First published, 21st November 2018
There is something seriously wrong with the processes of domestication be it of wolves, wild cats or human beings. Domestication is, itself, a form of violence. Domestication is the abuse of the natural state that leaves some battered and bruised and almost all (dogs, cats and people), ultimately, agoraphobic xenophobes. “Woof”.
The home is the space that provides a ‘toolkit’ for control and domination. It is a theatre for the soap opera that is family life, the playhouse for family power dynamics. Stick two or more human beings in a domicile and the same old scripts, the same old games will eventually be performed or played out every day under every roof.
The most important and common interplay is that between matriarchy and patriarchy. Within the walls of the contemporary home, matriarchy invariably wins. The patriarch is either coerced into having to perform the role of a gelded child/pet or else, in order to ‘survive’, he secures some sort of sanctuary like a hobby shed, man cave or maybe just a brainless phallocentric pastime like golf, darts or fishing, just anything that gets him out … or a study – if he’s old fashioned – or maybe just his ‘special’ chair – if he’s old fashioned and not so well off (and has retained some vestigial status, perhaps a notch above the spayed cat or dog). Failing to secure any of these attempts to preserve a sense of self-space and time, something of himself, there is, these days, always the iPhone or iPad (in olden day’s a book or newspaper) to hide behind.
There are males, of course, who attempt to resist the attrition, or at least match blow with blow. Against the rich repertoire of female domination techniques the only one with which evolution has provided the dumb male is physical abuse: unintelligent flailing, a little primitive, all round not good and definitely not playing the game, or not reading from the autocue. “Oh dear…”
It’s the stuff of ‘what-they-didn’t-teach-you-at-school’. Schools are, after all, only ever hell bent on preparing the next crop of ‘canon’ fodder for a toilsome life of work rather than the rewarding walk of life. And, as for parents, they’re too preoccupied battling it out over wet towels and whose turn it is to make the tea to find the time or energy to help shift the endless paradigms, somehow. Indeed, it deepens like a coastal shelf…
Or, maybe we’re all just too hard-wired to change the way we have to behave. Even if we did try to warn children (by making them conscious of all the ridiculous games we play as adults, by making them aware of what awaits them in the boxes down the cul-de-sacs of our mid-life mad-lives) it is probable, almost by definition, that we could never manage to revert to our ur-human nature or send the now accepted ‘normal’ human life cycle scuttering.
I wrote about this sort of thing in my novel, Portrait of a Landscape, a narrative not without its precursors: Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence spring to mind. Or even Henri Gauguin himself qua real life domestic refugee. And Doris Lessing, of course. Not just male fugitives. Women too. Sure. But these are the rare bohemians, fictional or otherwise. I mean, the migrant caravans are heading northwards towards and for the perceived rewards of ‘safe’ serfdom and a life sentence of mortgage repayments. In my mind there should at least be a caravan of spent domesticants heading across the borders the other way like battle fatigued soldiers being relieved from the trenches by fresh and rather naïve recruits. “So, what’s it like up there?” “Bloody murder…”
Domestic bliss is, indeed, a form of trench warfare. Maybe only at Christmas, do the combatants ruefully emerge into no man’s land to exchange gifts and share the sofa for the national sport of gloomification and a top-up of the GAD batteries via the likes of Christmas East Enders. As the sun sets, the annoyances return. Booze induced irritations have everyone scampering for their lines and wire in order to get back to the familiar business of rubbing along by rubbing up with those well worn acts of passive aggression and net twitching. Over the years, warfare provides a sick comfort zone of predictability and habituation… “Auf Wiedersehen, Tommy! See you next year!” “Maybe… Did you let the cat out?”
But seriously, why or when were we meant to be banged up in boxes? Well, I suppose the conventional Venus-Mars wisdom on this is that men, as opposed to women, have not been nearly so well groomed by evolution, history or culture for domesticity. James Bond sporting some ventriloquously slung neonate like a ventral base-jump backpack does, whatever one is meant to say, look faintly absurd. Incongruous because it is incongruous.
It’s not my intention to ally myself with some reactionary Jordon Peterson, Piers Morgan or laddist bandwagon over this general issue of woman handing misery (and babies) onto man. My tack is not with any stream, main or otherwise; I swim against currents, paddle my own canoe, etcetera…
What kills the romance and fires up the misogyny (and the violence, of course) is the emasculating house, the home. Exotic hotel bedroom: yes please! Marital bedsock farty duvet: no, but thank you. “Cocoa or hot milk tonight, dear?” Paarp.
In James Thurber’s battle of the sexes cartoons for The New Yorker the one that is perhaps most memorable, iconic, is the giant and menacing ‘house-woman’ looming with a scowl over a diminutive male returning home. It’s an oddly twentieth century revision of the return of Odysseus to Ithaca. In ancient and more patriarchal times, one supposes, the returning male off his PTSD meds would have been lauded for turning the so-called ‘living room’ into a killing zone bloodbath (look out, Penelope, hubby’s home!). Nowadays, he has to sit shaking patiently and wishing he could fully appreciate, or even just comprehend, his wife’s in-absence embroidery efforts, whilst sipping the tea he feels he should have made for them both but defiantly didn’t. “So what’s the weather like in Kabul?” “I need to punch someone. Kick the fucking dog.” “Oh dear…”
But there are men, creative types who, in contrast to the supposedly feminist Austen and Woolf, or the traditional literary patriarchs, do seem to be in love with the uninhabiting and uninhibited romantic woman. After all, some know we will never find the dynamism of romance in the inert stasis of domesticity. “What we have here is a dead shark.”
Jane Austen considers the unhoused woman to be essentially and necessarily unhinged. Lydia Wickham’s failure to put house over husband is exposed to be a sort of bonkiness that it isn’t. Virginia Woolf’s key contribution to female emancipation goes not much further than demands for solitary confinement. Still, perhaps, had Austen and Woolf not lived in rainier and colder climes, they might have extolled and yearned for the virtues of distant hills, rolling sands, a life at sea. I don’t know … somewhere more liberating than the cosy straight jackets of domestic spaces, however warm, dry and dead.
The Ancients saw women as being dangerously rather cloying, always hoping their goal-obsessed travelling victims might settle long term rather than just bed down for the night. Shakespeare, however, sailed merrily with the epithalamium tide; the rakish free women, if there are any, are, like Lydia Wickham, peripherally batty. Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, is not to be preferred over Portia conniving to wrest her insipid gentile victim from the clutches of the wandering Jew; to be imprisoned in her infernal Belmont to make porky babies.
But there are men – like me – who have been enchanted by free women – fictional women – like themselves…
The Feminist social agenda has tended to want to persuade and coerce men into loving homes as much as they do themselves, when it might have been more emancipating just to have flown. How could four walls and a roof ever have provided freedom or even sanctuary? – not that I’m against shelter, but homes are something quite different. I mean, why didn’t Dido sail off with Aeneas to find Rome? Why the funeral hearth fires piled high with consumer tat, for the gods’ sakes?
Ahh! In contrast, there are those wonderful free spirits from Carmen to Holly Golightly, Tess to Nastasya Filippovna, who, albeit portrayed as being somewhat bananas – as these women tend to be, for some unfathomable lack of reason – are at least not banged up in a Bertha Mason jar by some gothic weirdo with a big dog. Free spirits unite!
Well, whatever, the problems of domestic violence may soon be solved through the combined effects of social inequality, climate change and internecine warfare that extends beyond the borders of suburbia. Minimalism is the new-now pragmatism for those unable ever to afford a house, let alone three. Let the world be filled with caravanserais, date palm oases and free trailer-trash parking zones. Let a new species leave the charred remains of that lost Paradise. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Hobo sapien!”
And whatever I might fail to achieve during the romance, at the end of it all, don’t incarcerate me in some black hole-buried box, but take my ashes to the coast in an old Folger’s coffee can and scatter my spirit to the ocean breeze (just ensure you stand upwind this time, Dude).