Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

“There seemed to be no way for the biographers to deal with the anti-woman, anti-wife, anti-sex rant other than by leaving it out, sympathising with the impulse, trivialising it as a ‘mood’, denying it as ‘fiction’ or blaming the woman herself.”

Orwell’s rant about the difficulty with wives initially sparks Funder to research Eileen. Funder observes that the response of other male writers is to explain away the problematic passage in various ways, and her analysis highlights How Fiction and Truth Overlap. By arguing that Orwell was only writing fiction, the other writers deny the underlying truth expressed by that fiction.

“In this system the oppressors can imagine themselves innocent of crimes against a people, not by denying the crimes, but by denying the equal humanity of the people.”

Orwell describes the evils of racism in colonialism in his first book, and Funder uses that same logic to expose the subtle sexism in the world of literature and biography. Orwell and his biographers do not deny his abusive behavior toward women, but by ignoring the impact of the women who greatly influenced Orwell’s life, they devalue the humanity of those women.

“Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife.’”

The Nature of Invisible Labor is that the workers providing the service are ignored and therefore become invisible themselves. This is especially notable in the wives of many successful writers when their work of supporting their husbands through cooking, cleaning, and managing the household is ignored or given only slight attention.

“Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it,’ is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.”

The Nature of Invisible Labor is that it is often invisible to the person performing the labor. In this passage, Funder argues that even in the modern world, when one has the clear intention to maintain equality between genders, women themselves often ignore or discount the invisible labor that they perform daily.

“The most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice. Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved. Every time I saw ‘it was arranged that’ or ‘nobody was hurt’ I became sensitised—who arranged it? Who might have been hurt?”

An awareness of the effect of the passive voice allows Funder to pinpoint areas to research more thoroughly. She observes that The Schism Between Writer and Person can reveal itself grammatically within the writing. She therefore uses her own skills as an author, employing her innate knowledge of grammar to uncover obfuscations within historical texts.

“And so I write, as Orwell put it, because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention. Or, as it happens, a person.”

Funder connects herself to Orwell as a writer, but also as a person in search of How Fiction and Truth Overlap. In Orwell’s novels, he tries to expose lies, but ironically, he perpetuated them in his own life. Funder therefore seeks to draw attention to the person Orwell hid as he avoided the truth of his relationship.

“But you can’t kill an angel who is also a mother because our job is, somehow, to interpret the madness and injustice of the world to our children in a way that does not make them despair.”

Funder’s consideration of Virginia Woolf’s “angel”—a personification of a submissive and supportive woman infused with duty and domesticity—evokes the societal expectations of women but complicates Woolf’s rejection of those expectations. Although Funder also wants to escape the societal requirements of womanhood and wifedom, she concludes that the obligations of motherhood are so connected with identity, the future, and pure love that they cannot simply be rejected.

“Yet here she is, obediently corralled with the other domesticated animals, without anything having needed to be said.”

When Eileen is left behind while Orwell goes to Spain, it is because someone needs to look after the goats, and Funder uses this event to highlight The Nature of Invisible Labor. Because Eileen is expected to perform domestic labor, she is equated to domesticated animals—those animals who are tame and serve people rather than following their own desires or interests.

“A moment when Eileen can be glimpsed, if in a negative way, like dark matter that can only be apprehended by its effect on the visible world. The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.”

Funder has already established that Eileen is often hidden by the use of passive voice on the part of Orwell and his biographers. Here, Funder uses the concept of dark matter as a metaphor to illustrate the challenge that Orwell’s male biographers faced in the effort to avoid mentioning Eileen’s contributions.

“Reverse-engineering the book’s chronology felt like untangling a cobweb. Reconstructing cause and event from the point of view of an invisible person showed me how the disappearing trick is done. Once you recognize the techniques, the patri-magic doesn’t work and you can see her, right there—at the heart of the action.”

The metaphor of the magician’s trick evokes The Nature of Invisible Labor and returns in this passage. By researching Eileen and identifying the rhetorical techniques employed to hide Eileen’s identity and contributions, Funder is able to work in both directions to uncover who Eileen really was.

“Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ thirty-seven times. And then I see: not once is Eileen named. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, it can all be stolen.”

In this passage, Funder conducts a close reading of Orwell’s work to discover that his erasure of Eileen comes in part from the way he references her in Homage to Catalonia. Although she is present in his book, he replaces her identity with “a job description” in order to avoid giving her genuine credit for her bravery or her accomplishments. By denying her a name, he denies her a concrete presence in his life and writings.

“But at the same time—George’s breathing is so calm, unruffled, his face sunk into its folds—she feels something in her split from science into hope and magic: she wants him to live no matter what the facts say.”

This is one example of How Fiction and Truth Overlap, for Funder’s dramatization is designed to reveal Eileen’s enduring love for Orwell. Her dedication to him is evidenced by her care and her insistence on seeing her future with him from the day they marry. Although Eileen never said these words, the fiction that Funder creates gives Eileen’s love for Orwell a voice.

“I have conflated—in the way of dreams, of memory, of the swift, subterranean imperative of narrative—this first experience of sexual threat, the sadness of how I knew it in my bones at six—with the galloping tide at Mont-Saint-Michel. The fabulous and freaky haste of the world you might be curious about and then, if only just, able to outrun.”

The image of the tide in this passage is linked with the near-universal experience of women recognizing the ever-present sexual threats in the world. Funder articulates this dynamic as the overwhelming sense of the tide coming in, the inescapable nature of it, but also the possibility of safety if enough attention is given.

“I saw the gap between an author and their work. This is not an empty space. It’s full of dark matter, matter that holds together the writer, the work and the reader.”

In this passage, the repeated reference to dark matter creates a connection between Funder, Orwell, and Eileen. Eileen has been concealed in the dark matter, and Funder as reader and writer discovers her within the work largely because Funder is a writer herself.

“Any writer could fall into the gap between what a reader imagines of them, and who they think they are. And a woman might live there.”

The gap that Funder describes highlights The Schism Between Writer and Person. Funder observes that the reader expects a writer to be a perfect person, while the writer sees themselves as something else, and reality reveals the writer to be yet a different person than either the reader or the writer perceive. The reality of Orwell is Eileen’s knowledge and vision of him—represented by the idea that she lives in the gap between the reader’s perception and the writer’s.

“She knows editing is a thrill to him, the dangerous pleasure of having someone see you more clearly than you can.”

Eileen, like Funder, knows a part of Orwell that no one else can know. Because she engages with both his domestic self and his writer self, she can see the flaws in both the writing and the man, and she works to resolve both.

“As her forearms goose-bump to the elbow, she realises that she has always thought that to know something is to understand what it will feel like. But she has underestimated experience itself, which can freeze your blood before your head has understood what is happening.”

In Funder’s dramatization, she suggests that Eileen’s misconception of the impact of an experience versus the knowledge of that experience highlights How Fiction and Truth Overlap. A major difference between fact and fiction is that fiction allows the reader to imaginatively experience an event, while fact merely provides knowledge.

“She remembers writing propaganda in Spain that bore the slimmest connection to what was going on at the front, as if it were a story inspired by events for a whole other purpose—which is exactly what it was.”

Eileen has two jobs in her life that require her to advance propaganda—propaganda that she believes is effecting positive change in the world. The nature of propaganda is another element of How Fiction and Truth Overlap, for sometimes a fiction can achieve a purpose the facts cannot.

“Unlike life, with chickens and bombs and no fixed purpose, this dream has one: every book is a deposit on immortality.”

One explanation for why Eileen stays with Orwell is that she believed in his work and wanted to be part of its creation. In the wake of Laurence’s death, in a world that might end at any moment, Funder surmises that Eileen may take solace in Orwell’s writing. The promise of immortality in creation is another explanation of How Fiction and Truth Overlap.

“They have acquired a new vocabulary: V1, V2, barrage balloon, anti-aircraft gun, Stutka, parachute bomb, air-raid shelter, incendiary canister, Heinkel, tracers, Luftwaffe. People wield these words in sentences shorn of surprise, suddenly familiar with the mechanics of the apocalypse.”

The power of language is an underlying thematic element throughout the book—the passive voice discussion, the dark matter metaphor, and even the references to doublethink demonstrate the power of words. The landscape of war for Eileen and Orwell is reflected in the transformation of their vocabulary.

“It is the tiny hard bits like this that I don’t like, though I leave them in.”

This sentence plays on the sentence just prior to it; Eileen worries about leaving the hard bits of apple because they bother Orwell. Funder, however, is inserting herself into the narrative in this passage in an effort to explain the importance of accurately representing Orwell and Eileen’s relationship.

“Sometimes she thinks about the work the girl or cook is doing, which would, at the flat, be hers. She thinks of all the ways people have invented to not see others around them, to stop themselves from spelunking into the vertiginous cavern of what it is to be another.”

In this dramatized passage, Funder conveys the idea that Eileen is becoming aware of The Nature of Invisible Labor. Because she has been performing that labor, she becomes aware of its absence when it is no longer her responsibility to fulfill such tasks. This passage reinforces the idea that exposing the labor and removing its invisibility will grant it additional value.

“There is a locked path in an open landscape, like a warning in a dream…Later I learn that the padlocked chain in the middle of the moor is an island quirk, respected out of traditions no one can remember. No matter: I am with the woman who has the key.”

The description of the Scottish moor is a metaphor for the forgotten reasons for the traditions that society maintains. The primary reason for The Nature of Invisible Labor is outdated and forgotten, but the work, like the chain, remains.