The Awakening Conscience (1853) by William Holman Hunt

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady By Kate Summerscale, Bloomsbury, Rs 599

While Queen Victoria, with a little help from Tennyson, was weeping buckets of idle tears for her dead husband and being the model wife, her fellow Englishwomen were falling like ninepins all over the country. They were succumbing to adultery, prostitution, seeking divorce, living in sin, and in some rare cases, bashing up the offending husbands. With the opening of the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in 1858, it was proved that nearly all the Victorian closets were rattling with naughty skeletons, which tumbled out in glee once the newly constituted Divorce Act brought them back to life again.

In her previous book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale had dealt with the seamy underside of Victorian life by reconstructing the real-life murder of a child that had thrilled the English countryside in the 1860s. Among other things, the reconstruction led credence to the aphorism that life imitates art, since the central elements of the case, starting from the clue in the dirty laundry, the body hidden in the privy to the Scotland Yard detective, were the stuff that so much fiction of the time was made of. In this book too, Summerscale engages the reader with the correspondence between life and art by examining the adulterous affair of a middle-class Victorian woman, Isabella Robinson. With her strong passions, intellect and moodiness, Isabella could have been a heroine from the novels of the Brontës, George Eliot or Fanny Burney. But the interplay between fact and fiction gets keener in this book than it was in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This is because the court case involving Henry Robinson’s appeal for divorce from his wife, Isabella, that this book dramatizes, hinged on the journals kept by the latter, where she gave voluptuous expression to her infatuation with the young, and married, medical student, Edward Lane, as well as to her bitter hatred of the unloving husband.

Like the purloined letter, the diary itself is missing now — Summerscale thinks that it was probably destroyed by Henry. But the gossip-hungry contemporary press and the court had documented all the juicy bits — this is how Summerscale could read Isabella’s mind as laid bare in her diary. The mediated access can, of course, raise many textual questions that Summerscale does not go into here, perhaps because that would have complicated matters further. The overwhelming evidence against Isabella in the case rested on the assumed veracity of the diary as a document. But what was Isabella really recording in her diary? Was it her lived experience or was it the life of her fantasy? And were her outpourings meant for her own eyes only or did she have an audience in mind all the time? Henry chanced upon the diary when Isabella was delirious with diphtheria, and thus began the long legal wrangle initiated by the supposedly wronged husband (Henry kept a number of mistresses and had two illegitimate children — facts which never counted against him in the case). Perhaps, even if unconsciously, Isabella wanted her husband to discover her feelings both for him and for Lane and so end the festering marriage. Isabella was a well-read woman, and it would not be surprising if she had been conscious of the unconscious, which had begun to stir in the public psyche at about this time.

While pulling the diary to pieces, the judges wondered whether Isabella was in her right mind. After all, it was unthinkable that a married woman and a mother of three could give free expression to her desire for multiple men, seek satiety with them, and still care for her family and friends. To absolve Lane of the charge of adultery and salvage his reputation, Isabella’s lawyers later had to argue that her colourful accounts of togetherness with Lane were the products of the diseased mind of an erotomaniac. While that served the purposes of Lane and of outraged morality, Summerscale’s extracts from the diary tell a different story. One can’t deny that there is an element of the novelistic in confessions such as “I never spent so blessed an hour as the one that followed [with Lane], full of such bliss that I could willingly have died not to wake out of it again. I shall not relate ALL that passed, suffice to say I leaned back at last in silent joy...” Similarly, “I shall not state what followed” sounds too coy to be real, while reminding one of Hardy’s drawing of the veil over the significant scene of Tess’s seduction. Isabella may have been making up things here. But it can also be that in order to describe such intensely lived experiences, she could only take recourse to the language of the texts she had read. Besides, in these lines, the middle-aged, reportedly plain-looking housewife becomes the heroine of her own novel. Maybe, like all writers, Isabella started off from reality and then embellished it in a way to suit her fancy. Seen in this light, diary-writing becomes an exercise in self-love and the diary a site of an autonomy that a woman in Isabella’s social position could not have had in real life.

In writing her diary, Isabella had unleashed a force which assumed an insidious life once it was out in the world. It compelled the public to look at adultery through the eyes of the adulteress, whose frustrations with the institution of marriage rung an alarm bell in several female hearts imprisoned in the corsets of respectability. Moreover, Isabella was smashing the Victorian myth of the wife as the angel of the hearth and letting loose the madwoman in the attic by unashamedly voicing her desires, that too in writing. As Summerscale says: “Female writers, who had become increasingly prevalent by the mid-nineteenth century, were all implicated in the excesses of Isabella’s journal.” With the journal out in the open, Isabella was, even if unwittingly, exercising power over more than one man — over Henry, who was thus reduced to the comic figure of the cuckold, and over Lane, whose honour was sullied like a woman’s if Isabella’s account of their dalliance was held to be true. The resulting topsy-turvydom, in which wives scorned their husbands’ authority, dreamt of sex, wrote about it, and in the process, empowered themselves, was frightening in the reality it hinted at.

Summerscale leaves Isabella’s story to grow in the readers’ mind after she has pithily presented the facts and her analysis, both of which can lead in every possible direction. The author’s terseness enables her to present every possible facet of the case, complete with the correlations to literature, in the space of just 226 pages. The calm surface of Summerscale’s narration both heightens and lightens the sensational matter she is dealing with. She writes with a straight face about Catherine Crowe, a minor writer, being in love with a ghost, about Euphemia Ruskin “who, after six years as the wife of the celebrated art critic, John Ruskin, had petitioned for an annulment on the grounds that her marriage had never been consummated”, about the phrenologist, George Combe, whose head was removed for further study with his wife’s consent after his death, or about the tortured masturbator, George Drysdale, who talked of sexual freedom as the only cure for onanism way back in 1854. With these figures surrounding Isabella, her excesses, if they were that indeed, seem normal, almost an expression of the spirit of the age. While withholding judgment on Isabella, Summerscale subtly realigns the line separating madness and sanity so that Isabella becomes a part of the sizeable crowd that questioned beliefs — whether in religion, marriage or the family — and was damned for it.

Summerscale seems to delight in giving bizarre happenings and eccentric people a local habitation and a name. The facts she starts with in her books are usually so strange that fiction looks pale in comparison. In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, on the one hand, Summercale makes a human being — ordinary in her cravings, expectations and fervent imaginings — out of the woman who had been demonized as a home-wrecking nymphomaniac. On the other, she peels off layers of Victorian morality to find an age that tried hard to come to grips with the naked shingles of the world revealed by the receding sea of faith. The staid old Queen Victoria said it all. She is quoted by Summercale as writing in a letter to her newly-wed daughter: “I think people marry far too much... it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.”