From Gissing’s The Odd Women comes this beautiful quote:
In no woman on earth could he have put perfect confidence. He regarded them as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity, remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions. Of course he was right; he himself represented the guardian male, the wife-proprietor, who from the dawn of civilization has taken abundant care that woman shall not outgrow her nonage. The bitterness of his situation lay in the fact that he had wedded a woman who irresistibly proved to him her claims as a human being. Reason and tradition contended in him, to his ceaseless torment.
Gissing’s words remain more than relevant still. His character allows the patriarchal mythology to destroy his life. Haven’t we all met such people?
Clarissa's Blog 
I found myself in the feminine side of that patriarchal trap, but not by will or choice. At its core, patriarchy is a system that treats women as if they belong to their fathers. What a father wills for his daughter is publicly what she “is” and what it is necessary for her to remain. Other men will tacitly reinforce what they divine to be her father’s will for her. From personal experience: you can’t go around saying, “My father wants this for me, but I want the other arrangement.” Well, you can say it, but its a way of garnering popular support for your father and making your own choices look extremely dubious to the public eye.
Because of this patriarchal dynamic, which impacted on my psychology, I developed a persistent sense that I wasn’t really there when I spoke. My sense of my own experiences was revoked by others who assured me I couldn’t really mean what I said; that I meant something else when expressing my perspectives. This ideological denial of my opinions, ideas and observations was crazy-making, since it created a smokescreen around my consciousness. I was never quite sure what kind of opinion or idea had an social validity. I felt like I was in a sense unreal, myself, and had to bring myself into the world by some tireless gesture, which involved sticking to my guns until the smoke clouds around me started to subside.
I’m sure that there are many women who were not born into this patriarchal trap to begin with. It must be less common in this day and age. To be made uncertain of what you know and what you don’t, because people keep barraging you with suggestions that you don’t know what you surely do, is a recipe for crazy-making. There are few people who will not take the father’s view. It seems authoritative.
The fact that it wasn’t authoritative has taken a long time to become clear. In the mean time, I had given up expecting any consolation from others. My father’s view of me was based not on his experience of me, but on his experience of his mother. That much is now apparent; he felt tormented and abandoned by her. I didn’t torment and abandon my father, but his mother did when she sent him to boarding school at an early age, and did not protect him from the violence of the world, including his step-father’s verbal violence and rage.
Because it was my father who entertained some pretty immature conceptions and notions about me, these conceptions and notions were considered to be true by the authorities I went to for help. I couldn’t make sense of the fact that my own views were not taken as the true ones. This made me feel uncertain and unborn.
Marechera’s writing helped me, finally, to understand reality on my own terms. You have to abandon your fear of death and your need for social approval, and then other people’s agendas in wanting to control you become plainer to see. That’s because you’re no longer wrapped up in the circumstances emotionally and in particular you’re no longer crossing your fingers for a good outcome — that life should turn out to be full of roses and benevolence. Once you lose hope, you gain reality. And, it turns out that reality isn’t ideological; it’s not patriarchal. It’s robust, and complex and pulsating.
I managed to finally move from patriarchal unreality into the realm of experience. Here, I understand everything on my own terms at last.
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I have extremely similar experiences to yours. I could have written 90% of this post word for word about my own life. So I know exactly what you are talking about. Especially the sense that you are not real and the need to ground yourself in reality in some way.
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That’s interesting! One weird thing: I’ve never sought normality or social grounding so much as an initiatory experience — something that would move me from fuzzy experience into palpable reality. I think I’ve always sought that. At least, from my early twenties, I always sensed that this was missing. I no longer do, however, since I’ve pushed myself to my limits psychologically and perhaps physically. I definitely felt the G-force psychologically, so I am satisfied with that — that I am completely brave and worthy of my own approval. This is what matters, in the end. If you haven’t tested yourself, you are still inclined to ask others for their views on you, to try to ground yourself in that way. That’s a horrible thing to do to oneself.
Having gained this emotional self-knowledge, I have completed the most significant task for an individual, in their lifetime.
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What is pupilage? What is nonage?
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Nonage is a “no-age” state, immaturity, being permanently underage.
Pupilage is being a pupil, a student. Gissing is talking about the prevalent patriarchal idea that husbands should spend their entire lives educating and guiding their wives who can’t guide themselves in anything because of their lack of brain matter.
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