LAUREN CHATER Gulliver’s Wife. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
In her first novel, The Lace Weaver, Lauren Chater took readers to Estonia; in her second she imagines the life of the woman left behind in London when Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver went off on his travels.
There’s an old saying: behind every great man there’s a great woman. But in 18th-century England the struggles of women, no matter how hard, dangerous or heroic, count for little when set against the exploits of men. This remains the case even when the man’s exploits are of little if any benefit, and end in disasters entirely of his own making. This is the proposition that Chater explores in her new novel Gulliver’s Wife, a story packed full of the trials, tests and tribulations readers associate with the name Gulliver, just not the Gulliver you know.
Most people today have at least heard of Gulliver and his wayward travels, the satirical creation of Jonathan Swift almost 300 years ago. The image of a man in 18th-century garb lashed to a beach by diminutive Lilliputians has been burned into the collective consciousness, with perhaps a little help from Hollywood. Fewer people are aware that Lilliput represented only the first of his adventures, which included spending time with the giants of Brobdingnag, travelling to the flying island of Laputa, and ending up in a strange land peopled by sentient horses and ape-like beasts known as Yahoos.
Gulliver’s Travels is narrated by its central character, a man who is not always as truthful as he could be. Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver is a classic unreliable narrator, who leaves the reader uncertain as to exactly what has kept him at sea all these years. Chater picks up on this from the outset, with Mary Gulliver contemplating the multiple deceits that are revealed to her along with the news that her husband’s ship has sunk off the coast of Sumatra:
Letters had begun to arrive before they’d left London for the funeral – invoices demanding payment for credit accounts held in her husband’s name. One missive contained a sum so staggeringly large the shock sent her, trembling, to her knees… Domestic mysteries unravelled as she remembered how each time Lemuel had returned from the sea, he’d handed over a paltry amount of coins ‘for your keeping and that of the children’ and then the next day begged money from her purse.
But Mary has no time to mourn. She has mouths to feed while ministering as midwife to the local women without incurring accusations of witchcraft, and managing the demands for money to meet her late husband’s debts. And these competing dilemmas don’t appear to be unusual. In the first few chapters of Gulliver’s Wife we hear of the issues facing a number of women, such as those incarcerated in Newgate prison, who prefer dying in childbirth to receiving ‘the lewd attentions of the guards, the strippings and beatings’.
Life three centuries ago was hard in ways it can be difficult to conceive of today. There were no social services, no unemployment benefits, no occupational health and safety regulations. Before he left on his voyages, Gulliver was a surgeon, and Mary remembers almost casually how she had assisted her husband in his work by ‘spreading straw over the bloodstains’. Men and women alike fight a daily battle against hunger, cold, disease and a threat of crime so constant it has almost become casual. In this world, no one – man, woman or child – has an easy life.
But Chater is clear from the outset that the difficulties faced by men and those faced by women were not in any way the same. In the opening pages, we revisit that famous scene of Gulliver on the beach – a man clearly out of his element, restrained by as yet unknown creatures, and facing an adventure that is so fantastic it is worthy of a story that will live down the ages. Cut to a scene of Mary, Gulliver’s wife, up to her elbows in blood and muck as she works as midwife to a simple village woman. Mary is anxious. This is the woman’s second child, the first one having been stillborn. But this time the baby is safely delivered and everyone goes home. Both spouses have faced down fear and wrestled with death that day. But while Gulliver claims the space as a hero and gains an enduring story, Mary simply wanders back home, unremarked and unremarkable.
Swift’s original narrative was a satire. Chater’s tale is anything but. It is gritty, and doesn’t shy away from the realities of the world she is portraying. When Gulliver returns, a changed man, speculation builds as to what tribulations he’s faced that have driven him to drink and to mutter nonsensical insanities in his sleep. Meanwhile the women of his household scramble to manage as disaster piles upon disaster. But no one is interested in their mundane, domestic tragedies. And so they struggle on in the background, barely given any notice while Gulliver pulls all the attention.
In an author’s note at the end of the book, Chater writes that the inspiration behind Gulliver’s Wife was the fact that Mary, despite appearing in Swift’s original work:
… is an absent character throughout much of the story. A symbol of the domestic world, she exists on the fringes… never destined to travel further (as far as we are told) than the outskirts of London.
Yet this hardly means that her world was uneventful. As we watch her negotiate the snares and traps of a typical 18th-century Englishwoman’s life, it becomes increasingly clear that the England Gulliver yearns to return to may not be the civilisation he remembers, and that it may not be necessary to travel to exotic lands to find yourself besieged by monsters.
The result is a work that can, at times, be unrelenting. This is probably not a book to be taken in large doses, unless you have built up a solid immunity to misery and gross inequality. But this is life three centuries ago, not life today. And for all of our imperfections and problems, we live in a world so much better than anything Mary Gulliver or her contemporaries could possibly have imagined. Which must lead you to wonder how much more we might improve by the year 2320. And that must be a reason for hope.
Lauren Chater Gulliver’s Wife, Simon and Schuster 2020 PB 416 pp $32.99
Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.
You can buy Gulliver’s Wife from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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