Mary Ann Evans (whose pseudonym was George Eliot) is an author I wish I had discovered when I was a teenager.
Like many teenage girls. I had read the "Anne of Green Gables" series by L.M. Montgomery along with "Little Women" and "Little Men" by Louisa May Alcott as a preteen. As a teenager, I read the more adult short stories written by both women while discovering period authors like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin.
For me, her novel "Middlemarch" was a poignant antidote to the seductive poison of novels that predict a happy, painless marriage based on a fairytale romance leading to marriage. Specifically, characters named Lydgate and Rosamund fall madly in love, marry, and then realize that they are absolutely miserable together in a time and place where divorce is impossible.
At the same time, Ms. Evan writes an equally striking rebuttal against expecting passionate women who want to change the world to do so through marriage to a well-educated but stodgy older man. Dorothea was raised by a well-meaning but scattered-brained bachelor uncle. Because they live in a small town,are technically members of the gentry, and were educated on the models of the time, Dorothea and her sister Celia have grown up isolated and undereducated for Dorothea's desires in life to make changes. Celia, by her less ambitious and more easy-going temperament, fits well into society's design for her. Dorothea sticks out as being overly religious, too passionate and simply makes a lot of people uncomfortable by her inability to read a room. The following quote is a narrative description of the ideas that 19-year old Dorothea Brooke has as a single woman:
Can you see why Dorothea reminds me of a lot of CP/QF girls?
Dorothea's flaw is not her passion or even her lack of education. No, her flaw is that she expects to expand her ability to change the world by marrying a much older man who has been slowly creating a magnum opus about an obscure topic of mythology. She embarks on her marriage to Casaubon in with cautious excitement about a greater level of sacrifice leading to personal fulfilment from a greater cause.
What she receives is a marriage where she must stifle her very self to protect her husband's frail ego while he is dying of a heart disorder.
Nineteen-year old Jasmine Baucham's vision for a future husband reminds me so much of Dorothea Brooks
This quote triggers four areas of CP/QF ideology among young women. First, their future husband is a paragon of quiet knowledge, calm sensibility and mature management of all emotional issues. He is a pinnacle of hard-work, fair judgement towards his wife, and reigns over the family with benevolent kindness.
All of this makes me more in favor of unchaperoned time between young men and women. After all, the only way to keep this kind of idealistic future husband in mind is to never ever spend time around real men. Some men work hard; others are lazy. Some men work hard, but cannot turn hard work into enough money to support their families; some inherently lazy men figure out how to find jobs that pay well enough for their families' needs. All men have emotions. Expecting a young man (and I'm pretty much clumping everyone under 50 in this group) to dispassionately decide what is best for the entire family and then calmly lead his wife to the same decision is insane. Most men will try and decide what is best for the entire family group - but some are selfish. Some are so selfish as to be narcissistic.
A more realistic expectation would be to expect to grow and change with a spouse - but that doesn't sound quite as nice.
The second and third ideas that I would like to discuss are intertwined. I mentioned Lydgate and Rosamund from "Middlemarch" earlier. The mismatch in their personalities and desires comes to a head because of the expenses and debts they acquired while setting up a home. Lydgate, particularly, epitomizes two fallacies that CP/QF girls are prone to fall into. Lydgate is quietly disparaging internally of people who are materialistic while being blind to his own assumptions of what is absolutely necessary in running a home.
It's easy to see where Jasmine Baucham mocks young women who are too materialistic in her view. These women want the newest and best appliances. They want a husband who will put no restraints on their actions. They want a husband who will dote on them. These women want a husband who will check his actions and dreams if the actions required of the wife are too much for her to handle. Women like that are materialistic and therefore undeserving of a great marriage.
What Jasmine Baucham is blind to - like most 19-year-olds of all stripes - is her personal assumptions about minimal acceptable standards. After all, labeling someone as materialistic is a bit like labeling someone a nymphomaniac; the label says as much about what a person believes is a normal level of material comfort or sex as it does about the other person's life.
She assumes hardworking husband will be able to afford to replace broken appliances without the wife working outside the home or cutting into other needed goods. Her world is does not include Joy (Duggar) Forsyth living in an RV for years while her husband works at the family campground and flips a house a year. Her assumptions cannot fathom Debi Pearl's oldest daughter illegally squatting on a Native American reservation without access to basic utilities like water, sewage or power.
She assumes that a similar-in-age husband will be able to provide wise and judicious insight to his wife's spiritual and character development. Her world ignores a young man who is jealous of attention his wife draws from others. She cannot conceive of a marriage partner like Ben Seewald who clearly could care less about fine-tuning other people's spiritual beliefs while trying to support a wife and three small children through manual labor.
Jasmine has been taught that her future husband will be a "priest, prophet, provider and protector" by her father - and she's too young or sheltered to recognize the absurdity of that claim. In most religions, priesthood is conferred after an extensive period of study and close monitoring - not simply because a person is a married man. Prophecy is even more rare of a talent - and no one pretends that prophecy is anything besides a rare gift from the divine. Provider is the least absurd of the claims - but how are the providing capabilities of a high school graduate with minimal career training in comparison to her father who has a bachelor's degree, a master's degree and a professional degree in ministry? Protector is anachronistic. Women and children needed protectors when there were marauding bands from other villages attacking on a regular basis. Today, the tragedies likely to strike a family cannot be warded off by a weapon and a strong arm.
My last observation is that sexual desire seems completely absent from this future marriage. Jasmine Baucham's writings often refer to raising children - and CP/QF families are very much in favor of babies - but the writings for unmarried daughters are completely scrubbed of any implication that the young women understand that babies come as a result of adults having sex.
That's the end of the chapter on a false view of husbands....or was it marriage....I honestly don't remember - and I'm too lazy to look it up. :-P
Excellent handling of the QF's terrible marital expectations. I was just reading through my copy of So Much More last night and came across the timelessly horrendous quote about husbands being "prophets, priests and kings" (and this was in a paragraph telling girls how to treat their brothers bc that's what those brothers would be one day to their own families! How would girls EVER relate with such males, or act around them? Puts me in mind of a fantasy novel where everyone tiptoes around a glowing, golden little princeling who's destined to be the next Gandalf or something).
ReplyDeleteI either had no idea or forgot that George Eliot was a woman. Books like Middlemarch are still important, and coincidentally I've been watching two different versions of Madame Bovary. The ironic thing is that QF girls would deeply condemn not only Bovary's actions, but her love of novels and high expectations of passionate romance, while being completely unaware of the harmful and fake picture of marriage their own supposedly wise parents have sold them.
I hadn't thought of that! Plus, she married Bovary to get out of a rather awful home-life....and "any port in a storm" is a tried-and-true way to cause a shipwreck.
DeleteGreat point! I'm surprised more QF daughters didn't find the ideal of QF hubbies sold to them to be dreadfully boring or bossy, but maybe that's just another reason that so many have left or outgrown the movement.
DeleteTwo main things struck me with this.
ReplyDeleteOne was the last line in her first quote: "Think, instead, of a loving prophet, priest, provider, and protector to whom you'll have to submit - even when ( especially when)it becomes difficult".
The words "have to submit" stick out like not only a sore thumb but a huge flashing red light. It tells me exactly how she (and probably every other woman or young woman in the movement) feels but usually won't admit.
She doesn't say "get to" or "want to". And I know it sounds weird to even say that anyone would ever want to do something like that. But think about all the things we kind of really want to do that might not sound awesome.
I want to go to the gym (I hate the gym really, but I like how I feel after I go and I like that I'm taking care of myself). I want to eat healthy food (I like ice cream and nachos better but again, I feel better when I eat good stuff). I want to clean my home (not because I love cleaning -- I'm no Monica Geller -- but because I like how a clean space makes me feel and I'm grateful for the things I have).
All of these things are examples of things I might not love but I do want to do for some reason. In the same way, if in a book (where you have every opportunity to edit and self-censor) you haven't caught the slip that belies the fact that you will HAVE TO submit to someone, that tells me there is possibly a very deep resentment.
The second thing that stood out was what you were saying about how ridiculous it is to expect a young husband to be all those things she lists. The mental picture of a 20-year-old boy (cause really, a lot of them still are boys) knowing who HE is enough to guide someone ELSE's journey is ludicrous. And way too much pressure on him. He would at best be faking-it-till-he-makes-it and not feeling able to admit he has no earthly idea what the hell he's doing.
Of course CP/QF culture seems like it would never be a safe place for him to admit he's still trying to find his way. Talk about blind leading the blind.
My cynical two-cents is that Jasmine has heard plenty of how hard it is to submit to a husband from listening to women in church and homeschooling communities. I suspect the topic comes up frequently.
DeleteAt the same time, I suspect young Jasmine does assume on some level that her marriage will be different because every woman hopes that while preaching the obey-your-husband doctrine taught to her.
Regardless of age - I've found that two heads working together get better outcomes than one.