Photo: Medium
Wisdom and happiness have long been associated with a certain serenity—an acceptance of one’s life and one’s self, in all their beauties, limitations, and imperfections.
Montaigne, arguably the West’s most ardent proponent of this view, ends his essay “Of Experience” with a plea for a “gay and sociable wisdom,” stating that
[i]t is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully…. The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity. (1044)
Reflecting back on his time in captivity and on the lesson he learned from his fellow prisoner Platon Karataev, Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhof realizes the folly of his longstanding quest to find “the purpose of life,”—a quest on which he had thrown himself successively into “European life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, [and] philanthropy” (War and Peace 1104). From his conversations with Platon, rather,
he had learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to see it, to enjoy contemplating it, he had naturally abandoned the spyglass he had been looking through until then over people’s heads, and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the calmer and happier he became. (1104)
Finally, and closer to our day, Robert Sternberg and Judith Glück have argued that wise individuals
are not driven exclusively or even largely by external sources of pride such as money, fame, or power. Wise people are at peace with themselves. They have accepted who they are, and they are accepting of others. They live the life that is right for them because they know what they really need. (Wisdom 115)
Let me give just two brief examples of canonical novels that exemplify this understanding of wisdom as grounded in serenity and an acceptance of life, however mundane that life should be.
Photo: Middlemarch, dir. Anthony Page
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is frequently and rightly cited as one of the wisest and most psychologically astute of traditional realist novels. In Middlemarch’s Finale, Eliot recounts the fates—happy and otherwise—of her primary characters, in a tone that is both broadly loving and fully alert to their many foibles. On full display here is Eliot’s singular genius for intimating truths behind her characters’ assumptions. Witness, for example, the brief passage where Eliot reports that the generally unserious Fred Vincy had published a work on the Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle Feeding and his more substantial wife Mary Garth a book for her boys entitled Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch. Whereas the townsfolk of Middlemarch oddly assume that both books were written by the other spouse, Eliot strongly hints that both were in fact composed by Mary.
At a key moment in the Finale, however, Eliot uses the judgment of those same townsfolk to anticipate the frustration of her readers, from 1872 to today, that her protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, had not fully realized her youthful reformist dreams: “Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother” (836). Arguing that all of us are more constrained than we realize by the social conditions in which we live, and that the provincial mores of Reform Era England had no place for a new Saint Teresa or a second Antigone, Eliot concludes of Dorothea:
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (838)
Photo: Middlemarch, dir. Anthony Page
In a 2017 essay encouraging contemporary college students not to conflate purpose and meaning with glamor, as social media can incite one to do, Emily Esfahani Smith quotes this passage to argue that the “most meaningful lives… are often not the extraordinary ones. They’re the ordinary ones lived with dignity.”
The very title of Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Angle of Repose evokes just such an attitude of acceptance. Infirm, cantankerous, and recently divorced, Stegner’s embedded narrator, retired historian Lyman Ward, passes his days reconstructing the life of his gifted grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, as she strives to make peace with her marriage to a bright, yet demonstrably less cultured husband and to realize what artistic ambition she can in the rough and tumble American West of the gold rush era. Lyman recognizes that he himself is “much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were” and defends his “transmitted prejudices, culture, [and] moralities” as personal, even though they are largely “familial”. In so doing, he interrogates Susan’s quest for “some restful 30° angle,” her desire to make peace with a life, a marriage, and a sense of herself that “all came unglued together” (3f., 13).
What interests Lyman in the papers that inhabit his study in the California cottage his grandparents built is thus not so much Susan’s career as a novelist and illustrator or her husband Oliver’s as a mining engineer, but rather “how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into the future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them” (228). For much of the novel, Lyman relies on the assistance of the young Shelly Rasmussen who, like his son Rodman, becomes the target of Lyman’s (and presumably Stegner’s) scorn for early 1970s counterculture. Thinking of Shelly’s tendency to “question everything” except the very “act of questioning,” Lyman reflects: “I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise” (569).
In their own ways, both Middlemarch and Angle of Repose raise the following question. If accepting that our lives are fundamentally constrained by external circumstances—the cultures and communities we live in, our families and partners, the presence or lack of real opportunity in our lives—why is it that the constrained subjects are so often women? Is the recognition of “wisdom”, in other words, just a consolation for those—so often women—who accept their lot in life and do not, like Shelly, “question everything”?
Susan Ward clearly chafes at the compromises she has been forced to make in ways that Dorothea rarely does. But Eliot’s explicit framing of the constraints on women in England of the 1830s and beyond and her ever-present ironic subtext on all matters involving the thwarting of female ambition, not to mention Mary Ann Evans’s perceived need to adopt a male nom de plume, all suggest that the wisdom of Middlemarch is, on balance, more realistic than consoling.
Photo: Alta Journal
The case of Angle is more complicated. Lyman clearly loves and admires Susan, looking to her for insight into how best to negotiate the challenges of his own life. Yet the novel is in fact a double reconstruction: as Lyman works to piece together Susan’s life as she would have experienced it coming at her, not with what Stegner calls the “Doppler Effect” of “expectations reduced, desires blunted, [and] hopes deferred,” Stegner himself infamously composed Angle thanks to massive, largely unacknowledged borrowings from Mary Hallock Foote’s memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (14). Ironically, in other words, a novel that turns on a male historian’s efforts to reconstruct and celebrate the life of his largely forgotten artistic grandmother itself relies on a male author’s scandalous silencing of the authorship of another forgotten woman (Sands Hall).
To return to my question then: is “wisdom”—surreptitiously or not—an alibi for quietism, especially among women? Let me approach this question by way of some interesting work that literary scholar Kathleen Woodward has done on the association of wisdom with age. Drawing upon wisdom’s longstanding association with what psychologists call emotional regulation, Woodward mounts an interesting (if ultimately one-sided) argument “against wisdom” as a supposed characteristic of old age, writing that
[i]t is time to declare a moratorium on wisdom. I do not mean that we would not be correct to describe certain people as wise or certain actions as wise. What I mean is that we should not resort to wisdom in theorizing or imagining a social role for older people in general…. Living up to the emotional (or unemotional) standard of wisdom can have the damaging consequence of suppressing the experience of an appropriate anger. (63)
As Woodward well knows, this prohibition against a “vitalizing anger” among older people mirrors, and can be compounded by, the arguably broader prohibition against anger among women, regardless of age (55). The risk of depression through what Woodward diagnoses as a turning inward of culturally prohibited anger is no less acute for women in general as it is for the elderly.
Photo: Ted Leonhardt
Toward the end of her essay, however, Woodward undercuts her call for a moratorium on wisdom by evoking, in her discussion of an ageist slight experienced by feminist activist Barbara Macdonald, “an anger that, upon reflection, turns out to have been wise” (65). Woodward works to resolve this apparent contradiction by insisting that she would not call the sixty-five year-old Macdonald a “wise old woman,” because that would imply that she is “calmly dispassionate” (65). But the damage to Woodward’s “moratorium” is done.
