The Wing of Azrael.

by Alice Caird

The Wing of Azrael.

British Library, Historical Print Editions

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British Library
Caird, Alice;
1889.
3 vol.; 8°.
012638.m.12.

Genres: Classics, Victorian, Feminism, 19th Century, Fiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

Reviews

[Charlotte Kersten]

"You shall be the happiest woman in England against your will."

So What's It About?

Viola Sedley is quiet and naive, sheltered by her mother's protectiveness and piety. She has hardly glimpsed the world before she learns that she is to marry Philip Dendraith, a childhood acquaintance with whom her relationship has been turbulent at best. She enters into her new life unwillingly, hardly knowing what is to come, and as marriage becomes more and more intolerable she must confront her love for a kinder man and the struggle between the opposite forces of duty and happiness.

Spoilers follow as well as discussions of abuse and sexual assault.

1. "'What is duty?' she inquired."

Viola Sedley is, in all respects, a product of her society - socialized, Caird makes it clear, to be passive, submissive and dutiful in suffering above all else. The struggle between the suppression she has learned by heart and the restlessness and questioning of spirit that underlie that suppression is the book’s central conflict, more so than Viola’s external conflict with her husband. She agonizes over religion and fate and morality over the course of the book. Sibella and Harry wonder if it is possible to extricate her from her marriage not only because of the practical challenges therein but, more than anything, because of Viola’s desperate struggle against the imposed sense of obligation to piety and morality that binds her to her husband.

Ultimately, this question is answered in tragedy - Viola’s last act in the book is that of rejecting Harry’s continual avowances of love and loyalty in spite of Viola’s murder of Philip. Rather than allowing him to share in her shame and scandal by helping her, Viola engages in one final act of monumental self-sacrifice by killing herself. Her denial of selfhood for the sake of men, engrained into her since childhood, is embodied in this final tragic act. With it, I think Caird argues that simply ridding yourself of the men who persecute you (through murder or other means) will not liberate you so long as you are still shackled by the gendered expectations that have shaped you.

We do see her relatively more joyful and unrestrained as a child. It is as a child that she violently and outspokenly resists Philip’s cruelty and imposition, to the extent that she nearly kills him. However, that resistance gradually gets smothered as she becomes a woman, and Philip uses her resistance and the harm that it did as another means to draw her in and guilt her into a sense of obligation to him. Even then, though, there is a kind of resistance within her passivity that I think a lot of people may recognize as simply being weakness unless they have been abused. Philip says that “stupidity is the thing to marry” but Viola is far from stupid - she quickly realizes that Philip is only looking for more ways to torment and punish her and so she decides that her best means of surviving is to simply give him as little possible resistance to work with.

2. “It is immoral to be found out. I can conceive of no other immorality.”

Philip Dendraith is a stone-cold abuser, calm and smiling through his manipulations, threats layered with blandishments, seemingly omniscient, constantly and fully aware that Viola’s terror only grows the more in control of himself he proves to be. His veneer is perfect, and indeed no one thinks to question the state of Viola’s marriage to such an unceasingly handsome, clever, charming and rich man.

He is entirely forthright about the fact that their marriage was a transaction: Mr. Sedley squandered his money and effectively sold his daughter off for Philip’s financial assistance, and he sometimes refers to her as a “bad sell” because of her repeated failures and transgressions. He also brilliantly wields the Victorian ideal that, while a man has all the legal power in a marriage, it is in fact the woman who has true control through the exercise of her morality and womanly wiles. He repeatedly talks about this in company, further hiding the true state of the marriage. As his control over her grows more and more perfect he tells her that she might easily control him if only she tried a little harder to please him:

“A wife can generally obtain her object if she knows how to manage cleverly; and I shall be charmed to be managed cleverly, I assure you, and promise to keep one eye permanently shut so that you will have no difficulty in finding my blind side.”

This is nothing but mockery in reality because he is well aware of Viola’s utter unwillingness and inability to play such a part and submit herself to such debasement; he seems well aware of the dishonesty of telling her that she will be happier only if she makes him happier.

3. “You really can’t call me a tyrant, when that is my only form of chastisement. Kisses till you are subdued.”

As far as I understand the matter, Victorian feminists were sometimes loathe to talk openly about marital rape, but Caird’s management of this topic is interestingly discrete and overt at the same time. Viola reacts with terror and abhorrence whenever her friends and neighbors make little jokes about newlyweds or the prospect of a baby, and one brief paragraph describes her nights as a “living hell.” Philip is the one who speaks of legal coverture, the doctrine of Victorian law that subsumed a wife’s legal existence within her husband’s at marriage. In the eyes of the law they became one person and, so the argument went, self-rape was an impossibility. In the final murderous confrontation between husband and wife Viola kills Philip to avoid the immediate prospect of being raped by him again, in addition to throwing off the entirety of the misery he imposes upon her.

Sibella, fallen woman that she is, says some particular things about the sexual double standard that surrounds male-perpetrated violence and I wish I could say that they didn’t still resonate with me as a woman living in 2021’s rape culture:

"'...the fortitude and goodness of the victims are relied upon - and not in vain- to ward off from their perpetrators the natural punishment. It is for the victim to pay the price of the iniquity and to make it socially successful, and this they must do and keep silence on pain of excommunication. If the fortitude breaks down, ah! Then what a hue and cry! The woman is hunted, scorned, ruined; there is no mercy...nor do I see,' returned Sibella, 'that the daily unpunished sins of society against its women should continue to be expiated by their victims instead of their perpetrators, forever and ever, Amen!'"

Are you sure it wasn’t a misunderstanding? And him, such a nice boy with such a bright and promising future. Don’t you think you’d feel better if you forgave him? Others in the book say that any such disgrace or unhappiness is automatically the woman’s fault. They say that it is a woman’s job to reform a wayward man with her love. Tell me, who among us hasn’t heard the very same things in the present day?

4. “Gentleness, patience and obedience in a wife can work wonders.”

Caird is particularly interested in internalized misogyny. Again and again in The Wing of Azrael we see the way that other women work to entrap each other in an unending cycle of misery. Viola’s mother models utter and devout submission, piety and sacrifice to a tee, drilling these tenets into her daughter and pressuring her into a marriage that she does not want. Lady Clevedon and Arabella delight in facilitating Philip’s early seductions and manipulations, and Adrienne councils submission to Viola repeatedly, actually arguing that an unhappy woman is made only unhappier when people encourage her to think of her autonomy rather than her duty.

One of the most interesting scenes in the book is the scene where Adrienne and Sibella talk about Viola together. Adrienne, bastion of conformity, realizes that Sibella’s debased “wickedness” is not without a kind of logic and instead of considering what this actually means, she panics, rejects it altogether and flees. For her part, Sibella calmly maintains her position and refuses to be hurt by aspersions about her character - such things can’t hurt her anymore because she no longer cares for respectability. These false notions of respectability, Caird argues, divide women from each other and strip away the solidarity that they need to survive.

5. “I am no longer yours- body and soul. I belong partly to myself at last.”

I long for an ending to this book where Viola claims ownership to all of herself - the sweet and the vicious, the pious and the sinful. I want her to sail to France with Harry and leave Philip bleeding out on the floor. Ultimately, though, Caird is resolute in showing us that everything ugly thing can be tolerated except a woman who fights back. There is no place for such a woman, and there is no way that Viola’s struggle between self-sacrifice and self-actualization can end without tragedy until there is a reckoning.

[Paul]

4.5 stars
This is Mona Caird’s third novel and is an accompaniment to her infamous article on marriage where she refers to marriage as a “vexatious failure”. Her own marriage was successful. Probably because her husband had a farm in Scotland where he lived and she lived in London!
Caird wrote about the nature of marriage and its inequalities. She was also a campaigner for women’s suffrage movement. She also campaigned against vivisection and was generally part of the New Woman movement. Towards the end of her life she also wrote a science fiction novel about the racism of eugenics.
This novel weaves together themes from Caird’s views on marriage, high melodrama and gothic. It is a study in what would now be called coercive control and domestic violence. Viola Sedley has been brought up to be obedient and has been given clear guidance about her role in life from her very pious mother:
“Mrs. Sedley, following the dictates of her creed, had spent her life in the performance of what she called her wifely duty, and this unfailing submissiveness, this meek and saint-like endurance had now succeeded in turning a man originally good-hearted into a creature so selfish, so thick-headed, and often so brutal, that even his all-enduring wife used to wonder, at times, if Heaven would give her grace to bear her heavy cross patiently to the end!”
Her father has a very clear idea that his daughter is a commodity to be traded for an advantageous marriage, no matter what she thinks and for his own financial gain he negotiates a marriage with Sir Philip Dendraith, a vicious and cruel man. When Viola tries to explain that she doesn’t love him, her father’s reaction explains his views about women who won’t or don’t marry:
“Yes, a burden, a dead weight, hanging like a millstone round my neck’. Do you know what a woman is who does not marry? I will tell you: she is a cumberor of the ground, a devourer of others' substance, a failure, a wheel that won't turn; she is in the way; it were better she had never been born. She is neglected, despised, left out; and who cares whether she is alive or dead? She is alone, without office, without object, without the right to exist. If you are minded to choose such a lot, at least you shall do it with your eyes open. A woman who is not performing her natural duties, serving her husband and her children is an absurdity,— an anomaly, a ramrod without a gun, a key without a lock, a — a ship without a sail — she's — she's a DAMNED NUISANCE!”
Viola is in love with someone else, who also loves her, but she has to marry Dendraith in obedience to her parents. Her marital life is a miserable and oppressive one and the novel is unremittingly bleak. Eventually even Viola begins to question her lot:
“We have both been taught (as we imagined) to worship God; I fear that we have really been taught to worship the Devil! We are trained to submission, to accept things as they are, to serve God by resignation — yes, even the resignation of our human dignity; whereas the Devil laughs in his sleeve, and carries off the fruits of miserable lives to add to the riches of his kingdom.”
The novel is a clear and salutary account of patriarchal reality set in a classic Victorian backdrop. There is wind and rain, rambling bleak and creaky old houses, cliffs and rocks with crashing waves: all the usual backdrops. You want gothic?
“The great stable-yard clock was slowly striking the hour – midnight. …

The mist was thick, but one could see through it a large white house with innumerable majestic windows, very broad and very high. Even in this dim light it was evident that everything was falling into decay. … The house stood hushed in the moonlight, with blinds drawn, windows closed; all but one blind and one window on the first floor, on that side of the house which faced the garden, and beyond it a steep avenue of elm-trees.

At that open window a small figure was kneeling; a dark-haired little girl”
You have gothic!
Under all the melodrama Caird represents the themes she explores in her article “Is Marriage a Failure? Female sacrifice and self-abnegation, sexual exploitation, threats of incarceration (the “mad woman” locked in the attic trope) and there is almost the feel of a fable to it all. Viola’s husband has virtually no redeeming features and he is also cruel to animals. Viola knows this before she marries him but follows what she perceives to be her duty and lot in life. Her husband also knows her role:
“Do you think that you have only yourself to consult? Let me remind you that you bear my name; that, in fact (to speak so that you can understand), it is branded upon you, and by that brand I can claim you and restrain you wherever you may be, so long as you live. Now are matters clear to you?”
“You will see nobody, man or woman, without my knowledge; you will make no acquaintance, man or woman, without my knowledge. You will receive no letter that is unseen by me. And now” – Philip held open the gate into the garden gallantly – “now to the home of which you are the sunbeam.”
Don’t expect a happy ending!
Caird presents a very stark picture of Victorian marriage and be careful if you don’t like gothic melodrama.

[Terence]

3.25-3.3 stars.

Mona Caird is a late 19th / early 20th century (proto)-feminist English writer. I came across her name when I was searching for modern retellings of Greek myths and found The Daughters of Danaus. It turned out that Daughters was not exactly speaking a retelling but the story intrigued me enough that I got the Kindle edition: Hadria, a musical prodigy, is forced to conform to the requirements placed upon upper middle-class women in Victorian society and pays the price both physically and mentally. Caird is not a first-rate writer but she’s not bad & occasionally her prose can be very affecting. There’s a scene in Daughters when Hadria realizes that her gift and her life have been wasted and there’s no recouping from it that’s devastating.

The Wing of Azrael portrays a young woman – Viola Sedley – who is forced into a loveless marriage with a man whose goal is to break her since she’s had the temerity not to think he’s the “bee’s knees” of manhood & has defied him. Caird rides the fine line between characters who are simply mouthpieces for the views she wants to present & actual people and she can be melodramatic (e.g., the ending) but she’s a good enough writer that you don’t mind too much, and in Viola, she does create a believable person.

Recommended.

[Carolyn Harper]

Well-written, Victorian novel—especially when compared with Caird’s highly emotional essays regarding the practice of vivisection—that explores the psyche of a woman trapped by the conventions of duty and familial obligation to make a good marriage when her heart is elsewhere. Yet within her compliance, she rebels. I was pleasantly surprised.