Can you forgive her for loving her job?
A side plot in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? involves the matrimonial prospects of Arabella Greenow, who “could smile from beneath her widow's cap in a most bewitching way.” Forty years old, and with forty thousand pounds from the late Samuel Greenow, whom she had married when she was thirty-five and he sixty-five, Aunt Greenow, as she is known to Alice Vavasor, the her of the novel’s title, has two suitors. She has Mr. Cheesacre, “a fat Norfolk farmer, with not an idea beyond the virtues of stall-feeding,” and she has Cheesacre’s rival, Captain Bellfield, a former officer and “penniless scamp… [who] looks as though he drank… paints his whiskers… and, being forty, tries to look twenty-five.”
In the novel the Greenow-Cheesacre-Bellfield triangle is presented as comic relief to set off the the main story, but it’s the only part of the book I remember.1 About two-thirds of the way through Aunt Greenow makes up her mind.
There was a good deal to be said on Mr. Cheesacre's behalf. Mahogany-furnitured bedrooms assist one's comfort in this life; and heaps of manure, though they are not brilliant in romance, are very efficacious in farming. Mrs. Greenow by no means despised these things; and as for the owner of them, though she saw that there was much amiss in his character, she thought that his little foibles were of such a nature that she, as his wife, or any other woman of spirit, might be able to repress them, if not to cure them. But she had already married for money once, as she told herself very plainly on this occasion, and she thought that she might now venture on a little love. Her marriage for money had been altogether successful. The nursing of old Greenow had not been very disagreeable to her, nor had it taken longer than she had anticipated. She had now got all the reward that she had ever promised herself, and she really did feel grateful to his memory. I almost think that among those plentiful tears some few drops belonged to sincerity. She was essentially a happy-tempered woman, blessed with a good digestion, who looked back upon her past life with contentment, and forward to her future life with confidence. She would not be greedy, she said to herself. She did not want more money, and therefore she would have none of Mr. Cheesacre.
The farmer never had a chance. A sensible minor character in Trollope marries for money once, but not twice.
I bring this up not to get into the question of marrying for money, which I don’t know much about, but to think about status. Who has it, who wants it in a partner, who is willing to forego it for the sake of—something else. What is it, even?
This last question is hard to answer. It’s subjective. I’ve been on dates with women who saw me as exciting and intellectual, someone who could bring into their lives exactly what they’re missing. I’ve also been on dates with women who saw me as interesting, at least conversationally, but found me unsexy. And I’ve been on dates with women who must have wondered how they came to be so unselective in their swiping and texting as to find themselves sitting in a cocktail bar with this a loser.2
I don’t think any of the women from this last group would marry a Cheesacre.
He was a thriving man, and what might not they two do in Norfolk if they put their wealth together?
But they require a thriving man all the same, that is, one who is thriving in the eyes of the world (as they define it). Someone who might say, here comes my Chinese rug.
So far, three sets of women: those who see me as high-status, and like me; those who see me as high-status in theory but who aren’t into me in practice; and those who see me as low-status and unappealing. Many of the women on dating apps in New York (especially the ones on Bumble) fall into the latter group, but that doesn’t preoccupy me since I’m mostly not interested in publishing executives, corporate lawyers, or e-commerce directors, anyway. It’s easy for us to ignore each other. We only match and meet once in a while, by accident.
There’s also, however, a fourth group, women who see me as low-status, and don’t mind. Trollope has Aunt Greenow contemplate Captain Bellfield in the paragraph that follows her rejection of the farmer.
Strange to say, his poverty and his scampishness and his lies almost recommended him to her.
I said above that I’m mostly not interested in successful professional women—but note the mostly. Not all publishing executives, not all corporate lawyers, not all e-commerce directors. As I once told a friend, I don’t care what job a woman has, provided she doesn’t like it. I grant an exception to anyone with a vocation, and of course I’m the sole judge of what constitutes a vocation, but for those who don’t get that pass the way to my heart is to be at least a bit disenchanted.3 This same disenchantment, it is to be hoped, might cause a woman whose status in her world is secure to see something—maybe even a Captain Bellfield!—in me.4
Why do I remember the subplot? Cheesacre’s character is amusingly drawn, but mostly it’s the widow, and Trollope’s affection for her. Here’s a passage, on mourning costume and the spirit and letter of law, that I still think about now and then, more than twenty years after reading the book (my italics):
The widow was almost gorgeous in her weeds. I believe that she had not sinned in her dress against any of those canons which the semi-ecclesiastical authorities on widowhood have laid down as to the outward garments fitted for gentlemen's relicts. The materials were those which are devoted to the deepest conjugal grief. As regarded every item of the written law her suttee worship was carried out to the letter. There was the widow's cap, generally so hideous, so well known to the eyes of all men, so odious to womanhood. Let us hope that such headgear may have some assuaging effect on the departed spirits of husbands. There was the dress of deep, clinging, melancholy crape,—of crape which becomes so brown and so rusty, and which makes the six months' widow seem so much more afflicted a creature than she whose husband is just gone, and whose crape is therefore new. There were the trailing weepers, and the widow's kerchief pinned close round her neck and somewhat tightly over her bosom. But there was that of genius about Mrs. Greenow, that she had turned every seeming disadvantage to some special profit, and had so dressed herself that though she had obeyed the law to the letter, she had thrown the spirit of it to the winds. Her cap sat jauntily on her head, and showed just so much of her rich brown hair as to give her the appearance of youth which she desired. Cheesacre had blamed her in his heart for her private carriage, but she spent more money, I think, on new crape than she did on her brougham. It never became brown and rusty with her, or formed itself into old lumpy folds, or shaped itself round her like a grave cloth. The written law had not interdicted crinoline, and she loomed as large with weeds, which with her were not sombre, as she would do with her silks when the period of her probation should be over.
My use of the word loser here borrows from this recent post by B. D. McClay.
I’m not, incidentally, going full David Graeber with this. I think it’s probably for the best, all things considered, that there are so many millions of bullshit jobs, semi-bullshit jobs, and necessary but boring jobs. I may even be in the market for one soon. But if you have one, you can’t take it over-seriously and also date me. You can work hard, you can take pride in your competence or your ability to manage your people, you can like your boss or even your employer. All that is fine, as long as, somehow, it still feels like a curse.
It was not, in fact, the Trollope novel that inspired this post. It was imagining what the Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Elizabeth Marvell characters in Burn after Reading might think of me.