Book Notes: Anna Funder’s Wifedom

I’m interested in the phenomenon of “the wife of a genius”. It’s a curious life strategy that is enlightening to observe. I thought that reading a biography of George Orwell’s wife by Anna Funder would be a valuable contribution to my collection of such stories but it turned out that Funder isn’t much interested in Orwell or his wife. She’s interested in talking about her own victimhood.

Funder shares that she always admired Orwell (which is hard to believe because Funder is very left-wing) but then she discovered that he was an “arsehole” to his wife and that admiration waned. It’s easy to judge Orwell’s imperfect private life. It’s harder to ask oneself what does it say about Funder’s character that she endlessly complains in the book about her husband not doing enough housework and stifling her literary genius or that her 9-year-old son is forced to condemn men for doing bad things to women to please mommy.

Orwell at least left great art to compensate for his personal shortcomings. Funder will not, and that’s not because she does too many dishes.

“I would have achieved so much if I didn’t have to do all the housework” is a statement akin to the ones endlessly issued by academics who are convinced they would have published a lot if only they had time. In reality, people use housework (or the academic daily minutiae) to hide from the realization that they have no capacity to achieve, publish, etc. And it should be fine. It’s only their over-inflated ego that makes them unhappy with what they have.

It’s almost embarrassing to see a woman complain that the unequal distribution of housework in her family stifles her intellectual gifts. What kind of an intellect is incapable of figuring out a comfortable domestic arrangement? Funder shares stories of her female friends, “powerful journalists” and “eminent historians”, who engage in feats of passive aggressive pouting against their family members who don’t do as much as they expect around the house. These are women my age and older, and it’s extraordinary to me that they have lived for 50+ years and still haven’t figured out how not to turn every load of laundry into the Battle of Austerlitz.

As a woman of an intellectual profession, I love folding laundry, a fascinating pastime I discovered in my mid-thirties by absolute accident.* I cook everything from scratch, and I love “soul-sapping grocery runs” that so frustrate Funder. I find all of these activities to be extremely restful. But if I didn’t, I would have found a way to solve this extraordinarily minuscule problem without having to write 500-page rants about it.

* I grew up in a strange family and had to learn many things in adulthood that people usually know by kindergarten.