Mrs. Poyser and the Plague of Karens

The general opinion, experts say, about Mrs. Poyser, the tenant farmer's wife in George Eliot's Adam Bede, is that she is a "comic character."

To which I say: you experts are missing the point. George Eliot gives Mrs. Poyser a comic turn because otherwise she would appear so serious as to make her a deeply unpleasant character. And all the characters in George Eliot's novels have some redeeming quality. Because George Eliot was that kind of woman. Henry James:

Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her… Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

Everybody loved George Eliot, despite themselves.

Now for a bit of throat-clearing. We are told by our betters that the society of old was a white patriarchal society where women were oppressed and kept in their place. Maybe so. But, on the evidence of George Eliot, it was also profoundly matriarchal. If the men were patriarching out in the field, the women were matriarching back in the home. And how.

Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede is the mother of three children -- two rambunctious boys and baby Totty. She is also mothering two orphaned nieces, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. She is running a dairy, renowned for its cream cheese, and keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, that visitors never forget to praise.

Mrs. Poyser's big problem is the unmarried girls in the household, dairymaids and whatnot. Because these single girls think of nothing but "finery," all except the sainted Dinah. These days we refer to "finery" as the "baubles, bangles, and beads" of the song made memorable by Peggy Lee.

One interesting thing in Adam Bede is that the married women all rate highly the provision of a "bit o' victual" to their husbands as the major thing they do. I take that to be George Eliot's hint that getting food on the table in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars was not a trivial matter.

In brief, far from the world being a patriarchy, for the Commoners it was a serious matter where everyone's contribution, men and women, mattered. I dare say it was a matter of life and death rather than a choice between Whole Foods and Trader Joes.

The other thing that seemed to be a matter of life and death was the reputation of the family in the community. Any misdeed by any member of the family shamed and humiliated not just the sinner but the whole family. So when Hetty Sorrel kills her out-of-wedlock baby the Poyser family immediately decides to pick up and leave the land they have farmed since whenever and move to another place where their shame is unknown.

Mrs. Poyser seemed to think that the only way the unmarried girls could be got to do their work around the house and in the dairy was through detailed supervision, featuring constant nagging and complaining. Who are we to say that she was wrong?

It is clear that women today still think that constant supervision and nagging and complaining is the way to get the world to work, and we have come to call this attitude "Karen" that we understand as "an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman." Some opinion-makers have suggested that many women in public office exhibit this characteristic, especially during the current plague.

Who am I to disagree? But I would advise all women in public life to think seriously about this issue. It may be possible to run a household on this basis, and maybe its strategic value is to encourage all unmarried girls to get out of the household as soon as possible and start making his "bit o' victual" for a darling husband.

But in the larger world, detailed supervision does not work. That is the meaning of the market economy. You offers your price, for your labor or your product, and the miracle of the price system works the whole thing out without any Karens -- or Stalins -- having to order anyone about.

And, by the way, it is also the judgement of the German General Staff, which determined during and after World War I that detailed supervision of lower ranks did not work in the "lethal battlefield" of rifled guns and artillery. Responsibility had to be pushed down the chain of command as far as possible.

In my view, Karenism is a disease of the whole liberal woke-aholic world. It is the idea that educated, evolved Gentry were born to supervise and nag the ordinary Commoners of the world. Because of their bigotry and superstitions.

This, as they say, is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. It may be possible, it may be desirable, to run a household as Mrs. Poyser ran the Hall Farm. But anything beyond the scope of the family -- and maybe the neighborhood -- does not respond to Karenism. And, for sure, bossy supervision should not be enacted into law, as in regulating whether people can have drive-in church services or whether the sale of seeds at Walmart is an essential service or not.

Oh, I get it. In the present plague, politicians are desperate to seem decisive and leader-like. And bureaucrats are desperately trying to come up with stuff to make it look like their flaccid and inefficient operation is "fit for purpose."

But guess what! We humans are social animals. We are at our best and most social during an emergency. This is exactly the time when we should relax the rigid web of supervision and Karenism and encourage all our good citizens to "have a go" and figure out something that might help their fellow humans.

I am afraid that some of our fellow citizens are going to have to find this out the hard way.