her prior relationships with others. For the
first result of her acknowledgment of love for Egremont
is her exile from her neighborhood -- what John Goode
has called "the sealing off of Lambeth."6 This situation stands in useful contrast
to Ludwig Feuerbach's ideas in The Essence of Christianity, which Thyrza's exaltation of romantic love evokes,
and which Gissing had read in 1882. Feuerbach values love in part because it
creates an awareness of species in the individual:
In love, the
reality of the species, which otherwise is only a thing of reason, an object of
mere thought, becomes a matter of feeling, a truth of feeling; for in love, man
declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he
postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart. . . . The
individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but
love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite;
because in it the self-consciousness of the individuality is the mysterious
self-consciousness of the perfection of the race.7
In light of
Feuerbach's grandly communal conception of love, the love in the novel seems
fairly paltry. Love in Thyrza fosters
greater individuality -- it alienates the self from the race. Because she is
preparing herself for the return of Egremont, Thyrza cuts herself off from her sister
Indeed Thyrza's love is connected as well to the compromised world
of Culture. The reading in history she undertakes may involve the development
of her intelligence, but it also involves entry into a particular stratum of
English society. Thyrza is not simply fashioning an
improved self, but a specifically middle-class self. As Egremont realizes, Mrs. Ormonde's
patronage has ensured that Thyrza has for two years
"lived in preparation for a life of refinement" (444). And this life
has involved as much self-distortion as self-realization. As I have mentioned,
it has involved alienation from Thyrza's earliest
associations. It has also involved the restriction and appropriation of her
musical gift. Thyrza takes voice lessons ostensibly
to become capable of demonstrating the essence of her love to Egremont. Music has figured throughout the book as the
purest means of self-expression, whether it is the "music of the obscure
ways" (111) in which Grail hears the undiluted experience of the natives
of Lambeth or the song Thyrza sweetly sings at the
"friendly lead" that is "a true expression of the life of
working folk" (44). But the cultivation of a musical gift involves Thyrza in oppressive regulation:
She had looked
forward to learning new songs, and she was allowed to sing nothing but mere
uninteresting scales of notes. . . . The teacher, like most of his kind, was a
poor creature of routine, unburdened by imagination; he had only a larynx to
deal with, and was at no pains to realise that the fountain of its notes was a
soul. (396)
Thyrza is being fitted for the
concert stage, the world of high culture. Interestingly, her first exposure to
a concert of art music had prompted her to renounce (however briefly) her gift:
"I shall never pretend to sing again" (226). Just when the narrative
is making Thyrza most emblematic of truthfulness to
the ideology of romantic love, she is most obviously hedged in by the class
interests of the literary and musical worlds. For, like her other efforts to
perfect her romantic love, her music training entangles her in a web of class
interests that is inimical to the expression of this characteristically
feminine mode of being.
Another example
of romantic love makes it clearer that culture is not merely irrelevant and
ineffectual, but actively destructive. In passages deleted from the second
edition of the novel, Clara and Harold Emerson, a married couple with whom Thyrza lodges for a time, offer a
vulgarized association of love and culture. Harold fancies himself an artist,
and is composing a poem that he claims will have a greater effect on society
than did the French Revolution. Clara's adoration of Harold makes her slave
away to support his life of aesthetic leisure; the pretense
of high culture allied to romantic love leads to a woman's exploitation. Harold
only briefly shakes her composure with his infatuation with Thyrza,
whom he styles his Muse. He seems in some sense an ironic double of the equally
ineffectual social architect Egremont; at one point Thyrza notes a specific similarity in their expressions of
concern for the corruption of society (III: 101-02).8 Yet Egremont's influence is ultimately even more pernicious to
the woman who loves him. A more oblique passage suggests that romantic love and
emotional violence are intimately connected. Totty Nancarrow declares her love for Luke Ackroyd
with unusual, but haunting indirection -- by letting him know that she has just
followed him home from the police station. Her proof of this act of devotion
includes describing a notice that is posted outside the station: "A man
had deserted his wife and left her chargeable to the parish" (198). Here
Gissing interestingly conflates the recognition of love with a wife's
mistreatment by her husband. Both this case and the Emerson menage
establish for romantic love a kind of guilt by association with both marital
and cultural irresponsibility.
The case of
Paula Dalmaine indicates most clearly that romantic
love is all too easily complicit with other strategies of oppression. Paula has
married James Dalmaine, even though she cherishes a tenderness for Egremont. After
their marriage, Dalmaine does his best to control
her, dictating her interests and even the subjects of her social conversation.
He wishes her, he says, to "keep to the sphere which is distinctly
womanly" (296). When Paula commits the impropriety of visiting Egremont's rooms alone, Dalmaine
seizes the opportunity to blackmail her into complete submission -- her
romantic folly has provided him with the weapon he has sought:
He was fond of
Paula in a way, but he had discovered since his marriage that she had a certain individuality very distinct from his own, and till
this was crushed he could not be satisfied. It was his home policy, at present,
to crush Paula's will. He practised upon her the faculties which he would have
liked to use in terrorizing a people. (368)
While we may
remember the novel's suggestion that Dalmaine is
ultimately an effective social reformer, we see, through his relish for
domestic tyranny, the propensity for social tyranny that underlies his model of
reform. Again romantic love has provided, not a vehicle for transcendence, but
an opportunity for patriarchal social control; it seems always to lead back
into the heart of a problematic social order -- whether the world of high
culture, or the underlying economic reality of capitalism.
1 have shown that Gissing's sentimentality has associated
women with romantic love. He establishes as well a somewhat less
sentimental identification that in the long run offers the most
satisfactory alternative to the pursuit of a compromised ideal of any
sort. When Thyrza, abandoned by Egremont, determines to return to Grail, she calls upon a
new ideology of womanhood.
There are some
women who never know what love is, who marry a man because they respect and
like him, and are good wives their life long. She would be even as one of
these. Suppose love to be something she had outgrown; the idleness of girls.
Now was the season of her womanhood, and the
realities of life left no room for folly. (467)
Of course, for Thyrza little life of any sort
remains at this point: her weak constitution will soon kill her. But her friend
Totty Nancarrow embodies a
similar deromanticized realism in her own marital
negotiations. Totty has long evaded the grasp of a
rich uncle, who repeatedly proposes "that she should surrender her liberty
in return for being housed and dressed respectably" (384). Now this uncle
has died, leaving a will that continues this attempt at control: Totty is to have £250, but only if she marries a man the
trustees approve. She does not let this bequest drive her into a hasty marriage
with Ackroyd, the man she could love; in time she
makes the prudential selection of Bunce, in whose
household she already has considerable authority as friend to his children.
Unlike the women
whose romantic passion led them to self-immolatory behavior, Totty has carefully
engaged with practical reality and discovered a strategy for survival. Her
marriage will involve some diminution of the freedom of conduct that has
characterized her and that Thyrza saw as
"something of an ideal" (39). Yet the dream of a wholly pure ideal
has proven delusory; transcendent ideals, however appealing, have proven to be
most effective in producing victims. Totty's own
version of the ideal, her own spirituality, consists of a decidedly untranscendent sort of Roman Catholicism.
To Totty her religion was a purely private interest. . . .What
was it to any one else if she had in secret a mother to whom she breathed her
troubles and her difficulties? . . . Her thoughts did not rise to a Deity; she
thought but seldom of the story which told her that Deity had
taken man's form. The Madonna was enough, the mother whose gentle heart was
full of sorrows and who had power to aid the sorrowful. (392)
Totty's allegiance is
to a powerful but very human Mary; a mother who will tend to her individual
needs. On the one hand this points us once again to characteristically female
capacities as a challenge to male institutions. However, it is also evocative
of the individualism that makes for the heedless selfishness of a James Dalmaine. Perhaps in the world of Thyrza
the only means of evading social control is to adopt some variant of its
strategies. In any case, Totty's practicality does
not represent a completely satisfactory option in this novel. At one point the
narrative describes Annabel Newthorpe in the
following way: "The idealism which she derived from her father would not
allow her yet to regard life as a compromise, which women are so skilled in
doing practically, though the better part in them to the end revolts"
(161). In allowing one woman at least to escape the idealism of the father,
Gissing has not constituted an alternative approach to life with the capacity
to satisfy that better part, or to challenge the gender categories that enable
a description of cultural hegemony.
Gissing never
entirely abandons his longing for some means of spiritual transcendence of the
material, nor a hope that it might in turn transform the material world. The
later Gissing would endow a single heroine with the ability to retain both a
measure of idealism and a clear-sighted understanding of material constraints
-- a unified perspective that, in the case of Rhoda Nunn in The Odd Women, permits
rational reform of existing social institutions. But the world of Thyrza demands that heroic women choose the
path either of self-destructive purity of spirit or clever accommodation to
existing structures. In this novel, women enable a telling analysis of
oppressive cultural systems, but are unable to change anything.
Notes
1 George Gissing, 2 June 1893, The
Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bentz, 1887-1903,
ed. Arthur C. Young (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), p. 171.
2 George Gissing, Thyrza
(1891;
3 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Amold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton, 1961), pp. 409, 411.
4 "Thyrza
herself is one of the most beautiful dreams 1 ever had or shall have. I value
the book really more than anything I have yet done. The last chapters drew many
tears. 1 shall be glad when you know Thyrza & her
sister." George Gissing, "To Ellen [Gissing],"
16 January 1887, The Collected Letters of George Gissing, ed. Paul F. Mattheisen et al., 4 vols. to date (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1992),
5 George Gissing, Thyrza
(London: Smith, Elder, 1887),
6 John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology
and Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 103.
7 Ludwig Feuerbach, The
Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989), p.
156.
8 His speech "recalled to her certain words of Walter Egremont's,
spoken when he sat in the parlour in Walnut Tree Walk. Gilbert Grail, too, was
wont at times to speak on the same subject. She did not know whether to be glad
or troubled that Mr. Emerson should hold the same views" (