Showing posts with label the secretary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the secretary. Show all posts

10 Jun 2019

Two Blue Birds: D. H. Lawrence's Take on the Phenomenon of the Office Wife

A secretary offers the only kind of polygamy we 
recognize in this country. - Helen Gurley Brown


I.

Lawrence's short story of 1927 entitled 'Two Blue Birds' belongs to both a sociological history and a literary sub-genre all of its own. Certainly the idea of a love triangle between a man, his wife and his secretary wouldn't have been new or at all shocking. Indeed, what's most surprising here is that Lawrence desexualises the relationship.

From the day that women entered into employment alongside men, the idea that this would lead to extramarital affairs was present and the jokes, stories, and saucy postcards began to immediately circulate. The secretary quickly assumed her place within the pornographic imagination alongside other stereotypical female figures, such as the waitress and librarian, for example.   

The phrase office wife dates to the 1920s, so there's a good chance Lawrence would have known of it - particularly as he spent a good deal of time in the United States. What he could not have known, however, was the popular novel of this title by Faith Baldwin published in the year of his death; or the Warner Bros. movie, directed by Lloyd Bacon, based on Baldwin's novel and also released in 1930.

In brief, an office wife refers to a secretary with whom a man shares a very special relationship. As we shall see, Miss Wrexall becomes a second wife to her boss, Cameron Gee. Not only does she spend many long hours working closely with him, bur she intuitively understand his personal needs and the pressures he was under, genuinely caring for his health and happiness.

I think we might legitimately speak of the propinquity effect in this case. And of sublimated desire, that is channeled into their queer-platonic collaboration, much to the wife's disgust (like many women in her position, she could accept her husband having a sexual affair, but not the strange intimacy of his relationship with Miss Wrexall).      


II.

The handsome writer Cameron Gee asked his adoring secretary to do things "in that good-natured, confident voice of a man who knows that his request will be only too gladly fulfilled". Not that he ever asked her to do anything inappropriate. For whilst Miss Wrexall was quite young and quite good-looking - and whilst he absolutely depended on her - he didn't desire her in that way:

"They were just the young master and his secretary. He dictated to her, she slaved for him and adored him, and the whole thing went on wheels."

Nevertheless, his estranged wife despises Miss Wrexall, whom she regards as competent, but common. Naturally, this rather complicated matters. And like many secretaries before her, Miss Wrexall found herself at times having to manage not only her boss, but placate and reassure her boss's wife.

Ultimately, the two women are locked into a battle and the question is: Who does more for this clever, enigmatic and whimsical man? Perhaps the wife already knew the answer to this in her heart. She may technically have the husband, "but a husband is the mere shred of a man, compared to a boss, a chief, a man who dictates" and whose every word a secretary will faithfully take down.   

The wife grows increasingly resentful. All the lovers and long winter vacations in the world don't help her forget her husband dictating to Miss Wrexall for ten hours a day "with nothing but a pencil between them: and a flow of words".

Worse! The secretary had brought her mother and sister into the household: the former as a sort of cook and housekeeper; the latter as a sort of maid and valet-de-chambre. Both provided an excellent service and soon all three women knew their master's affairs and personal tastes. Best of all, they hardly accepted any wages.   

For the wife, of course, had helped push the man into debt. And it was up to Miss Wrexall, his secretary, to smooth things over whenever a creditor became dangerous and threatened to trigger a financial crisis. But the secretarial family still received the wife when she came home "with most elaborate attentions and deference", though this only made her feel ridiculous.

"Could anything be more impossible! They had the house spotless and running like a dream: how could an incompetent and extravagant wife dare to interfere, when she saw their amazing and almost inspired economy!"

The man, if not perfectly happy, was nevertheless perfectly comfortable. Only his wife suspects that such comfort is not good for him. Or his work. It wasn't so much the home-cooked food and a soft bed that were the issue; his comfort, rather, consisted of having "nobody, absolutely nobody and nothing, to contradict him". His secretary prided herself on the fact that she spared him any aggravation.

At night, the wife could hear her husband dictate and she "imagined the little figure of the secretary busily scribbling shorthand". Then, in the sunny hours of the following morning, "from another distance came that sharp insect-noise of the typewriter, like some immense grasshopper chirping and rattling".

The wife thinks to herself:

"That girl - she was only twenty-eight - really slaved herself to skin and bone. She was small and neat, but she was acually worn out. She did far more work than he did, for she had to not only take down all those words he uttered, she had to type them out, make three copies, while he was still resting."

And for what? A very poor salary - and she doesn't even receive his kisses (though whether his never kissing her made things better or worse for the secretary, the wife could not decide). But she and her family adored him and were devoted to him. Only such uncritical adoration and devotion was subtly undermining the quality of his writing: "His whole tone was going down, becoming commoner."

The wife felt she ought to do something to save him and his reputation as an author. She wanted to destroy the perfectly devoted secretarial family and "sweep them into oblivion". But what, really, could she do? There was nothing to be done. But still she had to do something ... things could not go on as they were.

The wife, with her long and shapely she-wolf legs, was determined to defeat the dark-haired little secretary with "the pretty but rather common little feet". The latter is rightly terrified by the "queer, powerful, elegant, wolf-like figure of the wife".

One day, in the garden, the wife challenges the secretary; she wants to know why she's so self-effacing and never considers her own needs - why it is she doesn't have the man pay her more heed. This is said in front of the husband, leaving him looking "pained and somewhat remote".

As for the secretary, she hung her head and felt indignant that the purity of her relationship with him had been insulted: "But soon she was veering downstream on the flow of his words, too busy to have any feelings, except one of elation at being so busy." 

Later, at teatime, the wife reappears in the garden and insists that Miss Wrexall join her and her husband for tea. Both women are wearing chicory-blue dresses. The wife again rather cruelly puts the secretary on the spot with her irony and her questions. Miss Wrexall knows very well that the wife is trying to embarrass her and make her feel foolish, despite the latter's insistence that this isn't the case and that nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.

Mrs. Gee teasingly suggests that her husband's books read as if they were not merely typed but actually written in large part by Miss Wrexall. This annoys him and Miss Wrexall finally finds the courage to speak up, accusing the wife of wanting to ruin the relationship between herself and the man:

"'You want to spoil what there is between me and him, I can see that,' she said bitterly.
       'My dear, but what is there between you and him?' asked the wife.
'I was happy working with him, working for him! I was happy working for him!' cried Miss Wrexall, tears of indignant anger and chagrin in her eyes.'"

Of course, the wife protests (with simulated excitement) that she wants Miss Wrexall to go on being happy and to continue working for her husband. That the only issue she has is with him, for being an exploitative employer. But Miss Wrexall, being the perfect secretary - fiercely loyal and protective of her boss and full of what the Marxists call false consciousness - replies: "'But he gives me everything, everything!'"   

Naturally, the wife wants to know what this everything means and just how all-inclusive it is: "'I mean nothing that you need begrudge me,' said the little secretary rather haughtily. 'I've never made myself cheap.'"

This provokes the wife to explode with contempt: "'My God! [...] You don't call that being cheap? Why, I should say you got nothing out of him at all, you only give! And if you don't call that making yourself cheap - my God! -'"

However, Mrs. Gee has finally realised that the game is up and her sham marriage over; that it was time she left for good: "'I'm afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet: tearing out their little feathers!'"

And with that she walked away ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Two Blue Birds', The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 5-18. All lines quoted are from this edition of the text. An ebook version of the tale can be found online (thanks to the University of Adelaide) by clicking here.

For a secretarial sister post to this one, click here.


8 Jun 2019

Notes on the Sexy, Secret, Stereotyped World of the Secretary

Select her carefully and she'll prove the loveliest 
and most valuable of all fringe benfits. - Helen Gurley Brown

I. 

As Derrida notes, the rise of the personal computer has made the figure of the secretary structurally redundant. Only those who wish to continue marking "the authority of their position" still insist on hiring a secretary, even when they could quite easily do the work themselves on their laptop. 

Why should that be? 

Well, partly, it's a sign of status to sit behind a machine-free desk and reconstitute the old-fashioned boss-secretary relationship, passing over hand-written notes to by typed, or dictating whilst some bright young thing practises her shorthand. As Derrida says, power in the workplace has to be mediated, if not delegated, in order to (be seen to) exist.

But, there's also something else going on; something to do with desire and the way in which it infiltrates and directly invests even the most formal and professional of workplaces as a kind of productive energy. 

The fact is, argue Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality is everywhere - not least in the offices and boardrooms of big business. It's in the way a bureaucrat fondles the files; an accountant analyses the financial data; and it's there in the relationship between a male boss and his female secretary ...          

Never shy of discussing sexual politics, D. H. Lawrence naturally had something to say about all this. In an article first published in the Sunday Dispatch in November 1928, Lawrence writes:    

"The business-man's pretty and devoted secretary is still chiefly valuable because of her sex appeal. Which does not imply 'immoral relations' in the slightest. Even today, a girl with a bit of generosity likes to feel she is helping a man, if the man will take her help. And this desire that he shall take her help is her sex appeal. It is the genuine fire, if of a very mediocre heat. Still, it serves to keep the world of 'business' alive. Probably, but for the introduction of the lady secretary into the business-man's office, the business-man would have collapsed entirely by now. She calls up the the sacred fire in her, and she communicates it to her boss. He feels an added flow of energy and optimism, and - business flourishes. That is perhaps the best result of sex appeal today - business flourishes."

I think that's a pretty astonishing passage for several reasons (not necessarily all the right reasons). For one thing, it anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's analysis in Anti-Oedipus - as it does Helen Gurley Brown's claim in Sex and the Single Girl that office romances have a positive effect on performance and productivity. For not only will a man up his game when trying to impress a woman, but a girl in love with her boss will exhaust herself 24/7 and still wish there was more she could do to help. 
 

II.

The term secretary is derived from the Latin secernere and has connotations of something private or confidential (the English word secret has the same etymological root). A secretarius was someone, therefore, who discreetly handled the personal (or business) affairs of a powerful individual. Over time, whilst the duties of the secretary have varied and expanded, essentially the role has remained the same.

In 1870, Sir Isaac Pitman founded his famous school for would-be secretaries. Originally, much like the profession itself, it only admitted male students. But with the invention of the typewriter more and more women began to train as secretaries and by 1919 the role was primarily associated with the fairer sex. 

The period between 1945 and 1980 can probably be regarded as the golden age of the secretary. After this date, new technology and new office politics increasingly saw the role decline or transform. Secretaries became office managers, or personal assistants, or, indeed, bosses themselves and the work place became a boring, sterile environment: no fags, no booze, no flirting, no fun. 

Obviously, no one wants to write in support of sexual discrimination or sexual harassment. But, I have to admit that I find the new puritanism and political correctness just as concerning. Over the last fifty years our attitude towards the erotics of the workplace has moved from bawdy delight and Benny Hill to stern disapproval and the Time's Up movement.

Glancing down blouses and upskirts, making risqué remarks and double entendres, is now strictly forbidden or even legislated against. Some companies, apparently, have even introduced solemn love contracts for employees to sign, outlining what is and is not appropriate behaviour and who they can and cannot date.

It's all a very long way from the world of Mad Men. And if, in many respects, that's a good thing, in some ways it's a bit of a pity, because, as indicated earlier, some men and women work better and with real joy when they feel themselves attractive and subject to the charged flow of desire. Lawrence writes:

"If only our civilisation had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we migh all of us have lived [and worked] all our lives in love, which means kindled and full of zest, in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. Whereas what  a lot of dead ash there is to life now!"  


Notes 

Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', Paper Machine,  trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 29-30. Click here to read online.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 293.

Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, (Bernard Geis Associates, 1962).

D. H. Lawrence, "Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 147-48.

See also: Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire, (Yale University Press, 2012), which offers a more critical and in-depth analysis on this subject than I've been able to offer here. 

Click here to view George Costanza's (failed) attempt to do the right thing and stay out of trouble when hiring a secretary in the Season 6 episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', dir. David Owen Trainor, written by Carol Leifer and Marjorie Gross (original air date 8 Dec 1994). 

And click here to view the trailer for the 2002 film Secretary, dir. Steven Shainberg, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson based on the short story (of the same title) by Mary Gaitskill.