Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

by Anna Funder

So many of these men benefited from a social arrangement defying both the moral and the physical laws of the universe in which the unpaid, invisible work of a woman creates the time and – neat, warmed and cushion-plumped – space for their work. We know that a male writer’s time to write was traditionally created for him by liberating him from the need to shop, cook, clean up after himself or anyone else, deal with mundane correspondence, entertain, arrange travel or holidays, care for his own children (except as a ‘helper’ who is thanked, as if it were not his job, or not his children) and so on.

Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person’s time to work is created by another person’s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him.

To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided – whether you wrested a fortune from a conquered isle, or words from the void. Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife’.

I live in a different age, in which women are said to be equal, despite doing an unfathomably disproportionate load of the adults’ work in households, caring for the generation to come and, in many cases, the one before. The gap between what is said to be and what is, is the gap we collude in making by keeping all this work invisible. And it is a gap into which you can fall.

There is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.

Patriarchy is the doublethink that allows an apparently ‘decent’ man to behave badly to women, in the same way as colonialism and racism are the systems that allow apparently ‘decent’ people to do unspeakable things to other people.

So women are said to have the same human rights as men, but our lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not. Women, too must keep two contradictory things in our heads at all times: I am human, but I am also less than human. Our lived experience makes a lie of the rhetoric of the world. We live on the dark side of Doublethink.

We want people to be ‘decent’ and we want our writers to be too. Orwell engaged with this question of good work coming from flawed people.

In an essay on Dickens, Orwell argues explicitly that an author’s mistreatment of a woman in private life should not affect how we read his work.