8.
The View from the Doll’s House
I vividly remember the first time I heard a parent say that she thought she and her husband should choose a mate for their daughter. (The moment is memorable largely because that first time has, so far, been the only time.) My initial thought was You’re completely insane. That was also my second and third thought, but reflecting on the encounter later I finally had a different thought, which was How do I know you’re completely insane? And that question led me down a curious path of thought.
The woman’s core argument was this: Young people are both hormone-afflicted and inexperienced, and that’s a combination of traits poorly suited to spouse selection. Better to allow their more knowledgeable and less emotionally invested parents to sift through the options and come up with the best fit for long-term satisfaction. Which (I thought) might be at least a defensible idea if those parents are as levelheaded as all that. But what if they happen to have priorities other than the happiness of their children? Or their idea of happiness is irreconcilably different from the children’s self-understanding? Or if they choose someone whom their child finds thoroughly unattractive?
As it turned out, the woman had anticipated all of these objections. She freely acknowledged that marriages made by parents could go wrong, and in exactly the ways that had leaped to my mind. But the question, she said, was not whether her model is perfect; it was whether her model was better than the one our society currently employs. Look at the state of marriage in this country, she said. Look at how many marriages fail. Look at how many young people, who see how many marriages fail, choose not to marry at all. It’s time to try something different. She even thought that, if we could clear away some of the widely distributed propaganda about Romantic Love, young people might come to embrace the idea, to appreciate being relieved of the burden of making a choice they don’t know how to make well.
I’m sure all of us have at some time had the experience I had then: being overwhelmed by having to confront an idea we had never considered—being at a loss, argumentatively, not because the person arguing with us is necessarily correct, but because that person has reflected on something we’ve never reflected on. Until that woman suggested her plan to me, I had never considered that there could be a serious alternative to our current model: two individuals choosing to marry each other on the basis of . . . well, whatever they thought was most important, I guess. On even two minutes’ reflection the whole system suddenly seemed ramshackle, maybe even untenable. Why had its shortcomings never occurred to me before?
I thought about Romeo and Juliet, who fit our norm, but then I also thought about Odysseus and Penelope—how did they find each other? I realized that I had no idea what Homer’s audiences would have expected, what their assumptions (probably as unconscious and unconsidered as my own) would have been. And I thought about a real woman, an Englishwoman who lived about three and a half centuries ago. Her name was Dorothy Osborne.
Once upon a time, in seventeenth-century England, there was a man named William Temple, who became a noted British diplomat. He was sufficiently distinguished that a writer named Thomas Peregrine Courtenay composed one of those hefty Victorian biographies of him in 1838. Courtenay’s Life of Sir William Temple had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the brilliant historian, journalist, and polemicist Lord Macaulay, who tore it to shreds in the pages of the Edinburgh Review—but one aspect of the book appealed to Macaulay: the Appendix, in which Courtenay had placed some of the letters written to Temple by a woman who loved him: Dorothy Osborne. “Mr. Courtenay expresses some doubt whether his readers will think him justified in inserting so large a number of these epistles,” Macaulay declared. “We only wish there were twice as many.” Macaulay’s enthusiasm in turn intrigued a certain Edward Abbott Parry, who tracked down the whole cache of letters and published an edition of them.
The story of William Temple and Dorothy Osborne is worthy of enshrinement in a cinematic historical romance. They met and fell passionately in love in 1645, in the midst of England’s Civil War, with fathers on opposite sides: Sir John Temple supported Oliver Cromwell and served in the Long Parliament, while Sir Peter Osborne, lieutenant governor of the island of Guernsey, so passionately loved King Charles that he was the last Royalist leader to surrender, yielding Castle Cornet to Parliamentary forces only when his men were starving. Even after the war’s conclusion, neither family was pleased by the prospect of Dorothy and William’s union.
Dorothy was beset by a flock of suitors, the most noteworthy of whom was Henry Cromwell, son of that dreadful rebel who would soon become Lord Protector of England. The Osbornes, who were short of cash at the time, felt they could scarcely afford to stand on ideological principle. Dorothy’s brother Henry—who seems to have been the de facto head of the family—was especially eager for the match. But, even when he allowed himself some political flexibility in relation to Henry Cromwell, he could not bear to think of William Temple as a suitor for his sister. It was, he thought, more a matter of character than politics. As Dorothy reported to her beloved, her brother said “that religion or honor were things that you did not consider at all, and that he was confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do anything to advance yourself.” This intense familial opposition prolonged the courtship for about eight years, though neither Dorothy nor William seems to have wavered in their commitment.
The letters of Dorothy’s that survive (none of William’s do) cover the courtship’s last two years. I will say flatly that they are among the very greatest letters written in the English language; and I will say equally flatly that Osborne is a match for Jane Austen—yes, Jane Austen—in wit. I cannot sustain those extreme claims without quoting rather extensively from her letters, which I shall now proceed to do.
Here’s a characteristic passage from a letter written in the summer of 1653, in which, as is habitual with her, she refers to her suitors as her “servants”:
My brother says not a word of you, nor your service, nor do I expect he should; if I could forget you, he would not help my memory. You would laugh, sure, if I could tell you how many servants he has offered me since he came down; but one above all the rest I think he is in love with himself, and may marry him too if he pleases, I shall not hinder him. ’Tis one Talbot, the finest gentleman he has seen this seven year; but the mischief on’t is he has not above fifteen or sixteen hundred pound a year, though he swears he begins to think one might bate £500 a year for such a husband. I tell him I am glad to hear it; and if I were as much taken [as he] with Mr. Talbot, I should not be less gallant; but I doubted the first extremely.
In addition to poor Talbot we find, in the same letter, an appearance by one of the recurrent characters in the epistolary saga: Sir Justinian Isham, a widower with five children (four of them daughters) who seems to have had a reputation for piety but whom Dorothy thinks “the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited learned coxcomb that ever yet I saw.” She invariably refers to him as “the Emperor Justinian” and describes her encounters with him in diplomatic terms: “Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor Justinian that comes to renew the treaty? In earnest, ’tis true, and I want your counsel extremely, what to do in it. You told me once that of all my servants you liked him the best. If I could do so too, there were no dispute in’t. Well, I’ll think on’t, and if it succeed I will be as good as my word; you shall take your choice of my four daughters.”
Osborne excels at such banter, but in the most remarkable of her letters, the power comes from an extraordinary moment of Christian reconciliation. It begins when Henry’s vitriolic condemnation of Temple’s character finally became too much for Dorothy, who up to this point has cheerfully ignored her brother’s attacks:
I had not patience for this. To say you were a beggar, your father not worth 4000 in the whole world, was nothing in comparison of having no religion nor no honor. I forgot all my disguise, and we talked ourselves weary; he renounced me again, and I defied him, but both in as civil language as it would permit, and parted in great anger with the usual ceremony of a leg and a courtesy, that you would have died with laughing to have seen us.
But this was not the end of the story.
The next day I, not being at dinner, saw him not till night; then he came into my chamber. . . . [He] sat half-an-hour and said not one word, nor I to him. At last, in a pitiful tone, “Sister,” says he, “I have heard you say that when anything troubles you, of all things you apprehend going to bed, because there it increases upon you, and you lie at the mercy of all your sad thoughts, which the silence and darkness of the night adds a horror to; I am at that pass now. I vow to God I would not endure another night like the last to gain a crown.”
And from that admission by the proud and haughty Henry, peace between brother and sister was restored.
[We] fell into a discourse of melancholy and the causes, and from that (I know not how) into religion; and we talked so long of it, and so devoutly, that it [allayed] all our anger. We grew to a calm and peace with all the world. Two hermits conversing in a cell they equally inhabit, never expressed more humble, charitable kindness, one towards another, than we. He asked my pardon and I his, and he has promised me never to speak of it to me whilst he lives, but leave the event to God Almighty; and till he sees it done, he will be always the same to me that he is; then he shall leave me, he says, not out of want of kindness to me, but because he cannot see the ruin of a person that he loves so passionately, and in whose happiness he had laid up all his. These are the terms we are at, and I am confident he will keep his word with me, so that you have no reason to fear him in any respect.
The tribulations of the courtship were not over even with this. After all the “servants” had been sent away and the families (however imperfectly) reconciled to the match, Dorothy contracted smallpox, which left her face disfigured by scars, her beauty gone. William’s love survived this last trial, and they were married at Christmas 1654. Dorothy’s death parted them forty-one years later. William outlived her by four years.
As vividly and movingly as Osborne can describe the dark nights of her soul, she always retains a healthy distance from even her deepest fears: the great constant in her prose is the wit that enables her to see the humor and absurdity of our affairs. Indeed, for those many difficult and uncertain years when she and Temple were separated, wit must have been her chief tool for emotional survival. She was one of the great chroniclers of the human comedy. But few other than me would rate her nearly so highly. Why is that?
Partly because she wrote only letters, and we do not think of letters as having the same literary status as novels or epic poems. Yet there are several writers, especially in the century following Osborne, who dedicated themselves to letter writing as a vital literary genre, who expected to be remembered as masters of that art. That is a bridge for us to cross if we want to appreciate Osborne; but it’s crossable.
A larger and more treacherous bridge is this: Osborne’s lack of interest in what we might think of as feminist concerns. Many of the writers published in, for example, the distinguished and scholarly Oxford Women Writers series exemplify a kind of proto-feminism, but Osborne seems to have had little in common with these authors. Indeed, in one letter she scoffs at the literary ambitions of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle: “Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too. If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.” And indeed, once Osborne and Temple were safely married, the flow of letters seems to have stopped—because why write if the one who had inspired your writing now shares your bed and your breakfast table?
So Dorothy Osborne is a complicated case for the modern reader. She insisted on the freedom to choose her husband in defiance of her family’s ideas of what was best for her, and she articulated her insistence in brilliant English prose. To that degree she embraces what we think of as a proper model of Romantic Love—which is why I commented that her story would make a wonderful movie. Yet she placed no particular value on her gifts as a writer, thought the very idea of a woman writing books an absurdity, and simply wanted to be married and to bear her beloved’s children.
The situation might create some cognitive dissonance for us. Do we practice negative selection and stop listening to her because of her acceptance of a culture in which the scriptures say “wives, obey your husbands”? Or do we set that aside and practice positive selection, and welcome Osborne into the household of writers we admire because of the spirit and wit with which she resisted her brother’s claimed dominance over her and insisted on following her own path to love?
It’s interesting, I think, to ask whether we would feel any differently about Osborne if she had taken something like the opposite path. What if she had meekly and obediently married the Emperor Justinian—but then refused to obey him and devoted her time to writing books, like the Duchess of Newcastle? Readers differ, but I think that alternate-universe Dorothy Osborne would seem a more modern figure to us, and perhaps a more sympathetic one. A bit like Nora Helmer.
Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was one of the sensations of the nineteenth century because of its portrayal of Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who ultimately finds the confines of bourgeois life unbearable and leaves her family. Even the suggestion that Nora might be right to do so was outrageous at the time—so much so that one of Ibsen’s contemporaries said that the play “pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics.”
Indeed, when the play was first performed in Germany the famous actress playing Nora refused to perform the final scene: “I would never leave my children!” Since Ibsen had no copyright laws to protect his play, and anyone could change it in any way they wished, he, with gritted teeth, wrote an alternate ending in which Nora, on the verge of departing her home, is forced to look into her children’s bedroom, whereupon she sinks to the floor in mute acknowledgment that she could never leave her children. Fade to black. Ibsen called this ending a “barbaric outrage” upon his play, but figured that changes made by other hands would have been even worse.
In 2017, a new play reached Broadway: A Doll’s House, Part 2, by Lucas Hnath, which revisits Nora and her family fifteen years after she walked out of the “doll’s house” in which she had been kept by her husband, slamming the door behind her. And in Hnath’s sequel Nora is very glad that she left her husband and children all those years ago.
To which Terry Teachout said: Well of course. Can you imagine a play on Broadway in 2017 suggesting that Nora perhaps should have swallowed her frustrations and remained to raise her children? This review is the origin of the “theater of concurrence” phrase I used in the previous chapter:
The favorable reception of A Doll’s House, Part 2 was as much a foregone conclusion as is its ending, which is a quintessential example of what I call the “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything. The success of such plays is contingent on the exactitude with which the author tells his audience what it wants to hear, and Hnath obliges in every particular. Above all, the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.
I haven’t seen the play, but I have read it, and I don’t think Teachout is right about Hnath—though he may well be right about the performance he saw. Reading Hnath’s play I found myself disliking Nora very much, especially the way she recasts her abandonment of her family in terms of heroic sacrifice. For instance, she tells the family’s servant Anne Marie about the great personal “discipline” she had to exercise in order to prevent herself from sending Christmas presents to the three children she left without a mother. How brave of you, Nora! (Later, when Anne Marie tells Nora it was terrible for her to leave her children, Nora replies that it’s not a big deal, men leave their families all the time.)
And there’s a powerful moment when Nora meets her daughter Emmy—the daughter who doesn’t remember her because she was so young when Nora left. Emmy knows that Nora has written books denouncing the institution of marriage, and so is reluctant to tell Nora that she herself is engaged. “You think no one should get married,” she says, which Nora at first denies, but then goes into a lecture about how “Marriage is this binding contract, and love is—love has to be the opposite of a contract—love needs to be free.” And when Emmy resists this:
Nora: How much do you even know about marriage?
Emmy: Nothing.
Nora: Exactly.
Emmy: Because you left, I know nothing about what a marriage is and what it looks like. But I do know what the absence of it looks like, and what I want is the opposite of that.
And ultimately Emmy forces Nora to admit that the only reason Nora is speaking to her is to enlist her help in getting Torvald, her husband, to give Nora a formal divorce.
This does not, to me, look like a situation in which “the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.” You could perhaps play it that way. You could do something to make Emmy unattractive—in fact, perhaps the only way to make Nora seem unquestionably right is to make every other character in the play seem unquestionably awful—but Hnath’s writing does not hand you that interpretation on a platter. (Very much the same is true of his earlier play The Christians, whose pastor protagonist takes a stand that every good liberal will admire but may also be a selfish and calculating jerk.) If the director and cast of the performance Teachout saw managed to make the play’s meaning unambiguous, then that’s a sign of how desperately the performers as well as the viewers of plays can feel the need for a theater of concurrence—even when the playwright wants to deny them that comfort.
Near the beginning of this book I talked about the ways that information overload generates the need for informational triage. That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person. Admiring is easier when a person embodies values that stand high on our list of priorities—especially if we think that those priorities are being threatened. It is likely that, among the company staging A Doll’s House, Part 2 and among its Broadway audiences, a good many people believe that a Handmaid’s Tale–style misogynist theocracy, with fundamentalist Christian men enslaving women to fixed roles as Handmaids and Aunts and Marthas, could emerge if we are not vigilant. If so, then—in light of our earlier discussion of the situations in which we are disinclined to acknowledge that even vitally necessary progress comes with costs—we are sure to find among those people a strong inclination to support Nora’s choice and to minimize the costs of it. Presumably Lucas Hnath wrote the play because it raises questions that are germane to our moment—but the questions germane to our moment are precisely the ones that are hardest for us to assess fairly, because of our emotional investment in them. (As D. T. Max comments in a profile of Hnath, “The hallmark of a Hnath script is robust argument, but these debates are always infused by the stormy relationships around them.”) That is where the theater of concurrence comes from: it encourages us in the feeling that we’ve reached the proper conclusions on the issues involved and therefore don’t need to revisit them—and a good feeling it is, because heaven knows there’s already enough for us to think about. Once more we perceive the power of triage.
So in light of Hnath’s play we can see that, from our perspective if not from his, Ibsen rather let himself off the hook by ending A Doll’s House where he did. He didn’t have to reflect on the costs and consequences of Nora’s decision to leave because all he had to do was to show us that such a decision could be psychologically plausible and at the very least not necessarily immoral. That was the idea that had to be raised in his time: that human beings—even women!—have the right to self-determination and are not morally required to set aside their own well-being for the sake of the social order into which they happen to be born.
That particular lesson we have learned so well that it can be hard to remember that it had to be learned. Which can take the steam out of a performance today of A Doll’s House: yes, yes, we think, of course Nora is right to declare her independence. What was in its time a drama of profound tension can become in our own a mere melodrama, in which we already know who to root for. I have a suspicion that Lucas Hnath wrote a sequel to the story in order to revivify those characters: and it has the interesting side effect of making Ibsen’s original drama stand forth more brightly, to make its original question—Does this woman dare to escape her doll’s house?—seem alive again. As though we had not answered it definitively.
These complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past—they are the chief means, I think, by which increasing our temporal bandwidth increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost to this, and we have to fight our triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives. We see their moral frames continually coming in and out of focus: at one moment we feel that we know them intimately and at the next scarcely at all. Think of how the modern reader feels about Dorothy Osborne’s determination to marry the person she loves, and then about her contemptuous disdain for women who write books.
Helen Lewis, when she was coming toward the end of writing a book on the history of feminism, commented,
I can finally see why historians are so evangelical about what they do: studying history completely reframes how you see the present. A dozen times during the research, I found that a thought I believed was original had been expressed beautifully by a woman in the 1850s, or 1910s, or 1970s. It has made me feel more connected to feminism as a tradition, but also furious with myself for taking the long way round when other women had hacked a path through the weeds for me, if only I had known.
This is wonderfully true and powerful; but there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you. That is, I firmly believe, the greater moment of enlightenment: the moment of double realization. To confront the reality that the very same people who give us rich wisdom can also talk what seems to us absolute nonsense (and vice versa) is an education in the human condition. Including our own condition, which is likewise compounded of wisdom and nonsense.
A 2019 episode of the radio program This American Life tells the story of a woman named Shamyla, whose Pakistan-born parents raised her in suburban Maryland. They were her adoptive parents: she had actually been born to her mother’s sister, who had several children, and, in keeping with a common custom, gave one of hers to her childless sibling. Later, the sister who had been unable to conceive got pregnant, twice, and gave birth to two boys.
When Shamyla was twelve, she traveled to Pakistan to visit her extended family in Peshawar, and when she arrived they decided to keep her. She was their child, they said; they also said that the parents who had taken her in didn’t really love her, they loved only their boys, their “real” children. Also, it was clear that if she were raised in America she would become immoral, faithless, apostate. Her “real” family would therefore raise her as a faithful Muslim girl—according to their understanding of what Islam is—even though they knew that she had so many bad American habits that her reeducation would be painful for everyone concerned. And they could do this because Shamyla’s adoption had never been formalized: in the eyes of Pakistani law, she was with her true family there in Peshawar and those distant Americans had no claim upon her. So the project of transforming Shamyla began.
She had to learn to cover her head, of course, and not to look men in the eye. She had to make herself marriageable, which meant, her new family believed, that she needed to get thinner, so they installed a lock on the refrigerator so she couldn’t raid it. The books that she had brought with her were sure to corrupt her, and besides, a woman who reads is not attractive; so they took the books away and did not replace them. Shamyla loved to write stories, but this was perhaps worse than reading: her old/new father took her journals into the backyard and forced her to watch him burn them. She had to learn new ways, new duties; when she did not obey, she would be beaten. And so her life in Peshawar began.
But one day when she was visiting a market with a friend—she was at least allowed to have friends—she saw something that caught her attention. At one stall there was a stack of books, books in English, cheap imports from Singapore. And one of the books was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which Shamyla remembered reading, and loving, back in Maryland, in her previous life. She asked the friend to buy the book for her, promising to pay her back, and she snuck it into her bedroom and hid it in her mattress. She was worried about it making too large a lump, so she disassembled the book into eight pieces, and dispersed them along the length of the mattress.
And thus Shamyla discovered her refuge. “It was the book of my life. It was the only book I had to escape. It was the only book that I had to actually read over and over again. And I kind of memorized it.” It was an escape into a wholly different world: on the other side of the globe, and 150 years in the past.
And yet not everything was alien. When Shamyla read about the social limitations on girls who were not yet “out” in society—“Where is the use of having a lot of dresses when she isn’t out yet?” says one character—she realized that that was precisely her situation as well, and that of many girls her age in Peshawar. What she could do, how she could dress, whom she could meet and speak to, all were determined by her status as a girl not yet out. And all of a sudden this book whose chief attraction had been the utter dissimilarity to her life in Peshawar—its world of talking to boys and writing stories—became dear to her in a new way: because those nineteenth-century American girls knew at least one of the constraints she knew.
Shamyla eventually made her way back to the United States and never returned to Pakistan, but the years in which Little Women was her only companion, her only help, her only access to a better world than the one she was forced to live in, have marked her permanently. She calls Little Women her Bible. Every year on her birthday she reads the chapter that corresponds to her age, and feels that that chapter might tell her something about what will befall her in the year to come. And when she struggles to make a decision, she does something that people have for centuries done with the Bible (and for that matter with Virgil’s Aeneid): she opens the book to a random place, drops her finger like a dowsing rod onto the page, and looks to see what counsel the sacred text has for her.
We sometimes have similar mixed reactions to our own contemporaries, especially if they come from different cultures than ours. But the past brings home to us in distinctive ways the enormous range of difference in human experience. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once gave very shrewd counsel to people studying the past: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” That is, what people in the past were openly debating and conversing about is unlikely to be the most important thing about them. “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.” And those unarticulated ideas are the truly key ones in any culture or age—including our own.
When we encounter real people from the past, like Dorothy Osborne, and fictional ones, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House or Jo March in Little Women, our instinctive responses tell a tale about our values, our commitments, our assumptions, our hopes, our fears—and about theirs. When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it. This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor—a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time. (The sad thing is that only we can benefit from it, not the ones whose world we visit.) As Leslie Jamison says, that tension crackles and sparks. And the sparks produce both light and warmth.