Juxtabook: Mind the Gap: Strong Absences in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Women's Popular Fiction by Catherine Hawley

Footling about in my document files I came across the following essay which I wrote about 10 years ago. I had completely forgotten about it and I am no longer sure why I wrote it though I have a dim memory of being asked to write a piece for an proposed essay collection by book bloggers on mid-twentieth century writers which never came to fruition. As the topic covers serveal writers such as Noel Streatfeild and Monica Dickens who are popular with blog readers I am pasting it here in case it is of interest. I still agree with most of what I have said here not least that Saplings is in many ways a horror story. Like Mariana by Monica Dickens also published by Persephone, Saplings takes the everyday and uses it to show the real psychological horror of the war on civlians.

Mind the Gap: Strong Absences in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Women's Popular Fiction by Catherine Hawley

The first decades of the twentieth century are not the high age of literary Gothic. It is an era when Mrs Dalloway will buy the flowers herself1 or Katherine Mansfield's Bertha will rearrange her pears.2 It is the era of small gestures and domesticity even in the most literary fiction. Cathy no longer tears her hair and her stockings and chases Heathcliff. She is more likely to sit by an electric fire and darn. Gothic literature draws its power from gaps and absences and we the reader fill these with our longings and our curiosity. When we can see the flowers and pears, and indeed the darns, so clearly then what drives the reader in the domestic fiction of the 1930s or 1940s?

It is easy to feel an understanding of why the hysteria over absence that we see in Wuthering Heights is no longer acceptable in a half-century that contained two world wars. Screaming for one's lover was never terribly lady-like, and when half your neighbours were also missing someone, you are not unique in sensibility. Restraint and sock darning seem much more the order of the day. No longer just lady-like but a national duty.

Yet despite this restraint it is clear that the absences, particularly in women's fiction, in this period are as strong as any conjured by the Brontës. Loses are quieter, but deep and prevailing.

Mariana by Monica Dickens begins with an absence. Our main character spends a night waiting to find out if her husband is one of three drowned officers on the British destroyer, the aptly named Phantom3. The fact we then get a flash back (the substance of the novel), showing us her life from being about seven years old, means that the reader feels that Mary is getting the life-before-your-eyes-when-drowning. She drowns emotionally as she fears her husband has drowned in reality. As we watch Mary's character develop and form, it is always with this potential loss at the back of our minds. As we follow her through her mistakes with men until she meets the right one, the one that makes her laugh and that knows what she is thinking, the one with whom she is complete (her Heathcliff), the reader is un-nerved by his possible future loss whilst Mary remains of course in her own steady present. Her early mistakes don't seem much of a loss, but this last twists at the reader … can she bear it? Could we?

The possibility of this loss dominates the book, but the structure cleverly holds both it, and her, in until the end. She has no need for graveside clawing like Heathcliffe, as we don't find out until the very end of the novel whether he is dead or alive.4 We see what he meant to her in her past in order to understand the enormity of her loss in the present. We do not, however, have to live her loss with her after the fact. How could Monica Dickens treat her readers otherwise when their own men were fighting and dying for their country? Loss in the 1930s or 1940s cannot, must not, scream. It builds up in the poignant small details:

That'll be the worst part you see. There'll still be his things.5

Domesticity both hides loss and brings it into focus. Mary's childhood crush on her cousin Denys is symbolised by his handkerchief that she keeps, a thought that comes back to her the day she marries Sam:

She wondered what he [Denys] would say if she told him that she had come upon that crumpled handkerchief of his in the back of a drawer when she was packing, and had washed and ironed it for Sam's future use.6

A man's things, to be passed-over in indifference, or avoided for the pain of association, make household inventories highly emotional.

We see such things treated similarly in non-fiction. Vera Brittain's horror at the blood stained uniform returned to her fiancé's family starts with just his cap:

There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition - the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head - with the badge coated thickly with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.7

When placed alongside the bloodied tunic it seems hardly worth mentioning, but for women who cared for men by caring for their clothes, who picked up fallen hats, brushed them and returned them to a peg in the hall, symbolising a returning owner, it must have seemed crushing. The real horror of his absence starts with his squashed cap, however distressing the rest of his uniform is to see.

Jane Tynan notes of Brittain's reaction:

In her description of the service cap that he apparently destroyed by stumbling on it, she cannot conceal her grief, as if his falling was the moment when all her hopes were 'bent out of shape'.8

Mary, reversing this, takes the crumpled-in-grief handkerchief and launders it for her real love, thereby straightening out her life and hopes, until of course her war takes over and she too is upset by the hat stand in the hall.

Running parallel with Mary's loss is her mother's. We learn early on that her father, “was killed in the hand-to-hand fighting at Thiepval in 1916”. The “hand-to-hand” is almost a throw away comment yet it contains a world of images of horror, of bayoneting and close killing that damages those who survive as much as the dead. Yet the child sees just the smile in her father's photograph and feels nothing of his absence until a too kind teacher talks to her of “supreme sacrifices”. Her mother's grief is hidden deep, dealt with in just, “Mrs Shannon had turned out the light and gone out of the room very quickly”.9 Mrs Shannon survives by tackling work and domesticity equally. She refuses an allowance from her parents-in-law and gets a job whilst making a home for her daughter. Metaphorically, she keeps picking up the fallen caps, brushing them, and hanging them back up. Literally, she eventually builds a life by running a dress shop. Her escape is in that domestic detail: clothes.

Mary's mother is in complete contrast to another Persephone mother: Lena in Noel Streatfeild's Saplings. Lena is all clothes: a 'straw man' with no inner resources. Lena too loses a husband in a war and then falls completely apart. With no history of domesticity, except as an arranger of staff, her mothering consists of eau de cologne in the bath for a headache10. She does not even hire the women who look after her children: Nannie, and the governess Ruth.

Ruth often wondered how Alex had arranged the engaging of Nannie for Laurel. The Nannie for the first baby would be engaged by the wife's mother, if the wife didn't do it. But Nannie was Alex's choice. Lena would have liked, and probably tried to get, a young Norland or the equivalent, looking smart in her uniform, and she would have seen that the nursery maid looked smart too. Yet Alex had felt, probably just because Lena was as she was, that his child must have somebody a little old-fashioned, solid, placid, and imperturbable, so he has acquired Nannie, who engaged her own nursery maids and very much ruled her nurseries ever since.11

Others look after Lena's children, and she leans heavily on her husband relying on sex, clothes and parties to keep the marriage going. Ruth sees that a smart uniformed nanny is what would have mattered most to her. Lena just needs things to look right.

When Alex is killed near the start of the war, in an air raid, what Streatfeild shows us is the mental disintegration of his children. The absence they suffer is massive. They loose not only their father, but also their mother who existed only in the context of her marriage. The losses pile up for the children. A mother like Mary's in Mariana would have grasped the details and ploughed on, gathering her children and their mutual emotional resources to progress together. Lena's shallowness, represented by her clothes, tears the Wiltshire family apart.

In its way Saplings is a real horror story. What happens to the children emotionally is abuse. Streatfeild's strength is to manage to keep us present in the gentle domestic details and yet create this enormous Brontësque absence. The reader is stricken on the children's behalf, willing an adult to do something. Screaming, though, happens off the page: we hear of Tony's nightmares afterwards. Though the children cannot wallow in it, we feel the screaming. By showing us the absences from the children's point of view Streatfeild gets away with this close dissection of loss. To examine an adult without judgement would have seemed self-indulgent when there is so much loss. So we are given Lena to judge, and judge we do.

It is hard to imagine anyone as useless as Lena, even amongst the most privileged classes. She is a device, as the brutally bullying child psychologist Aunt Lyndsey is also a device, showing us that women who don't properly engage with the domestic sphere fail as human beings. Lena descends into alcohol and sex, Lindsey breaks too, falling into ranting her sexual jealousies at a child, and missing the real threat to her marriage, a practical woman in anonymous uniform.

There is no female solidarity here. Aunt Sylvia, 'a darling' who manges her children's lives, protecting them from the well-meaning tyranny of their clergyman father Andrew, is sacrificed. Lena's opposite, she is leant-on. She is burnt and scalded from trying to manage without a cook but keeps going. She has five children they cannot afford:

Andrew disapproved of birth control. 'It is for God to decide,' he said. Sylvia, when bowed by bills and housework, would find strength in thinking of God's clemency in this matter. It would have been so easy for Him to have decided not to stop at five.12

Sylvia's children are growing up well-rounded but at great cost to Sylvia. Versions of Mary's mother Mrs Shannon, who can handle both domesticity and the real world are few and far between.

From their happy home at the start the children loose their childhood house and their father to a bomb, their mother to her mental problems, Ruth and also their grandparent's house to the war effort, the popular “Uncle” Walter (Lena's first boyfriend of her widowhood) to their mother's instability, their schools, and then each other as they are separated when Lena is hospitalised.

The loss of home and sense of place is caused by the failure of the adults in their lives, not just by the bomb that destroys their house. Roberta Rubenstein details the enormity of this:

Not merely a physical structure or a geographical location but always an emotional space, home is among our most emotionally complex and resonant concepts in our psychic vocabularies...13

There is plenty to scream about then, though, what is most frightening is not any screaming but its absence. Tuesday, just four at the start of the novel, hums to herself. By the end of the book, wetting the bed and talking to an imaginary friend, she has stopped humming. Her family used to find Tuesday by listening for her humming. Like a Doodlebug rocket, you feel danger most when the noises stop.

Though what we see of the emotional damage in Saplings is often through the placid eyes of Nannie or the drunken one's of Lena, we are as conscious of the power of death and loss of home as we are in Wuthering Heights. Much of what happens in Saplings is continuation of the failure of mourning of WWI when bodies were not returned home for burial.

Death is a threat that has the power to destroy family structures and disrupt community networks. The threat it poses to society is controlled through the rite of passage of a funeral, which is a rite of passage in two ways. It is a rite of passage for the deceased person as the transition is made between life and death, which is constructed in various ways, such as heaven, a spirit world, or an afterlife. But a funeral is also a rite of passage for those individuals whose social status or identity is connected to that of the deceased. 14

The adult failure in Saplings gives death greater power. The Wiltshires are irrevocably damaged. Yet their father does not die an anonymous death at sea, nor is he obliterated in an explosion as many were in that earlier war. Alex is found alive, he confirms his identity in the ambulance before he dies. Alex's own father identifies the body. The lack of communication with the children means they do not know this and Tony is haunted by the idea of his father tapping, buried alive and endlessly calling for help. A funeral is never mentioned. The children are obviously denied the chance to attend one, or to mourn. Yet they were lucky, they had a body, they could have had this rite.

Is this focus on the treatment of the bodies a particularly female response? Are the bodies of loved ones, like their clothes, part of the domestic life that needs taking care of? Is it Lena's failure that, as with their other poor household arrangements, she fails in a laying out?

Nicola Beauman notes in A Very Great Profession that many fictional middle class characters such as Laura in Still Life might have been happier, “giving up the endless tussles with maids, cooks and nannies and doing the housework for themselves”.15 Lena has got by because her husband did the emotional thinking and her staff the practical caring. Once Alex has died and Ruth has gone Lena's domestic life fails entirely. It certainly doesn't occur to her that her eldest son might need to see his father's body, or her eldest daughter needs her own room and continuity in her schooling.

Jeremy Holmes in his afterword to Saplings calls Lena a narcissist.16 Streatfeild's narrator describes Lena as, “not a family woman, she was utterly wife, and, if it came to that, a mistress too” 17. She sees her husband's body not as part of the family, something to be honoured by everyone when he dies, but as entirely sexual and utterly hers, “She would not have missed those seconds in the hot tent, the flash of passion that would have come from the closeness of his cool, naked body.”18.

Similarly with clothes, she needs to be admired and to order new frocks but “clothes rationing was not a system Lena grasped” and she begrudges the coupons spent on Laurel's uniform, not a dress to flirt in, but just the right uniform for blending in. The loss of the uniform becomes the loss of the communal identity that begins to make a boarding school some kind of home. Laurel alone in green, “heard a whisper. 'Who's the frog?'”19.

Though the high Gothic novel by women writers of the late 18th/early 19th century has terrifying fathers and absent mothers20 (a feature also of Wuthering Heights) the reality of two world wars means the parental absence is now very male and the importance of a healthy mother-child relationship has never been greater. It is interesting that both Lena and Mrs Shannon have poor relationships with their mothers, who are also useless grandmothers, yet Mrs Shannon rises above this to make a stable home even in the face of her own loss.

Robin DeRosa establishes that in Wuthering Heights:

Catherine's death drive involves two foundational desires: the desire to merge with Heathcliff and the desire to return to an innocent state of childhood21.

The real and compelling horror of Saplings is that childhood itself seems under attack. These children have no 'death drive' nor masochistic wish to be with those that attract and damage them. They just need parents and a stable home. Lena is a faint echo of Cathy, wilful, compulsive and completely lacking in empathy for all their obsession with feeling.

“What, in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books, when I am dying!” complains Cathy of Edgar22. “Was it not enough that she should have lost Alex?” complains Lena when faced with difficult children23. They analyse and quantify what they feel, what they feel others should feel for them, yet have no real understanding of what the feelings of others are. Heathcliffe has the status and vocabulary to give Cathy as good as she gets:

"You are possessed with a devil," he pursued savagely, "to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me?"24

Yet, all the Wiltshire children have is the cruel pseudo-scientific analysis of their Aunt Lyndsey whose dressing down of Lena escalates rapidly:

Lyndsey had not expected this quick breaking of Lena's confidence, a quality in her that seemed unbreakable. Power excited Lyndsey25.

Lyndsey's poor reading of the situation pushes Lena to attempt suicide, a partial death that is again not properly explained to the children, and who are finally separated from each other as a result of it completing the death of the Wiltshire family as we saw it before the war. The Wiltshire family is ultimately broken, as broken as any family can be, as broken as the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Restraint and national duty has, in the end, been brutal as any of the hysteria in Wuthering Heights.

Notes

Mrs Dalloway, pp. 1
“Bliss”, pp. 95
Mariana, pp. 5
Mariana, pp. 377
Mariana, pp. 374
Mariana, pp. 361
British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki pp. 158
British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki pp. 158
Mariana pp 11
Saplings, pp. 17
Saplings, pp. 22
Saplings, pp. 300
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction pp. 2
Rituals of Mourning: Bereavement, Grief and Mourning in the First World War
A Very Great Profession, pp.146
Saplings, pp. 368
Saplings, pp. 16
Saplings, pp. 15
Saplings, pp. 170-1
Women's Gothic, pp. 2
“'To Save the Life of the Novel': Sadomasochism and Representation in Wuthering Heights”
Wuthering Heights, pp. 161
Saplings, pp. 164
Wuthering Heights, pp. 196
Saplings, pp. 262

Bibliography

Beauman, Nicola, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-1939 (London: Persephone, 2008)

Bourchier, Christine, “Rituals of Mourning: Bereavement, Grief and Mourning in the First World War” Gateway Spring 2003 Issue 4 http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/archive13.html (accessed online October 2014)

Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights edited by David Daiches, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)

Tynan, Jane: British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Clery, E. J. Women's Gothic (Tavistock: Northcore House, 2000)

DeRosa, Robin, “'To Save the Life of the Novel': Sadomasochism and Representation in Wuthering Heights”, Rocky Mountain E-Review of Language and Literature Spring 1998 Volume 52, Number 1 http://rmmla.innoved.org/ereview/52.1/articles/derosa.asp (accessed online October 2014)

Dickens, Monica Mariana (London: Persephone, 1999)

Mansfield, Katherine, “Bliss”, Bliss and Other Stories (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1962)

Rubenstein, Roberta Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)

Streatfeild, Noel, Saplings (London: Persephone, 2005)

Woolf, Virginia Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000)