The Heavenly Twins

1893, original Cassell edition
Madame Sarah Grand
The Heavenly Twins
Original and purchase price unknown
Hardcover with broken spine and worn corners
B-


I've always had mixed feelings about this novel.  Grand acts as if feminism is something completely new to her generation, who are the first women to be highly educated enough to be feminist.  It's as if she's never heard of Wollstonecraft, or known that there were women in the Renaissance who were not simply literate but scholarly.  Also, there's a snobbery in the book that's not just an aspect of its upper-class characters but seems to be the perspective of the narrator, with all the emphasis on the vulgarity and rude behaviour of the lower classses.

Additionally, I've got issues with "purity feminism," where the double standard is attacked because men's "vices" make them unworthy husbands.  Wilde takes the opposite (at)tack, believing that sex is not evil, even for women.  (Not that he's a feminist, but that's a different discussion.)  I do believe that the double standard was/is wrong, but acting as if women are (or should be) "pure" and on a pedestal, while men are (sometimes? usually?) victims of sexual urges that they should suppress, won't help matters.  Grand has a point, one Meredith made in 1859, that sowing wild oats, and probably contracting a venereal disease, and likely not telling the virginal wife, is unfair to that wife and the children.  Also, Grand doesn't believe in reformed rakes, like Tom Jones, while I think it depends on the circumstances.  I do agree that expecting said virginal wife, who in this book seems to always be 12 to 20 years younger than the husband, to reform the rake, when she's been sheltered from not just the act of but the knowledge of sex, is completely unfair.  To Grand's credit, she thinks that young women should be educated about medicine and the risks they'd be taking, although her concern is more with the moral than the physical decay.

The three main young ladies in the novel deal with the dilemma in different ways.  Nineteen-year-old Evadne, not unlike Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, learns the truth yet goes through with the marriage.  In Gwendolen's case, she does so out of a combination of thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness.  (It will secure her mother's financial support.)  Evadne, after some pressure from her mother, agrees to the "compromise" of living platonically with her sinful husband, while keeping up appearances.  This works fairly well, until he pressures her into never speaking out politically in his lifetime.  She goes from intellectually curious and forthright to withdrawn and depressed.

Edith is more sheltered than Evadne, and she marries a "childhood friend."  (Grand has weirder math than Alcott, and somehow a 17-year-old and a 30-year-old played together as children.)  He is, however, a very unreformed rake, so he ogles women right in front of her, and their baby is sickly.  She dies of depression, and he goes unpunished, except for Angelica throwing a Bible at him.

Angelica is one of the title characters, ironically named.  (Her brother Theodore is nicknamed Diavolo.)  She's pretty awesome, except for the violent streak.  Even though her mum is the most feminist of all the "elderly" women in the book (Grand seems to define "elderly" as 40+), Angelica for some reason thinks she's got no option but to get married.  So at 17 she proposes to a neighbour: "Marry me, and let me do as I like."  (Emphasis in the original.)  He does, but she's bored because she has no outlet for her energies.  She ends up disguising herself as her absent brother and, as The Boy, befriending a man.  Of course, it ends in his death.  She becomes a better person, deciding to devote herself to the social movements her uncle and aunt are involved in, as well as to her paternal husband.  (He calls her "my dear child," and she calls him Daddy.  Even allowing for Values Dissonance, this is creepy.)

Angelica's twin meanwhile has a "cry wolf" crush on Evadne, even though he's "six or eight" years younger.  (Except when it's convenient for the author, and then he and Angelica are four, or about ten, years younger.)  Diavolo, and even more so Angelica's imitation of him, is lazy and witty, like a pure-minded version of an Oscar Wilde gentleman, if that's not a contradiction in terms.  Some of the best parts of the book are the twins going around saying the unsayable.  I also like the portrayal of Evadne's parents, like the darker side of Meredith or the lighter side of Eliot, and Grand is good at pointing out the irony that they're more scandalised by Evadne than by her husband.  I find the world of Morningquest, with its recurring chime, well done.  I would say the first third of the book, particularly Evadne's self-education, is very well done.

But as the novel goes on, I drift further and further from the author.  By the time we get to Part Six, "The Impressions of Dr. Galbraith," I'm much less invested in the story.  It's partly that I'm sort of rooting for Evadne/Diavolo after Col. Colquhoun dies, and partly that I don't want Galbraith's impressions; I want Evadne's.  Also, on this reading, the idea of a doctor as a husband is more unpalatable after The Yellow Wallpaper.  True, he does eventually make her more engaged with life, rather than less, but at first he's worried about her reading or doing anything that might upset her.

Wikipedia tells me that at 16 Sarah Grand married a vice-ridden man 21 years her senior, eventually divorcing him in 1890.  I wonder if she ever considered that part of the problem with her world was that girls in their late teens were marrying men in their 30s.

With more regret than I felt over tossing From 18 to 20, I'll be getting rid of this copy.  If I ever want to read the novel again, and I've read it a half dozen times over the years, such is the strange hold it has on me despite my mixed feelings, it's both available online and in print, since there's a 100th anniversary edition, with cross-dressing, long-haired Angelica on the cover, ironically looking like a Wildean aesthetic man.  For once, I think Madame Sarah and Oscar would agree, and chuckle together.