A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. It’s a dynamic that goes back to George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, novels that wreaked havoc with conventional ideas about to whom brilliance is meant to belong and forced the reader to see how grindingly limited these male characters’ assertions of power were compared with the women’s gifts for generosity and self-creation – for life itself.
Now, 150 years on, the allure of masculine power remains a trap that shimmers enticingly at its victims, male and female. The divorce courts continue to be flooded by men who stake everything on success, only to be confronted by the talents of their wives; men who end up punishing and controlling the woman whose proximity becomes a kind of torture. These wives can turn out to be appallingly suited to the self-sacrificing life they are forced into. Affluent heterosexual marriages are so often the sites of secret, insidious abuse and pain.
