Split Second

I must make amends for what I’ve done. You see, I haven’t been the perfect wife, although heaven knows I’ve tried, I’ve really, really tried. I’ve read all the manuals (and there’s a hell of a lot of them), but things don’t seem to stick in my little brain, despite these lovely curls I have. I keep putting my foot in my mouth and have to atone for my sins. Will I ever learn what I’m supposed to do?

Actually, I’m kind of fed up (that’s the polite way of putting it) at having to backtrack, say I’m sorry, plead with him to give me another chance, ask how I can make it up to him. All that garbage so he can live in his little bubble and be the man of the house.

He says (his name’s Harold by the way, which is a hideous name, what was his mother thinking?) I should be like Patmore’s ‘angel in the house’. It’s a long poem from 1854, with lots of revisions, and it’s the best model for me. I’m just assuming that, although I don’t know for sure.

Harold has his head on backwards.

Harold is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. 

Harold is my husband.

Patmore, if we can make the comparison, was much worse. Three wives, all of whom escaped him by dying? Now what does that tell you about the man, huh? Plus, there’s another woman named Alice Meynell, who was a suffragist and a feminist (they’re kind of the same thing). She had to tell him to go jump in a lake to cool off because he became so obsessed with her despite her being married with eight children. 

Mr. Patmore sure had to have a female around, apparently. He must have been unbearable. No matter all three of his wives died.

So, just to show I have an open mind, I agreed to read at least part of The Angel in the House for Harold. I’d thought about making him listen to the whole damn thing (it’s extremely long, remember), but I didn’t think he had the stamina. Nor did I. Nor am I a masochist. That sort of writing should be on the banned books list. It withers the mind, male or female. As a result, I am limiting my agony to a few lines. That should be enough to please Harold, don’t you think?

I am practicing now, reciting the lines out loud, and making my voice as syrupy and fluttery as possible. This isn’t easy, you know. It certainly doesn’t come naturally. I have to work to keep my jaws from clenching. Harold looks like he’s fallen asleep. He does that a lot. I will keep calling on my pretty little butterflies to create a nice poetry reading for him. He is a nice guy, my husband, especially when he doesn’t snore.

Here goes. Just twenty-three lines, not too long. Feel free to correct my tone if it is not acquiescent enough or doesn’t achieve the drooling idiot, er, feminine appearance I’m trying for. I am willing to practice until I get it right. The perfect project for the dutiful wife, of course. Please him, no matter what it takes. Patmore writes (and don’t forget this is only a tiny excerpt from a much-longer literary piece that in no way is competitor to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was from 1792 so Patmore should have known better):

Man must be pleased; but him to please

Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf

Of his condoled necessities

She casts her best, she flings herself.

It’s a super-good thing that I have help, somebody to back me up if things go awry. This poem could get the best of me. Then I hear a familiar voice, one I trust.

There’s a recipe for disaster, you know, says Demon Number One, whose name is better than Harold’s because I named him. He’s Lorne and is funny and wise. Kind of good-looking, too. Lorne is laughing, because if the wife throws herself into the abyss, she’s not going to be able to make anybody happy. She’s a goner. If suicide is the best she’s got, it’s pretty pitiful. Lorne always knows how to make me smile.

Harold thinks it’s cool that I would jump off a cliff just to make him happy? Am I missing something here?

Not gonna happen. I agree with Lorne all the way.

How often flings for nought, and yokes

Her heart to an icicle or whim,

Whose each impatient word provokes

Another, not from her, but him;

So it looks like Patmore is saying that even if the wife goes jumping into that big chasm of ‘I have to coddle my spouse or else’, it might not be sufficient? Huh? This could take reinforcements. I’m feeling kind of faint.

Notice, says Demon Number Two, that the woman wife wimp is the one responsible for sacrificing herself, for killing herself. It’s her fault because she was dumb enough to follow some whim of her own. 

Demon Number Two is also nicely named. She is Amaya and is both savvy and delectable. Her upturned eyes remind me of a cat’s and they are just as green. Amaya says no need to kill oneself for a guy. Well, for anybody, actually. She obviously didn’t grow up Victorian.

Some people would say Amaya is feisty if they met her. That’s not correct. She’s just smart and doesn’t swallow any lines like stuff that was written back then. (Men still have lines. They think the lines work. They don’t.)

Demon Number Two notes how the poem tells us that a wife cannot be impatient. She’s pointing out how the poet is saying ‘women are to be seen but not heard’. I thought that saying applied to children being seen and not heard. Guess women and children were kind of the same thing to Patmore? Where did he ever get his ideas? Who died and left him boss? Woman, obey your man. Respect him with silence.

Not going to happen, old boy. If you pull off another of your screw-ups, like your last bad business deal, I will not be quiet, and I will not be patient. Remember that, Harold.

While she, too gentle even to force

His penitence by kind replies,

Waits by, expecting his remorse,

With pardon in her pitying eyes;

Both Lorne and Amaya support my interpretation of these lines. We’re a force to be reckoned with now, which makes it three against one. Poor Harold. Patmore’s wife is kind and pitying and pardons in silence. The three of us are rolling on the floor laughing, total rofl, because Harold, er, the husband, mucks things up but wife cannot respond either with kind words or with silent waiting. She’s between the devil and the deep blue sea and he’s taking his incompetence out on her?

This is so sad. The Demons and I don’t say it out loud, because of course it’s not in the poem, but we hope wifey chooses the devil, or rather, the Devil. That’s where the action is. We say scream at the jerk and don’t forgive him. 

The Three Musketeers (you already know Lorne and Amaya; I am Evangeline, but you can call me Eva or Van or something else) need to calm down. This is not supposed to be a smack-down of poor, misguided Patmore nor of my Harold. We have just gotten carried away with our political views. We are very progressive, as you can see. This is not a political rally. It is a poem and I am practicing it for Harold. Because if I have to suffer through it, so does he. Certain things have consequences. This is one of them.

Confession: I actually think Harold hasn’t a clue what the poem’s about. He probably just thought The Angel in the House was a cute title or maybe that it was a religious piece. Doesn’t he know yet that (2) cutesy is not my style and (2) I don’t participate in any organized religion? 

Whatever. He should still change his name. His middle name in Anders. That’s a nice name. He should use that. I’m going to tell him I prefer to be married to Anders. Harold is too old-fashioned and my dear husband is only in his early thirties. Too young to be set in his ways and definitely too young to be Victorian.

And if he once, by shame oppress'd,

A comfortable word confers,

She leans and weeps against his breast,

And seems to think the sin was hers;

Time to get back on track. I have the support of my Demons, but I do hope the Imps don’t show up or I’ll never have this recitation ready. We’d be partying! None of my crowd can fathom why the husband would want to blame his wife for his own mistake. Worse is the idea that the wife would say she was the one who did something wrong. That angel idiot wouldn’t know wrong if it were staring her in the face, I bet. 

That wife needs some educating, we think, and at that moment I spot four new eyes behind the Demons. Somebody has come to play...

I don’t have a Thing One and Thing Two, nor even a Tweedledum and a Tweedledee. What I do have are Imps, which some say are Demons in Training, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that. My imps are not boys or girls, nor males or females. Call them whatever you wish; I think they identify along the lines of Fraggles, Smurfs, Trolls, Freebles, Twirps, etc. They have names, though: River and Sea. They can change colors, like chameleons. I like the names I gave them.

But we were talking about the poem. I am having trouble with that line “she seems to think the sin is hers.” Just can’t wrap my head around the logic. Should I recite to convey meekness or does this line imply the lady’s resentment? ... she seems to think the sin is hers...

Maybe it’s that “seems” that confuses me. I could always ask Harold Anders what he thinks. It’s all in the way you stress that verb or give it one intonation or another. Anyway, there is a crew of five now, counting me, and we need to get my rehearsal of Patmore finished up. We need to be ready to roll in a couple of hours. Man will be home then.

Or any eye to see her charms,

At any time, she's still his wife,

Dearly devoted to his arms;

She loves with love that cannot tire;

I am all right with this. Not saying the husband and wife have to be monogamous, just that if they’re going to stay married, they should enjoy the marriage. I think you get what I mean. Not being sold myself on the existence of love, I still think it’s admirable to maintain a strong tie to a partner year after year. I am glad some people don’t get tired of loving the same person and just move on. That’s a horrid thing to do to somebody, but it’s not uncommon.

That’s why I tell my crew members: Don’t just “Love the One You’re With,” folks. I am not sure if they remember that old Stills song from the 70s. Those were the good old days, and they certainly weren’t about undying love for one person. No. Free Love all the way.

Anyway, I really am practicing this part a lot, trying to capture all the nuances and innuendos I can. I want Anders to like it. It matters a lot to me.

And when, ah woe, she loves alone,

Through passionate duty love springs higher,

As grass grows taller round a stone.

All five of us - Lorne, Amaya, River, Sea, and me, Eva or Van or Gina - work like a true team. We see the dutiful wife, alone, turning to faith for comfort (rather than another man?). The woman alone, like the grass. Both woman and grass molding themselves around the stone. The rock of the husband. Soft, pliant, conforming, and of course, silent. Obedience offered to the hard and cold. 

We are stunned. We now see something else happening in these lines.

Together, because this has been a joint effort, the five of us have made a feminist out of Mr. Coventry Patmore, thank you very. Very much. He wasn’t saying weak, wordless woman, wait alone until you join your spouse in the Hereafter. No, he was showing how cold and hard the husband is who treats his wife like an animal to be tamed and guarded, who enslaves her and ignores her. The stone husband is dead and thus even more unfeeling, while the wife-woman and the grass continue to live.

We decide to break out a bottle of Basque cider to celebrate our creation of a new Patmore and everybody wished me well on my performance. I shouldn’t be nervous; after all, this was for my husband, right? 

That’s the point.

Cider with Harold. 

(I slip and call him Anders. He thinks I’m drunk and calls me a lush. I hate that word. Anyway, the celebration was about him, indirectly.) We still serve ourselves ample glasses. It’s only 6% though.)

I think I threw Anders, no Harold, off when I lit the candles, rubbed the back of his neck and shoulders in case he was tense, and cited what you read at the beginning of this story:

I must make amends for what I’ve done. You see, I haven’t been the perfect wife, although heaven knows I’ve tried, I’ve really, really tried. I’ve read all the manuals (and there’s a hell of a lot of them), but things don’t seem to stick in my little brain, despite these lovely curls I have. I keep putting my foot in my mouth and have to atone for my sins. Will I ever learn what I’m supposed to do?

Actually, I’m kind of fed up (that’s the polite way of putting it) at having to backtrack, say I’m sorry, plead with him to give me another chance, ask how I can make it up to him. All that garbage so he can live in his little bubble and be the man of the house.

Harold thought I was mocking him. He had come across a poem about the love of a husband and wife and had decided to show it to me. That was all. All I meant to do was act as if I were portraying the role of the perfect wife/woman/mindless homebody. 

Maybe I shouldn’t have included the fed up part?

Harold had been eavesdropping while I was rehearsing. That was wrong.

Anders just laughed really hard. He knew I had understood. He had been teasing my inner feminist, he said. Virginia Woolf had written about the angel, apparently. (How did he know that?)

Anders knew I had brought my friends in to collaborate. Somebody had told him.

I believed both of them, the paranoid Harold and the joker Anders. I thought I was probably in trouble. Double.

What do I do? I moaned. The only thing I could do:

I kneel on one knee, now fully petrified, and beg them, or him:

Guys, I was trying to do something creative and got a lot of help from my friends. The angel poem was probably controversial from the time of its first publication. Some praised it and others despised its ideas. It was quite the challenge. We weren’t trying to rewrite the poem - just to explore its possibilities.

Harold and Anders are just standing there, nothing about them showing they’re alive. It is rather like looking at stone.

The silence is a river running through us.

Two points of view. Or three, depending on how you count. Which one gave me Patmore to read? Which wife has prepared this recital for him? Are we all being seriously with one another or is this just a game?

To act or not to act: that is the real point here.

Now please give me another chance to treat this famous poem as it deserves.

Define irony.