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The Farmer's Wife (SA/2023)
As the Little Greek poses at the gate of a nearby farm, I'm reminded that the (often sentimentalised) figure of the farmer's wife is a popular trope in art, literature, and cinema.
I suppose some might even insist she's a figure with archetypal significance; an embodiment of the Earth Mother, representing ancient ideals of fertility and homestead, etc. Early rising, hardworking, resiliant and reliable, she is the kind of woman who loves her chickens and her vegetables almost as much as her husband and children.
D. H. Lawrence famously provides a description of such women in whom the past (and perhaps the future) unfolds, in what many regard as his greatest novel, The Rainbow (1915).
However, Lawrence subverts the conventional stereotype of 19th-century farmwives by suggesting that, in crucial contradistinction to their heavy-blooded, slow-witted menfolk, they are increasingly tempted by the life afforded by the encroaching world of modernity.
Thus, whilst the men were content to put their very being into farming, the women were different:
"On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy [...] But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.
It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly about; it was enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand. So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged [...]
But the women wanted another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy." [1]
What is it, then, that these women wanted exactly? Ultimately, it's the same thing that so beguiled Eve: knowledge.
For despite occupying the supreme position in her own home - her husband deferring to her on almost all points - the Lawrentian farmer's wife is desperate to know "the far-off world of cities [...] where secrets were made known and desires fulfilled" [2].
She craved to know more and experience more; to have greater freedom and achieve a superior (more spiritual, less bestial) level of being. And if she couldn't achieve this, then she determined that at least her children would be educated and encouraged to aspire towards a different life - a bigger, better, finer life.
Sadly, we know where all this leads: today, farmers are increasingly prone to mental ill health and suicidal tendencies, and often have to resort to online dating services in order to find a woman willing to marry them [3]. To paraphrase Nietzsche, all meaning has gone out of modern farming; yet that is no objection to farming, but to modernity [4].
However, like Lawrence, I can't quite bring myself to condemn those desperate farmwives. For whilst I might not wish for the triumph of the mind and the machine, I'm not sure I would be happy living a rural pre-modern life on the farm, rooted in blood, soil, and agrarian bullshit.
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 10-11.
[2] Ibid., p. 11.
[3] Whilst the quality of data is an issue, research has suggested that farmers are at higher
than average risk of mental illness and suicide and the UK Government acknowledges this is an issue of concern.
For example, whilst 64% of farmers recently surveyed by Farmer's Weekly were happy with their physical wellbeing, only 55% felt positive about their mental health and in 2019, there were 102 registered suicides in England and Wales by individuals working in the agricultural
sector in England and Wales (this accounts for over 2% of suicides that year, whilst agricultural workers only make up around 1% of the workforce).
As for farmers having trouble finding wives, the magazine Country Living launched a unique dating service decades ago, based on the simple premise that if you live and work on the land it can be especially hard to find a partner. This grew into an online service and even spawned an award-winning TV series in more than twenty countries. If you are a farmer and wish to sign up, then click here.
[4] I'm paraphrasing what Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols of modern marriage; see 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', §39.
For a related post to this one on the farmer's daughter, click here.
