As a woman who has never fully grown out of her childhood conception of herself as awkward, naive, and small, I was surprised to see Lucrezia, the main character of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, as a mirror of myself. These ‘naive’ female characters are rarely the center of novels; after all, we are a generation raised on the strong Katniss Everdeens of literature. More tellingly, I assumed that Lucrezia’s character would disappoint me. O’Farrell strikes down these assumptions one by one with her prose, revealing not only the patriarchal traps of the past but the present as well. In O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, her suspenseful tale does not end with the thrilling anticipation; it questions patriarchal systems, the limits and edges of rebellion, and how much complexity women are allowed in history and in life.
O’Farrell’s tale revolves around a historical and literary rumour: in the 1550s, Lucrezia, a fifteen year old girl, is forced to marry the Duke of Ferrara and apparently dies of a sickness shortly after. However, there were rumours that the Duke murdered her, which inspired Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” in the 1800s. O’Farrell takes these two sources to a new level, building a character that is simultaneously weak and strong, small and large, and victimized and rebellious. It is Lucrezia who makes the story so successful, and it’s particularly resonant for an age when femininity is seen to exist in two extremes: weak passivity and rebellious anti-femininity. Throughout the narrative, O’Farrell carefully but subtly weaves a web of patriarchal systems around Lucrezia. Although her marriage to the Duke, who is at least ten years older than her, seems vicious to modern readers, O’Farrell illuminates how Lucrezia, despite her fear and anger, can only rebel to an extent. The scene of the loss of her virginity particularly strikes this tension: she “had not known… the bones of her spine and pelvis would creak” but “some part of her, the best part perhaps, answers the wind’s call. It shakes itself free” (149, 151). Readers are well aware of the cruelty of this (now) statutory rape, which is partly what makes the scene so complex. O’Farrell adeptly describes the physical elements, creating a tone that makes the room feel like it is closing in. Simultaneously, however, O’Farrell allows Lucrezia space to escape, at once highlighting her survival in these systems that normalize rape and abuse while illuminating that the only space for her escape is in her mind. Lucrezia has many moments where one strikingly remembers that she is a child; most of the time, she seems to be an adult, performing duties and ruminating on issues. That is O’Farrell’s strategy: to demonstrate the psychological indoctrination of Lucrezia into an adult-like role that occasionally strikes the reader with her disparate youth and role.
Additionally, O’Farrell reveals how Lucrezia is fixed between victimhood and agency both by her husband and by history and the readers themselves. Although she is a “Duchess” and is expected to perform many duties, as the scene of her sitting for hours for a portrait excruciatingly reveals, she is also infantilized at every turn by her husband. His whims of sweet kindness, such as patiently waiting a few nights after their wedding night to have sex, dissipate in a moment when he yells at her as if he were yelling at a child. O’Farrell’s characters and not the plot are the pivotal and revealing mechanisms of the novel, and the Duke and Lucrezia’s complexities both contribute to the nuanced, weaving set of patriarchal mirrors that O’Farrell exposes. When Lucrezia is believed to be pregnant, she stands in front of the window admiring a storm, and the Duke launches into a rage, stripping her to dry her off in case she ‘harms’ the unborn child. At the center of this humiliating and infantilizing procedure is a clear truth that reflects modern political situations – the woman is less important than the potential child and ‘mothering’ role she provides. Lucrezia’s naivety emerges at these pivotal scenes – she thinks she has never seen “Cosimo [her father] touch Eleanora [her mother] with anything other than tenderness”, and it is “suddenly apparent” that “Alfonso’s feelings for her resemble in no way her father’s for her mother” (213). Like many women in abusive and constraining relationships, Lucrezia has to realize that what Alfonso offers is not love, despite the occasional appearances of tenderness. The psychological complexity of her realizations is more striking because she has no escape or choice. The objectification and infantilization of Lucrezia does not end at Alfonso, the Duke. Rather, the doctor and the painters all treat Lucrezia like an object, a vessel to carry something more important but only if it is male. From the doctor’s meddling and invasive inspections of her body to his removal of all her paintings and prized items to ‘rebalance’ her humours, Lucrezia is the one responsible for not producing an heir and subjected to the violence of others’ wishes because of Alfonso’s power. O’Farrell’s detailed, introspective prose exposes that like the doctor’s invasion of Lucrezia’s life, Lucrezia is also historically a passive victim. O’Farrell illuminates the complexities of viewing women, especially survivors of sexual violence and domestic violence, as victims. This ‘secondary’ abuse of consistently relegating these women to passive roles is fully illuminated in the scene of Lucrezia’s portrait-painting. Alfonso’s curation of her dress and the painter’s creation of her pose positions Lucrezia as an item to Alfonso’s collection; likewise, in history, long assumed to be a victim of his murder, Lucrezia is also an ‘item’ assumed to have passively submitted to her husband. O’Farrell adeptly reminds readers that despite patriarchal systems like those in the 1500s, women can be both victimized by those systems and be complex, live people within them, with their own opinions, resistances, and forms of escape. Yet O’Farrell does not shy away from depicting the violence of seemingly ‘normal’ societal views of women, such as Lucrezia’s forced submission as a domestic, ‘quiet’ wife, Alfonso’s obsessive control over her body, and her image as the ‘opportunity’ for an heir. O’Farrell’s tale, then, is not about the ‘conventional’ stereotypes of a ‘strong,’ rebellious woman; rather, her book is a more realistic and converging series of lines that reveal that dichotomous systems of thinking of women as either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ and ‘tough women’ or ‘victims’ further alienates and removes women’s agency. To fully recognize the complexity of patriarchal systems and the violence they inflict, we must start with recognizing how dual, interwebbed, and multi-faceted women’s subjectivities are within these systems.
While this book may seem like a tale of a woman’s marriage at an ‘unfair’ age of humanity, O’Farrell exposes many long-held convictions of women’s personalities, roles, and expectations that surface in today’s political debates. The magnificence of her prose lies not in the plot events, which are sparse and seemingly mundane, but the inner complications of Lucrezia’s existence within a system that intends to obscure her, both in life and in death. O’Farrell reminds readers with a re-imagined historical tale that women need to do more than just recognize the violent patriarchal systems imposed upon them; they need to acknowledge the ways in which patriarchy is internalized, resisted, and merged with women’s lived experiences. Like all systems of oppression, patriarchy is not just physical violence; more significantly and enduringly, it is the small moments of infantilization, objectification, and silencing that continue to this day.
References:
O’Farrell, Maggie. The Marriage Portrait. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022.