My Apprenticeship: Autobiographical Resolution

Abstract

My Apprenticeship is the autobiography of a woman who lived on the ‘wrong side of ordinary’ and suffered the consequent ‘heart-burning’ and ‘mortification of spirit’. Beatrice Webb experienced her failure to be an ordinary woman as a conflict between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ selves: one self desired unrestrained mental and professional activity, while the other was anxious for the private, domestic contentments of marriage and family. In Webb’s autobiography, this conflict of sexual identity intersects with a specific spiritual conflict — between the believing ‘Ego’ and the sceptical ‘Ego’ — that characterizes the autobiographies of numerous male Victorians. ‘It is impossible,’ Webb wrote, ‘for a woman to live in agnosticism. That is a creed which is only the product ofone side of our nature’ (p. 98). The ‘womanly’ aspect of her nature, the faculty of faith and ‘emotive thought’ — a term she owed to George Eliot — had to be incorporated into whatever philosophy she adopted and whatever action she undertook. Webb sought to resolve the convergent crises of faith and sexual identity in a mode of existence that would combine ‘manly’ scepticism and ‘womanly’ belief, public striving and private contentment.

To be on the right side of ordinary is the perfection of prudence in a young woman, and will save her from much heartburning and mortification of spirit.

Beatrice Webb, Diary, November 1882