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Title: The Odd Women (Oxford World's Classics) by George Gissing, Patricia Ingham ISBN: 0-19-283312-X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Story That Speaks to Our Time
Comment: The other review posted and the editorial reviews do a much better job than I could in summarizing this story. However, I would like to comment on its insight & current applicability.
As mentioned, "The Odd Women" is about the women who don't get married for one reason or another. In the Brittish Victorian era, there was still a strong stigma against such women...that their one true goal & purpose in life is left unfulfilled. You enter into this cultural assumption almost as soon as you pick up the book.
What is new in this book was the very beginnings of the feminist uprising. Women were starting to rebel against such unfortunate and uncontrollable circumstances in their lives. And they began - out of financial considerations - to learn more masculine disciplines in order to make their own way in the world. At first, you think that this is encouraging and will naturally lead to peace & prosperity for the women...after a bit of struggle to raise the glass ceiling enough to get the women in the doorway.
I think where Gissing goes with the novel, however, is spectacular. Rather than showing such ideal outcomes, Gissing shows through Monica's character that the issue of women having careers wasn't just a matter of training. Women did not look to salvation through work. Most secretly longed for marriage while they were being trained, and some couldn't even focus their minds enough to take in the education. As shown through Monica's character, the women still would rather be trapped in loveless marriages than work.
In addition to developing this kink in the feminist plan, Gissing develops Rhoda's character in an even more dynamic manner. His insight into her strict, stiff, uncaring manner was piercing. He showed how her facad was based on her need to prove herself worthy in some manner; and this need rose from her not having received the attentions from a man. By bringing a desirable man into her life, Rhoda's whole philosophical system breaks down. The power struggle between these two is worth reading, even if a little masculine in its outcome.
In this way, Gissing continues to unveil how dependent these women's worlds still were on men. Even if they didn't want to be...even if they didn't have the choice to be, an idealic philosophy alone could not change these women's most secret desires and nature. It's a disturbing realization to behold.
But Gissing isn't degrading women. His insight is penetrating...especially for a man of his times...but he balances out his story well. He shows in a good way how a professor's long-awaited marriage helps him to become a much more fulfilled, well-rounded man. And, though pathetic, Monica's husband is clearly lonely & lost without a woman by his side. Gissing shows the men in this tale to be completely as in need of women (and desirous of companionship with them) as the women are of men.
In this way, Gissing's revelations lead one to somber despair. One realizes that the feminist uprising comes not out of a desire to truly work but out of an economic need and dignity of women for whom things did not work out. The story is not one of an pioneering spirit but rather of resignation to how things don't always work out and how people slip through the cracks.
Thus, while the historical and sociological insight Gissing provides is invaluable, his story has much to say in our times as well...and he says in such a way that I don't think most would have the courage to now.
Rating: 4
Summary: Early feminist novel by a man
Comment: "In The Odd Women there is not a single major character whose life is not ruined either by having too little money, or by getting it too late in life, or by the pressure of social conventions which are obviously absurd but which cannot be questioned." --George Orwell
George Gissing was a very odd man himself. Despite the fact that all his novels deal with social issues of the day, notably women, money, and class relations, he was neither a socialist nor a social reformer. He simply described in novels what he knew of degredation, misery, and the tortures "respectable" English society inflicted upon its outcasts and marginal figures. In The Odd Women Gissing chose to focus on the predicament of the extra females of Britain's disproporionate population ratio. These were the "odd" women who would never be matched with a man. Gissing's Madden sisters endured a representative sampling of the a dreary employment opportunities available for genteel but impoverished women in the 1890s. Of the two eldest Madden sisters, Alice was a governess until her health broke down; Virginia was lady's companion (poorly-paid drudge to an elderly tyrant) who has suffered from "mental lassitude" and taken to secret drinking. Another sister, a luckless "hard-featured" girl, is dead before the story begins; she taught in a girl's school until she committed suicide in despair. Monica, the youngest and only good-looking sister, spends twelve to sixteen hours a day on her feet in a large dry-goods shop and lives in an unsanitary dormitory with other shopgirls, some of whom supplement their wages by prostitution. Her sisters fear that Monica's health will also break down under this regime, and that she will lose her looks and her chance of marriage.
Enter Miss Rhoda Nunn and Miss Elinor Barfoot, two enterprising women who have founded a school to teach "odd" women business skills to enable them to compete economically, or at least rise above the general level of ill-paid drudgery. Barfoot and Nunn are early feminists; they wish to live and teach other women to live without feeling diminished by their unmarried status. Monica Madden considers enrolling in their school, but she has managed to meet and attract a man, a middle-aged bachelor named Widdowson, whom she marries instead. The substance of the novel involves the wreck of Monica's life following her disastrous marriage, and Rhoda Nunn's struggle to deal with her relationship with a man she is attracted to, but whom she cannot marry or live with without suffering diminishment and the loss of her role as a teacher and leader.
Gissing's book is a serious and sympathetic treatment of the much-discussed "woman question," and written from a point of view somewhat in advance of his time. The Odd Women has been mostly out of print for the last hundred years, and it is to be hoped that the recent appearance of three new editions heralds a long-delayed recognition of its merits.
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