View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository REPRESENTATIONS OF ADULTERY AND REGENERATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF FORD, LAWRENCE, WAUGH AND GREENE Joanna K. Bratten A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2002 Full metadata for this item is available in Research@StAndrews:FullText at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6723 This item is protected by original copyright This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence Strange Bedfellows: Adultery and Regeneration in the novels of Ford, Lawrence, Waugh and Greene by JK Bratten February 2002 University of St Andrews 2 Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE Introduction Unlikely bedfellows: adultery and regeneration 5 Adultery as degeneration 6 An age of crisis 8 Adultery as regeneration 11 CHAPTER TWO Sad Stories? Ford’s paradigmatic narratives of adultery and regeneration 15 The Sentimental Soldier 17 Standing up on a hill: a tale of reconstruction 29 Reconstructionary tales 31 Season’d Timber 38 CHAPTER THREE ‘The Democracy of Touch’: D.H. Lawrence and the process of ‘phallic regeneration’ 50 What is ‘phallic consciousness’? 53 Destruction 57 Resurrection 70 The feminist fallacy 71 The metaphorical alternative 75 CHAPTER FOUR Barbarians in the waste land, orphans in the storm: Evelyn Waugh and the civil and spiritual repercussions of adultery 92 A Handful of Dust and the civil repercussions of adultery 96 Brideshead Revisited and the spiritual repercussions of adultery 119 CHAPTER FIVE ‘Adultery can lead to sainthood’: Passion, pity and spiritual regeneration in the novels of Greene 136 Greene and the ‘Great Tradition’ 141 Public duty v. private passion? 148 Love or pity? The Heart of the Matter 150 ‘Ordinary corrupt human love’? The End of the Affair 158 3 CHAPTER SIX Pregnant conclusions: The symbolism of pregnancy, illegitimacy, children and childlessness 172 Pregnancy: the ultimate symbol of regeneration 174 Children and childlessness: distinct visions of hope and despair 182 Bastards and the idea of the ‘illegitimate’: reversing the roles 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY 194 4 Introductory Notes The main texts dealt with in this thesis are, in order, The Good Soldier and Parade’s End (Ford Madox Ford), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence), A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh) and The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair (Graham Greene). Other texts will be examined and cited, but these are those that are central. All editions of these novels can be found in the bibliography (page 195). In terms of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I am referring only to the final edition of the novel, not to either of the earlier editions. The alternative ending to A Handful of Dust will be considered in this thesis, but it is not considered to be part of the novel as it stands. Unless otherwise noted, all page references that appear parenthetically after quotations are taken from the editions listed in the subsection of the bibliography for ‘primary sources’. Only in three cases are there more than one edition of a given piece of fiction in use: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier and Parade’s End and D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love. In these cases the editions being used for quoting from the texts themselves are, respectively, the 1990 Penguin edition, the 1997 Carcanet edition and the 1995 Penguin edition. The other three editions are used solely for citations from introductions and prefaces and these instances are all clearly noted. There are many cases in which passages are cited that contain a great number of ellipses. Ellipses that are in fact in the original passage will be kept as they are: ... Those edited into the passage will be bracketed, thus: [...] 5 Strange bedfellows: Adultery and regeneration Adultery would not seem to have much in common with regeneration. Even without considering the weight of social history, our literary history alone provides over two thousand years’ worth of examples of adultery being anything but regenerative. Adultery has been unequivocally regarded as a destabilising force within the family, as well as society. Adultery, especially in literature, is synonymous with destruction, whether on a personal level or extending to a social level. Helen of Troy – whose face infamously launched a thousand ships, causing war and mass destruction – established the archetype; adulterous Guinevere sustained it, causing her husband’s kingdom to come crashing around his ears. The ‘great’ nineteenth-century novels of adultery – those of Flaubert and Tolstoy most notably – do nothing to contradict or overturn this archetype. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina effect their own personal destruction, as well as the destruction of their domestic societies. It is the twentieth century that finally overturns this archetype; adultery, in a literary context, is no longer consistently synonymous with personal or social destruction, but in some cases is synonymous with the exact opposite: personal or social regeneration. A number of novelists in the first part of the twentieth century approach adultery fiction in a way that effectively transforms what was perceived as a socially unacceptable and destabilising act into something positive and constructive – something regenerative. These writers – most notably, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene – link the subject of adultery with the theme of regeneration, and this combination creates examples of adultery literature that have come quite a long way from their earlier counterparts. While English literature may be ‘eccentric’, as Alison Sinclair has noted, in its lack of a great ‘adultery novel’, the twentieth century compensates for this by offering a number of adultery novels, or novels that deal with the subject of adultery in some aspect, which are building on the tradition that went before but taking it to a wholly new level of discourse and symbolism.1 Adulterous love is not ‘romanticised’ in the twentieth-century novel, but, quite importantly, neither is it doomed to total failure. Adulterous love is not regarded as being necessarily degenerate and painful, but neither is it placed on a romantic pedestal. Marriage, since its establishment as a spiritual and civil institution, has been generally regarded as essential for a stable social order, but passionate love has always been regarded as something that can destroy that order. The Medieval 1The Deceived Husband, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. I would disagree with Sinclair’s assertion that English literature has no such ‘adultery novel’. While the corpus of English literature may not boast a novel that correlates to the European ‘bourgeois’ model of the nineteenth century, there are at least two English novels that can certainly be classified unequivocally as adultery novels, The Good Soldier and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The latter, in particular, seems to match Sinclair’s description. 6 literary tradition created a dichotomy between passionate love and marriage, exemplified best in the story of Tristan and Iseult, whose forbidden love was far too passionate to exist within the bonds of Christian marriage.2 While this dichotomy may not be entirely dissolved, two of the novels that will be examined here go as far as to demonstrate how marriage and passion may not be essentially irreconcilable, and how, in Denis de Rougemont’s terms, it might be possible after all to ‘marry Iseult’.3 Christopher Tietjens, at the end of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, is going to be able to marry his mistress, Valentine. Oliver Mellors, at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, plans to marry Connie. These novels present a restructuring of the social fabric in post-war conditions, where the old fabric will no longer do: the breeding of bastards and marrying of mistresses are seen to make way for a new and, ironically, more wholesome social order. Marriage does not replace adultery as the central focus, not even in these two optimistic novels, but in all of the novels examined here adultery is treated in a way that none of the writers of earlier periods would have done, or would have been able to do. Rather than over-romanticising adultery at the same time as soundly condemning it as the ultimate social evil, as happened in the chivalric tradition of the Middle Ages, these novelists will use adultery as a means of demonstrating how personal, social or spiritual regeneration can be attained. Why this radical treatment of adultery appears at this specific period in history – just before, between and after the two World Wars – will be considered at the end of this brief introductory chapter. Adultery as degeneration The anxiety that surrounds adultery in most literature in the western world can be traced back to the anxiety caused by Paris’s abduction of Helen and the resultant war between Greece and Troy. This incident threatened ‘all existing bonds that held together states, armies, families, lovers, friends’.4 The consensus that the adulterous woman, for all her passion, beauty and artistic appeal, is an unmitigated social threat is one that has been maintained and nurtured over thousands of years. The Book of Proverbs warns a young man against the charms of the adulterous woman and describes a seduction, painting a very clear picture of the archetypal adulteress, certain characteristics of which 2 It can be argued that Shakespeare is responsible to some extent for dissolving the love-marriage dichotomy when he presents marriage not as emotionally sterile but as an emotionally rich field for interpersonal relations; love becomes both personally enriching and socially stabilising when people enter into the marital commitment. Passion still is seen as being at odds with marriage, but an emerging concept of romantic marital love is being developed here.