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struct. That the viewpoint is shared is more important to the couple's
happiness than its truth. Rose offers the good marriage of the Mills
as a case in point. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were not
equals, he was the more intelligent and she was the more powerful,
but "the facts in the Mills' case - that a woman of sharp and uncom–
plicated will dominated a guilt-ridden man - were less important than
their shared imaginative view of the facts , that their marriage fitted
their shared ideal of a marriage of equals ."
Like Gay, Rose rejects the common view of Victorian life as
heavily repressed in its intimate dimension but, unlike Gay, she sees
herself as a spokeswoman for a "post-liberated age," which means in
particular that she discounts the importance of sexual satisfaction to
a happy and successful union . The shared fiction is what counts .
Sexless marriages may reveal flexibility rather than abnormality. Har–
riet Taylor had no sex with her lover while her husband was alive,
nor did she have sex with her husband after she began her relation
with Mill ; this period of abstinence lasted for twenty years and did
not prevent what seem to have been good relationships with both
men . And Rose praises the so-called Boston marriage, a lifelong
commitment of two women who live together, whether or not any
sex is involved . There must be other kinds of marriage , she writes ,
other long-term associations between two people beyond the very
narrow ones husbands and wives generally demand of one another
today .
Rose rightly accents the need for imaginative satisfaction be–
tween men and women, but the retreat to happiness in fictions is
unappealing. Mill's own conviction, like Freud's later on , was that
we achieve human dignity by living in truth , however painful, even
though much of his own happiness with Harriet Taylor depended
upon his living in a dream. And Rose surely underestimates the
degree to which even the fictions we believe are constrained by ac–
tualities. The difficulties marriages encounter are sometimes caused
not by disagreement about what is going on but by the intrusion of a
painful reality which prevents husband or wife from believing the
old scenario. This is strikingly illustrated by the Carlyles' marriage .
Jane Carlyle took care of Thomas Carlyle, and he was grateful. "She
sacrificed; he thanked her. That was the equilibrium of their mar–
riage," says Phyllis Rose.
It
broke down , Rose thinks , when Jane
wanted to change the scenario which they had agreed upon in the
early days of their marriage . She had given up her life, given up her
ambitions to develop herself in favor of serving him, and now she
