Books
Kathryn Hughes on Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman
Published 27 November 2000
Landscape for a Good Woman
Carolyn Steedman Virago, £8.99 pbk
ISBN 0860685594
I read Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago) when I was 25, just as the certainty of youth was beginning to fade. A series of recent knocks had made me realise that my life was not, after all, going to consist of one graceful triumph after another. Nagged by the possibility that I might actually turn out to be quite ordinary, I found myself increasingly gripped by the conviction that annihilation - or, at the very least, destitution - lay just around the corner.
The books that I turned to (where else would a proud and clever girl go for help?) offered ways of seeing other people's anguish, but never my own. When I ploughed through the Penguin Freud, especially the case histories, I couldn't see where my story fitted. The upper-middle-class women who free-associated for Freud told stories about powerful husbands and fathers, rich and sexual, who treated their women with the kind of casual contempt that always left them wanting more. And when the daughters failed to get Daddy's attention (or, quite possibly, received the wrong kind), they retreated into hysteria, the 19th-century equivalent of the panic attacks that were making my own life such a misery.
But that wasn't my story. I didn't feel like I was in the grip of some inevitable pathology that applied to all women everywhere, no matter what their actual circumstance. Far from resenting men, I had never given them much thought. Both my grandmothers had been financially and emotionally independent, and I had a tribe of cheerful maiden aunts who spent their time motoring on the Continent. I suppose if I traced the family's income back, then I would get to the fathers and brothers who had run the farms that generated the cash that supported the women in modest gentility. But there were never any actual men around; they had all faded away in the 1950s, long before I was born.
In my own immediate family, too, we had done a good job of cutting the phallus down to size. My mother not only worked (virtually unheard of in the Home Counties during the Sixties), but literally towered over my father. I, meanwhile, liked to use my younger brother's head as a handy arm rest. Men, in my world, were either small or somewhere else. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make my childhood fit any of the psychoanalytic or political interpretations on offer. It was as if my experience simply hadn't happened, or perhaps just didn't matter. Yet here I was dealing with its fallout on a daily basis, literally shaking with terror at the thought of the horror that lay just around the corner. Then I read Landscape for a Good Woman, and some things (not all, because this is not a fairy tale) started to fall into place.
The book is Carolyn Steedman's attempt to make sense of her childhood in 1950s Streatham. None of the theoretical or analytical devices that she learnt as a social historian turns out to be the least bit useful when applied to her own experience. Her working-class parents, for instance, refuse to conform to the cosy stereotypes familiar from Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. Far from being a salt-of-the-earth domestic tyrant, her father was shifty and rarely there (half the week, as it turns out, he was living with another woman). Instead of being "our ma'am", the doughty lynchpin of the struggling household, Steedman's mother was a financially productive but emotionally withdrawn bitch. The close-knit Lancashire weaving community where the couple first met in the 1920s (and never married, as it turned out) had long given way to the anonymous isolation of a south London council flat where no one ever popped in for a cup of sugar and a chat.
Steedman was troubled by the absence of her story - the story of working-class girlhood - from the pages of Freud's case histories. While Freud claimed that his theories of emotional and sexual development applied across time and class, Steedman argues that they held only in rich, turn-of-the-century Vienna, or at least among people who could imagine themselves living there. Had she been alive at the time, says Steedman, she would have been condemned to shiver outside the gates of the bourgeois house where Dora K and all those other rich patients languished. Freud's theories won't work for Steedman because he never met anyone like her.
Reading Landscape for a Good Woman let me see that my story, too, had slipped through the net of other people's interpretations. In particular, it had been deprived of its place in history, the particular context that would have allowed me to make sense of it. My fears of obliteration and destitution were not, after all, the result of some stalled Oedipal moment, or the wickedness of "the patriarchy" (we still called it that in 1986), but the recouping of very real moments of the social past through which my parents and grandparents had lived. For just as Steedman had grown up in London hearing about her parents' native Lancashire - the weaving sheds, the mucky Catholics, all those flinty women just getting by - so I was raised on tales from other countries. Over and over, I heard how, as a little girl in Exeter, my mother had crouched in a bomb shelter under the kitchen table, holding her breath in the hope that it would make Hitler's aeroplanes miss their house (they did, as it turned out, although the cathedral was flattened). And, from my father, I learnt about Wales in the Great Depression, when children starved, got sick and were taken away from their parents; when the bailiffs called and demanded your last stick of furniture, and the playboy Prince of Wales, shocked by what he had seen in the Rhondda, declared that "something must be done".
With these stories banged into my head, it was hardly surprising that, at moments of emotional stress, I became convinced that the world, or at least my world, was about to end. As a child, I had been sure that we were about to be made destitute (unlikely, given that both my parents had long service records with the local authority). I was certain, too, that the Germans would invade Brighton at any moment - even though, realistically, a nuclear attack by the Russians was far more likely.
Reading Steedman's book made me realise how we are born into history - not just the record of past events, but what the people around us made of them - and that any theory which fails to take account of this ends up making us invisible. She would, I think, hate me for appropriating her story. She says as much in her book, bristling when well-meaning, middle-class women come up to her at parties and claim to have lived a life similar to her own. But I'm not doing that. What I take from Landscape for a Good Woman is the understanding that if your story doesn't fit the universal formulae - whether feminism, Marxism or psychoanalysis - then there's something wrong not with your story, but with those who think they know what it means.
Kathryn Hughes's George Eliot: the last Victorian (Fourth Estate) won the 1999 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography
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