A few years ago, my friend Anna was filling out an immigration form in Hong Kong when it asked for her marital condition. The examples given were listed as such: whether you are a bachelor/spinster; widower/widow; a divorced person; or previously married by any form of marriage.
She was shocked that the term spinster was still used on official government forms. Whereas the word bachelor implied a fun-loving, free and single man, the word spinster came with it connotations of an unmarried, unloveable older woman near menopause doted on by six or seven cats that would no doubt eat her once she dies alone in her flat. Anna actually wrote a strongly worded letter to the Hong Kong government asking them to change it, but I’m not sure if she ever got a response. From what I can tell, they still haven’t amended it.
As it turns out, Anna would meet her boyfriend a few months later and from all accounts they are still together and still very happy with no intentions of adopting even a single cat. At the time I didn’t see the fuss over a single word. I didn’t understand her disgust, her dread at the term being used. Of course I understood that it is unpleasant to be categorised based solely on whether you are in a relationship or not, or having your self worth measured in relation to your worth to a man. I understood that being unmarried is not a curse that only strikes unlucky women, but so what? Who cares about some old immigration form they hadn’t updated from the colonial days?
What strikes me more thinking back now is not the inherent misogyny of it, but the darker undertones to being a spinster, the kind of things that creep into the minds of both men and women in the early hours of the morning. Things we don’t like to talk about. We could all accept being a young and desired bachelor or bachelorette. Those words are imbued with an inherent hope, a promise of more to come. A spinster has reached the end of that hope. What if I get old and lonely and no one ever marries me? What if I never settle down with someone? What if I’m alone and all my friends have moved on to have families? What if I never find someone? What if someone never finds me?
Stephen Benatar’s Wish Her Safe At Home tackles these very questions, through the eyes of protagonist Rachel Waring. She is, in the traditional sense, a spinster. In her late 40’s, socially awkward, repressed, intelligent, almost certainly virginal and post-menopausal. She attempts to restart her life after inheriting a house from a great aunt, and she finds herself deliriously happy as life gets better and better in her new home. She also goes quite insane.
Told from the perspective of Rachel as she carves out a new life for herself, we are never given an objective look into the story. We garner only vague hints of darkness clouding at the edge of Rachel’s life, distant and faint warning bells that something is amiss. Unpleasant things are covered up in an unbearable British manner calling to mind Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Thoughts and feelings are left unsaid, desires left unexpressed. And as Rachel becomes more insular, we too begin to question the motivations of other characters. We become suspicious, secretive, distrustful of the world around Rachel. We isolate ourselves with her and her alone.
In yet another book that eerily mirrors life in a pandemic, Benatar captures the feeling of urban isolation to a painfully accurate degree. I do not use the word ‘painfully‘ as a colourful descriptor. Some of the passages of Rachel in social situations are physically painful to read. As Rachel narrates her thought process while talking to someone at a baby’s christening, or over coffee at a church, or attempting to flirt with the clerk at the pharmacy, I felt myself wincing. Physically cringing. Dreading what she was about to do next. But I couldn’t stop. It is brilliantly written. I finished the book in two days.
It brings to mind the ramblings of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Notes from Underground, or the oblivious madness of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. But unlike those characters, Benatar keeps Rachel incredibly likeable. She is positive, she is generous, she is bright and bubbly. Despite reading along and experiencing her descent in madness, we’re unmistakeably on her side. We want her to do well, we want her to make friends, we want her to please stop saying these inappropriate things to this married man. How accurately Benatar has captured the inner workings of the female mind I have no idea (he is after all, a man with four children who currently lives with his partner John), but it is nothing if not convincing. Rather than keep us at the arms length we would normally keep with unstable characters, Benatar wins us over and has us pulling for Rachel before things start to go sour.
I can’t deny the book made me uncomfortable. Not only with the second-hand embarrassment you feel when you watch someone make a fool of themselves (I audibly said at one point “no, oh god no don’t”), but also something deeper. Perhaps the similarities between Rachel and things I have myself done were a little too uncomfortable to confront. I do not think I’m alone in self-projection. The book was submitted for contention in the Man Booker Prize in 1982. One of judges of the prize John Carey was engrossed by the book, and when he expressed his love for it to his fellow judges, he was shocked by the response. Their response to his advocacy “was something between embarrassment and physical discomfort, almost as if I’d made an indecent suggestion”.
The book dances a line of taboo that we do not like to discuss in 2020, let alone in 1982 Great Britain. Mental illness, urban isolation, repressive English culture and lonely spinsterdom. Benatar melds them into an intractable puzzle from which the reader cannot distance ourselves. We too hold court in our own mind, run through monologues in our private moments, make enemies in our heads of acquaintances and passers-by. We have all been Rachel. Benatar has amplified all of these niggling emotions, shouting them back at us through a megaphone.
These social isolating fears, of not being understood, of not being loved despite our best intentions make up the soul of the book. It is the same dread I imagine when I read the term spinster, a modern horror story for anyone who wants nothing more than to be loved.