George, Eileen and the Patriarchy

Reading Anna Funder’s book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, about George Orwell and his wife Eileen, feels like listening to a clairvoyant seeking meaning and explanation from the tea leaves and dregs left in a stormy teacup after a seance. Perhaps Funder’s “sincere hope” that the biographers of Orwell (including Bernard Crick and Gordon Bowker, who are dead) will “embrace” Wifedom “in the spirit in which is intended” will be fulfilled if the spirit behind Wifedom materialises. But I could not embrace that “spirit” because it did not materialise for me; it is still deep within Funder, deeper than she is saying.

This review appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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Funder is indebted to Orwell’s biographers because for her they are straw patriarchs who are, at first glance, easy to blow away. Wifedom is nearly an epiphanal book; the research is thorough if selective, her observations about patriarchy are true and telling. But her thesis that “we are all caught in this gendered fiction” of patriarchy is an incomplete analysis of Orwell and Eileen, as it is of the relationships between men and women in our times. Her book co-opts the “behind every great man” trope as part of an argument about the pervasive perniciousness of patriarchy.

For her thesis to work, Funder needs to find evidence that patriarchy’s power is everywhere and finds it in Eileen and Orwell and in the male biographers of Orwell who fail to acknowledge Eileen properly. But Sylvia Topp, who knows the stories about Orwell and Eileen as well as or better than Funder, does not see Eileen through the lens of patriarchy in her book Eileen: The Making of George Orwell. Topp’s more detailed book about Eileen does not have a thesis to justify but is sharp and cuts deep into the cambium of their lives, allowing us to see that more than patriarchy explains them. Funder sees more of the wood and less of the trees. Funder—short shriftly—acknowledges that Topp has seen what she has seen but that they interpret it differently. Topp sees Orwell and Eileen as talented people struggling through life at a dreadful time in history. She brings Eileen to centre stage with Orwell without making claims about why literary history and biography have apparently neglected or minimised Eileen. Still, Topp is a clairvoyant too, citing analyses of the handwriting of Eileen and her brother, Laurence, to make statements about their characters and personalities. This hope to divine the future or what is unknown is part of the Orwellian heritage; Orwell had a horoscope done for their child, Richard, soon after they adopted him.

It is not true that Orwell’s biographers make Eileen invisible. The indexes of the biographies are replete with references to her. Some biographers such as Michael Shelden state their opinions about Orwell’s failings as a husband, and acknowledge Eileen properly. Funder does not refer to Robert Colls’s biography of Orwell and may not consider Peter Davison’s Complete Works as biographical, but they contain many revealing and detailed notes about the lives of those who were involved with Orwell and show if not state the significance of Eileen in Orwell’s life and writing. Funder does not refer to John Rodden, who in his book The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St George” Orwell, examines feminist analyses of Orwell; these feminist analyses in ignoring Eileen show and reinforce the truth of Funder’s central claim that women and their work are minimised compared to men even among those who want more for women. But Rodden’s perspective on them also reveals another truth—that women’s lesser power than men’s has many causes, of which patriarchy is one.

Nothwithstanding the real and great inequalities of power between men and women in politics, Funder may be uninterested in the politics of gender if she thinks that the ballot box is an example—“not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power as men”. A pertinent question is, why is ballot-box power not enough to better the situation of women? The answer is that democracy as we know it cannot do the work that needs to be done to change itself from a power-based to a needs- and wellbeing-based forum.

At times Orwell was narcissistic, misogynistic, androcentric, creepy, and had sociopathic traits; an arsehole, to use Funder’s daughter’s classification of such men. Eileen was charmed by and infatuated with him. Her brother Laurence was reckless and—as a husband, father, son, brother, and surgeon—incredibly selfish if we believe that he refused to seek shelter when the bombs fell at Dunkirk. But perhaps he was catatonic from intense fear. And they were so because, through no great fault of their own, they did not live measured and balanced lives or think about themselves enough. They were also very clever, kind, helpful, courageous and generous big-hearted people at times.

Human life is very complicated. All of us are constrained by and sometimes hostage to things we cannot easily control or change and might be unwilling to change even if we could change them. Often the hostage-takers are families and societies that treat us badly, again not necessarily malevolently. Some people learn about such things early and can change their lives, others learn late in life and some such as Orwell, Eileen and Laurence, never learn enough about themselves before they die far too young.

Wifedom minimises other causes of the often abysmal state of relationships between men and women such as economic, psychological and ethical influences. Our circumstances shape our lives in profound ways. Habits are hard to break regardless of whether they are smoking cigarettes or being untidy or expecting someone to make the tea or put away the laundry. We should break habits that devalue, diminish and degrade lives. The most irritating part of Wifedom for me is that Funder, in highlighting her own powerlessness to change patriarchy in her family, risks portraying patriarchy as too big to change.

Corralling children into early-learning creches and foisting the elderly into old folks’ homes while paying care workers the minimum wage or barely above it is the habit of wanting more for less and at the same time saying that I would rather (or have to) work elsewhere than look after you, my child, my mother. Rather than men and women sharing care more or less equally, they side-stepped patriarchal parenting but undervalued care. Institutional care of the young and elderly are necessary and important but not at the cost of devaluing care itself. The failure of laws and legislation to protect women and children from violence is a failure of democracy and of the philosophy that freedom trumps equality and care. Avril Blair thought that young Richard should be slapped when he made a fuss about putting on a jumper. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, “It remains lawful for parents in all states and territories to use ‘reasonable’ physical punishment to discipline their children.” Need we say more about why patriarchy exists?

Women’s greater and excessive work in the home is an ethical and psychological problem about justice and fairness, which can be solved in the spirit of fair conscionable contracts between those involved including children, and by breaking the unjust habits of generations. It is why we should have a universal basic income and a decent parenting income, and for the richer in the world adopting an ethos of living better with less.

If you want to understand psychologically why Orwell and Eileen were the way they were and why patriarchy succeeds (and why Funder is doing an unfair load of housework) read Raising Competent Children by Jesper Juuls. His paradigm-shifting insight is that the crucial task of families is to enable all the members of a family and perhaps especially the children to develop such a strong sense of personal integrity and autonomy that they take what they need from and give what they can to each other fairly. Then, they won’t be forty or fifty years old before they learn enough to be able to live measured and balanced lives. The family can be a school for male despotism, as noted by John Stuart Mill, but it is also the trailhead for meaningful change. In The Subjection of Women Mill wrote, “The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom … What is needed is that it should be a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other.”

Why Funder focused mostly on patriarchy when she could have been multifocal is an interesting question. Perhaps she cannot see or does not want to see the capitalist rendering and reinforcement of human relationships as primarily instrumental, and neglects how ethics and the psychology of common decency and fairness could undermine this instrumentality. Does she want the cake of capitalism and eat it too, as nearly all of us do? Undermining patriarchy in the family first is an answer; patriarchy started in families and could end first in families. Perhaps being less enamoured by power; the rich and famous, the “eminent historian”, the “powerful journalist married to a famous writer” or the “lawyer with a triple black belt in karate” would help us undermine patriarchy.

I have been up since 4.30 a.m. writing and revising this piece (to get uninterrupted time, and so that my writing does not impinge on my family life), motivated by a drive to—sensitively, I hope—expose Funder’s half-truth about patriarchy. Her book is inspiring. I must go. I have to make my wife Kristina two cups of tea and a cup of coffee and bring them to her while she is in bed, make our daughter Amy breakfast, and then drive Kristina to work (after she has made Amy a better lunch than I am willing to make) before I spend (and I do mean spend) the day working in the garden and house, visiting my ninety-nine-year-old mum in the old folks’ home, taking Amy to her music lesson after getting her from school, then making dinner while Kristina works to earn more money than we need to keep us afloat before she comes home and does the laundry and maybe the dishes, gets Amy ready for bed, and occasionally, telling us that she is the breadwinner in this outfit and as such is entitled to have some time for herself. And so she is. She is a wonderful wife and mother and my most acute teacher and mentor. I hope that I am able and willing to learn from her and her wisdom.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
by Anna Funder
Hamish Hamilton, 2023, 464 pages, $36.99

Matt Gaughwin is a behavioural biologist and retired medical practitioner.