The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [196]
They were troubled, as intelligent girls at the time were troubled, by the question of whether their need for knowledge and work in the world would in some sense denature them. Women worked, they knew, as milliners and typewriters, housekeepers and skivvies. They worked because they had no means, or were not pretty or rich enough to attract a man. The spectre of imaginary nuns haunted them. If Griselda did manage to be admitted to Newnham College, in Cambridge, would it be like entering a nunnery, an all-female community, mutually supporting intellectual desire and ambition which the world at large still saw as unnatural, and frequently as threatening? Griselda’s quiet love for Toby reassured her on this front also—she had ordinary womanly feelings, she was not a freak, or a withdrawn contemplative. She just wanted to be able to think.
Dorothy was sterner—she had to be—the path she had chosen was still into hostile country, even though there were now a respectable number of qualified women doctors in the world, and a new women’s hospital. The life of the mind, and the truly useful life of medicine, would doom her, too, to the inhabiting of an all-female community. Women doctors treated only women, and worked with other women doctors. One side of her nature would have to be denied, in order for her to become the professional person she meant to be. It was not so for males. Men doctors married, and their wives supported their surgeries, and comforted them when they were tired. In low moments, late at night, Dorothy asked herself if she was some kind of monster. But she went on, at least partly because she could not imagine confining her life to frills, furbelows, teacups, gossip. If women only, better the operating theatre than the sewing-circle. But it wasn’t easy.
Charles’s secret, his political opinions, caused him paradoxically to live in the frivolous, parasitic way those opinions condemned. He didn’t want to commit himself to university, and kept telling his father he needed time to work out what he really wanted to do and be. He went on European cultural journeys, frequently to Germany, since he was, after all, half-German. He talked Joachim Susskind into accompanying him for tours of six or eight weeks—thus putting a great strain on Dorothy’s instruction and disrupting her planned progress. Susskind was originally from Munich, and liked to go back there and talk anarchism and other forms of disorder—sexual, theatrical, religious—in the Café Stefanie, and in the Wirthaus zum Hirsch in Schwabing. Charles/ Karl was introduced to a psychoanalyst, wild Otto Gross, and the social anarchist Gustav Landauer. He went to satirical cabarets, which he did not follow, because his German was not idiomatic enough, and his local political knowledge was nonexistent. But he loved the smoke-filled air and the smoke-stained ceilings and the air of serious, witty wickedness and idealism. He would have liked to be a writer or a painter, but was not sure he could write or paint. He bought a sketch-pad and drew some secret cows and naked women, both of which were so wooden that he tore them up. Munich was full of serious, laughing women, painting in the open air. He loitered behind them, and watched their wrists turn as they put the strokes of paint on the canvas. He said to Joachim that he would like to stay long enough to take lessons in art or design. Joachim said complacently that München was a cauldron of creativity.