Misanthropy Read online

  Any woman reader of this book may well have been bubbling with increasing irritation at its masculine focus. The texts I have been quoting stubbornly keep on equating humanity at large with man. My book has seemed from time to time to mimic them in this. But it has also repeatedly asked questions about the defensibility of the misanthropic attitude, in effect sounding sceptical about what has been, historically, a predominantly masculine orientation. Surely, then, misanthropy was in fact a function of backwardness. If, as must self-evidently be the case, until the modern age, more or less all the misanthropists, or those we know about, were men, didn’t women just know better (and wouldn’t they have said so, given half a chance)? The rise of the modern feminisms calls time on misanthropy, or so the argument might seem to go; misanthropy swiftly becomes irrelevant, obsolete. With the integration of women into the modern, democratic constituencies, humankind redefines itself, and for the better. But has the continuing emancipation of women remade the world effectively enough to keep the misanthropists at bay? Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst proclaimed that ‘men were responsible for the present [dire] state of affairs’, but that women would successfully ‘undo’ their ‘terrible mistakes’.1 Have her hopes been borne out? Not all our contemporaries have confidently thought so. This chapter, however, is about some great modern women who never shared her optimism in the first place.

  The women’s movement, or what is sometimes known as ‘first wave’ feminism, particularly in Britain and the United States, began in the 1860s and 1870s. In Britain, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded in 1872. But the constitutionalist suffragists that emerged from this made comparatively little headway until, with the emergence of the suffragette movement – Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 – the militants arrived on the scene. They and the constitutionalists worked together until 1912. This produced a mood of moral buoyancy and uplift, a distinctively modern mood of ‘revolutionary’ elation if not exhilaration. In countries, too, that, as far as enfranchisement was concerned, were rather in advance of England and America – New Zealand, most of the Scandinavian nations – at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new and widespread modern confidence was emerging, reflected in the foundation, in 1904, of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. History everywhere was apparently on women’s side.

  The new optimism in early twentieth-century feminism cannot be separated from its humanism, progressivism and reformism. Sandra Stanley Holton has shown in detail how far the dominant strain in modern English feminism descended from Enlightenment political philosophy and nineteenth-century liberalism, notably through Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.2 In its inception, it was humanistic: women deserved equal rights with men because they shared common human attributes. As Mrs Hugo Reid put the point, ‘The ground on which equality is claimed for all men is of equal force for all women. … It is the possession of the noble faculties of reason and conscience’.3 For all her radicalism, Emmeline Pankhurst was still restating the same theme as late as 1914: ‘Human values must be restored’ via the suffragette movement; respect for ‘the value of human rights’ must be established through its work. After all, ‘the moving spirit of [feminist] militancy’ was ‘its deep and abiding reverence for human life’.4

  The suffragists, and particularly the suffragettes, did not just want the vote. They also had a raft of other demands, which pointed them beyond equal franchise (in Britain, granted partially in 1918, fully in 1928). In general, they looked forward to ‘better laws’ and ‘happier lives’ for women.5 There is no necessary reason why subscribing to a significant political or moral sequence with a particular and important goal, as suffragism undoubtedly was, should require that one espouse any larger theory or narrative of progress. But, like most twentieth- and indeed twenty-first-century liberals and radicals, the early twentieth-century feminists did. Pankhurst, for example, anticipated ‘the times to come, in all constitutional countries of the world’, when the emancipation of women would have had pervasive and far-reaching effects encompassing ‘the welfare of humanity’.6 This progressive mindset is equally evident in the work of the suffragist novelists: May Sinclair, Gertrude Colmore, Elizabeth Robins, Evelyn Sharpe. No self-respecting heroine in a suffragist novel can fail to make some kind of advance. Robins’s The Convert (1907), Colmore’s Suffragette Sally (1911) and Constance Maud’s No Surrender (1911), for example, all emphasize resolution, struggle, work and personal development, overcoming oneself and circumstances. The form of the personal is a microcosm for the political story. The characters change precisely in the interest of furthering the cause, the great movement forward, ‘the march towards the vote and political awareness’ (the onward march is a recurrent image).7 Indeed, for some of them, and for some sympathetic men, the women’s cause was representative. On the issue of the enfranchisement of women, wrote Brougham Villiers, ‘the character of the whole progressive movement in England depends’.8 If, then, for suffragists and suffragettes, getting the vote was crucial, it was also merely a stepping stone, the struggle for women’s rights a link in an emancipatory ‘continuum’.9

  But plenty of intelligent and articulate women were in some degree anti-suffragist, and often anti-progressive: Marie Corelli, Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward, Charlotte Yonge, Florence Bell, Beatrice Webb. This is hardly a gallery of dimwits. As Julia Bush remarks, ‘The anti-suffrage cause was extremely fortunate in its women writers’.10 For the anti-suffragists, women’s reality, while by no means inferior to men’s, remained separate and distinct from it. In the world of women, the priorities were family affairs, the domestic sphere, ‘gendered duties and responsibilities’, emotional life.11 If these writers have dated, it is because they too often sounded tamely conventional: their preoccupations were frequently religious, moralistic and commonplace. But beneath such emphases, on occasions, lay a profounder and more trenchant misgiving. Mark Winnington gives voice to it, in Mrs Humphry Ward’s Delia Blanchflower: ‘The vote? What is it actually going to mean, in the struggle for life and happiness that lies before every modern Community?’ One can only be ‘oppressed with its impotence for the betterment of life’.12

  The larger emancipatory drive may finally turn out to be powerless, whether or not any project for the liberation of a partial interest succeeds in its aims. The modern problem is somewhere else, somewhere apart from the political project as conventionally established in liberal minds however well meaning, and categorically inaccessible to the meliorists. (According to the OED, the word enters the language during this period). Emancipation has an intractable remainder which threatens to turn the taste of liberty to ashes in the mouth. Rebecca West (in The Judge) and Virginia Woolf (in Night and Day) dwelt on exactly this issue. On occasions, such scepticism can sound quite close to classical misanthropy: extreme suffragettes like Christabel Pankhurst and Cicely Hamilton even began to doubt whether relations with men could ever be other than destructive for women.13 Vir feminae lupus? But there were also good reasons for reservations about the suffragists and suffragettes: they ‘laid claim to the mantle of empire’,14 avidly supported the war effort between 1914 and 1918, frequently became bustling feminist entrepreneurs and often had little interest in women beyond the white middle classes.

  Certainly, by the 1920s and 1930s, as Holton puts matters, there had been ‘a considerable moderation of the high optimism of the suffrage movement’.15 The ‘New Feminists’ of the times were altogether more pragmatic and down to earth. But there were also other, different and more powerful manifestations in women’s writing of the collapse of pre-war buoyancy. If anti-suffragism was often anti-progressive, it was not misanthropic. None of the writers just discussed seems likely to tip over into misanthropy (though Christabel and Cicely’s forebodings seem unencouraging for the future of sexual relations). It is in the twenties and thirties that the strain of scepticism within feminism itself grows darker. The period witnesses the emergence of the great misanthropically focused nove
l as written by modern women. This misanthropic female tradition then re-emerges elsewhere, above all in France, at another moment of historic moral uplift, the Liberation in 1944. There are later manifestations of it in Britain and America. By the late sixties, however, so-called ‘second wave’ feminism spreads so widely and proves so successful that the misanthropic tradition in women’s writing fades into obscurity, and it would be hard to find significant examples of it today.

  I shall turn to five women writers whose work seems strikingly indifferent to the modern progressivisms and meliorisms (without being at all indifferent to women’s sufferings and sexual wrongdoing). Modern female misanthropy is bred less of disenfranchisement than of emancipation itself, not least because of the radical opening and extension of horizons it brings with it. That does not make it reactionary. Indeed, even when unmixed, modern female misanthropy may well point in the opposite direction. If the line of misanthropic descent had been overweeningly patriarchal, certain modern women writers took hold of it as such and, with extraordinary vitality and ingenuity, recast it, thought it afresh, made it their own without abandoning its fundamental premise, that the good of and in the human thing is neither self-evident nor assured. I shall look at five principal strains in modern misanthropic female writing. I shall call them the shocked appropriation of the world at large; the private world as theatre of war; wastelands of new solitudes; the malignancy of tropisms; and ‘dying like a woman’. Together, they constitute a major new reinvention of misanthropy.

  *

  Edith Sitwell, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Jean Rhys all show scant awareness of even belonging to the same world as contemporary suffragists, suffragettes and feminists, and seem possessed of an immunity to the progressivist mindset almost as complete as their ability to make great writing out of savage, destructive, vengeful, malevolent, forlorn and melancholic emotion. Compton-Burnett’s middle-class background and university education (Royal Holloway College, London, women-only at the time) might have led a young woman to suffragism. But Hilary Spurling’s massive, vastly assiduous biography of her contains no reference either to suffragism or to feminism.16 It is as though, for Compton-Burnett, an extraordinarily brilliant and tough-minded woman, they scarcely existed. Edith Sitwell was perhaps a bit too upper-crust for suffragism. But it would have fitted in with her politics in the twenties and thirties, which were leftist, pacifist and anti-imperial.17 She had very good reason for abhorring patriarchy: aided and abetted by a manufacturer (male) and a surgeon (male), her father attempted to cure a curvature of her youthful spine by encasing her in a painful orthopaedic brace, a cage that ran from her armpits to her hips, with steel boots (and steel leggings and locks at night). For a period, she also had to wear a steel nose-truss (family friends came and gawped).18 Yet, though she later vilified her three benefactors, she seems to have taken no interest in the women’s cause per se. Jean Rhys was Dominican Creole. She came to England from the Caribbean in 1907. But she went to a school where she had to read Charlotte Yonge aloud each night after supper as part of an anti-suffragist education, which, given her temperament and disposition, might swiftly have bred an inward resistance.19 As her biographer Lilian Pizzichini shows, she may very easily have been subsequently exposed to suffragist ideas.20 But there is no indication that they were ever important to her, and her turn to the theatrical world brought her into contact less with advanced ideas than with a sexual culture quite beyond the experience of most of the suffragists.

  Sitwell provides my example of ‘a shocked appropriation of the world at large’. It would be absurd to suggest that, before the 1920s, women writers did not think beyond provincial horizons. George Eliot, for example, decisively broke with any such assumption, most strikingly in Daniel Deronda (1876), which ranges through Europe, exposes its readers to foreign worlds and opens them up to new intellectual vistas (Zionist and Kabbalistic ideas, modern European philosophy and music). But Sitwell in effect asserts that women are as capable of extreme thought as men, that they can stare without flinching at what another woman writer with occasionally misanthropic tendencies, Stevie Smith, called ‘the general view’.21 Women’s writings, too, can be vehicles of a grand, prophetic, modern indictment of the whole show, as say, some of Conrad’s, T. S. Eliot’s and Waugh’s were. This conviction underlies Sitwell’s novel I Live Under a Black Sun, and Heart of Darkness, ‘The Waste Land’ and A Handful of Dust loom alongside it like sombre monoliths.

  Sitwell’s spinal problem led her to identify with the great Augustan poet Alexander Pope, who suffered from an acute curvature of the spine, and, through him, with the darker aspect of the Augustan vision, notably in no less a figure than Swift. The central character in I Live Under a Black Sun is a modern version of Swift called Jonathan Hare, and it quotes Swift liberally. Its vision, like Swift’s, is without sweeteners. The ‘general view’ is the novel’s baseline and its insistent groundswell. It takes its larger sense of things from the urban context. Sitwell’s city is the città infernale, and the city is where one confronts essential truth; nature, by contrast, is incidental, exists as nooks and byways. In the urban ‘circles of hell’, Sitwell writes, all the forms of misery congregate together.22 Here one learns all one needs about the ‘old tyrannies and cruelties’, ‘the rankness of all human nature’, ‘this muddle and waste that we have made of the world’ (BS, pp. 19, 38, 175). Cities are places where ‘men have created and known fear’ as a consequence of ‘the man-made chasms’ between them (BS, p. 19). This is notably the case with the ‘two nations’ that ‘alone inhabit the earth, the rich and the poor’, walking ‘in opposed hordes’ in ‘their endless pursuit of nothingness’ to their death (BS, pp. 29, 105). This, says Sitwell, stonily, is all we have been capable of creating out of ‘the oceans of blood that have been spilt for us, from all the worlds that have been laid down for us’ (BS, p, 137) – so much for a world that has supposedly been ‘made safe by [the First World] war’ (BS, p. 104). But in any case, it is not war-free; memories of 1914–18 bulk large in it. One might better imagine the whole panorama as ‘laid waste by the Plague’, thick with ‘infections from the world’s fever’, haunted by shapes from prehistoric life, ‘worm’s spawn beginning in the worm’s shape, ending with the worm’ and thriving in the ‘morbid pomp’ of the sun (BS, pp. 38, 110, 138, 140). All of this Jonathan Hare apparently grasps with an unfathomable intensity, ‘a black unknowable power’ (BS, p. 13).

  One crucial moment in the novel comes more or less at its midpoint, when Jonathan shrugs at one of his two women, Anna:

  ‘Little tendernesses!’ he said to her. ‘Small marks of consideration! They are for small men, Anna. But that is what women want; that is all they care for. They know nothing of the vastness of life, and they care nothing; they are incapable of a great conception’. (BS, p. 120)

  I Live Under a Black Sun itself emphatically repudiates this condescending assumption of small-mindedness (not least in the figure of its author). At this point the novel turns increasingly against Hare. Darkness overtakes his women, first Anna, then Essy, then Anna again, more profoundly, and it is Hare, we increasingly see, who is responsible for smashing them up. He battens on, consumes, destroys them. In his most precious relations with women, he is himself the very instance of the fatal human virus he excoriates. Sitwell has long foretold that the ‘black unknowable power’ might ‘at any moment’ rise ‘to such vast and uncontrollable strength that it would turn on him who had been its master and destroy him’ (BS, p. 13). Like Swift, Hare goes mad, but in Sitwell’s narrative this final disintegration seems the direct result of his treatment of women. The havoc Hare has everywhere so lucidly perceived has finally become one both with the havoc he has caused and the psychic havoc in which he ends.

  Sitwell had a very profound understanding of Swift’s irony. She saw that it fuelled and confirmed his misanthropy in that he was able to turn the huge, despairing rage he felt towards humankind equally on himself, since he knew that the malignity and destructiveness
he saw everywhere were also his own, and recognized his own ‘craze for power’ as, like humankind’s, a lunacy (BS, p. 17). Hare’s irony has the same double edge. But Sitwell supplements it with her own, which is as baroque as Swift’s, but in a different manner. She reproduces Hare’s black panorama, understands it both from within and without, but also draws a limit to its purchase insofar as women are its needless sacrificial victims; and yet again, she also extends and deepens it in a final, Sitwellian version of it. For she brings us back from the ‘polar silence’ of Hare’s madness to a realm of psychic paroxysm which becomes indistinguishable from the pandemonium into which the world is plunging, turning us back to the apocalyptic vision that dominated the first half of the novel (BS, p. 244). Not surprisingly, the novel ends extremely starkly:

  Let them fight. Let them destroy each other.

  Then will come Darkness,

  Darkness.

  (BS, p. 254)