“Is It Time We Move Through Or Space?”: Literary Anachronism and Anachorism in the Novels of Elizabeth Taylor
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Diane Freeborn “Is it time we move through or space?”: Literary Anachronism and Anachorism in the Novels of Elizabeth Taylor Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2014 University of East Anglia This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract “Is it time we move through or space?”: Literary Anachronism and Anachorism in the Novels of Elizabeth Taylor This thesis examines Elizabeth Taylor’s twelve novels through the lens of the interlinked concepts, anachronism and anachorism, an approach that enables an analysis of the structural, thematic and stylistic engagements with time and place in her fiction. Blending theme with chronology, the study attaches a particular topic to each decade between the 1940s and the 1970s: war and its aftermath are considered in Taylor’s 1940s novels; the servant- figure in those of the 1950s; feminine constructs in the 1960s; and death and dying in the 1970s. The study argues that while Taylor’s texts look back to previous literary periods and, increasingly, to earlier parts of the century, they simultaneously speak to their particular historical moment. The thesis contributes to recent scholarship that has sought to reappraise the fiction of neglected mid-twentieth-century writers, uncovering an altogether more innovative and complex fictive form than previously recognised. Taylor’s oeuvre is positioned firmly within this more nuanced and complicated literary landscape. Anachronism and anachorism frame and shape an analysis of those aspects within the structure and content of Taylor’s novels that are unexpected, out of place even, within the genre of domestic fiction. To facilitate the analysis, the study introduces the metaphor of ‘the scalpel within the kid glove’, which points both to the way Taylor writes and to a way of reading her. The distinct contribution the thesis makes to current scholarship is to demonstrate that Taylor’s novels are altogether more strange, more angry, more political and more philosophical than generally acknowledged. They destabilise reader expectation even as they disrupt the conventions of realist fiction. Taylor emerges as an ‘after- modernist’, a classification that exhibits both temporal and aesthetic qualities, signalling a writer engaged with the after-effects of war, while at the same time in conversation with the legacy of modernist poetics. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Note on Citations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Chapter 1: In and Out of Time and Place Introduction 31 In and out of place – Elizabeth Taylor’s private world 32 In and out of place – Elizabeth Taylor’s literary world 43 Fitting into a literary genealogy 48 In and out of category 58 Conclusion 69 Chapter 2: Placing War in the Domestic Introduction 71 At Mrs Lippincote’s 78 A View of the Harbour 98 A Wreath of Roses 110 Conclusion 125 Chapter 3: The Domestic Servant Introduction 128 The servant in history and literature 131 A Game of Hide and Seek 145 3 The Sleeping Beauty 160 Angel 171 Conclusion 183 Chapter 4: On the Cusp of Feminism Introduction 187 The Second Sex 194 In a Summer Season 198 The Soul of Kindness 213 The Wedding Group 228 Conclusion 241 Chapter 5: Death’s Waiting Room Introduction 249 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont 263 Blaming 276 Endings 290 Conclusion 299 Bibliography 306 4 Note on Citations Novels by Elizabeth Taylor are cited with abbreviated titles as listed below, and enclosed in brackets alongside the relevant page numbers, for example (AML, 241). Full publication details can be found in the Bibliography. AML At Mrs Lippincote's (1945) ANG Angel (1957) AVH A View of the Harbour (1947) AWR A Wreath of Roses (1949) BLA Blaming (1976) GHS A Game of Hide and Seek (1951) ISS In a Summer Season (1961) MPC Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) PAL Palladian (1946) TSB The Sleeping Beauty (1953) TSK The Soul of Kindness (1964) TWG The Wedding Group (1968) 5 Acknowledgments My greatest thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, who constantly encouraged and challenged me to think more deeply and more broadly about my subject, forcing me to expand my intellectual boundaries. I am also grateful to Dr Karen Schaller for her friendly support and helpful insights in the last two years of my studies. I would like to thank Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter, Joanna Kingham, for making me so welcome in her home in Shropshire, for telling me about the private Elizabeth Taylor, and for allowing me to study the fascinating Taylor papers. My thanks also go to Elizabeth Taylor’s good friend, Elizabeth Jane Howard, for kindly allowing me to interview her in her home at a time when she was very ill. The support of friends and family has been enormous. In particular I wish to thank Nonnie Williams Korteling, for her abiding friendship and unfailing emotional and practical support through all the highs and lows of thesis- writing. Thanks also go to friends and family members who have never ceased to show an interest in my work, sending me useful articles from the press, and alerting me to relevant programmes in the media. Most importantly, they have listened with remarkable patience and interest to my near-endless talk of Elizabeth Taylor. My final thanks go to my husband, Trevor, who has encouraged and sustained me every step of the way – without his support this thesis would never have been written. 6 Introduction The wet fields were dealt out one after another for Cassandra’s benefit. She sat with her back to the engine (as Mrs Turner had seen her off), with The Classical Tradition and a pile of sandwiches wrapped in a stiff damask napkin on her lap. Sodden cattle stood facing north, or hunched under hedges in the drizzle. The train ripped through the sullen landscape like scissors through calico; each time it veered round westwards rain hit the window in long slashes. ‘Is it time we move through or space?’ Cassandra wondered, lulled by the sequence of the English Landscape – the backs of houses and sheds, fields, a canal with barges, brickworks, plantations, the little lane going down under the bridge, fields, the backs of houses. Then the wet blackness of stations, sidings, the jagged edge of shelters beneath which people stood bleakly with luggage, and sometimes children, awaiting trains. The Classical Tradition had a strange fungus smell and its pages were stippled with moles. The prose was formal and exact, [...] and yielded up nothing between the lines, so Cassandra clicked open her little case and brought out The Woman in White. (PAL, 15) In the second chapter of Palladian (1946), the young orphan, Cassandra Dashwood, travels by train to take up a post as governess in a decaying country house. ‘Is it time we move through or space?’, reflects Cassandra. The answer, of course, is both. Though she is travelling forwards in space, she is in a sense travelling backwards in time, to the era of the governess, an occupation already long-past, old-fashioned, by the mid-1940s. Just as Cassandra’s question signals an ambivalence surrounding the novel’s temporal and spatial framing, so it points to the interconnectedness of these two concepts. 7 Mikhail Bakhtin examines this interconnectedness in his late-1930s essay, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, attaching the term ‘chronotope, (literally “time-space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.’1 In Bakhtin’s theory of meaning in narrative, the chronotope becomes the basis for distinguishing literary genres according to their characteristics and specific space-time ratios. My use of time and space/place in an analysis of Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction is somewhat different but no less significant: while acknowledging their inseparability, my particular concern is with notions of out of time and out of place. Through an examination of the structural, thematic and stylistic engagements with these twinned concepts, this study contributes to an ongoing critical reappraisal of Taylor’s novels, and to a rethinking of her place within the mid-twentieth-century literary landscape. Palladian’s setting is a lugubrious, anonymous landscape – ‘wet fields’, ‘wet blackness’, ‘sodden cattle’, ‘drizzle’, ‘sullen landscape’. To escape reality, Cassandra turns to literature, not to The Classical Tradition, however, a fusty work of non-fiction, but to the altogether more entertaining novelistic form, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. When serialised in 1859 this text was arguably the first ‘sensation’ novel, a genre noted for its themes of murder and mystery, jealousy and adultery. With the exception of murder, all feature in Palladian, including a moment of high melodrama when Cassandra’s charge is flattened by falling masonry. Palladian’s opening line foregrounds its preoccupation with the novel as a form, and with the powerful 1 M. M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). p. 84. 8 effect it can have on the reader: ‘Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions’ (PAL, 5). Her name looks back to both a literary and mythological past – to Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra, and to her novel, Sense and Sensibility, but also to the princess of Greek mythology blessed and yet cursed with the gift of prophecy. On first meeting her melancholic employer, Cassandra prophesies: ‘He will do to fall in love with’ (PAL, 38).