emma_in_dream

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/dec/04/marriage-equality-in-australia-is-a-final-step-in-a-long-march-from-1788


I found this article about the control of marriage in Australia interesting. My ancestor, John Nichols, ‘married’ two women in Australia (in addition to the wife he left behind when he was transported to Australia).* I imagine that neither of his Australian wives had a great deal of say in the matter as they landed before the ‘Female Factory’ was built. This meant that convict women could be selected for marriage or household service by any free men and there other option was to sleep rough, available to every man in the colony. Unless you were selected by a complete psychopath, I imagine that being the property of one man alone would be a much better deal.

Note: He selected one and she was sent off to Norfolk Island for bad behaviour. He then selected another and they had like eleven children and populated half of Victoria. It wasn’t much of a punishment to send people to the other side of the world and then to give them massive swathes of land stolen from the native population.

I always think of this when I read *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*. I love that Heinlein tried to present a society with completely different marriage structures, but as an Australian I find it implausible. There was a place on Earth where there was a massive shortage of women as those sent there were convicts. Oddly, this did not lead to a female-centered marriage pattern but to men doubling down on privilege and those at the top of the structure grabbing the few available women.

Let me tell you how I came to *Aurora Leigh* (1856).

I read Joanna Russ’ rebuttal of Virginia Woolf’s analysis of EBB’s *Aurora Leigh*. Of course they would all be interested in *Aurora Leigh*. It is a lengthy narrative poem about the difficulties in being a woman writing.

Aurora Leigh, the narrator, was raised by her bookish father in Italy, then orphaned and lived with her cold aunt in England. She was close to her cousin Romney Leigh but he rejected her poetry without bothering to read it.

That book of yours,

I have not read a page of; but I toss

A rose up–it falls calyx down, you see! . . 

The chances are that, being a woman, young,

And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, . . 

You write as well . . and ill . . upon the whole,

As other women. If as well, what then?

If even a little better, . . still what then?

We want the Best in art now, or no art.


Romney proposes but really wants a helpmeet to assist him in his social causes. Aurora refuses him. After her aunt’s death, Aurora goes off and becomes a professional writer. There’s some voice of experience stuff about how many different forms of writing she has to undertake to support herself.

Romney tries to marry a pauper and then a mean wealthy woman, and it doesn’t work out. And then he marries Aurora after he realizes he does love her.

They are to combine art, love and work for social causes. Specifically, she espouses a kind of contemporary poetry, not one set in a romantic past, but one which grapples with contemporary issues.

Beloved, let us love so well, 

Our work shall still be better for our love, 

And still our love be sweeter for our work, 

And both, commended, for the sake of each, 

By all true workers and true lovers, born.

The poem is one long meditation (like 11,000 words of blank verse)* on what it means to dedicate yourself to art, what it means to love, whether marriage and art are compatible, how female artists are treated, whether poetry should be contemporary, urgent and radical (her answer to that one was a resounding yes).

Of course this theme preoccupied EBB who wrote despite being effectively locked in a tower for twenty years by her father; of course it was central to Virginia Woolf’ life, a woman who didn’t even have what education a governess could supply and who nonetheless became a great novelist; of course Joanna Russ wanted to talk about it in *How to Suppress Women’s Writing*. It is really a privilege to hear three such intellects in conversation.

I don’t have much to add to the conversation beyond highlighting this passage.

We get no good

By being ungenerous, even to a book,

And calculating profits . . so much help

By so much rending. It is rather when

We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge

Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,

Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–
'
Tis then we get the right good from a book.

So, EBB, Virginia Woolf, Joanna Russ – all in one long conversation.**



And some extra stuff:

Also, I was struck by some of the topical allusions. Potatoes – will they cease to exist with the potato famine?

And are potatoes to grow mythical

Like moly? will the apple die out too?

Mastadons – apparently on EBB’s mind.

Books, books, books!

I had found the secret of a garret-room

Piled high with cases in my father's name;

Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

The first book first.

And I like her description of a baby:

There he lay, upon his back,

The yearling creature, warm and moist with life

To the bottom of his dimples,–to the ends

Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;

For since he had been covered over-much

To keep him from the light glare, both his cheeks

Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose

The shepherd's heart blood ebbed away into,

The faster for his love.

• Apparently longer than the twelve book Paradise Lost.
** Having written this, I remember that Russ also wrote a rebuttal of Robert Heinlein's *Farnham's Freehold* and I imagine him joining in the conversation. My goodness.