Wife Stories: Narrating Marriage and Self in the Life of Jane Franklin

"Why do women marry? God knows, unless it be that like the great Wallenstein they do not find scope enough for their Genius and qualities in an easy life" (qtd. in Christianson 284). So Jane Welsh Carlyle lamented to John Forster in September 1840, after fourteen years of marriage to a cantankerous and demanding historian. Her ironic question and answer turned on its head the conventional wisdom that women found in marriage their protection, security, and comfort. She presented the choice to marry not as the humble acceptance of a fortunate possibility, but as a woman's deliberate and ambitious determination to test and expend her "Genius and qualities" in a difficult, demanding, and otherwise unrewarding role—one she chose to link with the ambitious, though ultimately unsuccessful, efforts of Albrecht Wallenstein, a celebrated general of the Thirty Years' War. In both its substance and its style, Carlyle's rhetoric claimed "Genius" for women. Her self-consciously satirical wit proclaimed her own particular writing genius at the same time as she declared that all women required genius if they were to survive as wives.

Jane Carlyle needed all the wit at her command to render her own marriage as a triumph of self-realization. As Jane Baillie Welsh, she had been gradually persuaded through many years of argumentative letter writing to abandon both her reluctance to marry and her writing ambitions in order to devote herself to tending the hearth of the writer and historian, Thomas Carlyle. Her grand gesture of self-abnegation condemned her to many years of bitterly humdrum existence. Her duty as wife was to achieve self-immolation; her tasks were to sustain the comfort of the home, to suppress the crowing of cocks that might irritate her husband's genius, and to soothe him after dinner with light conversation and music—to which he rarely attended. But few recognized her sacrifices as significant—or even as sacrifices. In the eyes of her contemporaries, she was not a Genius who had nobly submerged herself in the Wife, but only the wife of a genius. As she counted the cost of her decision, her own writing, in the form of private correspondence, became her chief recourse and consolation. In Aileen Christianson's words, she developed "a finely honed talent for the epistolary art: the art of a miniaturist creating mock-heroic struggles out of her daily life, in contrast to the blocks of monolithic history hewn by Thomas as he sat at the centre of her domestic life, essential to her both as rationale and as material" (283). Thomas Carlyle himself, as overbearing husband, became "a fine tragi-comic creation," an artful product of Jane Carlyle's genius for letter writing (283).

Unhappy wives make comfortable subjects for feminist biography. Jane Carlyle's caustic voice speaks to modern feminist historians in language they are well-primed to hear. Her letters evoke the constrictions and powerlessness that beset the middle-class Victorian wife, while at the same time offering an expressive, individualist voice of opposition and critique. In life she could do little to escape the confined world she had chosen, but after her death her diaries and letters were read by her husband, and through his remorseful agency her writing voice eventually reached the ears of an unwilling public. The miserable stories released by Thomas Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude—their burden the unhappiness and subversive vision of wives who had apparently surrendered all, to be repaid with neglect and indifference—destroyed Carlyle's posthumous reputation, unseating him from the pantheon of Victorian heroes (Clarke, Ambitious Heights; Rose). In the late twentieth century, those same revelations, augmented by the publication of Jane Carlyle's extensive correspondence with friends and relations as well as Thomas himself, provide rich fodder for numerous feminist reappraisals of the Carlyles' marriage. Nineteenth- century discomfort feeds naturally and effortlessly into twentieth- century critique.

It...