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Gavin McCrea discusses Mrs. Engels, and how he created a book from the perspective of a woman who left no historic record.
How did you stumble across the life of Lizzie Burns?
What compelled you to write Mrs. Engels from the perspective of a working-class, illiterate Irishwoman who left no historical record?
I came across Lizzie Burns by chance. I saw her name in a newspaper review of Tristram Hunt's biography of Frederick Engels, and I was intrigued. I had no idea that Engels had had a relationship with an poor Irishwoman. I began to search for information about Lizzie, but I couldn't find much. Because she was illiterate and left no diaries or letters of her own, Lizzie remains a ghost in the record. Lizzie is mentioned in the Marx-Engels correspondence but has no real historical "weight" of her own. When I discovered that Engels had also had a relationship with her older sister, Mary, I knew I had to write the story.
I also knew that I would have to write it in first-person, from Lizzie's perspective. As a writer, I am interested in the creation of the illusion of "mind," and I wanted to give Lizzie a "mind" that appears larger, more forceful, more fully realized than those of the now-famous personages who surrounded her. I liked the idea of turning a slight historical figure into a massive fictional character.
You've mentioned that writing from Lizzie's perspective is akin to "literary and linguistic transvestism." What do you mean by this?
In order to create the illusion that Lizzie is "someone" other than "me," I write her in a kind of drag. This linguistic dis¬guise is comprised of words and phrases from a number of sources, including the Marx-Engels letters, classic 19th-century literature, and Irish and Northern English vernacular. The mix is highly artificial, but no more so, I believe, than the inher¬ited/found/imposed/assumed/constructed/performed vocabularies which make up my own voice (the voice of "Gavin"), and by which I express and come to believe in my own identity (as "Gavin").
As a child, I remember being very frustrated that boys weren't "allowed" to wear dresses. I liked to dress in my sister's and my mother's clothes, and I often went out in public in drag. (My mother, to her great credit, never prevented me or scolded me or created a fuss.) Using fiction to become a woman is perfect for men like me who no longer have the bravery they once had as a child—that is, men who have lost their balls.
Lizzie's relationships with money and with the Engels and Marx family servant girls are quite fraught. What informs Lizzie's complicated attitudes about currency and class?
Central to Mrs. Engels is the typically 19th-century theme of money. Lizzie's uncertain attitudes towards money, like her ambivalent feelings towards the servants, are the result of insecurities (about class, taste, worth, entitlement, propriety, privilege, reward) which accompany her rise in social stature. She harbors no nostalgia for the poverty she has left behind, yet she finds herself unable to unreservedly embrace the manners associated with her newfound affluence. Her expressions of entitlement, though increasingly confident as the novel progresses, remain haunted by feelings of guilt and loss.
When dramatizing Lizzie's attitudes to money, I drew directly on my own feelings of "poverty" and "wealth" at different periods in my life. There have been times when I've been dangerously in debt with no means to pay the rent. I've been on the dole. I've experienced the anxieties, the jealousies, the bitternesses, the desires, the vulnerabilities and the drives that feelings of "scarcity" can engender. Likewise, there have been times when I've felt "rich." I've lived in permanent sunshine with a swimming pool in the garden. I've been in the company of people who have never worked and will never have to work. I've spent large amounts of someone else's money. I've been extravagant and given money away. I've feared losing it all, and—importantly—I've actually lost it. Without these different experiences, it would have been difficult for me to perform as Lizzie. If I had tried to "be" her before I had lived on both sides of the mental/material divide, I don't think I would have done her proper justice.
Did you do a great deal of research for this novel? How did your research influence how you thought about Lizzie Burns and the other characters?
Before writing Mrs. Engels, I knew little about Communism or 19th-century European history more generally. I was starting from scratch, so I needed to do a large amount of research—about a year of full-time work. Of course, being fiction, the novel is also full of "my own" memories, experiences, and emotions. I put quotation marks around "my own" because in the course of writing Mrs. Engels, I came to question the nature and meaning of ownership. Mrs. Engels is a book populated by characters who believed that the modes of production (i.e. the sources of power and wealth) would one day be wrested from the minority and shared among the majority. So I was constantly asking myself what it means to own something: houses, money, experiences, ideas, emotions. Do we ever really own anything—even our thoughts, our bodies and our selves?
Ultimately, I think the book asks: can Lizzie own her own destiny?
Elsewhere you've written, "Mrs. Engels is, at base, an exploration of the idea of the political as personal." Could you elaborate?
One of the main criticisms directed at Communism is its disregard for the individual. Marx's Communism (as opposed to later forms of democratic socialism) overlooks "the private," the self, subjectivity. For example, the category of "proletariat," upon which Communism relies, fails to account for the many different kinds of worker that exist in any industrialized society: their individual circumstances, their local, national, racial, and sexual identifications, and their particular desires and needs. In Marx's Communism, individual workers are absorbed into a highly generalized mass, while their personal concerns and the local problems which they face every day are subsumed into a war of global proportions.
Mrs. Engels takes a look at the private lives of some of the early adherents to this form of thought. The novel aims to show that these people were, in fact, implicated in a system of power much more complex—that is, much more personal—than that described in their theories. In doing so, however, the novel does not mean to belittle Marx and Engels or disregard their ideas, rather it presents Marx and Engels as ordinary human beings struggling, as all ordinary human beings do, to reconcile their vision of the world with their private circumstances.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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