There are only two musicals that I will openly admit to liking: the film versions of The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady.
For those who don’t already know, the plotline of My Fair Lady is fairly simple (and was used to prop up the lifeless scripts of almost every PG-13 teen movie made in the 1990s): a wealthy phoneticist named Henry Higgins makes a wager that he can transform the unsophisticated flower-selling Eliza Doolittle into a refined British lady almost exclusively by teaching her how to speak properly. Sparks fly, emotions run high, and Audrey Hepburn looks really pretty. It’s awesome.
Well, long before George Bernard Shaw ever wrote Pygmalion, an eighteenth-century progressive “intellectual” with a recently broken heart attempted a dastardly Doolittlean experiment of his own. His name was Thomas Day and his bizarre, utterly fascinating story is detailed by author Wendy Moore in her new book: How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate.
Because I’m more interested in fleshing out some of the points of application that scream out from this wonderful piece of writing, here’s a quick synopsis of the story from the book jacket:
Day knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would live with him in an isolated cottage, completely subservient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her.
Men do crazy things for love and even crazier things when that love is scorned and rejected. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, Menelaus, or Kevin Arnold.
The two components that fueled the engine of Thomas Day’s insanity more than any other contributing factors were a broken heart and a broken worldview. Behavior always follows belief, and the radical Rousseauian views on human nature and society Day had embraced as a student led him to conclude that doing things like adopting young girls from an orphanage so he could indoctrinate them with his life philosophy (before they were old enough to wed-and-bed) were every bit of kosher. Of course this is not to say that every fan of Jean-Jacque Rousseau ends up at this same exact point, nor does it mean that Thomas Day fully comprehended the true intent of Monsieur Rousseau’s teachings.
But the unavoidable truths that emanate from even a casual reading of Wendy Moore’s book are that someone’s worldview matters and emotional tragedy–romantic or otherwise–exposes the character of a man.
In the end, the very thing Day was running from–rejection from a female–caught up to him and both of the young girls he adopted rebelled. His blind-spot was an uncompromising ideology, one that no woman of his era wanted anything to do with. And his progressive values caused him to miss one of the most important lessons any young man can learn when courting a young woman: we need them. Men need women. We need our moms when we’re little boys and, generally speaking, we eventually need wives to help us become men.
For a million intangible, existential reasons, and many practical, tangible ones, women help complement and domesticate men. Day’s ideologically driven stubbornness, exacerbated by the irrational bitterness of someone recently dumped, caused him to miss the fact that it was he who needed to be house-trained. It was he who was in need of serious re-indoctrination. He needed a new heart.
Day thought he could “get back at” the women who had hurt him by mucking around with instinctual gender distinctions. For someone who claimed to be guided by reason and the intellect, he was blind to the havoc his unresolved anger was wreaking on innocent bystanders. The totalitarian instinct that has typified progressive thought for centuries is a scary thing to behold, even on the smaller scale of one wealthy aristocrat’s life and property. The reasons I personally love and cherish concepts such as liberty and free enterprise can be gleaned from such stories as Thomas Day’s. One of those reasons is simple: one person with too much power can ruin the lives of countless others simply because he or she had a bad experience or feels bad about themselves.
Wendy Moore’s How To Create the Perfect Wife is not a treatise on political theory. It’s also not a scholarly, in-depth metaphor for the modern state dating and courting. It is, however, a really good book and one that I highly recommend.
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