The Fiction of Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985): Negotiating the Boundaries of Welsh Identity
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The Fiction of Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985): Negotiating the Boundaries of Welsh Identity by Lucy Thomas This thesis is submitted to Cardiff University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. December 2008 UMI Number: U585268 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U585268 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed., ............ D a t e . ? ....... Statement 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed.. fvSrfc .oM-'VrtEV.-;........... ............ Date...< Statement 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed.. .. p t Date. m . j . Q i . j m .......................... Statement 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed . ............ Date.. ZJ../.P.S../ o . 6) . ...... 1 Summary Hilda Vaughan was a successful writer from the 1920s to the 1950s whose novels, short stories and plays, largely depicting the Welsh countryside, found international renown. Married to the celebrated author and playwright, Charles Morgan, she moved in illustrious literary circles both in London and in Wales. The second half of the twentieth century saw her writing fall into critical neglect, in part due to Vaughan’s elevated social class, which distanced her work from that of many of her Welsh contemporaries. Vaughan inhabits a complex ideological position: she was a Welsh writer, writing in English, who lived for the majority of her life in London. She wrote novels that depicted the lives of working-class agricultural communities, though she was herself descended from the class of small-landowners. Much of her work is set in her beloved Radnorshire / Breconshire birthplace and this area close to the Welsh / English border, with its dual cultural influences, informs much of her writing. This thesis examines the negotiation and renegotiation of identity in Vaughan’s work, with particular emphasis on the construction of nation, the depiction of gender and the effect of social class in her narratives. Chapters one to four of the thesis explore Vaughan’s texts as they engage with contemporary issues, such as the scientific ideas of Social Darwinism and anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, the expansion of mass Anglo-American culture during this period and its effect on Wales, the emerging roles for women at this time, and the First and Second World wars and their destabilising influence on Welsh and British identities. Chapters five to seven examine Vaughan’s depiction of the landscape, folklore and language of Wales as her work reforges connections with an ‘estranged’ Wales, rebuilding and reinforcing a sense of Welsh identity in the novels. 2 Contents page DECLARATION.................................................................................................................. 1 SUMMARY...........................................................................................................................2 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................ 5 CHAPTER ONE ‘That’s how we do grow from ape to savage, and from savage to civilized man’: Social Darwinism and Anthropology in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan.....................................................................................................31 CHAPTER TWO T lost my way in a bog of acquired culture’: Anglo-American Mass and Minority Culture in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan............................................ 64 CHAPTER THREE ‘Tin soldiers out of the same box’: War and Welsh Identity in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan................................................................................................ 96 CHAPTER FOUR ‘Wouldn’t my sisters say I was shocking?’: Spinsters, Lesbians, Heroines and the New Woman in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan ..................................................................................................................................123 CHAPTER FIVE ‘I am looking across the valley and sighing to be back there’: Place in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan.................................................................................162 CHAPTER SIX ‘Strange memories, not of her own but of her nation’s past began to stir in her’: Welsh Folklore and Folk Custom in the Novels of Hilda Vaughan .......................................................................................................................193 3 CHAPTER SEVEN ‘He was thinking in Welsh now, though he spoke in English’: Boundary Levelling and Maintaining in the Language of Hilda Vaughan’s Novels................................................................................................................ 232 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................263 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................ 283 4 Introduction In the summer of 1926 Hilda Vaughan’s second novel, Here Are Lovers , had been published, following on from her highly successful debut, The Battle to the Weak (1925), and a sense of excitement was building up around the young Welsh novelist. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Welsh press, in which celebratory articles appeared with an enthusiastic frequency. An article featured in the Cambria Daily Leader on the 25th of July of that year is particularly memorable because of the whimsical portrait it paints of the author in her youth: As a child Miss Vaughan had a wonderful time. She kept all sorts of pets including a large collection of lizards which she specially liked, and she never went to school... This left her free to roam the countryside, where she made friends with all sorts of country people...1 The description reads like a fictional tale and the figure it portrays of a young girl roaming the countryside conjures images not unlike the heroines found in Vaughan’s own narratives, though the lizards lend an air of exoticism incongruous in the Welsh setting. What is most intriguing, however, is the relationship between Vaughan and her native country that is suggested here. Though immersed in the Welsh landscape, Vaughan cuts a solitary figure in her surroundings. Hers is an individual experience of Wales and Welshness, not representative of Welsh life as a shared experience. Though she makes friends along her journey, she does not join her peers at school. She is an observer who does not fully participate in the cultural institutions that would link her to her fellow country-people. The simultaneous proximity and dislocation suggested here provide 1 Cambria Daily Leader, July 25th, 1926. 5 tensions that would indeed characterise Vaughan’s relationship with her native country and inform much of her work that was to follow. The distance between Vaughan and her fellow country-people in the passage above can be partly accounted for by her social class. It was into the small-land-owning class that Vaughan was born in 1892 in Builth Wells, just on the Breconshire side of the border with Radnorshire. Her father, Hugh Vaughan Vaughan, was a country solicitor, Under Sheriff of Radnorshire and landlord apparently beloved of his tenants, whose outpourings of grief at his death in 1936 are vividly described by Hilda Vaughan in a letter to her husband.2 The remnants of this feudal society underpin the narrative structure of many of Vaughan’s novels, such asHer Father’s House (1930) and The Soldier and the Gentlewoman (1932). This places Vaughan’s work alongside that of her contemporary, Eiluned Lewis, whose similar upbringing is reflected in her semi- autobiographical novel,Dew on the Grass (1934); a resemblance which Vaughan acknowledges explicitly in her own autobiographical essay, ‘A Country Childhood’ (1934). Vaughan’s mother, a Campbell of Scottish and English extraction, was keen to ensure that her two daughters did not acquire the ‘ Welshy’ accent of the neighbourhood and Vaughan was schooled by various governesses and reputedly forbidden from reading a modem novel until she reached adulthood.3 Vaughan was devoted to her father but eager to escape the controlling influence of her mother. In her desire to leave the stifling constraints of home, her career could have taken a very different path, as the young 2 In a letter from Hilda Vaughan to Charles Morgan, dated Sunday night, April 4th 1937, Vaughan writes about her father’s funeral, ‘which is to be on Thursday, we think; but may be rushed on to Wednesday in order to