Patterns of Confinement and Escape in the Novels

Home , A Weekend in the Country, Vows (Dollhouse)

“SOMETHING TO KEEP US SEPARATE”: PATTERNS OF CONFINEMENT

AND ESCAPE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH BOWEN

CONSTANCE ELIZABETH MEANS NUNLEY

Under the direction of Simon J. Gatrell

ABSTRACT

Through a wide range of characters, situations and events, Elizabeth Bowen’s novels reveal the significance of controls or restraints which limit characters’ freedom of choice, movement, feeling—even their ability to love. These restrictions, sometimes internal or involuntary and sometimes external and deliberate, almost always grow in number and variety throughout her novels. Confinements of place extend beyond enclosures to include external influences such as social class, nationality and war—with a progression toward freedom in a place of one’s own. Bowen’s children and adolescents experience confinements of propriety and knowledge imposed on them by adults. As they learn of love and pain, they also learn conventional ways to protect themselves from pain through confinement of emotion. In addition to the sometimes-attractive confinements of safety and shelter, marriage demonstrates the limitations of loneliness and unrequited love; death, the confinement of incomplete fulfillment; suicide, the great escape. Social class presents a prefabricated structure either reassuring or confining to those within it, and attractive to those outside. The primary impetus of confinement inside the class structure is to keep those outside in their place. Authority figures further this process of exclusion when possible and help to protect innocence and the status quo. Only when authority degenerates into the authority of power does the confinement it imposes become destructive, even evil. The inability to communicate is the ultimate confinement in Bowen’s novels. Some characters seek to limit others by defining, stereotyping or ignoring them while others need someone to communicate to them their own existence, identity or worth. Finally, however, it is the inescapable psychological distance imposed by alienation that Bowen believes to be humanity’s greatest obstacle to communication, and she dramatizes this isolation by giving her characters physical limitations of vision, hearing and speech. The inability to connect is for Bowen the most impoverishing limitation. Without connection, there is no reciprocal love; love, then becomes Bowen’s most difficult and distinctive achievement.

INDEX WORDS: Elizabeth Bowen, English literature, Anglo-Irish literature, Confinement, Escape, Place, Childhood, Marriage, Death, Social class, Authority, Communication

“SOMETHING TO KEEP US SEPARATE”: PATTERNS OF CONFINEMENT

AND ESCAPE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH BOWEN

CONSTANCE ELIZABETH MEANS NUNLEY

B.A.., Converse College, 1979

M.A.., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2002

Constance Elizabeth Means Nunley

“SOMETHING TO KEEP US SEPARATE”: PATTERNS OF CONFINEMENT

AND ESCAPE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH BOWEN

CONSTANCE ELIZABETH MEANS NUNLEY

Approved:

Major Professor: Simon Gatrell

Committee: Charles Doyle Adam Parkes Carl Rapp Hugh Ruppersburg

Electronic Version Approved:

Gordhan L. Patel Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2002 iv

DEDICATION

To Bruce Nunley, who has endured the process of its completion

during our entire married life

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would particularly like to thank Dr. Simon Gatrell for his inspiring teaching of Elizabeth Bowen and for his guidance and patience as I wrote about her. Dr. Kristin Kelly’s comments, observations and encouragement have also been invaluable during the revision process. For computer expertise and advice, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Lora Lindsey, Jon Bruschi, Randy Elliot and my husband, Bruce Nunley. Truett-McConnell College also deserves my appreciation for financial support during my doctoral studies. Dr. Joyce Stavick’s continual commiseration improved my mental health throughout the last year, and, without the childcare provided by Bruce, Alice Nunley, Linda Kelly and

Sherry Ledford, I would never have been able to write. For prayer without ceasing, I would like to thank my mother, Mary Ellen Means; my sisters, Linda

Kelly and Gail Beisiegel; my friend, Dr. Cathy Shore; my husband; and my daughter, Clare Nunley. I would also like to thank Clare for her patience as

Mommy completed this project, and for her loan of a guard kitty to keep away interruptions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 PLACE...... 9

3 AGE ...... 74

Childhood...... 75

Coming of Age...... 92

Marriage ...... 113

Death...... 165

4 SOCIAL CLASS...... 189

5 AUTHORITY ...... 226

6 COMMUNICATION...... 263

7 CONCLUSION...... 304

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 313

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

All the time, you go making connections [. . . .] You’re working on us, making us into something [. . .] You put constructions on things.

—The Death of the Heart (348-49) In the attempt to classify her as a writer, Elizabeth Bowen has been labeled a social realist, a sophisticated naturalist, a continental modernist, a novelist of sensibility. Because of the diversity of her influences, her Anglo-Irish descent and her choice of subject matter, characterizing her requires particular flexibility, and the term “romantic,” while still not comprehensive enough to encompass all of her eclecticism, comes closest. Bowen is a romantic; indeed, she is, in the context of British literature, a Romantic. She demonstrates a preoccupation with the past, with childhood and fantasy, with the supernatural, and with imagination characteristic of the Romantic Era (1785-1830). Her creative process and its results also reflect Romantic tenets.

Though she almost always places the settings of her novels in the present, she often contrasts that present negatively with the past, and her works Bowen’s

Court (1942), The Shelbourne (1951) and A Time in Rome (1960), demonstrate a

Romantic’s fascination with both the recent and the remote past. Her essay from

1951, “The Bend Back,” asserts that, with its confidence in the present broken by two world wars, all “Contemporary writing retreats from the present-day” to the supposedly better days of the past in which imagination finds a “golden terrain” 2

(MT 54). As Bowen later clarifies, “It is not the past but the idea of the past which draws us” (MT 58), and certainly all of Bowen’s works mine this golden terrain to some extent.

One frequently-traveled path back to the better days, Bowen notes, is that of “one’s own past: childhood,” another favorite concern of Romantics. The numerous children in her works are never like the “six years’ Darling of a pigmy size” idealized by Wordsworth, but they embody much of Bowen’s preoccupation with innocence, and by extension her Romantic associations of that innocence with Eden. Bowen was an only child who considered herself to have experienced a “protracted childhood” (Glendinning 35); from this source, perhaps, comes her pervasive and speaking animation of objects and the fondness for fantasy that “is often present twice over” in her short stories. According to Bowen, writing was

“an extension [. . .] of the imaginative play thing a child has—that life isn’t amusing enough, so you build it up with imagination of your own” (Glendinning

36).

The short stories, as repositories of “what is crazy about humanity,” best reflect her Romantic predilection for ghosts or the gothic. The novels, however, also have their share of the supernatural (A World of Love) and madness (To the

North, The Little Girls), as well as a strong suggestion of megalomania in Mme.

Fisher of The House in Paris, a novel some have called Bowen’s “gothic” novel

(MT 130).

Her bringing of a specific place and time to the foreground of her writing suggests the attainments of Romantic painters—the irradiated, more 3

Impressionistic work of a later Turner, perhaps—who began to let the landscape dominate the figure. As Bowen herself claimed, “Much (and perhaps the best) of my writing is verbal painting” (Glendinning 49). There may be a suggestion, as well, of Pantheism in her animation and elevation of landscape.

Though she commonly set aside mornings for writing in a rather organized and anti-Romantic way, her creative process relies in part upon several basic

Romantic tenets. She believes, for example, in the God-like authority of the author over her creation, and in the importance of the self, the “inner life.” She once characterized writing as the process of “objectifying one’s inner life, and projecting one’s thought and emotion into a form—a book[, w]hich [. . .] is the exercise of an unchecked power” (Glendinning 110). Her belief in the pre- existence of characters has Wordsworthian overtones, and the writer’s magnetization to a particular subject that finds him argues for intuition and a certain spontaneity (MT 37, 58). Indeed, she considers herself an “aesthetic- intuitive” writer rather than an intellectual one (MT 61). Her belief in “an inherent failure in any story which does not detach itself from the author” recalls

Keats’s “negative capability” while her rejection of some of her early short stories on the basis of their “synthetic” qualities and her insistence that there should be

“nothing in [. . .] a story which can weaken, detract from, or blur the central, single effect” is reminiscent of Coleridge’s “organic unity” (MT 128).

The inversions of syntax, particularly those in the speech of Bowen’s more inarticulate characters, suggest rather too strongly Wordsworth’s “real language of real men,” making the reader welcome all the more her passages of lush, lyrical 4 prose that approximate more closely Coleridge’s preference for poetic diction.

Bowen notes, in fact, that the prose of writers in 1950 “shows a poetic trend [. . . .

I]ndeed in our writing romanticism has all but reached the high-water mark. The romantic never has cared for things as they are” (MT 58). If Yeats, with his

Anglo-Irish roots, can be considered by some the last Romantic poet, Bowen can, though a further step removed by her prose, be considered the last Romantic

Anglo-Irish writer.

One can, of course, identify other influences in Bowen’s work. Her concern about the relationship of the artist to society—as exhibited in her three- way conversation with Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett entitled Why Do I

Write?—and her fondness for social satire might suggest more eighteenth-century predilections. Her preoccupation with alienation, on the other hand, argues her awareness of the Freudian and Jungian theory which became influential in literature throughout the 1920’s and ’30’s and places her firmly in the twentieth century. There, she asserts, though “stacked and crowded upon one another in our living and moving,” we do not “feel in contact: personal isolation has increased”

(MT 59).

With her diversity of influences, Bowen’s Romanticism is remarkably unsentimental and unlike romanticism as it is popularly conceived. While her protagonists may begin as innocents in Eden, she thoroughly disabuses them of their ingenuous notions by the conclusion of every novel with the exception of A

World of Love—and even Jane has by the time of the novel’s denouement shed several illusions about herself. Bowen avoids happy endings, generally providing 5 sympathetic adolescent protagonists before exposing them to some painfully adult truth.

She is, then, as Sean O’Faolain succinctly stated, “a romantic up against the despotism of reality” (166). O’Faolain, as a fellow native of County Cork,

Ireland, was perhaps best situated to take her measure in spite of their different social backgrounds, and he compared her to recent French predecessors, particularly Flaubert. While she acknowledged Flaubert as an important influence on her work, she described all writing as a re-creation, not only of memory, as

Wordsworth would have it, but particularly of the memory of the writings of others—others as diverse as Dickens and Austen, Le Fanu and Haggard, Woolf and James—for “it was the story that apparelled everything in celestial light” (MT

53).

In the same eclectic spirit in which Bowen herself wrote, then, the following study of patterns of confinement and escape in Bowen attempts a holistic approach to Bowen which does not fully espouse any particular critical theory. It relies primarily on close reading of the text, for, as Jonathan Culler reluctantly admits, nowadays “Whatever critical affiliations we may proclaim, we are all New Critics” who continue to value “the requirement of ‘close reading’ ”

(322). Indeed, Bowen scholarship as a whole rests largely on close readings of small portions of her works. There are very few studies of all her novels and only one of all her short stories; still, almost every critical work related to Bowen uses terms related to confinement or escape en route to some critical end which does not focus on issues of restraint or freedom. Yet, as I will show, within the text of 6

Bowen’s novels are countless references to confinement and escape, and in studying them a number of coherent and informative patterns emerge.

Although such patterns may seem peculiarly suited to a feminist study— and some of Bowen’s female characters do struggle against patriarchal traps—the number and diversity of references to confinement or escape go beyond gender.

Through a wide range of characters, situations and events, Bowen reveals the significance of controls or restraints that limit characters’ freedom of choice, movement, feeling—even their ability to love. Sometimes the restrictions are internal or involuntary; sometimes they are external and deliberate. Almost always the kinds of limitations grow in number and variety as Bowen’s career progressed, and the various types of confinement and escape require of those terms, particularly “confinement,” great flexibility.

This study also considers the importance of the cultural and historical backgrounds of the characters within the novels. Confinements of place, for example, extend beyond the imagery of walls or enclosures to include external influences such as social class, nationality, and war—with a movement toward finding freedom in a place of one’s own. Bowen’s children and adolescents experience confinements of propriety and knowledge imposed on them by adults.

As they begin to learn of love and pain, they also learn conventional ways to protect themselves from pain through repression of emotion. In addition to the sometimes-attractive confinements of safety and shelter, marriage demonstrates the limitations of loneliness and unrequited love; death, the limitation of incomplete fulfillment; suicide, the great escape. 7

Other patterns of confinement and escape in Bowen’s novels involve social class and authority. Social class at any level presents a prefabricated structure either reassuring or confining to those within it, and often attractive to those outside. The primary impetus of confinement inside the class structure is to keep those outside, at any lower level, in their place. Authority figures, both natural and imposed, involuntary and voluntary, further this process of exclusion when possible and help to protect innocence and the status quo. Only when authority degenerates into the authority of excessive power does the confinement it imposes become destructive, even evil.

The inability to communicate, however, is the ultimate confinement in

Bowen’s novels. This limitation prevents connection with another human being most often through speech, but also through the senses of hearing, touch and vision. Many characters seek to limit others by “clap[ping] them down under an adjective” or otherwise defining or stereotyping them (LS 86). Some control others by ignoring them and curtailing their effectiveness at communication. Still other individuals, constrained by their inborn traits of personality, need someone to communicate to them their own existence, identity or worth, or they want to forge connections with others but cannot express their meaning clearly. Here the inherent limitations of language to embody meaning also contribute to the inability to communicate. Finally, however, it is the inescapable psychological distance imposed by alienation that Bowen believes to be humanity’s greatest obstacle to communication, and she dramatizes this isolation by giving her characters physical limitations of vision, hearing and speech. The inability to 8 connect is for Bowen the most impoverishing limitation. Without connection, there is no reciprocal love; love, then, becomes Bowen’s most difficult and distinctive achievement.

This study, finally, makes connections between the novels and the biographical and autobiographical material related to Bowen because, though she spoke vehemently against writing as self-expression, Bowen also noted that “any fiction [. . .] is bound to be transposed autobiography” (MT 129). While primarily

I seek to affirm the significance of Bowen’s concerns and beliefs in relation to her novels, the purpose of this work is also to reaffirm the importance of Bowen as an author because she has ever been confined by her unusual combination of subject matter, social class and gender from bookstore shelves and classroom syllabi. As her works go in and out of print, it becomes necessary to stress that they are not period pieces, limited by place and time, but universal expressions of a struggle to overcome a world of confinements in order to experience the freedom of love.

CHAPTER 2

PLACE

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.

—The Death of the Heart (194)

It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you [. . .] are to know well [. . .] These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers [. . .] they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart [. . .] From what you see, there is to be no escape. Untrodden

rocky canyons or virgin forests cannot be more entrapping than the inside of a house, which shows you what life is.

—The House in Paris (95)

The curtain would fall, the light would discover her before she could slip out to bolt for “home.” “Home,” used to be by

the gong, at the foot of the stairs. Once you were “home” you won, you could not be caught.

—The House in Paris (202)

In the novels of Elizabeth Bowen places often reverberate with meaning: landscapes echo emotion, rooms empathize with their occupants to such an extent that furniture becomes almost sentient, and clothing and flower arrangements speak of the past, or things passing. While landscapes may represent fresh air and freedom, they just as often threaten or oppress. Likewise, walled gardens and rooms may confine, but increasingly homes come to represent places of solitude and safety, necessary refuges apart from a rather forbidding modern world characterized by change. Moreover, real homes elude Bowen’s characters at every turn.

The first Bowen novel to resound throughout with the importance of landscape and location is The Last September. Her only retrospective novel takes place in Ireland during the Troubles before the division of the country into the

Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1922. These days mark not only the last September of the Big House “Danielstown,” which republican supporters burn to the ground in the last pages of the work, but they are the last ascendant days of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, a largely Protestant social class which had lived in and ruled Ireland for hundreds of years. Bowen herself lived through these days—and in the same impossible position as the central family of characters in her novel. Caught between social occasions with representatives of the British army and a generations-old feudal relationship with the very cottagers from which that army is trying to protect them, the Anglo-Irish do not want to acknowledge the underlying necessity for the soldiers with whom they play tennis or have luncheon—or the underlying hardships that these soldiers are causing

“their” people. They will not call the Troubles a “war” and will only discuss in any detail shootings, arrests or burnings that have occurred in some county other than their own; the implication is that, of course, such things could and would not happen here.

While the message of the characters may be equivocal, however, that of the landscape is not. Many of the Anglo-Irish occupied demesnes, estates surrounding a mansion or Big House. An early description of the Danielstown demesne, enclosed by a border of trees which screen but do not protect, foreshadows the destruction of the house by fire:

The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind

the house—embracing the lawns, banks and terraces in mild

ascent—had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered

darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening

drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind

the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an

invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered. (LS 26)

The “invasion,” furthermore, suggests the encroaching republicans just as

“smouldered” indicates both that the fire has been alight for some time and that at any time it could burst into flame. Bowen’s continuing emphasis of the darkness, the quiet associated with Danielstown—“some intensification of the silence surrounding it” since visitors Hugo and Francie Montmorency had last stayed there years before (LS 15)—underlines the precarious position of the demesne islands within Ireland:

Far east, beyond the demesne: a motor, straining cautiously out of

the silence [. . .] Then behind the screen of trees at the skyline,

demesne boundary, the sound moved shakily, stoopingly, like

some one running and crouching behind a hedge. The jarring

echoed down the spines of the listeners [. . . .] It seemed that the

lorry took pleasure in crawling with such a menace along the

boundary, marking the scope of peace of this silly island,

undermining solitude. In the still night sound had a breathlessness,

as of intention. (LS 39, italics added)

The intentions, if unacknowledged, are apparent all around the Anglo-

Irish. That same night Lois, niece of Danielstown, sees a trench-coated man walking steadily and resolutely and thinks, “It must be because of Ireland he was

12 in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne” (LS 43-44). Furthermore, “in County Carlow they had said things were bad round here” (LS 27); indeed, “Things [. . .] seem to be closing in [. . . .] Three of the men on the place here swear there are guns buried in the lower plantation”

(LS 29).

Political references, though underplayed by the family, abound, and the landscape underscores these repeatedly, as when Lois, traveling through the countryside in a pony trap, looks down on the Danielstown property:

To the south, below them, the demesne trees of Danielstown made

a dark formal square like a rug on the green country [. . .] Looking

down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns

blotted in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were

not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid.

Far from here too, their isolation became apparent. The house

seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face,

as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its

trees close in fright and amazement at the wide, light, lovely

unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set. (LS 95-

96)

The house seems to realize the predicament of enclosure and exclusion that its adult inhabitants deny. It “had that excluded, sad, irrelevant look outsides of houses take in the dark. Inside, they would all be drawing up closer to one another, [. . .] ‘Compassed about [. . .] by so great a cloud of witnesses [. . .]’ ”

(LS 44-45). The biblical allusion, a reference by Paul to the faithful who have died believing in the future Messiah, here becomes ironic in that the current

“cloud of witnesses” is faithful not to their landlords but to a republican future for

Ireland, and “compassed about” gives not reassurance but a threatening image of confinement (Heb. 12:1, King James Version).

The confinement-filled language that Bowen uses to describe the rooms and grounds of the Big House furthers the feeling of enclosure. In the first sentence of the novel, “the sound of a motor [. . .] collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue” (LS 1). The Danielstown residents sweep inside, greeting their newly-arrived guests, “their exclamations, constricted suddenly, filling the hall” (LS 3). Outside, “romantic horse-hoofs

[. . .] died on the avenue, smothered in trees,” trees which “with their rainy smell were a wall of moisture” (LS 101, 116). Down a walk, “the path’s perspective was a tunnel of glass” (LS 119). Through a gateway, “they walked between walls of dusk, to be released to an airy green space, tree-pillared. The green strip [. . .] on their right was bounded by an uneven wall” (LS 123, italics added).

The house itself, though stocked with such Victorian-era amenities as oil lamps and rainwater collected in a tank on the roof—while more up-to-date

England had enjoyed electricity for years (LS 251)—has none of the Victorian associations of sanctuary or shelter from the world. Its mistress has “got into a terrible habit of shutting doors” (LS 18), and its inhabitants seem weighed down or isolated even when together. The height of the drawing room creates a

“disproportionate zone of emptiness [which] dwarfed at all times figures and

14 furniture. The distant ceiling imposed on consciousness its blank white oblong”

(LS 22). While the figure in a trench coat passes through their demesne, the

Anglo-Irish hold on to an illusive security inside this “shuttered-in drawing-room, the family sealed in lamplight, secure and bright like flowers in a paper-weight”

(LS 43). In a bedroom at night, the silence has, “like the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture, like cobwebs, muffling the senses” (LS 157). In another bedroom,

Sir Richard Naylor’s repressed worries about the inescapability of their situation surface in his dreams:

He rode round the country on a motor-bicycle from which he could

not detach himself. His friends cut him; he discovered he was a

Black and Tan. But night rolled on over them thickly and

uneventfully [. . .] The darkness clamped round their waking brains

did not any one moment seem to abate its insane pressure; (LS

160)

In the dining room, “Spaced out accurately round the enormous table [. . .] each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal, the six [. . .] dwindled personally” (LS 28, italics added).

These are not people ready to brave the crisis at hand. They are solitary, outnumbered, but accustomed to their own way of living on “an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast” (LS 44). Bowen’s multiple island references make it clear that the Naylor family is an island within the larger island of the demesne within the literal island of Ireland.

Only the young people within Bowen’s novel seem to yearn for something other than confinement to a life of illusory security. They feel less attachment to a place not wholly their own, and elsewhere seems equally attractive. Laurence, the nephew of the house, wanted to spend the summer in the Spanish sun and frets over his inability to travel due to finances and the confines of the political situation. He wants to be a part of something, even something violent. Once “he met three armed men coming out of a gate.” They take his shoes and wristwatch and scare him enough so that, when they “advised him for life’s sake not to look round or stir for twenty minutes,” he actually waits fifty minutes before moving.

Yet “he limped home to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered” (LS 284-

85). At least, he feels, the experience constitutes a completely new sort of confinement to place.

Lois, in turn, finds that she hasn’t “had much scope here” and thinks, “I might just as well be in some kind of cocoon” (LS 144, 67). Apparently Lois’s mother, Laura, had felt the same way some twenty years before. Finally, from her bedroom,

choked in the sweep of the bed-curtains, she had writhed in [. . .]

epic rages; against Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in

life at all [. . . .] Until once she had risen [. . .], dabbed her eyes,

buttoned a tight sleek dress of that day’s elegance over her heaving

bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks [. . .] and driven off,

averting from the stare of the house an angry profile.

From there, “she went up North to attract and marry Mr. Farquar [. . .], the rudest man in Ulster” (LS 159, italics added).

Her daughter, Lois, though less angrily, also wants to go somewhere, to do something, to escape. Her “eyes went dark with vivid and deep disappointment at the thought of anybody doing anything without her. She missed everything, no one would ever care, she would never marry” (LS 169). Lois can practically catalogue all the ways in which the time and place in which she was born confine her. She has never been abroad “because of the War [World War I], and of course she would like to [. . . .] She had never come out through a pass and looked down on little distinct white cities with no smoke. She had never been in a tunnel for more than five minutes [. . . .] She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine.” Most of the things that Lois wants to do are colored by her experience of the political, religious and social limitations imposed in Ireland:

She wanted to go wherever the War hadn’t. She wanted to go

somewhere nonchalant where politics bored them [. . . .] She

wanted to go into cathedrals unadmonished and look up

unprepared into the watery deep strangeness. There must be

perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns

secret without coldness, unaware without indifference [. . .] She

did not want adventures, but she would like just once to be nearly

killed. (LS 147-48)

Unable to leave Danielstown yet unable in her orphaned state completely to call it home—she tells an officer at a dance, “I don’t live anywhere, really” (LS

235)—Lois compromises by making a series of little escapes, one of which grants her near-death wish. On a walk with Marda and Hugo, she and Marda yield to the

“irresistible [. . .] idea of escape” from him. The scene, an old mill without roof or floor (LS 184), seems at first glance inadequate for confinement—though its description foreshadows the fact that it hides a possibly fatal threat. It is one of many “dead mills [, . . .] never quite stripped and whitened to skeleton’s decency: like corpses at their most horrible” (LS 183). Within, beyond “a further door, into darkness,” a native Irishman has sought safety in this symbol of the past and the changes wrought by the Anglo-Irish (LS 185). His place gone, he advocates for its usurpers voluntary confinement: “It is time [. . .] that yourselves gave up walking. If you have nothing better to do, you had better keep in the house while y’have it” (LS 187).

Lois’s other physical escapes occur sporadically through the novel. To escape her friend Livvy, “she fled to the back of the house and hid in a box- room”; she “dashed behind a window curtain” to escape her Aunt Myra (LS 197,

200). She walks with Livvy in the rain to escape the others inside Danielstown

(LS 205). She longs fervently to love Gerald, a Black and Tan soldier with whom she could possibly escape to Egypt when his regiment was relocated. Gerald, an early representative of the repeated Bowen idea of person as safe place, is a familiar place for Lois; with him, she felt “she was home again; safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness” (LS 226). She escapes Danielstown by going to dances in regimental huts surrounded by sentry- guarded walls topped with wire. There, still, the unfriendly native Irish “country

18 bore in its strong menace” (LS 230). To have done something, she agrees to marry Gerald—though her action precipitates more confinement imagery: “What she had done stretched everywhere, like a net” (LS 242). She is disturbed by the fact that he is so predictable, “a wood in which she counted from tree to tree—all hers—and knew the boundary wall right round” (LS 265). Yet when Gerald tells her, against the backdrop of the “plantation where, constricted by firs, thought and movement were difficult,” that her aunt Myra had indirectly informed him that he was not good enough for her, Lois’s “mind halted and she wanted to run away.”

She “thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train” (LS 286-88). Yet, because she cannot love Gerald and cannot deny the truth of those who tell her that she does not, she cannot re-enact her mother’s defiant leavetaking.

Thus Lois is not permitted any sort of escape until after Gerald, part of a two-man patrol, has been ambushed and killed instantly at a crossroads west of

Clonmore (LS 304). Gerald, a soldier on active duty abroad, is in many ways the antithesis of the Danielstown young people. Likewise, his dreams are not of escape to danger or adventure, but to the safety of home:

He looked ahead to a time when it all should be accurately, finally

fenced about and all raked over. Then there should be a fixed

leisured glow, and relaxation, as on coming in to tea from an

afternoon’s gardening with his mother in autumn. He turned in

thought to confident English country, days like the look in a dog’s

eyes, rooms small in the scope of firelight, neighbourly lights

through trees.

Unlike his Anglo-Irish counterparts, he sees things “small” and “fenced about” as positive, comforting—a deliberate contrast between England and Ireland at the time (LS 129-30).

After his death, Lois’s escape abroad to Tours to improve her French becomes more of a sending away to save Aunt Myra from having to face someone who knows how unhappy her anti-marriage machinations made Gerald before he died (LS 309). Probably to their chagrin, both Lois and Laurence ironically escape the moment in the novel in which war would have approached them closest to home. In that moment, place again becomes paramount as

Danielstown, Castle Trent and Mount Isabel burn to the ground in a single night.

With an echo of the Old Man in Yeats’s play Purgatory, Bowen calls the act of setting the houses afire an “execution,” and her imagery recalls, horribly, an earlier description of a Danielstown sunset:

It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet,

that the country itself was burning [. . . .] At Danielstown [. . .],

the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging

aghast), [and the] sound of the last [unlit] car widened, gave itself

to the open and empty country and was demolished [. . .] Above

the steps, the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace. (LS 311-

12, italics added)

The repeated references to openness satirize the limitations of Ascendancy hospitality and point out the futility of Anglo-Irish attempts to protect themselves within multiple enclosures. The central enclosure, the Big House, is reduced to nothing more than a “vacancy” and the Naylors to nothing less than dispossession

(LS 311).

Cultural historian Kurt Bowen summarizes the situation of the Anglo-Irish as a confrontation with a “particularly concentrated campaign of terror and persecution with [sic] neither the British nor the Free State government could prevent”:

With their ostentatious loyalism, their ascendancy backgrounds,

and their isolated residences in the countryside, they stood out as

helpless symbols and as convenient targets for anti-British

sentiment [ . . . T]hey were often raided for arms and provisions by

the Irish Republican Army, and some of their houses were burned

as reprisals for acts of both governments which had no connection

with the houses and families attacked [. . .] The eventual result was

both the wholesale departure of the Ascendancy and their final

destruction as a distinguishable national class within Ireland.

(22-23)

Kurt Bowen tracked the numbers of departing Anglo-Irish by studying census figures listed by religious denomination. According to him,

The rate of Church of Ireland decline reached its peak in the census

period of 1911 to 1926, which encompassed the final, violent stage

of nationalist struggle, the advent of independence and the ensuing

Civil War. In all, the number of Irish Anglicans fell from 249,535

in 1911 to 164,215 in 1926—a decline of 34 per cent [. . .]

Munster, with a fall of 44 per cent, proved to be the most

inhospitable of all the provinces. (20-21)

Furthermore, for forty years after independence the number of Irish Anglicans continued to fall until they represented only 3.7 per cent of the total population in

1961—though the minority “Protestants never exceeded 15 per cent [. . .] at the rural district level” (K. Bowen 20-21, 27).

These numbers underlie the realities of the Elizabeth Bowen’s family, who resided primarily in County Cork, the southernmost county in Munster, and were members of the Church of Ireland. Indeed, by 1961 Bowen herself had become one of these statistics, in 1959 selling her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, to a man from County Cork who wanted the land and its timber and who subsequently demolished the Big House in 1960 (Glendinning 257-58). Thus Bowen was intimately familiar with the circumstances of the household that she depicts in her only other novel completely set in Ireland, A World of Love, published in 1955.

The Irish—or, rather, Anglo-Irish—setting is, of course, the primary link between The Last September and A World of Love. Some imagery also links the two novels, particularly references to dust and gold. In the earlier novel, Bowen represents Francie Montmorency’s age as an inescapable dustiness in comparison to Lois’s youthfulness, and gold seems to refer equally to the landscape (“gold field,” “gold weather,” LS 17, 76) and to the young people in that landscape (Lois

22 has “the golden touch; Gerald’s “flannels were gold-white in the sun,” LS 10, 46).

Both imply a retrospective golden glow.

In A World of Love, young Jane is the resident golden girl, a “shower of gold” bestowing on others the “golden apple of her attention” (WL 120, 84), and the thirsty land is suffering from “[n]erve-racking ghastly endless sublime weather,” as if the countryside were “clamped under a burning-glass” (WL 32,

124). While the heat is a source of confinement in the novel, it is a temporary one, and the land itself, in stark contrast to the threatening landscapes in The Last

September, is “[a]t all times open and great with distance” (WL 9).

One profound, long-term oppressor in A World of Love is lack of money, and everything in the surroundings of the Montefort household reflects this lack.

Montefort, a remnant of the ascendancy of the Anglo-Irish, is a small mansion with an obelisk out front and a “façade [that] carried a ghost of style” (WL 61, 9).

In terms of openings and closures, however, little there remains as it was meant to be; doors are closed on hospitality, spaces open in dereliction. The kennels, the dovecote, the stables are all “forsaken” (WL 10), and predominantly the place has

an air of having gone down: [. . .] trees had been felled around it,

leaving space impoverished and the long low roofline framed by

too much sky. The door no longer knew hospitality; moss

obliterated the sweep for the turning carriage; the avenue lived on

as a rutted track, and a poor fence [. . .] served to keep back

wandering grazing cattle. (WL 9)

The road approaching the house is “haunted in ranks by beeches gone, down one by one in gale after gale year after year,” and “shadows like trees fallen barricaded what was left of the avenue [. . . .]” (WL 173). The wall surrounding the garden is broken, but the Venetian window that “[i]n its day” looked down on the garden is sealed” (WL 10). In an isolation that amounts almost to extinction, the house rarely receives “comers” (WL 76). Most chance visitors, indeed, generally have “No idea there was anyone living here” (WL 41).

Yet, ironically, members of the household continue the Anglo-Irish habits of decades if not centuries: locking the gates at the entrance and the doors of the house itself. Antonia, the owner of Montefort,

lost no time in barricading the door behind her, [. . .] going through

a performance which meant nothing—forcing the key round in the

stiff lock, letting drop the crossbar into its sockets. Not since

Montefort stood had there ceased to be vigilant measures against

the nightcomer; all being part of the hostile watch kept now by

eyeless towers and time-stunted castles along these rivers. For as

land knows everywhere is a frontier; and the outposted few [. . . ]

never must be off guard. (WL 116)

Place remembers the need for defensive confinement even longer than its ascendant people do, for it endures longer.

The gates at the Montefort entrance—though their “white spears” are

“warped” and the “eating-out of rust through the last paint gave [them] more than their daytime aspect of dissolution”—receive similar careful attention from

Antonia, now more than ever one of the “outposted few” (WL 116). In this case, however, there is, as Jane states so succinctly, a more practical and frugal reason for the confinement: “Cattle” (WL 173).

Inside the house, confinement imagery continues to underline the underlying poverty. Bowen describes one of the downstairs rooms as “crouching

[. . .] with its smoky ceiling” (WL 22). In the kitchen,

the room in Montefort which had changed least [, . . .] the great

and ravenous range [. . .] was built back into a blackened cave of

its own [and] remained Montefort’s sole means of heating water—

none of the innovations, boilers, plumbing and so on, envisaged

once by Antonia, had been yet installed, nor did it seem probable

that they would be. There was not the money. (WL 28, italics

added)

Due to the current drought, the household’s one servant must haul water up from the river in a donkey cart. After midnight, the “flagged floor began to be running with cockroaches” (WL 118), and though it is now June, the calendar hanging on the dresser is “for the year before” (WL 28).

Upstairs, the wax-caked candlestick in the “lair” of Antonia’s bedroom demonstrates lack of electricity while the torn curtains drawn to form “mantled claret-red dusk” and a “damaged Crown Derby saucer” as an ashtray attest to confinement and decay (WL 13, 11-12). In the drawing-room, former social center of the home, disuse is most starkly evident: “[a]ir had died, the windows having been bolted.” Here, “[a]ny charm of a chattery circle had been broken by

25 condemnatory pushing apart and back of armchairs [, . . .] “Water-colours [. .

.]covered stains on the walls,” and the windows have an “undraped stare” (WL 42-

43).

The improbability of a communicative social circle in the drawing room symbolizes the psychological and often literal distance between members of the

Montefort household. The adults, trapped by poverty and the past, inhabit separate spheres which enable them to avoid each other as much as possible.

Antonia, Montefort’s owner, travels from London to Ireland to the continent, restlessly trying to escape who she has become: a once-famous photographer with a failed marriage following the death in World War I of a first cousin, Guy, for whom she had felt an incompletely requited love. Since Guy’s death, much of Antonia seems dead or paralyzed as well. Ownership of

Montefort seems both asset and liability. She can’t decide “whether to part with

[it] or to take it over.” Though she had an “overweening sentiment for the place,” she also has neither the desire nor the means to stay there throughout the year (WL

17). Even when drawn inevitably back to Montefort, Antonia keeps to her closed, drape-drawn bedroom most of the time, attempting the escape routes of smoking, drinking to excess, and taking pills in order to sleep. Once, perhaps because

“They say the sea’s as far as you can go,” she escapes to the sea, and, released, her “Ford’s sound [. . .] fanned out widely over the country.” The departure

“somehow lessened the pressure on Montefort” if not on Antonia, who with regret notes, “I never could [drown]” (WL 67, 66). She may have even tried suicide, but she can never escape the place to which her past is so completely connected.

Fred is “Guy’s and Antonia’s illegitimate cousin, bye-blow son of roving

Montefort uncle [, . . .] allowed to grow up in the stable yards.” Fred achieved his most far-reaching escape when he “walked out one morning without a word to anyone, to be heard of some time afterwards in Australia.” Later, however, Fred voluntarily returned to Ireland, and, by the time Antonia found him, he had evidently decided to stay there permanently (WL 19). Thus he was amenable to

Antonia’s inspired idea that he stay and farm Montefort—a place to which he, too, seems inescapably drawn (WL 20).

For Fred, as for Antonia, Montefort seems a mixed blessing. Because “a woman went with the land,” Fred sometimes feels the need to escape Lilia and to

“go where I’m wanted” (WL 154). At the time of the novel Fred and Lilia occupy separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house. But the never-ending needs of the place itself offer him more opportunities for escape, and he goes “off into his working limbo,” where among his workers “himself was the one he drove hardest of all” (WL 141, 28).

Tying Lilia, an English woman with an aversion to Ireland, to Montefort requires more coercion. Years ago, Lilia had been Guy’s fiancée. When Guy had been killed in battle in early 1918, Antonia, Guy’s heir, had felt responsible for her, but Antonia finally ended thirteen years of Lilia’s dependence on her when she “decided to marry her off to Fred” (WL 19). Lilia’s capitulation to this marriage was largely a result of Antonia’s ultimatum that she would under no circumstances support her any further (WL 22). Afterward, Antonia cannot escape fast enough; she “leaped back into the beribboned hackney and made her

27 habitual dash to the boat train,” leaving Fred and Lilia “framed in the doorway, blankly watching her go” (WL 23). Their being “framed” clearly indicates

Antonia’s success at confining the pair to place.

The arrangement—a triangle of mutual confinements through which Fred farms the land, pays half of any profits to Antonia, and lives rent-free in the house with his family while reserving Montefort’s best room for its owner—leaves the

Danbys’ status too open: “uncertain, never secure, never defined.” Yet the agreement, by the time A World of Love opens, has survived for twenty-one years, ironically “owing perhaps partly to all parties’ reluctance to [. . .] binding themselves to anything hard-and-fast” (WL 16).

Lilia, the least-consulted member of the triangle, ends up “half the hostess at Montefort, half not.” She in particular “disliked Montefort, wilted under the life here, but had ceased to more than dream of escape” (WL 16). In England, she came from a more comfortable background of “suburbia merging into the Thames

Valley” (WL 18), and since her arrival at Montefort, she has had

a sense [. . .] of being besieged, under observation or in some way

even under a threat. Apprehension was seldom at rest in her[. . . .]

When in winter, sometimes, the hunt ran over the land [. . . ,] she

trembling locked herself into her bedroom. Was it the place itself,

her mistrust of Ireland or the uncanny attentiveness of the country

which kept her nerves upon the stretch? What was unforeseen

boded something abnormal. So [. . .] she dreaded any comer at

all—men wanting Fred, tinkers with their sky-empty blue eyes

annihilating their patter of talk, beggar-women sepulchral in black

shawls, with the saints behind them. Worst were those who stood

at the door mute, neither speaking nor going away. (WL 76)

Bowen again emphasizes the contrast between suburban England and rural

Ireland, noting in particular the apparent unfriendliness of the unfamiliar place to the English outsider.

Once Lilia had “made a bolt for London,” writing that “she was not expecting to be returning.” While at first her escape seems reminiscent of Laura

Naylor’s in The Last September, Lilia’s is, in contrast, incomplete. Though Lilia repeats, “I will never go back to him,” she, as Antonia none too gently points out, really has nowhere else to go. Marriage and children, some of the things that

Laura Naylor escaped to, Lilia already has and is trying to escape from. Antonia, realizing from the fact that Lilia’s protests grow steadily fainter that “Lilia would come back but never go back,” gives Fred money and a week, but “by the end of that week she would expect to hear of their both being back [. . .] at Montefort”

(WL 136-38).

Though Fred’s first response was to destroy the check Antonia had sent, ultimately he went to London, wooed Lilia anew, and tacitly reinstated the agreement tying both husband and wife to Montefort. The “reconciliation, although brief, was signalized by the conception of Maud,” who, in terms of confinement to place, “put the lid on everything” (WL 138-39). Now, even the places to which Lilia can escape are limited in variety and opportunity and thus limiting to the imagination. The Hunt Fête, for example,

now was the sole festivity of the lonely year, for Montefort the

annual outing [. . . .] Rare were sallies from Montefort—[. . .]

Lilia, shy and huffy, felt unequal these days even to braving church

[. . . .] As to the Fête, however, there remained an imperative: this

challenging social gathering, which one paid money to enter, was a

thing apart. The Danbys “appeared” at it, as unfailingly as they

could be relied upon to be nowhere else. There they were, still

themselves, still alive; forgotten since this time last year they had

gone on existing, inside those gates knotted shut with a chain. (WL

38)

Apart from her annual escape to the fête, where Lilia is a “lost lady [. . .] fashionably got up” (WL 38), only visits to local towns for marketing break a monotonous routine. Supposedly for increased ventilation in the heat but even more just to be elsewhere (WL 122), Lilia escapes to Clonmore for a haircut. But

Clonmore, with “[d]ung baked on the pavements” and “in eternal windows goods faded out [. . . ,] not only provided no place to be, it provided no reason to be, at all.” In fact, Lilia states, “this is a place where one could not even be run over,” yet “Where else, now, is there? For me, nowhere!” (WL 131).

Lilia’s daughter Jane, the counterpart of Lois Farquar in The Last

September, is at twenty slightly older and less desperate for experience. She has not been as Ireland-bound as Lois, having been educated at Antonia’s expense

“first at expensive boarding school, then abroad, lately at a select London secretarial college” (WL 17). While on the brink of womanhood, she is, like Lois,

“not yet so” (WL 11), and she is the central ready-to-be-awakened character in the novel. “[B]orn of Lilia cold, by Antonia rendered colder,” she is “[r]eady, empty, apt,” her feelings largely untouched, her natural impulse more to be than to do.

Though physically at hand, she is psychologically “all the time somewhere else”

(WL 35).

Yet, ironically, Jane’s is the momentous act that finally frees the adults in the novel from some of their isolation and brings them marginally closer together.

Jane finds in Montefort’s attic a packet of letters that transports her into another world. She escapes intrusion while she reads the letters by pretending to be asleep when Antonia looks into her bedroom. She finds an elder with “waxen blossom within themselves forming a cave” and there, in her “cramped bower”

(WL 62, 65), Jane “lay face down among growing bracken [. . . ] ; a hot tang came from the bracken fronds crushed into bedding by her body. Languidly,” she let

“the deep keen dream” inspired by the letters “come combing through her, keeping her being running like tressy water-weed [. . .].” The “particular secret of the place where Jane lay was that it was pre-inhabited. An ardent hour of summer had gone by here—yes, here, literally where she was, to her certain knowledge

[. . .] It had been June then too,” and Guy, the author of the letters, had been in love, had written, “if only YOU had been here!” (WL 67-70). Romantic and empty Jane, completely filled up by the past, feels suddenly her own disconnection from others. Though she has “humanity waiting round her everywhere in this pathetic house, [she] would have none of it; it was not good enough for her.” To escape this humiliating picture of herself, “she fought

31 through the undergrowth round the elder,” thinking “she had better get back to

London [. . . .] Why not bolt now, before Antonia could be there to stop her?”

Ireland seems to be holding her back from all that she could do and be. Then she recalls, as do most characters in the novel, “she had no money” (WL 78). Escape seems impossible, but a note from Lady Latterly, the new English châtelaine of the castle where the Hunt Fête had been held (WL 39), brings a dinner invitation and a new escape route.

In fact, the invitation not only offers an immediate outlet but also another entrée into a new world—through an old place. If the letters are a key to the

Ireland’s past, here is a ticket to the future. A new class of people are moving into Ireland, replacing the departed Anglo-Irish, and “These days, one goes where the money is” (WL 94). Lady Latterly, hostess of the Hunt Fête, seems determined to demonstrate what money can do to place. With no Lord Latterly in evidence, two years ago she had bought the “unusually banal Irish castle” and had it refurbished (WL 83). Jane, accustomed to “starchless damask cloth[s]” and

“dinner plates [. . .] chipped at the rims,” in Lady Latterly’s bedroom finds “no smears, no ash, no feathers on the floor; instead, whole areas of undinted satin, no trace of anything having been touched or used” (WL 50, 81). Here money seems associated with lifelessness and the absence of a past. Downstairs, “Bowers of flowers cascaded fern mist from the piano top; jaded late green heat came in at the open windows. The room [. . .] was overcast by the outdoor rise of lawns and encased in walls of transparent blue” (WL 84-85, italics added). Bowen’s poetical description of the natural beauty of the setting contrasts sharply with her

32 disparaging treatment of its featureless inhabitants. Apparently indistinguishable from one another, their “alike, anonymous masks seemed to be attached to the same body, one abstract shirtfront” (WL 85). Jane underlines their Wonderland unreality when she calls them all “nothing [. . .] but a pack of cards” (WL 89).

Bowen portrays Lady Latterly in a particularly mordant manner.

“Latterly,” for example, implies “recently” and hints at her nouveau riche status.

“Vesta,” her given name, recalls the Roman goddess of the hearth, and Lady

Latterly’s drawing-room is “orientated [. . .] towards the fireplace,” but “the grate was empty” (WL 90). Jane, shown upstairs to replace Lady Latterly’s English maid, who left because she “couldn’t stand the country,” judges her bedroom to be “a replica, priceless these days, of a Mayfair décor back in the 1930s.” Jane thinks to herself, “Fancy, to know so little when one could spend so much!” (WL

83, 81, 82). Lady Latterly does not seem fully to realize “the fragility and perhaps the pathos of all this [spectacle] as a carapace,” a painstakingly-produced façade behind which to hide an essential emptiness (WL 82). A place with money but no fully-delineated individuals and no connection to its past is no better than a place like Montefort, with no money and distinct personalities haunted by a ever- present past; it may even be worse.

Fortunately, Jane “was in a mood for the theatre” and suffers being “the lovely nobody, exhibited but not introduced” (WL 83, 89). Perceiving that she is being used, Jane in turn uses the unfamiliar surroundings to effect her own release. She rather enjoys the alcohol-induced “phantasmagoric” but freeing atmosphere that “this circle of the displaced rich” creates. Because “Something

33 more [. . .] unfettered than imagination did now command them,” there “ensued a release of ardour and flattery”; “there was no censor” (WL 98-99). The censor arrives soon enough, however, in the form of Antonia. Displeased by Jane’s “get- away” to a different place, she has come to take Jane back to Montefort (WL 106,

107).

Jane’s role in the novel is to set things free—or at least to provide impetus toward freedom. She demonstrates both her role as a catalyst and draws attention to her own situation in Ireland by “let[ting] a fly out from [. . .] under a clouded glass bell” because “it would be a pity to let him suffocate” (WL 127, 129). The letters that she frees from the attic were “hidden to be found” (WL 211), and they in turn liberate the spectre of Guy, who “came back, through Jane, to be let go”

(WL 203). Montefort, the reservoir of the past and the only place where the central characters are ever together under one roof, is the only possible setting in which this process could occur.

Lilia is one of four characters who has a cathartic visitation from Guy.

Later, having successfully avoided opening his letters, which she knows are not hers, Lilia flees to the Montefort garden. There within an enclosure not visited since her early time with Fred, she relives her leave-taking of Guy before he went to war. Just as being “walled in” and “wedged to a stop [. . .] with no shelter” forced her to face the truth about Guy’s infidelity in the past, the similarities of setting—walls but no roof—may force her to relive her memories and to effect an escape and cartharsis for both herself and Fred (WL 142).

As a result, between Lilia and Fred there is “not so much a solution as a dissolution, a thinning-away of the accumulated hardness of many seasons, estrangement, dulledness, shame at the waste and loss” (WL 155). As they experience “a little redemption [. . .], Bowen’s imagery takes on nuptial overtones: “the chestnut [. . .] canopied them over; over their heads were its expired candles of blossom” (WL 155). Because of the couple’s progress toward reconciliation, Antonia, instead of further manipulating Fred and Lilia into confinement at Montefort, actually suggests that Lilia escape to London—at

Antonia’s expense—because “you need a change” (WL 125). And although Lilia at first flees from such an idea “towards the distant sanctuary of the house” (WL

125), she at length agrees to go for about a week because a “week will seem long

[. . .] to those left behind” (WL 188). The last glimpse in the novel of the adults echoes Fred and Lilia’s

Wedding afternoon. All was repeated almost exactly [, . . .] on

such a day as this was, near the end of a June. Left behind in that

doorway the pair had stood, watching Antonia drive away in their

wedding taxi, free of them. Those two she had forced to their

bridal doom; she had left them to it, and to what? But the fact was,

there had been no going away; one is never quite quit of what one

has done. (WL 209)

There is, still, no going away from Montefort, but perhaps the couple will feel less confined now that occasional escape from their permanent place seems more possible.

For Jane the liberating change precipitated by Guy’s letters will be more comprehensive. Fetched by Peregrine while “walking around in circles” (WL

175), she returns to Lady Latterly’s castle to find it and herself disenchanted. She feels oppressed by the emptiness of the drawing-room, “faced and confounded by the chimney-piece.” She watches Peregrine “lifelessly looking around his cage” and, “slowing down into one of the pacing, far-ranging circles in whose course

Peregrine had found her,” feels that she, too, is “anybody’s game” (WL 176, 179).

Apparently, Jane has no place, no safe resting point. Poised between flight and resignation, she again allows herself to be used by Lady Latterly—this time to accompany Harris, the chauffeur, to meet a man named Richard Priam at the airport.

The atmosphere foreshadows Jane’s discovery of her place as the heat wave gives way to the expectation of rain (WL 195). At first the stillness is “more oppressive, more lucid, [. . .] more intent than that of the heat. The uncanny imminence of rain hushed almost every other sensation” (WL 198). As the

Latterly van drives away from Montefort and toward the airport, the description becomes at the same time more open and more suspenseful: “the obelisk dropped from view, leaving the skyline to be one continuous flowing change, and the road after the early miles began to untrammel itself from hedges [. . . .] (WL 212). The van, “bowling along the straight, straight road [. . .] grew smaller under so much sky [, . . .] the obdurate cloud-ceiling still saying nothing” (WL 216). Finally, after the “narrowed intensity of this all-but-last phase,” the sky begins “to let fall far-apart tepid drops” (WL 220, 222). The release of rain signals the anticipated

36 moment toward which “the expectation and desire of some Great Thing” has drawn Jane (Traherne title page). Then Richard descends from his plane with “a look of ease at being at large again” (WL 223), and Jane, though apparently “in the act of turning away, of indeed fleeing,” at last lets her eyes meet his: “They no sooner looked but they loved” (WL 224). The terminal marks a new beginning. Jane finds her home, her place in him.

Due to the uncharacteristically hot June, the exterior landscape in A World of Love seems contradictingly most stifling when most open and most indicative of imminent relief when the mountains and sky begin to close in, threatening rain.

The interior spaces—such as the kitchen with “ivy over the window-bars and the persisting humidity of the stone-flagged floors”—sometimes “look cool without being so” (WL 27), but they offer little relief from the heat or from the constraining proximity of others. Invasions of privacy are frequent. Antonia walks into Jane’s bedroom unannounced; Jane, Antonia and Fred each separately interrupt Lilia’s retreat to the walled garden; and everyone except Fred enters

Antonia’s bedroom. Almost every journey—to the elder tree, to work in the fields, to town, to the castle, to the sea, to London—is an attempted escape from the confinement of Montefort to the promise of greater freedom elsewhere.

That promise never materializes, and, except possibly for Jane, it never will.

With The Heat of the Day, another wartime novel, the landscape resumes the threatening aspect that it wore in The Last September. In this novel, the titular

“heat” is not literal as it was in The World of Love. Rather, The Heat of the Day chronicles Stella Rodney’s love for Robert Kelway during part of World War II as

37 her own life and “the fateful course of her fatalistic century” experience “the testing extremities of their noonday” (HD 127). According to Bowen, the two are inextricable. Stella and Robert had first met in London during the first air raids of

September 1940. Then Londoners observed the more liberating daytime, though

“charred by the smoke from ruins,” as “a pure and curious holiday from fear”

(HD 85). As at Montefort, London offered some curious spatial reversals, the effect of which was almost always to make dangerous and unknown territory of the formerly safe and familiar. Parks, “suddenly closed because of time-bombs,” presented “empty deck chairs” and “dazzlingly silent lakes [in]mirages of repose.” Though railing still enclosed the parks, these would be later removed and melted down for munitions, creating a still more unnaturally open space (HD

86). The “ropings-off of dangerous tracts of street made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side.” Traffic was diverted from “blocked main thoroughfares into byways” (HD 85-86).

However, the night, dark with the systematic blacking out of all exterior lighting and fraught with anxiety-filled sleeplessness, held, even more immediately than nighttime in The Last September, the threat of extinction:

“between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine” (HD 85). This was a “time of opening street doors conspiratorially: light must not escape onto steps” (HD 43). The

“night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain

[. . .] Strangers saying ‘Good night, good luck,’ to each other a street corners, as the sky first blanched then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown” (HD 86, 87).

Enclosures of any kind offered only illusive, emphemeral safety:

“Apathetic, the injured and dying in the hospitals watched light change on walls which might fall tonight. Those rendered homeless sat where they had been sent; or, worse, [. . .] retraced their steps to look for what was no longer there” (HD

86). The numbers of “campers in rooms of draughty dismantled houses or corners of fled-from flats” increased daily (HD 89). Regency terraces were only shells, their “black vacant windows [. . .] indifferen[t]” (HD 18). Even Stella’s bedroom window, “glassless since two or three nights ago, ran up with a phantom absence of weight” (HD 88). Whole blocks of buildings fall to rubble so that, ironically, there was “plenty of everything in London—attention, drink, time, taxis, most of all space” (HD 89).

Within this unwelcome and often inaccessible space, the Londoners themselves consisted primarily of a “new society of one kind of wealth, resilience.” They were people “whom the climate of danger suited,” who lived a fluid existence in a “canvas-like impermanence of [. . .] settings” (HD 89). Place loses any overtones of safety or solidity and becomes merely where the uprooted stay temporarily. Place also loses hierarchy, with no one place necessarily better than another. Because, for Londoners, to “work or think was to ache,” their afternoons in “offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens” pass slowly and in anticipation of being elsewhere (HD 86). At night, to escape the increased

39 tension of being alone, they moved “to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other’s places.” Stella, among them, was also “being gay in company whose mood was at the pitch of her own,” and “in a bar or club” she met Robert (HD 89,

90).

There, meeting for the first time, both “fixed their eyes expectantly on each other’s lips” and “both spoke at once, unheard.” Above them,

an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the

pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire [. . . .] The barrage

banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked.

Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung

whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four

walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on

glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off

into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere

else. (HD 90-91)

Drowned out by the barrage and then incapable of being called back,

Stella and Robert’s first words to each other were lost, taking on “the significance of a lost clue” (HD 91). Gradually, however, they developed a relationship with elements of confinement both as constriction and as safety. At first Stella, during that autumn of 1940, “had been the onlooker with nothing more to lose—out of feeling as one can be out of breath” (HD 89). One morning in October, however, she felt a “breaking down of immunity [, . . .] a sort of imprisoned humming” inside her head. The “non-existence of her window, the churchyard hush of the

40 square, the grit which had drifted on to her dressing-table all became ominous for the first time,” and, because she’d been “certain that he was dead,” she rushed to meet Robert at a restaurant (HD 88). There, the “pushing in upon them of the table by the waiter had been like the closing of a gate; behind this there was something a little forced” about their meeting until Robert broke through the barrier of discomfort with what Stella, too, had been thinking: “I’m very glad you are here. I was certain something had happened to you” (HD 92). Thereafter, the two come to be places of safety for each other; Robert is “a habitat” for Stella, and the “lovers had for two years possessed a hermetic world” (HD 85). With places no longer permanent or secure, people become the new places of refuge.

Stella’s own immediate surroundings consist of a furnished top-floor luxury flat. For privacy, she’d taken a relatively old house in Weymouth Street which was occupied by doctors’ and dentists’ offices during the week but left empty on weekends (HD 21). Because she had dispensed with the last of her own houses and stored their contents when the war started, she endures the oddly confining “irritation of being surrounded by somebody else’s irreproachable taste” but has the satisfaction of not seeing her own belongings threatened (HD

21-22). Yet, in doing so, she has also restricted her living space to only two rooms, and, when her son, Rodney, on forty-eight-hour leave from the Army, comes to visit, “no benevolence came to [their meeting] from surrounding things.” First the rooms suffer from the war-imposed blackout: “The day had gone from the moment Stella had drawn down the fitted blinds and drawn across them the deadening curtains: now nothing took its place. Every crack was

41 stopped; not a mote of darkness could enter—the room [is] sealed up in its artificial light” (HD 53). Then they suffer from the anonymity of the place, a less direct result of the war. The drawing-room sofa is

without environment; it might have been some derelict piece of

furniture exposed on a pavement after an air raid [. . . . B]etween

son and mother the absence of every inanimate thing they had in

common set up an undue strain [. . .] Where they were concerned,

the ban, the check, the caution as to all spending and most of all

the expenditure of feeling restricted them [. . .] Was this war’s

doing? [. . . I]t was a sign, in them, of an impoverishment of the

world. (HD 51-52)

Outside Stella’s lodgings, less of the world is accessible. Increasingly severe cuts in the train service are accompanied by posters discouraging travel, which now occurs largely for necessities only. Mere impetuous escape suddenly seems profligate. When, at Stella’s suggestion, she and Robert travel in October

1942 to visit his mother, Stella has “[l]audably little travel [. . .] on her conscience: since last May’s expedition to [Cousin Francis’s] funeral she had left

London not more than once or twice” (HD 99).

By the time of the day trip to see Mrs. Kelway and Robert’s family,

Harrison, an intelligence agent for Britain, has met with Stella. Harrison has accused Robert of being a spy for Germany and offered not to turn in Stella’s lover if she will have an affair with him instead—or, as Stella puts it, “I’m to form a disagreeable association in order that a man be left free to go on selling his

42 country” (HD 34). Harrison later accurately describes the journey into Robert’s past as Stella’s excuse “to look at the first place where rot could start” (HD 125).

Holme Dene, Mrs. Kelway’s house, is the perfect setting for the beginning of some deep psychological disturbance, as Bowen hints by placing the notice

“CAUTION: CONCEALED DRIVE” at its “bald white gates” on an “otherwise empty road” (HD 100). The house itself, in contrast to Danielstown of The Last

September or Montefort of A World of Love, “must have been built about 1900” and has therefore not housed any one family for generations. An eclectic combination of “half-timbering with bow and French windows and two or three balconies” backed by “a tennis pavilion, a pergola, a sundial, a rock garden, a dovecote, some gnomes, a seesaw, a grouping of rusticated seats and a bird bath,”

Holme Dene seems to have neither style nor tradition to recommend it (HD 100,

101).

Inside, it becomes clear that the house also lacks convenience. As Robert explains, “the war has saved our faces. We always have lived uncomfortably in this house; now it is possible for us to make a point of doing so” (HD 115). The embodiment of proof of Robert’s statement is his small autocratic mother. She, upon their arrival, occupies the lounge, a room of “concentrated indoorness” so

“blackly furnished with antique oak” that it manages to consume the light of the three large windows. Some of the mahogany furniture, a dining table, a dumb- waiter and an upright piano, “could be marked as evacuees out of other rooms”

(HD 103, 102). Indeed, Mrs. Kelway, who delights—if she may be said to experience delight at all—in putting others at a disadvantage while describing at

43 length her own exemplary privations, explains the presence of those pieces of furniture in the lounge:

“Afternoon tea at this table does not seem the same to me, but the

gate-leg at which we used to have afternoon tea had to be taken

away into the drawing-room to make place for the piano out of the

drawing-room when it was moved in here: we could not have

Anne practising in the cold [. . . .] Since we were told of the fuel

shortage we have made a point of keeping to this room, as the most

central. My son tells me that in London you would not notice the

war; I am afraid it is far from the same here.” (107-08)

The fact that the room also has numerous exits and archways, as well as a staircase, and is therefore impractical to heat, seems beside the point. Apparently

Mrs. Kelway finds more satisfaction in advertising the number of draughts endured for the war effort by placing “screens of varying heights” throughout the room (HD 103).

Upstairs, Robert’s former bedroom is remarkable primarily for its feeling of emptiness, and, Robert stresses, “It could not feel emptier than it is” (HD 112).

A museum to Robert’s past, the room’s contents suggest a discrepancy between outward appearance and concealed reality. It contains manly mahogany furniture of “unblemished veneer” as well as “interspersed fictions of boyishness” such as

“[g]lass cases of coins, birds’ eggs, fossils and butterflies that he must once have fancied or been supposed to fancy.” Some sixty or seventy photographs of Robert at every age cover the walls (HD 110-11, italics added). The dresser drawers are

44 filled with socks “beautifully put away” in mothballs. The room has a “narrow glacial bed, which, ends and all, had been draped in a starched white cover [. . .] as though [Robert] were dead.” And “[E]verything was dustless; new air with all its perils came in now—[Robert] had opened a window" (HD 112-13).

Holme Dene is a house in which almost any kind of freedom is viewed negatively. Anything that hints of the fresh, the unexamined or the unrestrained is under suspicion. Opening a window could let in perilous motes of dust. Hiring a taxi for the three miles from the station to the house is extravagant. Having one’s identity known is equivalent to exposing its flaws. Even Stella’s refusing anything to eat at afternoon tea—a polite gesture meant to smooth over the fact that, with rationing in progress, the Kelways have no butter for her bread—is interpreted by Mrs. Kelway to her grandchildren as, “Mrs. Rodney is free not to eat cake if she doesn’t want to: that is just what I mean by the difference between

England and Germany” (HD 108). Trying to rationalize their behavior, Stella thinks, “The English [. . .] were extraordinary—for if this were not England she did not know what it was” (HD 109). Ironically, the freedom-restricting Kelways of Holme Dene embody wartime England—a traditional, flag-waving compilation of ideals that cannot be wrong because they protect all of the already-tested freedoms of the free world.

Oddly, Holme Dene, this purported bastion of proper English feeling, has almost always been for sale. Mr. Kelway, understandably uncomfortable anywhere with his wife, “foresaw that he would be wanting another change,” having already moved in Robert’s lifetime from Elmsfield near Chiselhurst to

Meadowcrest near Hemel Hempstead to Holme Dene. Either buying it in the first place or putting it back on the agent’s books for re-sale was “simply one more of

[Robert’s] father’s mistakes” (HD 115). Stella, though she, like Robert, has

“come loose from her moorings” to move from one location to another, cannot imagine never having had moorings. Though “what she had left behind her dissolved behind her, [. . .] A handsome derelict gateway opening on to grass and repeated memorials round the walls of a church still gave some sort of locale, however distant, to what had been her unmarried name" (HD 109). She cannot fathom anyone living “in a place that has for years been asking to be brought to an end.”

What she doesn’t understand, Robert implies, is the delusive, even deliberately deceptive nature of Holme Dene—and of all the clichés of English uprightness that it represents. The house, Mrs. Kelway points out, “though antique in appearance, was not actually old[.] The oak beams [. . .] were imitations” (HD 110). Similarly, Robert tells Stella, the moments depicted in the photographs on his bedroom walls were only “Imitation ones [. . .] Can you think of a better way of sending a person mad than nailing that pack of his own lies all round the room where he has to sleep?” (HD 112). According to Robert, the essentially empty, joyless events were staged to imitate a normal, happy childhood. The entire “impermanent” household, according to Robert, “was brought here from somewhere else, with the intention of being moved again [. . .]

Reassemble it anywhere: you get the same illusion” (HD 116).

Whereas Stella goes to Holme Dene primarily to investigate Robert’s past, her next journey recalls her own past. Roderick, Stella’s twenty-year-old son, has inherited from his father’s Cousin Francis an Anglo-Irish estate that he can neither visit nor administer because of his service in the Army. Stella remembers Mount

Morris, Roderick’s inheritance, because her son was conceived there on her honeymoon with Victor Rodney over twenty years ago. She receives a number of letters concerning the estate—“asking for decisions I can’t make because I can’t grasp, from this distance, exactly what they’re about or what they’d entail” (HD

154)—and, therefore, plans to travel to Ireland for several days to sort things out.

Though she has had to convince the Passport Office of the urgency of her business there, the trip is also something of an escape for her. As Robert complains, in Ireland she “will be away completely” (HD 153), giving her an opportunity to sort out, uninfluenced by either Robert or Harrison, what to do about the accusation of spying.

Ireland certainly seems a world away from London. The days are longer.

The country, officially neutral in World War II, performs no nightly black-out ceremony. Indeed, Stella’s “exciting sensation of being outside war had concentrated itself round [Ireland’s] fearless lights—though actually, yesterday night as her ship drew in, the most strong impression had been of prodigality:

[. . .] windows had not only showed and shone but blazed [; . . .] dazzling reflections in damp streets made Dublin seem to be in the throes of a carnival”

(HD 160). The ordinary evidence of existence after so much hiding and constraint seems excessive, even unsafe, but in fact Ireland’s reputation during

47 this time directly opposes that of the island during The Last September. Now

Ireland is the place of safety and England the place of peril.

At Mount Morris, Bowen’s descriptions recall something of the isolation and enclosure of Danielstown: “The river traced the boundary of the lands: at the

Mount Morris side it had a margin of water-meadow into which the demesne woods, dark at their base with laurels, ran down [. . . .] This valley cleavage into a distance seemed like an offering to the front windows [. . . .] Elsewhere rising woods or swelling uplands closed Mount Morris in” (HD 155, italics added).

Inside, Stella finds the house startlingly familiar. Freed from the past, “it rose to the surface in her, as though something weighting it to the bottom had let go” (HD 158). Even in the prevailing dimness, Stella “seemed to perceive [. . .] everything that for the eye the darkness hid” (HD 159). In the library, “Light lived in the particles of the air only, for the walls and soaring curtains were of a deadening red.” On the walls, too, were “Injunctions, admonitions and warnings, unevenly block-printed by Cousin Francis.” Stella, “regretting she had not any such clear directions as to her own life—which, at this moment more distant than

London, would not be less problematic when returned to”—wishes to “stay here for ever, playing this ghostly part” (HD 156, 157). Thus, inside her bedroom at

Mount Morris, where “Care had raised the temperature of this long-empty room to the tepidity of a normal summer” and “curtains and shutters did double work,”

Stella, comfortable and enclosed, briefly evades the larger questions of her life

(HD 159).

Only in her visit to Mount Morris’s drawing room does Stella realize that for some the home could represent incarceration instead of deliverance. At first

Stella finds that the room has very little power over her, but when she looks in the mirror, she “became for the moment [. . .] the lady of the house, [. . .] immortal as a portrait” with “the look of everything she had lost the secret of being.”

Suddenly she sees herself as the heir of generations of ladies in drawing rooms;

“she had been unaccompanied by them along no path she took.” The drawing room represents the realm of the ladies, the “victors [. . .] of society” whose victory is largely aesthetic and external. In this room they sat, “hearing their dresses rustle, fearlessly intercepting flashes from their bracelets, rings and from the brooches nested on their bosoms in the lace.” This is a world of “flower- painted cups” on “silver trays”—a world of outer beauty and propriety (HD 166-

67).

Underneath the sparkle and civility is a world of limitations. For all its beauty, a drawing room is but a small place peopled by ladies of “virtue with nothing more to spend, honour saying nothing.” The ladies’ “conversation was a twinkling surface over their deep silence” (HD 166-67). It was

chiefly here in this room and under this illusion that Cousin Nettie

Morris—and who now knew how many more before her?—had

been pressed back, hour by hour, by the hours themselves, into

cloudland[.] Ladies had gone not quite mad [. . .] from listening

for meaning in the loudening ticking of the clock [. . . H]er kind

knew no choices, made no decisions—or, did they not? (HD 167)

Bowen states that it was a decision, however restricted, to refuse to prove what they suspected about the things that they were not told—but which in any case

“sifted through to them, stole up behind them, reached them by intimations.” As in the circumstance of Cousin Nettie, Cousin Francis’s wife, “the enactment of ignorance [. . . became] too much, insupportable inside [her] sheltered head.”

These ladies’ eyes “interchanged warnings,” but they “were never to speak at all”—except to a child, an animal, an inanimate object (HD 167).

The Mount Morris drawing room, that most formal of rooms, thus becomes a symbol of confinement, as do the “crossbars of the shutters [which] stood out against the panels horizontally black, the one iron note in the room”

(HD 167). The drawing room’s final intimation of despair is a picture “torn from a magazine” and “stuck crooked into an alien frame—a liner going down in a blaze with all lights on[. . . .] ‘Nearer my God to Thee: The Titanic: 1912’ ”

(HD 168-69). Stella, feeling “something inexorable” in the image of herself as mistress of Mount Morris, “turned away from it” (HD 166).

In marked contrast the next day, on a path in the valley in which Mount

Morris sits, Stella feels “the peace of the moment in which one sees the world for a moment innocent of oneself.” But “One cannot remain away,” and she soon returns to a London of “blinded windows” and a darkness so complete that “every main-line landmark was blotted out” (HD 169-70, 173). The sense of confinement returns with a vengeance.

If Mount Morris is for Stella a momentary escape, for Roderick it represents a vision of more prolonged freedom. He realizes that technically,

50 because probate will probably be held up because of Mount Morris’s Irish location, the estate is “still in the course of becoming his.” Nevertheless,

“Personally, he had entered into possession the day the effect of the Will was made known to him,” and “Possessorship of Mount Morris [. . .] established for him [. . .] what might be called an historic future,” a “habitat”(HD 46, 47, 85).

Submerged in a war through which “vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past,” Roderick grasps at the idea of a house both “geographically standing outside war” and apparently “standing outside the present” (HD 90, 47). Mount

Morris becomes “the hub of his imaginary life, of fancies” which, being called fantastic only “because circumstance outlawed them from reality [, . . .] made for his acquiescence to the immediate day.” In his struggle to situate himself in relation to some place, some permanent home, he daily escapes his military life through these visions of a less regimented time. He uses them to fill “those pockets of vacuum underlying routine,” the “long docile will-less waits for his turn for something further to happen” (HD 47). The only aspect of his inheritance that causes Roderick undue concern is Cousin Francis’s statement, rendered without punctuation in his Will, that he bequeaths the property to

Roderick “In the hope that he may care in his own way to carry on the old tradition.” Even then, Roderick does not fret about confinement, but about exactly what sort of freedoms he has been granted: “Does he mean, that I’m free to care in any way I like, so long as it’s the tradition I carry on; or, that so long as

I care in the same way he did, I’m free to mean by ‘tradition’ anything I like?”

(HD 83-84). Roderick wants to find his niche in something continuous and meaningful.

Ironically, almost everyone except the inheritor of Mount Morris seems to regard it as a liability rather than an asset. Harrison, who’d visited Cousin Francis there before his death and subsequently attended his funeral, describes it as isolated and feudal, an “old place [. . .] right off the beaten track” where the

“reception one got [was] quite Oriental.” Bowen notes that “With regard to heating, lighting and plumbing [Cousin Francis had been] happy to keep Mount

Morris in, almost, its original state; and his farm was run and his land worked with few aids unknown in his grandfather’s day” (HD 73).

Colonel Pole, another funeral attendant, expresses his opinion that, though

“there was no braver country [than Ireland] when I was young [, . . .] Things may not be what they were in that unfortunate country” since handing “over the reins to a pack of rebels” (HD 76-77). He labels Mount Morris a “white elephant [. . . , t]he last sort of thing that his generation wants” and declares all the gentility and traditionalism that it represents a “thing of the past.” While he expresses bitterness at the thought of “Mount Morris going,” he recommends that Roderick

“get rid of it—sell outright, before he ties himself up” (HD 77-78).

Even Robert believes that Cousin Francis’s act of “unload[ing] the past on a boy like that” is “fantastic,” a “racket of that old lunatic’s” to get Stella back to

Ireland (HD 153). Only Stella seems at least marginally to countenance Cousin

Francis’s “egotistic creative boldness” of “requisitioning [. . .] Roderick” to secure a future for Mount Morris. She worries lest Roderick “came to set too

52 much store by a world of which she, both as herself and as an instrument of her century, had deprived him,” yet she “never would agree that Roderick had been victimized: he had been fitted into a destiny; better, it seemed to her, than freedom in nothing” (HD 168). Roderick cannot extricate his new place from tradition, culture and the past; instead, he grasps at Mount Morris as a place of his own and prepares to shoulder all its attendant confinements.

Yet, while Bowen’s statement that “A man of faith has always a son somewhere” may advocate creative primogeniture for Ireland’s sons—or to obtain sons for Ireland—her depiction of the role that daughters of Ireland must play is considerably less positive. Cousin Nettie, Cousin Francis’s wife, is a case in point. She has lived for years in a nursing home in England, Wisteria Lodge, that seems to be the epitome of restrictiveness. It is surrounded by a “high garden wall” and “framed” with arabesques of wisteria. In this “hive of lives in abeyance” with doors that must be shut and thoughts that must not be dreadful, everyone lives “in a little world of [his] own” (HD 195-96). Roderick, who feels that he has “inherited Cousin Nettie with [Mount Morris],” worries that she is not aware of her husband’s death and that she might suddenly want to go back to her former home only to find that it had been given away in her absence. He has written the owners of the Lodge, the Tringsbys, but they apparently restrict both incoming and outgoing information and reply “ambiguously about Heaven and everything now seeming beautiful to Cousin Nettie” (HD 193). Thus, as current head of the family, he plans a visit in order to ask her himself.

He finds Nettie working on a needlepoint design “very possibly not of her choosing” near pictures of a “rural innocuous kind” chosen by Mrs. Tringsby (HD

198, 201). Mrs. Tringsby, further forwarding the idea that Cousin Nettie is incapable of doing anything herself, suggests that she might not know who

Roderick is. Cousin Nettie herself rapidly dispels that notion by announcing, “I was expecting Victor Rodney’s son. Has he not come?” (HD 197). Other small acts attest to the independent spirit in front of the “bolted window-sash.” For one thing, she sits with her back to the window “with finality,” as if “she must have ceased to look out of” it long ago (HD 199). She wears no wedding ring, and she intends to stitch a purple rose in defiance of others’ preconceived ideas about the flowers. Though “no pins were allowed in walls,” to Mrs. Tringsby’s safe pictures she has added a considerable gallery of own, but not even one photograph. “[W]hy,” she says, “should I want a picture of anything I have seen?

Don’t you think [. . .] it is a little odd that they could expect anyone to be so forgetful?” (HD 202).

Cousin Nettie’s problem is not that she is forgetful, but that she remembers too well. She needs no further reminders of her husband or Mount

Morris, both significant sources of confinement in her life. She realizes quite well, for example, that her husband is dead, but she is “only in half mourning” because “he was my cousin” and, from her perspective, “There should have never never been any other story” (HD 200).

Instead, her story was entangled with that of Francis, who as a young man was “Head and shoulders about all the rest of them” but who, to her dismay, “had

54 to go looking for a son” (HD 201). Though she, apparently, would rather have remained his cousin, she married him because she knew her place, which was to accept his decisions as the prerogatives of the male: “[A]ll my cousins make decisions; I have been used to that all my life [. . .] It was only for me that there was nothing to do but what I did.” With marriage came Mount Morris, a place that Nettie believes rejects her even as she rejects it. While Francis, because he was a man, had been almost able to “keep going, going, going and not notice,” for her

Day after day [. . .] was like sinking further down a well [. . .] I

could not help seeing what was the matter—what he had wanted

me to be was his wife; I tried this, that and the other, till the result

was that I fell into such a terrible melancholy that I only had to

think of anything for it to go wrong, too [. . .] once the fields

noticed me with him, the harvests began failing; so I took to going

nowhere but up and down stairs, till I met my own ghost. (HD 208-

09)

At that point, apparently, Cousin Nettie had committed the unforgiveable by leaving Francis and his patriarchal place and choosing to live anywhere else.

Then people, aghast that she was residing in a hotel, had said:

“If you keep on not going back to Mount Morris when Francis asks

you to and everybody thinks you should, people will come to the

conclusion that you are odd.” So at last I said: “Then that must be

what I am.” Because once that came to be known, nothing more

could be expected, could it? So they said in that case I ought not to

go on living in hotels, even quietly, even in private ones. If I was

well enough to be in the hotels, then I was well enough to go back

to Mount Morris. So I then said: “Very well, then, perhaps I had

better go into a home.” There seemed to be nowhere for me but

here or there. (HD 205)

Though place constitutes only one component of all the confinements that Nettie flees, she will find her own place, at any cost. After such a testimony, it should come as no surprise that Roderick thought it would “not do to tax her with being a malade imaginaire when she had [. . .] adopted the one possible course” (HD

207). Against formidable opposition, Cousin Nettie, too, had made a decision, and “One could argue, she had chosen well [. . .] inside this closed window was such a silence as the world would probably never hear again [. . .] Here was nothing to trouble her but the possibility of being within reach: seated on the sofa with her back to what she had ascertained to be nothing, Cousin Nettie was well placed” (HD 207). Despite its confinement, she is convinced that she resides in the only place for her, and is content.

Thus Nettie, to escape the symbolic drawing room at Mount Morris,

“voluntarily espoused Wisteria Lodge,” with its “indomitable surrounding wall” and latched gate to the world outside (HD 207, 210). She is careful not to upset

Mrs. Tringsby, who “understands that this is my place, so she will never take away my room” (HD 204).

As claustrophobic as Nettie’s circumstances seem, they offer her safety, comfort and a degree of happiness. Like Robert, Stella and Roderick, she highlights the novel’s increasing rootlessness and the accompanying need to find somewhere to attach oneself, or to be oneself. Similarly, the title character of Eva

Trout, Bowen’s final novel, has no place. She is reminiscent of Stella Rodney in that, with no solid family or property roots, she tries to find her place in another human being. Her own rootlessness, however, is much more severe, and her attempts to plant herself in place or person are all thwarted.

The subtitle of Eva Trout—Changing Scenes—sets the tone for the nomadic nature of the novel’s protagonist. At first, Eva relocates frequently through no fault of her own. She is the only child of Willy Trout, millionaire financier, and “perpetual changes of milieu [are] attendant on being the Trout daughter” (ET 47). Details of Eva’s childhood are incomplete, but apparently her father fell in love with Constantine Ormeau, a charismatic and conniving homosexual of uncertain background. At some point, Eva’s mother, Cissie, chose literal flight to escape from the awkwardly triangular arrangement, but her plane crashed over the Andes, leaving Eva, “Alas[,] Motherless from the cradle” (ET

35).

Thus, “from infancy onward Eva had had as attendants displaced persons,” and, confined to their unloving care yet constantly moving, she comes “to express herself like a displaced person” (ET 10). Her education is attended to only haphazardly: “Whenever we came to a new place where we were to remain for more than some hours, my father would telephone down for [a governess]” (ET

60). At almost fourteen years old, Eva is sent to her first boarding school. The school, an experimental, coeducational one, was purchased by her father, who had given the castle in which it was housed to Constantine so that he might install his friend Kenneth as headmaster there. Willy, anxious to get rid of this friend, believed that “two hundred miles out of [London] would be just the place for him.” To prove his support for the project when criticized by Constantine, Willy sends Eva there as well, apparently not wondering whether the distance from him would be suitable for her (ET 44-45).

In spite of the isolation from her remaining family member—perhaps, in fact, because of it—Eva attaches herself wholeheartedly to the castle, which temporarily becomes her first home. Indeed, one of the cleaning women pronounces that the place is not a school but “a Home, if ever she saw one, and moreover a Home for afflicted children” (ET 51). The castle, possibly because even a few months of illusory rootedness seem welcome after years of perpetual motion, also becomes her first real infatuation. She “fell in love with the castle at first sight, in the shimmery amber weather of her arrival” in September (ET 49).

Though, she “had not, strictly, anywhere of her own,” Eva, as the donor’s daughter, is given a choice turret room with a lake view and only one other occupant. Here Eva, accustomed to noise, would sleep while her roommate wept until she slept and, later would wake with the dawn to a beautiful silence all her own. At that hour, “[t]hrough the curtainless window day stole in,” and “this redemption from darkness was for Eva [. . .] a miracle inseparable from the castle.” In a mirror facing the window, “she could see existence begin again, and

“after the night of loss and estrangement, after the malicious lying of her misleading dreams in which she was no one, nowhere, she knew herself to be here” (ET 50). Eva’s survival skills allow her to draw a liberating affirmation of identity from the castle’s reassuringly stable surroundings.

When Elsinore, the suicidal eleven-year-old roommate, walks into the nearby lake and experiences convulsions upon being dragged out, there is no castle sickroom to take her to. And, there also being “No other place at all” for

Eva, the two stay together, Elsinore in a coma and Eva watching over her (ET 52).

A curtain over the window hides the lake, and their enclosure is complete.

Thereafter, the “octagonal chamber [. . .] seemed more locked-up round its consenting prisoners than if a key had been turned in the door” (ET 53). The isolation—a sort of being alone and having companionship too—appeals to Eva.

She chooses to remain constantly in the room unless someone sends her away to a lesson or meal, and in that rarified climate, Eva’s first recorded love for another person blooms. She “had a passionately solicitous sense of this other presence.

Nothing forbad love. This deathly yet living stillness, together, of two beings, this unapartness, came to be the requital of all longing” (ET 54). In the cocoon- like safety of this physical confinement, Eva seems able to sublimate the emotional terrors of abandonment, illness and virtual quarantine into something positive and memorable.

Somehow the incident, after Elsinore’s mother arrives on the scene, brings the school—which had already been prey to several crises, including two escapes—to a scandalous close (ET 52). The auguries for the castle as a long-

59 lasting home had always been poor. Just as the “man-eating house,” Holme Dene, had no rooks (HD 116, 248), the castle had herons which had been “driven out by the swans, which meant bad luck,” and the “rooks had deserted, which meant worse.” Before March the premises are emptied, attesting to the “unconquerable unluckiness of the castle” (ET 51-52). Eva’s first real place of safety becomes inaccessible, and as abandoned as she.

Willy Trout, deciding that Eva had had enough education for the moment, then takes her back for two more years of globe-trotting travel which represent, in miniature, her entire life:

He took her to Mexico, where they were joined by Constantine;

then, business calling him to the Far East, dropped her off with a

Baptist missionary family in Hong Kong, reclaimed her, left her in

San Francisco with some relations of his chiropodist’s, caused her

to be flown to him in New York, flew her from thence to

Hamburg, where he picked her up later and asked her if she would

like to become a kennel-maid, decided it might be better for her to

go to Paris and was about to arrange things on those lines when she

said she would like to go to an English boarding school: one for

girls. (ET 55)

At Lumleigh, the boarding school, it is not the buildings that leave their mark on Eva; it is an English teacher, Miss Iseult Smith. Miss Smith becomes interested in Eva, with her wooden way of talking and fear of reading and writing, as a test of her teaching skills. Nevertheless, the school, with its contemporary

“enlightened huts [. . .] consisting [. . .] largely of glass,” seems designed to highlight Iseult’s enlightening effect on Eva (ET 56). Indeed, the moment when

Iseult takes on the challenge of Eva takes on the imagery of both place and light.

Miss Smith in her voluminous oilskin appears to Eva “like a tent of yellow lit from within” (ET 57). Until Miss Smith’s arrival, no other person had ever shone on Eva the full light of her attention—“an attention which could seem to be love.”

And, because she “knew nothing of love but that it existed,” Eva does interpret being singled out for Miss Smith’s special notice as affection (ET 10). She even asks her teacher whether she cares for her, and when Miss Smith replies, “As much as I can,” Eva pronounces this enough (ET 66). Miss Smith becomes a place of emotional enlightenment for Eva, but Iseult’s warning that she is claustrophobic foreshadows the transience of this haven as well (ET 58).

Even Iseult’s attempts to guide Eva to other places of enlightenment fail.

When Iseult escorts Eva to Lumleigh’s library, the “affable wide window” suggests light and openness. But the library is housed in the traditional Victorian core of Lumleigh and its contents thus beyond the reach of Eva, who represents all things contemporary. Though nothing in the library was “hidden except what was in the books” (ET 60), that is sufficient. The books themselves are the real source of new vistas, but they are never a place of safety for Eva.

After her time at Lumleigh, Eva, still on the move, stays in touch with the more stationary Miss Smith as though finding in her a foundation. She mails her postcards, sends her a wedding gift and frequently visits Larkins, the house where

Iseult and her husband, Eric Arble, live (ET 11). During the years after school,

Eva “watched [her father] being destroyed” by Constantine, who, apparently inflicting one cruelty too many, pushed Willy to the extreme escape route of suicide (ET 271, 96). To her dismay, until her twenty-fifth birthday, when she will inherit a fortune from her father, “her guardian and trustee is Constantine, by whom any arrangement involving money had [. . .] to be authorised.” Drawn still to Iseult, at Eva’s desire she became a paying resident of Larkins (ET 9). Her account, years later, of her time there is surprisingly articulate:

First, I was always glad to be in their house—I even looked on it as

home [. . .] Only then, I saw that she hated me, hated the work she

had feared to finish. And I who WAS that work, who had hoped

so much—how should I not hate her? She saw. Twice over. She

could not abide me there; I became a witness. How she had cast

away everything, she had seen me see. (ET 204)

Another prospective home turns out to be all too temporary, and Eva flees to the local vicarage, where she can be herself with Danceys (ET 9). There, again, the appeal is not the elderly and unappealing building—though its many draughts and doors ajar attest to its open, non-judgmental atmosphere—but the inhabitants.

Motherly Mrs. Dancey tells her that “we love you here and here is always a home” (ET 75), but her son Henry is the main attraction. At twelve years old,

“topmost intelligent one of a family all rendered to a degree intelligent by poverty, breeding and the need to get on [, . . .] Already he was qualified to deal with Eva [, who is twenty-four]: she could not boss him and he could mortify her” (ET 7). With him, she conspires to escape Larkins in March—before her

62 coming-of-age on April 21—by having him sell her Jaguar to provide money for the interim. She wants a place of her own by the sea, another symbol of freedom

(ET 71). With an echo of Kathie, the maid, to Antonia in A World of Love, Henry assures her that “You could hardly get further away than that.” He thrills to the ideas of intrigue associated with the fact that Eva, in running away, wants “to elude pursuers,” and he happily agrees to “cover [her] tracks” (ET 72).

Following Henry’s advice to “go all out,” Eva rents Cathay, a well-worn but spacious furnished house. Though open toward the sea, the house is enclosed on the opposite side by both hedge and fence: “the promontory had inland an intense secretiveness, everything being sunk within bastion hedges impossible to see through or over. The forceful growth of the hedges had here and there burst open the wooden fencing beneath [. . .] and bushed up gardens, smothering as it flourished” (ET 79). Such deterrents, though they had caused Cathay to be listed on house agents’ books long and unavailingly, give the setting a fortress-like solidity that appeals to Eva. Moreover, Cathay’s musty smell reminds her pleasantly of the castle, and its tired interior recalls a dollhouse that she had once desired (ET 80). The house is Eva’s her first home for herself alone, and she feels every outside influence as an encroachment on her property. When the estate agent, Mr. Denge, “plonked his hat down” on her refectory table and “made free with one of the windows, throwing it open,” she “could not [. . .] wait for him to be gone.” When he flushes her toilet, she shouts at him, “Go—go away at once!

You take liberties!” (ET 80-81). His presumptions confine her newfound sense of freedom, and, though she has run him off before finding out how to turn on the

63 lights, she prefers going to bed in darkness to his “mak[ing] too many noises in

[her] house” (ET 99). The curtains will not shut due to rust and disuse, but Eva loses no privacy because she is alone on the promontory, and she relishes the liberty of her solitude. She had told Mr. Denge at his office, “I want to go home,” and after parking her newly-acquired bicycle in the garage, she “homegoingly turned indoors” for an improvised meal (ET 78, 83). Perhaps because “No other sound came from any part of the promontory[, . . .] an abyssmal contentment filled her” (ET 83). As place becomes safer and less confining, Eva puts down tentative roots at Cathay. She feels, for once, inviolate.

The feeling is illusive because, though Eva had arrived on Tuesday, by

Friday of the same week two of the pursuers that she was trying to elude find her.

By the next month, however, she inherits her fortune and consequently strengthens her ability to escape. In addition, having been traced so easily before makes her more careful, and, to crown her efforts, she leaves a trail of destruction behind which assures that at least some of her circle will no longer wish to pursue her.

Eva originally flees to New York and then on to Chicago where she ensures companionship and invests again in person-as-place by arranging to purchase a child on the black market. From Chicago, her nomadic existence continues: “San Francisco, quite a spell there. Indianapolis. Cleveland. Dallas.

Seattle. Kansas City. Brooklyn—no, not New York. Last lap, Chicago.” She travels from city to city, living in hotels just as she did with her father, “seeking for specialists, for Jeremy,” the son whom she discovers to be deaf (ET 183).

During their years together, each hotel room replicates the quarantined isolation of the castle tower with Elsinore and the process learned there of transforming potential confinement to the illusion of safety: “Sublimated monotony had cocooned the two of them, making them near as twins in a womb” (ET 207).

Eva’s previous experiences, however, again foreshadow only a temporary home in Jeremy for Eva—and impending claustrophobia for Jeremy.

Eight years later, Eva returns to England with Jeremy, where, apparently,

Eva had promised Jeremy a permanent home. Instead, they continue to foster the illusion of normal, rooted family life through the choice of, and accumulation of goods in, each new setting. In London, Eva and Jeremy settle into a suite at the top of Paley’s Hotel, for its “mahogany lift, massive iron woodwork, Turkey- carpeted corridors had all the solidarity she hoped” (ET 160). They immediately begin to add more false stability to their surroundings with things, and over time their suite develops “a sort of unwilling, provisional look of permanence: more and more cultural picture books, a scooter, boxes of crystallised apricots, a telescope, a cageful of budgerigars[. . . .]” (ET 177).

Meanwhile, pursuing an elusive vision of home, Eva takes Jeremy to

Larkins, which had undergone improvements which only added to its homey attractiveness. In short, the “promised, promising house” was “so houselike, so red-as-a-plum, so square within its fairyland orchards,” and Jeremy drank it in with anticipation (ET 160-61). As it turns out, however, the Arbles have gone

“nobody knows where,” and Eva instead takes Jeremy briefly to the vicarage, where Henry Dancey, now twenty, reenters the novel as a possible resting place

65 for Eva’s restless soul. Jeremy, in contrast, his expectations unfulfilled, “looked unutterably reproachfully at Larkins” (ET 161). Some time later Eva tries to revisit Cathay, but it, too, is not the answer to her homelessness any more. In keeping the place up for eight years, Mr. Denge has removed all the positive associations of secrecy and security. The now-trimmed hedges no longer suggest fortification against the trespasser, and the sun lounge is “desolatedly sunny” (ET

177-78). Unfortunately, when rooms had been opened and aired, “nothing came back to fill them.” When Eva, who had also hoped much of Cathay, urges him to come along, Jeremy “stood his ground a minute, bewildered, resisting—Larkins over again? Where, then, was to be the promised land, the abiding city?” (ET

178). Eva decides on the spot to sell Cathay, but Jeremy feels dislocated and disconsolate, for “he had been denied a home. That England was to provide one had been implicit. What an error, to grant him a glimpse of Larkins, an afternoon’s habitation of Cathay. Eva had broken a pact, which was very grievous.” Eva, by bringing Jeremy to England, breaks another implicit pact by bringing him “into another dimension” which, being “dense with experiences which by claiming her made her alien,” thrusts him “into the middle of [. . .] the inconceivable.” Never before having considered the two of them as separate entities, he feels abandoned in this new place because “He was alone in it” (ET

209). His isolation renders him less able to find his home in Eva alone.

For Eva, too, the transition is difficult, pulling her in different directions.

She feels exhilarated by the challenges inherent in returning to her former scenes, some of them scenes of destruction, but, at the same time, “Never before now had

66 she felt [Jeremy] to manacle her” (ET 209). Another contradiction assails her as she experiences simultaneously the freedom of falling in love with Henry and feelings of confinement upon visiting him at Cambridge. The “beautiful agonising mirage of the University was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in.” The landscape speaks to her of its eternal world of learning in lyrical water imagery

the more real to her for consisting of fiery particles of transience—

bridges the punt slid under, rain drops spattering the Cam with

vanishing circles, shivered reflections, echoes evaporating, [. . .]

glorification coming and going on buildings at the whim of the sun

[. . . .] Holy pillars flowed upward and fountained out, round them

there being a ceaseless confluence of fanatical colours burningly

staining glass. (ET 198)

Eva is haunted by the thought of all the great minds who had inhabited this scene, and she is “set upon by the swamping, isolating misery of the savage.” She is an outsider in this world, but Henry is “one of its children,” and, partially because of his familiarity with it, “She ached for him with the whole of her longing being”

(ET 199). Shut out, she desires the perfect home that the university represents and to be, like Henry, a child with such a home.

Iseult, who has learned of her return and whereabouts from Constantine, interrupts Eva’s London idyll by kidnapping Jeremy for four hours one afternoon.

Upon his return Jeremy, forthwith, must

witness the demolition, around his ears of what had at least

equivocated to “home.” Their continuing on at Paley’s, although it

charged Eva [. . .] with an unkept promise, had spelled some

domesticity for Jeremy. He had clutched at the token, later to be

exchanged for the real thing. They had in a way kept house,

established themselves—their surrounding accumulation of heaps

of objects [. . .] had quieted, assuaged him and reassured him. (ET

226)

These details, in which objects are the only possessions, underscore the essential lack of place in the Trouts’ lives—and, indeed, in all of the mobile modern life that Eva and Jeremy illustrate.

In a panic Eva destroys yet another illusion and flees with Jeremy to Paris, taking a room in “small hotel on the Left Bank” for greater anonymity (ET 225).

She tells only Henry where she is, and he informs his family because his parents are going to Paris with their church choir and hope to visit Eva. In one of several chains of coincidences riddling this fatalistic novel, Mrs. Dancey ingenuously tells Iseult, who has visited the vicarage for that very purpose, where to find Eva.

Mrs. Dancey, in turn, mentions Iseult’s visit and the “leakage as to her whereabouts” to Eva upon seeing her in Paris. Eva bolts again. She “at once pulled out of the Left Bank and removed to Fontainebleau,” missing a letter from

Henry because she “adhered to her known principle of leaving no forwarding address with any hotel” (ET 237). Pursued, Eva sacrifices the ties of place to the tie between herself and Jeremy.

In Fontainebleau Eva does not feel exiled because locals tell her about the

Drs. Bonnard, a husband and wife who specialized in cases like Jeremy’s, and she believes that she has been brought there for a purpose (ET 246, 238). Notably, the

Bonnards also have a “house with [. . .] white doves and weathered jalousies, bound round by a patriarchal wisteria, [that] re-inspired in Eva a lost confidence”—and possibly in Jeremy as well. In any event, Jeremy, who has previously been resistant to and angered by specialists’ attempts to help him, responds well to the Bonnards (ET 169, 238).

The new development ends an eight-year-long psychic connection between Eva and Jeremy: “his and her universe was over [. . .] It was a thing of the past” (ET 240). Dr. Gérard Bonnard wisely attempts to warn Eva of the consequences that she is likely to suffer and recommends a new and attractive escape route for her. In the past, Eva tells him, “I have made myself not think about what is thought of me.” She has sought refuge in an atmosphere of isolation in which she does not see herself reflected by others. Dr. Bonnard, however, tells her, “Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice— choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see one rightly—is the only escape. But for some of us, it is an escape difficult to make.

Was it for you?” His advice seems to echo Bowen’s continual reminder that choice companions are a home, a place of escape from ourselves, advice that Eva later takes by planning to wed Henry. At this point, however, she must admit, “I continue going away. But I am awaited.” Dr. Bonnard, not aware of the age difference between Eva and Henry, is the only person in the novel who receives

69 this oblique reference to Henry with pleasure. His own wife awaits him, and he perceives “that there should be somebody there is precious.” He expresses his hope that she is in love because “it is so very possible to be happy.” He even tells

Eva, with perhaps not the most felicitous imagery, that she is “framed for happiness,” and, in spite of the fact that she is “frightened, as though I were about to die,” his good opinion of her finds her “instantly drawing herself up” to face the challenge (ET 248-50).

Indeed, the fact that the Bonnards want to try removing Jeremy completely from Eva for a few weeks affords her time to come to England to see Henry and to put into action new plans (ET 241). Henry is, in multiple ways, the heart of her plans. Like Iseult, he is a magnetic source of a “passion for knowing” (ET 256).

Like Miss Smith’s room at Lumleigh and the Dancey parsonage, Henry’s room at

Cambridge is cluttered with Bowen’s primary symbol of intellectual activity, books—“overflowing from his share of the shelves” (ET 194). His conversation is strewn with literary allusions that offer her a glimpse of a world of learning otherwise beyond her.

Yet Henry could initiate Eva into yet another world missing from her past.

He is the product of a “dreadful building” made into quite a delightful home by its inhabitants. There “No door but [Mr. Dancey’s] was ever shut,” and every room looks comfortably and continuously lived in. The vicarage was “unmistakably one of those homes there is no place like” (ET 21, 69). Moreover, Henry has a history of enthusiastically supporting Eva in looking for houses. Long ago he suggested several salient features for Cathay and, upon Eva’s return to England,

70 recommends that she “Be sensational. Get hold of a house, and I mean a house.

A spectacular London one” (ET 195).

The scene in Eva Trout that most vividly demonstrates the position of both

Eva and Jeremy with regard to houses and home life occurs during a walk that the two take with Constantine. They proceed into Hereford Square, where good cars are parked alongside balconied homes in conservative neutral tones. Constantine,

“admiring the facades,” sums up what they represent—“The soul [. . .] of normality”—and adds, “We are outsiders, Eva” (ET 184). As they continue to walk, Jeremy

slanted away from Eva across the roadway to peer through the

hedge [. . .] into the interstices of the glades within—voluminous

golden privet and speckled laurel, [. . .] poplar already leafy

enough to enhance the mystery—with the rigid, addicted intentness

of a voyeur [. . . C]hildren were playing inside there, where there

was grass. (ET 185, 186)

Eva wishes that Jeremy, too, “could play in there,” where enclosure means safety and the enjoyment of an apparently ideal family life. She asks Constantine whether her money might facilitate such an arrangement, but, “halting at a locked wire gate” covered with notices of further restrictions, he replies that the enclosure is “No place for any of us” (ET 185). As children of the moment and the rapid change of that moment into another, they must remain forever outside normalcy, looking in. A little farther along, however, he asks, “Can you never take root?” and, “referring to their surrounding, this enclave,” further inquires

71 whether she would ever like to settle down in a similar setting. “Enclave,” however, suggests an area not only enclosed, but enclosed by something foreign and potentially hostile, perhaps modernity threatening to destroy the ideas of home and family of past centuries. Certainly the ideas of home and family connect in Constantine’s mind when he states, “[I]t’s time you married [. . .] Get

[Jeremy] a father” (ET 188).

Between Dr. Bonnard’s indirect suggestion and Constantine’s blunt directive, Eva not surprisingly comes to the conclusion that to give Henry a new home may provide her with one as well, in him. For the moment, Henry’s emphasis on a house tends to focus more on showy materialism than homeyness.

Nevertheless, Eva shops for a house, doggedly viewing monstrosities and “white elephants.” Her fear that the only one she likes might not meet Henry’s requirements implies a hope that the house will make a home for them both (ET

200).

One day in June, Eva and Henry revisit her first safe place, the castle.

There Eva summons the inner resources necessary for her to propose to Henry, and he, rather later, accepts. He surmounts his family’s certain objections and she her attachment to Jeremy to grasp at happiness. Then, in a denouement both fatal and fatalistic, Jeremy shoots Eva—perhaps fulfilling Constantine’s prediction that he will escape Eva “only [. . .] across [her] dead body” (ET 192). He revenges himself for Eva’s abandonment and broken promises. Though she has literally traveled the world in search of a permanent refuge, never, for Eva, will there be

72 any escape from intellectual isolation, rootlessness, and the largely unloving modern world.

The scene in which Jeremy peers through the hedge is so paradigmatic as to provide a symbol for Bowen’s preoccupation with place in all of her novels— and, indeed, perhaps to indicate Bowen’s own place-related predicament. A home, she implies, is essential. It may, like Eva’s castle, be a home for afflicted children, or it may, like Cousin Nettie’s Wisteria Lodge, be a nursing home, but it must be a home. One must put down roots somewhere. The crux of Eva and

Jeremy’s chronic confinement is not that they are shut in—but that they are, like so many Bowen characters, shut out.

Such is Bowen’s own dilemma by the end of her life, and her novels chronicle the progression. In the 1920’s represented by The Last September, characters—generally the young ones who have always known such a life—have the luxury of disdaining and longing to escape from homes rooted in inheritance of property and social and political ascendancy. By the time of World War II and

The Heat of the Day, many of the places representing that gentrified Anglo-Irish life have been burned or have new owners. By the 1950s and A World of Love, the central character has little feeling for place and seems destined to have her own past submerged in a life lustrous with nouveau riches but poor in taste and conversation. By the 1960s and Eva Trout, the exclusive social and family life of the past is visible only in glimpses through a hedge.

This evolution mirrors Elizabeth Bowen’s own situation. “Having been born to some idea of position,” she lived through the Anglo-Irish death knell of

73 the establishment of the Irish Republic (HD 109). Having been an insider within

Ireland, she became an Irish outsider in England on both social and literary levels; indeed, in terms of her writing, she remains so today. The gravity of the situation in post-Ascendancy Ireland intensified through the years after her husband’s death as it became increasingly difficult for her to earn enough to retain the Irish roots represented by her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, and its surrounding acreage.

Finally she sold the property—to its ultimate destruction—and became reminiscent of Stella Rodney in that only the nearby church and Bowen graves testify to the presence of her family in Ireland. Like Eva Trout, she began living primarily in England except for sojourns in America. And, of course, Bowen’s experience echoes that of the world—the disappearance of certain class and race distinctions and the accelerated pace of the twentieth century caused the death, with few exceptions, of an entire way of life rooted in place. With this change comes the need to broaden literal definitions of place-as-refuge, which proves ever more elusive, to include books or, more often, people as places of solace or safety. Just as there is no place for Eva Trout, neither, Bowen implies, is there ever more than a brief sanctuary for anyone.

CHAPTER 3

AGE

“You know, even grown up people cannot always do what they want most.”

“Oh! Then why grow up?”

—The House in Paris (255)

“Really, Laurel, I think it must be a good thing for people to harden.”

—Friends and Relations (36) Elizabeth Bowen’s characters vary in age from approximately eight to sixty. Each age range—childhood, coming of age, marriage, death—includes its own set of confinements based on traditional social and moral expectations.

Bowen’s children are a study in multiple limitations by adults, who govern not merely what they wear or eat but also who will rear them and what they know, sometimes to a potentially identity-altering extent. Those undergoing the transition to adulthood also suffer—and occasionally profit from—adult restraints, which are sometimes attempts to save adolescents from themselves.

Bowen’s record of adulthood, focusing particularly on marriage and its repercussions, suggests that, in confining the young, adults may be externalizing their own confinements, for there are many. Death, for some, is a confinement; for others, an escape. The primary common denominator among the age ranges, however, is that never does anyone, except possibly those who choose suicide, fully escape the confinements attendant upon age. Even with suicide, there is no evidence that what they have achieved by escaping life is freedom.

Childhood

First, Bowen’s novels include an unusual number of children. Bowen, who memorialized her own early years in a short autobiographical work entitled

Seven Winters, liked to make connections between the events of childhood and their influence on the adult. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the children in

Bowen’s novels, however, is how frequently the influence seems to work in reverse. Instead of enjoying little fantasy worlds detached from adult restrictions, her children are amazingly confined by limitations imposed on them by adults.

For the most part Bowen’s children are minor characters, not surprisingly confined by lack of experience, and lack of information that adults deem it inappropriate for them to know. They are uniformly precocious, sometimes socially useful, and frequently confining to the adults who either want to be alone or to discuss some adult topic.

Eleven-year-old Cordelia of The Hotel is a good example of the typical

Bowen child. She persistently demands attention and time from Sydney, who finds her both annoying and occasionally helpful. Cordelia’s mother has told her that she might go for a walk “with anybody who would have me,” and Cordelia, using begging, scorn and flattery, attempts to get Sydney to walk with her.

Although Sydney at twenty-two is “still near enough to her own childhood to mistrust children profoundly” and thus declines the offer, before she escapes,

Cordelia exacts from her a promise to walk on another day (H 97-98).

On that other day Sydney feels abandoned by her friend Mrs. Kerr, who is going out with her son, newly-arrived from Genoa. Feeling confined from Mrs. 76

Kerr’s presence and limited to her own, Sydney finds Cordelia a welcome distraction and “With a sense of reprieve [. . .] let herself be waylaid” (H 137).

Though she has previously agreed to walk with James Milton, she, “denying a sense that this was mischievous on her part and a shade dishonourable,” tells

Cordelia that she, too, may come (H 138). Sydney thereby passes her own annoyance and confinement along to Milton, who says, “I’m very pleased, of course, if Miss Warren has invited you” but “looked daggers at her profile” as

Cordelia passed (H 139). Cordelia engages Milton in conversation, leaving

Sydney, “released but not unfriendly,” less wary of a tête-à-tête with him (H 143).

But Sydney’s freedom is Milton’s confinement, and soon he gets rid of “this confounded little girl” by sending her into town to buy dates for all of them (H

140). He considers this idea an inspiration because Cordelia has “been the most infernal nuisance all morning” (H 145). Seizing the moment, Milton asks Sydney to marry him and “had proposed and been rejected before he had entirely realized that they were not still quarreling about Cordelia” (H 146). After his awkward and abrupt escape back to the hotel, “to recover herself” Sydney suggests upon

Cordelia’s return that they continue their walk (H 155). At one point Cordelia demonstrates both inexperience and lack of an internal censor when she calls

Milton “long-winded” without knowing what the term means. Cheerfully, she says that “It was a sporting risk” that she might be right, and Sydney wishes “that she could be so honest” (H 156). In this characteristic, too, Cordelia represents most Bowen children: while her presence is sometimes confining, her lack of experience frees her conversation from many adult restraints. Depending on the 77 circumstances, adults may suffer this freedom of speech and action or may flee it in some way.

The first response of adults to children in Bowen’s novels seems to be to shut them out or to escape from them in order not to have to conform some adult occasion or habit to fit their perceived inexperience or innocence. Often, but not always, this results in confinement for the child as well. Eleven-year-old Dicey

Piggott of The Little Girls is sent with her friends—admittedly, to the delight of all—for tea and ices at a cafe so that her mother may welcome Cousin Roland after his travel with “a quiet tea” (106). Julian Tower of To the North, guardian of a fourteen-year-old orphaned niece, balks at and then feels confined by the fact that he must have her at his apartment for a week. He leaves her with his housekeeper, who “did not like children” and who, “anxious to get Pauline out of the flat,” recommends a ride on a bus (45, 51). Pauline’s “assaults on [Julian’s] attention were like the firings-off of a small gun,” and, his anxiety mounting as he is confined with this barrage in the limited space of his flat, he escapes to his girlfriend Cecilia’s house. There, he relieves himself of his heretofore-confined opinions regarding Pauline’s presence by complaining about her to Cecilia (TN

45). Nine-year-old Hermione Meggatt of Friends and Relations tries to impress her father with how many times she has “jump[ed] off the mounting block,” but his unresponsiveness leads her to say, from having been often asked to leave,

“Oh, all right . . . I suppose you’d like me to run along” (92). Lewis Gibson, upon viewing Hermione’s first cousin, almost-eleven-year-old Anna Tilney, he thinks it “a pity Anna was not brought up like Hermione.” Feeling confined by 78 her presence, “He would have liked to ask her to run away” as well (FR 265). In

The Death of the Heart, Anna Quayne can hardly bear being near her sister-in-law

Portia, at sixteen still quite innocent and inexperienced but just on the verge of adulthood. While it is true that Anna would feel limited by having to share attention with almost any other female, she seems particularly confined by her responsibility for Portia. Because she has company for tea, Anna sends Portia downstairs to see her brother in his study (DH 38); then, when Anna wants to speak with Thomas herself, she says, “Oh, Portia, I hate to worry, but if they have given you any homework, don’t you think you ought to do it now?” (DH 48).

Later, Anna, Thomas and Portia go to a movie, meet an old acquaintance of

Anna’s, and invite him home for a drink. All is well until Portia stops listening and makes a comment. Then “Anna looked at her watch. ‘Portia,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to spoil the party, but it’s half-past twelve’ ” (DH 65). All three instances, resulting in both spatial and verbal restrictions for Portia, occur on the same day.

Yet the most striking occasions of confinement associated with children deal not with how they constrict adult behavior and are consequently physically excluded from various adult scenes but with how their current lives are confined because of their parents’ past actions. As Dinah Delacroix of The Little Girls rather biblically states it, “the non-sins [and often the sins as well] of our fathers—and mothers—have been visited upon us” (217). By “non-sins” she means the transgressions of thought, not deed, that characterize several just-not- adulterous Bowen couples. 79

The first non-sinning couples whose marital and moral choices cause repercussions in their children are Edward and Laurel Tilney and Rodney and

Janet Meggatt of Friends and Relations. Though Edward and Janet love each other, they decide to remain married and physically faithful to their own spouses at least in part because of how the more blatant sinners of the previous generation—Edward’s mother, Elfrida, and Rodney’s uncle, Considine—affected both families in general and Edward in particular. Elfrida left Edward’s father for

Considine and then inexplicably did not marry him, a course of action resulting in the breakup of her family and the ruin of her own reputation, if not her entire life.

The unsavory nature of the affair from the perspective of polite society, further complicated by Janet’s marriage to Elfrida’s co-respondent’s nephew, creates confusion and awkwardness in the subsequent generation as well. Of course, neither the Tilney children, Anna and Simon, nor the Meggatt child,

Hermione, know anything concrete about the disreputable past. Edward’s need for revenge on Elfrida dictates that “Naturally he must not meet Considine” and cultivates “a strong prejudice against Laurel’s meeting Considine.” It follows, then, that “his children were not to be at Batts [Considine’s home and the residence of the Rodney Meggatts] with Considine either, on any account” (FR

93-94). However, in spite of not verbally telling their children to “run away,” the

Tilneys are in the habit of regularly sending Anna and Simon away to Batts to relieve Laurel or Edward of any stress, real or imagined. Thus, when “a first epidemic had swept the Tilney family,” the restriction against meeting Considine

“had relaxed,” revealing the imposed limitations to be largely a matter of 80 inconveniencing persons in the present by reminding them of the past (FR 265,

94).

Nevertheless, difficulties are inevitable: Edward wishes “his children would not call Considine ‘Uncle’ and that Hermione Meggatt need not appropriate Lady Elfrida as ‘Grandmother’ ” (FR 94). Nevertheless, all three children often visit both miscreant adults—separately. When, after ten years, the barrier keeping Elfrida and Considine apart breaks down, Anna and Simon are also at Batts and immediately become socially useful. Edward arrives at Batts, ostensibly to “take away his children who were being corrupted” (FR 164). Anna objects, “We’ve just settled down here,” but she and Simon are pawns in a larger chess game that they do not understand. While “It became clear to the children, someone was in the wrong,” it becomes equally clear, as her grandmother tells

Anna, “don’t be annoying,” that “Children were certainly at a discount” (FR 147).

When Edward characteristically makes a scene, Janet uses the alleged perspective of the children who must grow up under the shadow of the Elfrida-

Considine scandal to bolster her argument: “I don’t know how much Anna and

Simon do know, but when they must hear what happened, surely this, what they see here now, would be nice for them to remember? Otherwise, I don’t see how you can bear them to grow up.” Edward “involuntarily” answers, “I suppose I hardly can” (FR 154).

Indeed, their way of rearing their children supports the fact Edward and

Laurel, reluctant to grow up themselves, want their children to experience all the joys of childhood that Edward, at least, missed. Thus, “everything the two 81 children did had for their parents a poignant and charming importance.” Edward and Laurel “could hardly bear not to participate,” and “Edward was always best pleased to discover them in the cellar or on the roof. The tabus of his own childhood had obtained for his children a system of rather paralysing unrestrictions.” This oxymoron reveals that Anna and Simon are still restricted to the activities in which their parents can share although “they would have preferred the rink or the riding-school to the [. . .] cave their father and mother built for them under the dining-room table” (FR 89). In fact, “one would have preferred a father more like Mr. Darling, less like Peter Pan” (FR 147).

Of course, no discussion of the past becomes a childhood tabu that

Edward retains and enforces. Nevertheless, parental innuendo has already given

Anna some inkling that the Meggatts, though richer, are more to be pitied: “she understood that the Meggatts were fortunate but in some way deplorable” (FR

105). And Theodora writes to the Laurel that the children have been discussing and reconstructing the past from hints and rumors: “They [. . .] talk about their grandmother—you have no idea! I forget, is Anna a little girl who has been Told, or Not been told? Not, I should think, or she’d hardly be so ingenious” (FR 159).

One result of Edward’s visit to Batts to retrieve his children is that, although the Tilneys come to Batts every summer when Considine is away, and in spite of the fact that they cannot afford the additional expense, the family plan to visit Brittany this year instead. Again, the children are a convenient excuse. “We thought [. . .] we would take the children somewhere to play on the rocks,” and 82

“we hope that Anna and Simon may play with French children,” Laurel explains

(FR 199).

When circumstances erroneously make it appear as if Edward and Janet have left London together, Anna, well-schooled in propriety, becomes the adult, fetching slippers and a robe for her mother who looks “like a schoolgirl in her nightdress” (FR 246). Lording her elevation in status over her brother, “Anna would tell him nothing” though, naturally, she really knows relatively little (FR

249). She sees that “Father [. . .] hasn’t slept here” and draws her own conclusions about who is to blame (FR 247). The real culprit, she decides, based on having listened to servants gossip, is “that Elfrida—they [the Tilneys] are a lot, they are! Not real fathers or grandmothers, not respectable. Mother has no idea”

(FR 248).

Later, when the crisis turns out not to have happened, everyone wishes immediately “to reassert the normal” (FR 266, 265). Unfortunately, for Anna, the normal means once more being “overlooked” or sent away. She remains “furious with suspicion. They all know her father had not breakfasted: something was still the matter; she was not being fairly used” (FR 266). Lewis and Laurel take comfort in the fact that “she knew nothing,” and they “could not do enough to propitiate the little girl.” Attempting to protect her innocence and to preserve family reputations, they attempt to limit Anna’s knowledge, but they have temporarily allowed her new power and not entirely allowed for her perceptiveness during their extremity. Here, then—reminding the reader of

Edward and the effects of “ruin” perceived in childhood on his adult life—is the 83 seed for repercussions in yet another generation: “She would feed on this morning, making her strong young growth, like a tree, from the very thought of ruin” (FR 267).

The extent of Anna’s confinement is small, however, in comparison to that suffered by Leopold in The House in Paris. Bowen confines not just Leopold’s knowledge of family history but knowledge of his own history, erasing his origins and limiting his sense of his own identity. In Leopold’s case Bowen, still examining the effect of the past on the future, eliminates the relatively non- sinning generation that served as a buffer between children and catastrophe in

Friends and Relations, thus making the acts committed by Leopold’s parents more immediate and unrepeatable. Leopold’s upper-middle class English mother,

Karen Michaelis, at eighteen fell in love with Max Ebhart, a “French-English-

Jewish man in a bank” (HP 111). Six years later, when both are engaged to marry more socially appropriate partners, they meet and find that the love which was once impossible to act upon still exists—and that both desire to act upon it. They meet, spend a night at a hotel, and plan to dissolve their former alliances in order to marry each other. When Max returns to France to break the news to his fiancée, Max’s mentor, Madame Fisher, expresses approval of the liaison, but she twists his motivations so that his image of himself becomes so ugly that he can no longer live with it. To escape both this portrayal of himself and Madame Fisher, and to punish her for her destructiveness, Max slits his wrist in front of her and, running outside, soon dies in an unfamiliar alley. Not long after the suicide,

Karen learns of her own pregnancy and permits her mother to secrete her away in 84

Germany for a year. She also allows her friend Naomi Fisher—who is ironically

Madame Fisher’s daughter and was originally Max’s fiancée—to arrange for her son to be adopted by a couple in Italy before returning to England and marrying her original fiancé, Ray Forrestier. Nine years later, only four people know the facts of Leopold’s birth. This is confinement with a vengeance.

As the novel opens, Leopold has been sent from Italy to the Fisher house in Paris, where he will meet the mother he never remembers having seen before.

He is now nine-year-old Leopold Grant Moody, and, like Anna Tilney, he has

“Not been told.” He lives in Spezia, Italy, with “Aunt Marian and Aunt Sally[, who] were faded aesthetic expatriate American women” and “Uncle Dee, [. . .] the husband of Aunt Marian.” His relations by adoption “over-underst[an]d” him and make him “feel he knew more than anyone else” (HP 32). In the oppressive

Spezia atmosphere “kindness thickened the air and sentiment fattened on the mystery of his birth,” and “There was no one he could ask frankly: ‘Just how odd is all this?’ ” (HP 33).

As a result, Leopold is avid, almost frantic, for information and for some measure of control in an uncontrollable situation. To get these things, he will break free of any rules that he finds it inconvenient to obey. He first appears in the novel entering the salon—though Miss Fisher “told me not to come in here”

(HP 22)—and finding Henrietta, a little girl of eleven staying briefly at the

Fishers’ house before going on to Mentone that evening. She, by showing him that “he was nothing to her,” becomes “his first looking-glass,” and he asks her,

“What did Miss Fisher say about my mother and me?” (HP 32, 33, 27). Though 85 each child was warned separately not to converse about the subject with the other,

Leopold discovers from Henrietta that “other people [. . .] might think it was rather sort of peculiar” that he does not live with his mother (HP 27-28).

When Henrietta must visit the invalid Madame Fisher in her bedroom upstairs, Leopold helps himself to the contents of the purse that Miss Fisher left in the salon and finds two letters and an envelope in it. The envelope brings particular disappointment because, although addressed in his mother’s handwriting, it is empty. Nevertheless, he finds out from it that she was last in

Berlin and that her last name is Forrestier. Of the two letters, one is from

Henrietta’s grandmother and therefore relatively uninteresting, but the other contains much information about himself from a new perspective. References to

“his unfortunate father” and “Leopold’s heredity (instability on the father’s side, lack of control on the mother’s)” Leopold would undoubtedly find riveting. The lines recommend curtailing any “revelations Leopold’s mother may see fit to make” and mention that his adoptive family has “allowed him to understand” that his mother married in England “for the second tine [sic]” (HP 42, 43). Leopold,

“staring at what he now saw from the outside,” feels the “revulsion threatening him [become] so frightening” that he quickly picks up the remaining letter and reads it “as though to clap something on to the gash in his mind” (HP 43, 44). He feels an overwhelming need to escape, and “he saw he must not return to Spezia”

(HP 48).

Whereas previously Leopold had imagined that when his mother arrived, she would take him out to “have tea at a patisserie” (HP 25), now his imagination 86 builds for him a more complete escape. With his mother’s envelope pressed to his forehead, he imagines that the contents include these words:

I am taking Leopold home to England with me. He cannot go back

to Spezia as I mean to keep him, the people there must get hold of

some other child. I never did mean him to go back, but did not say

so for fear they would make a fuss [. . .] I have come to the

conclusion I cannot do without Leopold, because he is the only

person I want. (HP 49)

Leopold continues to attempt to build superiority from uncertainty. When

Henrietta returns, she asks him why he and his mother have different surnames, and he responds, “ ‘Because no one knows I’m born’ [. . .] with an air of enjoying the distinction” (HP 69). Henrietta adds to Leopold’s knowledge by telling him that Miss Fisher was once engaged to marry his father. He chooses not to believe this revelation, saying that “If Miss Fisher is not mad, then she is a liar [. . .]

Anyhow, it doesn’t matter: he’s dead” (HP 70). Leopold confounds Henrietta by telling her calmly, “with masterful confidence,” that he and his mother are “going to live in England” as if his escapist dreams are a fait accompli. In response, she raises the issue of another form of child confinement—that of child as chattel.

Only in the latter part of the twentieth century have children in some cultures ceased to be regarded as possessions, and Henrietta protests that he can’t simply leave Italy because “we’re children, people’s belongings” and asks, as if to settle the matter, “Who do you really belong to? I mean, who buys your clothes?” (HP 87

70, 72). Besides, she adds, “where can you go if nobody knows you’re born?”

(HP 71).

But Leopold has an answer for every objection and will not be deterred from his goal. To create an image of his mother, “he commandeered [. . .] every desire, not only his own. He was a person whose passion makes its object exist”

(HP 72). Though Henrietta explains that only her governess could do it properly, he insists that she tell his fortune with playing cards, for “It’s the future I want to know [. . .] Make up anything. If it’s really the future it will come out somehow”

(HP 73).

Until the telegram arrives informing the Paris household that “Your mother is not coming,” it seems that Leopold will travel to England through sheer force of will (HP 78). After the bad news, Leopold escapes inside himself, standing “stone still [. . .] with his chin up, disengaging himself from [. . .] everyone” (HP 253). Even then he tries to salvage something from the situation.

He pulls up one drooping black sock because the “dignity of his looks was all he had.” He reasons that because his mother would not come, she “was not, then, the creature of thought. Her will, her act, her thought spoke in the telegram [. . .] So she lived, outside himself; she was alive truly. She set up that opposition that is love.” Thus, until Miss Fisher leaves, he is able to “stay fully himself” (HP 256).

After Naomi goes up to see her mother, however, “his pride in his isolation” collapses, leaving him “without one ally” (HP 259). Henrietta, who had earlier seen “despair in his eye” and had been sure that “If we stop arguing, he will weep,” soon is proved correct (HP 256, 257). With no physical escape 88 possible, his emotions must attain catharsis. There with Henrietta, he “wept like someone alone against his will, someone shut up alone for a punishment: you only weep like that when only a room hears.” Yet Henrietta “could not know how sharply Leopold realised everything that at this moment perished for him”:

He is weeping because he is not going to England; his mother is

not coming to take him there. He is weeping because he has been

adopted; he is weeping because he has got nowhere to go. He is

weeping because this is the end of imagination—imagination fails

when there is no now. Disappointment tears the bearable film off

life. (HP 260)

Leopold, at nine, encounters the first of a series of unbearable realities that continue through adulthood to death.

Just when escape seems impossible, however, another door opens.

Madame Fisher, the woman who closed off any apparent escape route for

Leopold’s father, insists on seeing Leopold and, ironically, offers him new means of self-mastery by delivering to him more of his past. Though she restricts

Leopold from making “plain” inquiries, he “may ask [her] curious questions” (HP

265). He realizes that “People who knew me must not know I was born, and people who knew I was born must not know me,” but mistakenly believes that his father “must have known I was born” (HP 266, 267). From Madame Fisher he discovers that his father was “at the time he died still more ignorant of you than it is generally wished you should be of him” (HP 267). 89

As they talk, a curious identity develops between Madame Fisher and

Leopold. Knowledge of his nine-year existence has been so limited in some circles as almost to constitute non-existence, and she has, she says, “not been alive for nearly ten years.” When she complains that she has “not been felt,” from his own experience he understands this to mean “People not knowing I’m there”

(HP 268). When he states that he will remain powerless until people do realize his existence, she tells him,

Yes, you are quite right. But to have been born is to be present

[. . .] For you or me, to think may be to be angry, but, remember,

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young

tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and

grow up to any height [. . .] They need not stay ignorant of you.

That is in your hands. (HP 269)

Madame Fisher tries to bestow power on someone from whom the past has at every turn robbed of power. When she finds out that he does not speak French, she notes, “They have clipped your wings for you nicely, then.” But even

Madame Fisher does not realize the suffocating depth of Leopold’s confinement.

When she says that “it is not important” whether or not he returns to Italy, he looks at her “like a child prisoner” and immediately enlightens her about his adoptive relations:

The servants laugh at them because they never had children, so

they never let me alone [. . .] They show off to other people to

make them think I am theirs. They keep trying to make me be 90

things. Have they bought me, or what? [. . .] They make me feel

like a place with sheep eating on it the whole time. They are so

pleased because I cannot remember anything else but them. (HP

271)

In response, Madame Fisher tells him her version of his past from shortly after his birth: his residence in Germany until he was two, the death of his guardian, his mother’s concurrent illness after the “birth of a dead child” rendering her “not able to be consulted,” Naomi’s consequent full responsibility for interviewing and choosing the Grant Moodys (HP 272-73). She even offers an explanation for his mother’s non-appearance:

Dread of the past and nervous weakness of body must have made

her [. . .] shrink [. . .] from knowing you. That must still be so,

since she has not come to-day. That she must not love you was

written on her heart [. . .] Also, the death of her husband’s child

must have closed what heart she had against you, in panic. No

doubt, too, she hoped to have other children. But I have heard

lately that this may not be so. (HP 275)

Due to her own weakness of body, Madame Fisher cannot go on. Leopold diagnoses her illness as similar to his; she is “prey to one creeping growth, the

Past, septic with what had happened [. . .] He saw life as a concerted attack on himself, but noted she had been struck by one arrow too” (HP 276). “To leave her became unbearable” because he has more that he wants to tell her and because she frees his imagination: “when you make me angry I see everything.” He 91 pleads silently, “Do not seal me up again, listen, listen!” Her parting words are,

“This is too late! [. . .] However, do what you can—” (HP 276, 277). Strikingly, here the creeping growth of the past imprisons both young and old.

If Madame Fisher hands Leopold his past, Ray Forrestier offers Leopold his future. Without Karen’s consent but with her instincts probably warning her what will happen, Ray goes in her place to see Leopold. At first Ray and Leopold are enemies, foreigners regarding one another with suspicion. Leopold

“understood that this Mr. Forrestier had begun by wooing him, but now liked him less. This left Leopold cold; he wanted not just one ally but everybody’s submission.” Yet Leopold finds out that Ray did not know until later that Karen had given him up for adoption and that he had been angered by her decision. Ray at length thinks, “It can still be done,” and Leopold waits wordlessly while “this theft of his own body” is “being proposed, rejected, decided upon” (HP 294, 296).

Finally Ray says, “You know, till things get fixed up [. . .] this amounts to stealing you?” and Leopold, submitting completely to this temporary captivity because he believes it to be freedom, replies, “I don’t mind” (HP 296). Leopold fully embraces every new relationship in his family. When Henrietta asks him whether Ray is his step-father, “Leopold hesitated, then he said quickly, ‘Yes’ ”

(HP 300). He is interested to learn that he has a grandfather in England—a

“placid old man who so plainly regretted [Ray and Karen’s] childlessness” and who is among those never told about Leopold (HP 310, 291). Leopold, vindicated as his vision takes on flesh and blood, tells Henrietta, “I knew this would happen somehow,” and to take him away the taxi waits, “impatient as a 92 new world at their door” (HP 300, 306). Even Ray thinks, “the child commanded to-night. I have acted on his scale” (HP 318). Thus Leopold, with adult confederates, escapes confinements—a life with people he does not respect and a personal history consisting of secrets and lies—of unusual severity. Inevitably, he will encounter a new set of adult confinements imposed by Ray and his mother, but at the moment he considers the exchange a step toward greater freedom in establishing his own identity.

Coming of Age

Another child confined by the past who attempts to achieve some authority over her life is Portia Quayne of The Death of the Heart. In some ways she marks the beginning of a completely new category because she is sixteen and already “losing her childish majesty” (DH 39). She is Bowen’s most thoroughgoing representative of the painful but imperative process of growing from childhood into adulthood. According to Bowen, to grow up is to travel from protected confinement to exposure requiring further protective confinement. The innocent, she says, feel a

general tender kindness towards the world [that] comes from a

pitying sense of the world’s unreality. The happy passive nature,

locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what

goes on but demands not to be approached. A pact [. . .] of

immunity seems to exist” but “is not respected for ever—[. . .] an

overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, [. . .] someone’s unjust

fate—the peace tears right across [. . .] In the chaos that suddenly 93

thrusts in, nothing remains unreal, except possibly love. Then,

love only remains as a widened susceptibility: it is felt at the price

of feeling all human dangers and pains. (DH 236)

This, then, is the process to which Bowen refers in her essay “Out of a Book,”

“No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt to picnic in Eden” (MT 50).

Portia’s life with Thomas and Anna Quayne, even before losing innocence, is certainly no picnic nor Eden. Like Leopold’s, Portia’s past is a source of consternation and therefore not disclosed to everyone. Thomas’s half- sister, younger by twenty years, Portia was conceived out of wedlock when their father had an affair with a younger woman, Irene, a “scrap of a widow” who worked in a flower shop in London (DH 23). Thomas’s mother, always morally correct at least according to the letter of the law, insisted that her husband marry

Irene, so they married, had Portia, and lived in Europe a life of perpetual disgrace in a series of “back rooms in hotels, or dark flats in villas with no view” (DH 27).

After the elder Mr. Quayne and Irene’s deaths, he in effect leaves Portia to

Thomas and Anna “in a will—or in a dying request, which is not legal, and so worse” (DH 17). At that point Thomas, due to “unavowed relief at the snuffing out of two ignominious people, who had caused so much chagrin,” states “against

Anna’s objections” that it was “fair” and “only proper” to take Portia (DH 54).

Thus it comes to pass that Portia—characterized by a Quayne family friend as “the child of an aberration, the child of a panic, the child of an old chap’s pitiful sexuality” (DH 343)—enters a household where the master and 94 mistress value appearance and convenience far more than kindness or even human life. They believe, as if Portia herself were at fault for her past, that “She’s made nothing but trouble since before she was born” (DH 13). Out of guilt, they provide food, shelter and education for Portia—though the latter is more to get her out of the house than for edification. Although they realize that Mr. Quayne “No doubt hoped in his heart that we’d keep her on” longer, he “only spoke of a year, and Thomas and I [. . .] have not liked to look beyond that” (DH 20). Portia, apparently, realizes her temporary status quite well. When a family acquaintance asks her, “You live here, too?,” she accurately replies, “I’m staying here for a year,” and Anna did not replace the wallpaper in Portia’s bedroom because “she would only be in it for a year” (DH 62, 55). After that time “she is to go on to some aunt, Irene’s sister, abroad” (DH 20).

Meanwhile, her presence is an irritation and a confinement for Anna and

Thomas, who in turn confine her in an attempt to avoid her or her past. She represents the “something” generally relegated to a closet that “Most people have

[. . .] in their family” (DH 49). They keep from her anything that might foster her sense of being secure or comfortable. They have no “family custom” because it

“has long been rationalised away” (DH 57). Anna will not allow Portia to wear mourning for her recently-deceased mother because “mourning not only did not bring the dead back but did nobody good”—not to mention the fact that it would require explanations and make the Quaynes look bad for keeping a young, orphaned relative only a year (DH 56). 95

In their attempts to get Portia out of their drawing room and into some less public part of the house, the Quaynes do not discourage her relationship with

Matchett. The Quaynes’ housekeeper, who with the household furniture is an inheritance from Thomas’s mother upon her death, lives conveniently out of sight downstairs. Matchett, in turn, provides Portia with somewhere and someone to escape to when the Quaynes frequently do not want her around. While Matchett, too, represses emotion, she nevertheless makes toward Portia many of the little gestures that characterize a caring person and consequently has a freeing effect on her. In Portia’s bedroom, Matchett when cleaning “will not touch” various arrangements by which Portia makes the room her own (DH 12). She wants

Portia to fit in somewhere and worries when she won’t carry a handbag because

“All girls your age carry bags” (DH 30). Though not previously known “to put in her own oar,” Matchett protests to Anna, when she puts Portia “in colours” rather than black, that “Young people like to wear what is usual” (DH 56).

Matchett is the person in the Quayne household with whom Portia prefers to have tea and the person who, when Thomas and Anna are out, comes to say good night to her. It is on these nocturnal visits to Portia’s bedroom that Matchett becomes most emotional and maternal and Portia most open and confiding. Her status as Thomas’s parents’ former servant also gives her knowledge about much of Portia’s history, and, in a situation reminiscent of that of Mme Fisher and

Leopold, Matchett restores to Portia the past that no one else will discuss.

Matchett’s perspective is refreshing for Portia because she sees Portia’s father as an admirable man whose wife—and, later, son—rob him of former dignity. 96

“Fascinated as ever by the topic” of her own past, Portia, childlike, wants to hear

Matchett repeatedly re-tell the story of her birth and everyone’s reaction to it (DH

102). She loves to hear little details about her father, but she seems to feel instinctively the literal “confinement” that she brought on her mother with her conception. Unjustifiably, she feels responsible for having contributed to her parents’ rootlessness and rather shabby circumstances. She cringes when she hears “how they lived, without a stick of their own” and feels moved to defend her parents’ peripatetic life and to justify her own existence: “But he liked moving on. It was Mother wanted a house, but Father never would [. . .] Oh, don’t be so angry: you make me feel it was my fault for having had to be born.”

Even when Matchett tries to reassure her that her birth was “no doubt [. . .] for a purpose,” Portia feels confined by and anxious about her relatives’ response to it.

She realizes that “my relations who are still alive have no idea why I was born”

(DH 285):

That’s what they all feel; that’s why they’re all always watching.

They would forgive me if I were something special. But I don’t

know what I was meant to be [. . .] Portia had unconsciously

pushed, while she spoke, at the knee under Matchett’s apron, as

though she were trying to push away a wall [. . .] She began to

weep, [. . .] without at all full feeling [. . . . T]his obedient

prostration of her whole being was meant to hold off the worst, the

full of grief, that might sweep her away. 97

By “crossing her arms tightly across her chest,” Portia attempts to withhold the extent of her despair about those who in turn withhold any feeling from her (DH

108-09). As Portia and Matchett agree, “Except for you and me, nobody cares.”

As Matchett adds, “No, there’s no past in this house” and “Those without memories don’t know what is what” (DH 110).

But Matchett is not an entirely comfortable or affectionate source of escape for Portia; sometimes she, too, shuts Portia out. When Portia indirectly admits that she would prefer that Anna be fond of her, Matchett’s jealousy surfaces. Sitting on Portia’s bed in the dark, she “fold[s] her arms sternly, as though locking love for ever from her breast,” and admits that Portia “should look for [her] fond-ofs where it is more proper.” Though Matchett, “softening, [. . .] unlocked her arms,” social class and propriety erect a wall between Portia and her: “Something steadily stood between them: they never kissed [. . .]

Matchett’s embrace had made felt a sort of measured resistance, as though she were determined to will, not simply to suffer, the power of the dividing wall” (DH

114). The late-night meetings offer, therefore, only limited freedom of speech and emotion for the two.

In addition to Portia’s own past, another source of confinement for Portia is Anna’s past. When Anna, nineteen and in love, threw herself at Robert

Pidgeon, he did not respond as desired (DH 433). She remembers everything about the experience: the “pitted scar” on this shoulder from his injury in World

War I, his “hurting exposures of her limitations,” and most particularly that “He thought nothing of me at all [. . .] I did not break his heart” (DH 64, 364, 368). 98

The implication, of course, is that he broke hers. She apparently revenged herself, however, because she also remembers “how much innocence she herself had corrupted in other people” (DH 62).

Directly or indirectly, Anna helps to perform this dubious service for

Portia. Anna cannot endure Portia’s innocent look, so reminiscent of her own innocence. Portia “had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere [. . .] their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical [. . .] You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face.” Anna, unwillingly, “felt bound up [. . .] by that enwrapping look of Portia’s: she felt mummified” (DH 66).

Portia’s innocence stifles Anna, a now-“dangerous woman” whose own long-ago death of the heart has already caused her to repress much of her past and most of the emotion of the present (DH 374). While she asserts that “The past is never really the thing that matters,” she presses her “closed years” back firmly (DH 368,

60).

Spurred on by revenge on life or a dead heart, Anna seems to be leading

Portia step by step down her own path of failures. She teaches Portia to repress memory by never allowing her to discuss her own past. She invites indiscretion by giving Portia too much freedom too young. She sets a poor example by forming an inappropriate relationship of her own with the young man—himself no model of virtue and eleven years Anna’s junior—whom Portia finds sympathetic and at whom she later throws herself. When Anna needs to dispose of her during an escape to the continent for several weeks, she sends Portia to 99

Miss Yardes—now Mrs. Heccomb—a former governess whose effectiveness as a chaperone had been questionable in Anna’s own past.

Furthermore, being touched by any pity for Portia’s predicament only seems to harden Anna more. After meeting Portia’s unguarded gaze, Anna thinks, “hardening, [. . .] At all events, [. . .] she has her own fun” (DH 62).

Indeed, Anna’s problem is not that she understands too little about Portia but that she understands too much. She imagines throwing a pack of letters—her only souvenirs from her affair of the heart with Robert Pidgeon except the scars—at

Portia and saying, “This is what it all comes to, you little fool,” but she never approaches Portia closely enough to discuss anything personal (DH 343).

Thomas tells Anna, “If you were half as heartless as you make out, you would be an appallingly boring woman” (DH 338). But she could “easily pity,” easily empathize with Portia; most of her heartlessness exists in the fact that she chooses not to let herself be hurt again by letting such emotions re-surface (DH 49). Even though she has exacerbated the problem herself by reading in Portia’s diary her account of life in the Quayne house, seeing herself so accurately represented in

Portia’s eyes and words has “given me a rather more disagreeable feeling about being alive—or, at least, about being me” (DH 425). When called upon toward the end of the novel to explain how she would feel if she were Portia, her response is memorable for both length and thoroughness:

Contempt for the pack of us, who muddled our own lives then

stopped me from living mine. Boredom, oh such boredom with a

sort of secret society about nothing, keeping on making little signs 100

to each other [. . .] Contempt for married people, keeping on

playing up. Contempt for unmarried people, looking cautious and

touchy. Frantic, frantic desire to be handled with feeling, and, at

the same time, to be let alone. Wish to be asked how I felt, great

wish to be taken for granted—”

Anna’s most reprehensible quality, perhaps, is her unwillingness to act on this knowledge. She concludes, “Though she and I may wish to make a new start, we hardly shall, I’m afraid.” And so she sends Matchett to retrieve a Portia so in need of escape from brother, sister-in-law and boyfriend that she has run away from home and thrown herself on the mercy of Major Brutt, a World War I veteran whose existence is almost all past but very little future. Anna knows that

“We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't,” but now she is her own creature of self-limitation; she will not help to prevent another broken heart (DH 335).

Indeed, Anna’s last statement, above, is an alternate version of Bowen’s formula for achieving adulthood—or at least her process of having adulthood thrust upon her characters. Portia’s experiences bring her, perhaps rather early, just to the verge of this inevitable transformation. At sixteen, she begins the novel with a smile “already not quite childish,” and she changes before the reader’s eyes

(DH 37). As Bowen states, “Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous.” Furthermore, the “innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet their victims lie strewn all around” (DH 144). Thus when Anna’s twenty-three-year- 101 old protégé, Eddie—part cad, part carefully-concealed innocent—enters the

Quayne house and Portia’s heart, dissimulation comes in with him. As Portia schemes to see Eddie alone, her diaries begin to contain entries like “Eddie says our lies are not our fault. So I am supposed to be going out with Lilian” (DH

161). Portia learns adult methods of confinemenet as she learns to conceal the truth.

When she goes to Mrs. Heccomb’s home, Waikiki, for a visit, her education in adulthood continues. A drunken young man at one of the Heccombs’

Friday evening parties calls Portia “a sweet little kid” (DH 233), and she is puzzled and disturbed by a resemblance to Eddie that she cannot precisely identify. She is, as another young man tells her, “so young that no fellow has started to rush you yet” (DH 249), and she takes seriously the pseudo-marital references—such as “Wouldn’t it be nice if you were poking our fire and expecting me home at any minute?”—in Eddie’s letters to her.

When her suggestion that Eddie come to Waikiki for a visit is approved by the never-vigilant Mrs. Heccomb, Portia’s education in adulthood accelerates. At the theater, the first place that Portia and Eddie go in public after he’s arrived, she discovers Eddie and Daphne, Mrs. Heccomb’s daughter, “holding hands. Eddie’s fingers kept up a kneading movement: her thumb alertly twitched at the joint”

(DH 271). When she confronts Eddie about the episode, he calls her “neurotic” and a “little girl.” She reminds him that he “once spoke of marrying” her, and he explains that he suggested as much “Only because you were such a little girl.”

Her reply, “That it didn’t matter?” is obviously only too astute (DH 275). Eddie 102 feels free to show the more ingenuous, less manufactured side of himself to Portia because of her nonjudgmental innocence, but attempts to confine her forever to her innocence by telling her that she “must never show any sign of change” (DH

294). Her reply is quite pragmatic:

“Yes, that’s all very well, but I feel everyone waiting; everyone

gets impatient; I cannot stay as I am. They will all expect

something in a year or two more [. . .] I can see there is something

about me Daphne despises. And I was frightened by what you said

this morning—is there something unnatural about us? Do you feel

safe with me because I am bats? What did Daphne mean about

ideas I hadn’t got?” (DH 295)

Portia doesn’t understand, just as when Matchett, trying to ascertain the extent of

Eddie’s influence over her, asks her, “but are you a good girl? I said I didn’t know what she meant, and she said no, that is just the trouble” (DH 165). She has no experience, no basis for comparison, “no way of telling” when others practice the arts of adulthood on her (DH 383). She is a “good, discreet little girl,” and these qualities fascinate some and repel others (DH 380). Anna confines her past by limiting discussion of it and her present by trying continually to get rid of her, and Eddie attempts to confine her future by begging her not to change. But, partially through the impact of her multiple confinements, she does change. She finds, for example, “anticipation no longer the pure pleasure it once was. Even a year ago, the promised pleasure could not come soon enough [. . .] Now, [. . .] she unconsciously held it off with one hand” (DH 258). Matchett “marvelled at 103

Portia” upon her return from Waikiki and exclaims, “My goodness, [. . .] they have taught you to speak up. Anyone wouldn’t know you” (DH 322). Even Anna notices that “since she came home [. . . s]he isn’t nearly so shy, but at the same time she is less spontaneous” (DH 369).

Eddie, who contributes perhaps the most to her change, also notices the difference in her. When he attempts to kiss her not as an adult but to appease her as a child, she refuses his caresses and responds to his comment, “You mean [. . .] that I didn’t once [kiss you] when you did [want me to]?” with a rather adult

“immune little smile, as though all that had been too long ago” (DH 386).

Ultimately the adult in Eddie spurns the advances of the burgeoning adult in

Portia (DH 394). Repressing any emotion that he might feel for her, he tells her that he would be happier without her (DH 395). He cuts off their friendship and any future that she saw in it. Her feeling, after Eddie left Seale, that “All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day

I last saw Eddie, not nearer the day I shall see him again,” becomes prescient in retrospect (DH 313).

It is tempting to see Portia at sixteen, Eddie at twenty-three, Anna at thirty-four, and Matchett at some undisclosed but considerably older age as representatives of different stages in the same necessary, universal process of moving from one confinement to another. Portia, the child, though possibly

“young to judge,” experiences some cruel realizations. Anna and Thomas, she sees, 104

did not think my father and mother wicked; they simply despised

them and used to laugh [. . .] I suppose he and my mother did not

know they were funny: they went on feeling upset because they

thought they had once done an extraordinary thing [. . .] but they

thought life was simple for people who did not do extraordinary

things [. . .] if [my father] and I met again I should have to tell him

that there is no ordinary life. (DH 408)

Eddie, for his part, has “shown me all my mistakes [. . .], said I gave him the horrors and told me to go away.” Major Brutt, to whom she has revealed some of her newly-discovered home truths, suggests that this may be her first hard knock against reality, and says reassuringly, “one forgets, you know. One can always patch oneself up.” Portia replies firmly, “No [. . .] This can’t happen again [. . .]

Is this being grown up?” (DH 409).

Though Major Brutt denies that the adult world of reality consists of many such knocks, for most of Elizabeth Bowen’s characters, it certainly does. Bowen asserts, “Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it. Childish fantasy [. . .] protects [. . .] the terrible budding spirit”

(DH 411). The delusions of the young and innocent protect them, separating them from the world and confining them inside a sphere of security. Thus, while they are permitted some license to “speak the truth,” they have not yet mastered the confinement of meaning that is adult language and do not know how to speak it tactfully (DH 385). Their directness, then, can cause “terrible” pain. Yet, for the adolescent, there is no escape from adulthood except death. To feel at all is to 105 feel both love and pain, and many of Bowen’s adults, therefore, restrict or deny feeling in order to avoid pain. To grow up is to leave the protection of the “happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room,” to feel the

“chaos that suddenly thrusts in,” and then to choose whether to feel the “widened susceptibility” that is love or to repress all emotion in order to protect the spirit from pain (DH 236).

Portia, who still believes it possible to run away to someone who will save her or that there could be one completely correct response to her escape, never achieves full adulthood in the novel. Eddie hates the real world pastime of always preserving a patched-up surface and resists selling all of himself to that world.

Sometimes the world breaks his heart and, for release from its grip, he goes “over the edge,” as when he “broke out into sobbing” before leaving Seale. And sometimes—more often as the novel progresses—he hardens his heart to that world, removing feeling still farther from reach, as when he sends Portia away

(DH 308, 395). Anna has learned more thoroughly to patch herself up and thus has achieved complete adulthood, including a character that already “must have set” into some definite, confined form (DH 37). Pragmatically but coldly, she cannot see herself changing enough at her age to effect a real reconciliation with

Portia. Matchett, in part because she is a servant, has learned to repress more kinds of feeling than even Anna has. She hides expression behind the

“opaqueness of her features,” permits “no sag of tiredness,” denies encroaching old age and any right to love Portia (DH 323). But love Portia she does, and thereby she offers both Portia and the reader hope that adulthood need not consist 106 entirely of confinement and being finished off, “kind of like a hen bird, all dim”

(LS 258). Though most young Bowen characters in transition to adulthood are

“bound to grow up to a disappointment,” for Bowen adolescents, at least, to change does not always mean to decline (FR 159).

A less terrible, less painful transition to adulthood marks the life of Jane in

A World of Love. The past, confined by being buried, undiscussed, repressed— has worked for years its confining effect on the main female characters of the novel, who cannot move beyond its not-yet-dead emotions of love and pain.

Nevertheless, the release of the past has a reciprocal freeing effect. The novel opens with the momentous action—the rediscovery of the past which will lead to its complete release—already having taken place and Jane “Wearing a trailing

Edwardian muslin dress” with her 1950’s hairstyle (WL 10). She “gloried in having set free the dress” but the more significant find from the past, a packet of letters, had “insisted on forcing their own way out” (WL 49). Prior to this moment, Jane had felt constricted by both the era in which she lived and the family into which she was born. She has hesitated on the verge of adulthood, unwilling to participate in “[h]er time, called hers because she was required to live in it and had no other,” as it “was in a crying state of exasperation [. . . .] Like someone bidden to enter an already overcrowded and overcharged room, she paused for as long as possible on the threshold, waiting [. . .] for the floor to empty or the air to clear.” Furthermore, the “passions and politics of her family

[. . .] resembled those of the outside world” and offered no escape. Neither, until now, had she considered the past to be a viable escape route. Indeed, the 107

“wreckage left by the past oppressed her,” and she “had an instinctive aversion from the past,” primarily because in her family she “sometimes had had the misfortune to live through hours positively contaminated by its breath” (WL 37,

48, 49). She, therefore, mistrusts the past-steeped possibilities within the letters:

“if there were anything in them, let it remain contained!” (WL 48). She consciously resists the past without realizing that she is also resisting the adulthood contained within it.

But the letters break free from their band and, “altogether spilled out and showering,” elude organization and identification (WL 47). They “were headed by day-names only—‘Tuesday,’ ‘Saturday,’ and so on,” and fell into disorder when their rotten rubber band snapped (WL 46). Furthermore, they “have no beginnings [. . .] they simply begin” (WL 59-60). Their timelessness and the omission of the addressee’s name give the letters a universality that appeals intensely to Jane. With these specific obstacles removed, she can easily imagine herself the letters’ recipient, and does. Though apprehensive that “the inner course of her life was about to change,” she reads the letters avidly, secretly, and at least partially because “she felt entitled to raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat [the past] in any way possible” (WL 47, 49).

It is the past, however, which more completely has its will with Jane.

“Guy,” the author of the letters and apparently the only specifically-identified name within them, captures and fills her imagination, becoming twenty-year-old

Jane’s first male love other than her father. Antonia, Jane’s cousin and mentor, sees Jane “Falling in love with a love letter” (WL 55). But Guy, “one-time owner 108 of Montefort [Jane’s home, inherited from Guy by Antonia], Antonia’s first cousin and dear ally, had, when he fell in battle in 1918, been engaged to Lilia,”

Jane’s mother (WL 17), and his release through the letters is destined to affect all three women’s lives.

The letters become a catalyst for Jane’s transition into adulthood as she tries to re-enact the past. One of the epistles, written in some past June, described

“an ardent hour of summer” that had taken place underneath an elder near the river below Montefort. Jane, in the present-day June of the novel, re-visits the spot—“yes, here, literally where she was”—and lies “face down among growing bracken” (WL 68, 67). The description of the setting takes on sexual suggestiveness appropriate for an “ardent” hour: “Water-mint wet in the dwindling current and meadowsweet creamily frothing the river bank sent up a scented oblivion round her; a hot tang came from the bracken fronds crushed into bedding by her body” (WL 67). There, with the letter “in the breast of her dress,” she recalls his words—“if only YOU had been here!”—and responds, “Oh, here I am!” (WL 69). Jane, released into the past, seems to want to respond to Guy with more than words and finds the safe sexuality of responding vicariously liberating.

That Maude, Jane’s fourteen-year-old sister, witnesses some of this scene and chummily inquires what sort of game Jane is playing mortifies her and causes her to question the nature of the experience: “What was this that grew like a danger in her? What had she been tempted up to the very brink of? Was she lost forever? Was there a path back?” (WL 78). The questions echo the Traherne epigraph on the novel’s title page: “Do you not feel yourself drawn by the 109 expectation and desire of some Great Thing?” The brink is adulthood with, perhaps, love, the “Great Thing,” waiting on the other side—and there is no path back.

The next step toward Jane’s imminent adulthood takes place at the dinner party to which Jane was invited by Lady Latterly, a nouveau riche English purchaser and inhabitor of an Irish castle. Here non-drinking Jane imbibes several martinis and tries to lure the only Anglo-Irish guest into a discussion of the past because “Guy had dined here often” (WL 97). When she says the words

“My cousin Guy,” she feels that his name “had left her lips and was in the room.”

Having been freed from his letters and spoken, god-like, into existence, “Guy was among them” (WL 95). A place directly across from Jane—“an empty place, laid, and an empty chair”—has been saved for him at the dinner table (WL 97), and

not a soul failed to feel the electric connection between Jane’s

paleness and the dark of the chair in which so far no one visibly

sat. Between them, the two dominated the party [. . .] Something

more peremptory, more unfettered than imagination did not

command them—there had been an entrance, though they could

not say when. (WL 98, 99)

Jane sees him, “the arrested torrent of an existence,” now “more than living” once more (WL 100). Only when she dares to look directly at him does she discover that “He was gone,” but “That he had been with them, with her, was an unfettered fact—where is there perfection but in the memory?” (WL 103; italics added). 110

Guy’s confinement in the past has been unlocked by Jane, freeing her to pass from the limitations of childhood into those of adulthood.

As Jane thinks later, “So long as there’s fuel there’s no extinction,” and the letters provide fuel for Guy’s return, for his visitation to Jane—and for two further visitations to Lilia and Antonia. The letters lead Jane, who “had till now never courted memories” to feel the “awesome attraction” of other people’s memories for the first time (WL 139). While the attraction itself has a mind- broadening effect on Jane, the reactions from those unwilling to remember or to share memories have a restricting effect, often both on Jane and on those whom she asks. When at Lady Latterly’s party she questions old Terence, he tells her

“it’s no use trying to pin me down!” (WL 94), presumably to the past. When she asks her mother about “Guy,” Lilia rebuffs her for calling him by his first name because “he was older than your father”—though of course in his letters he is hardly older than Jane (WL 128). Feeling that she is perhaps acting foolishly but unable to stop herself, Jane wears a “look of a quarry, terror, mortification” when faced with laughter—though only from the wireless that Maud has switched on

(WL 189). When Antonia, apparently to remove her from the letters’ and the

Latterly set’s dual influences, states that she and Jane will leave for England tomorrow, the “entrenched presence of Maud could not but put a constriction on

Jane’s lips[. . . .] Yet a hampered anger, anger at being hampered, rose in her breast [. . .] Women had framed her up” (WL 190). In their confinement of her,

Antonia and Lilia evidently dread the pain that they might have to face if they allow the release that Jane has set in motion to continue. Part of this fear involves 111 the fact that they were not able to prevent their own manipulation and “framing” in the past.

Though Jane youthfully admits that she does not “know what deep waters are,” her life is on the brink of the deep waters of adulthood. Although she has

“thought of beginning to earn [her] living” and scornfully, “aloofly” tells Antonia that “Everything’s over,” she is not really ready to leave new experiences associated with the past because she feels that the future is closed to her; she cannot see or imagine it. She asks, breathing in deeply “as though, almost, for the last time before a death [. . . ,] “Fool as I’ve looked, fooled as I’ve been!—

Antonia, when shall I be so happy?” (WL 190, 192). Antonia, for whom the prospect of Jane’s future spreads long and bright, answers “drily” and prophetically, “Why, any day—tomorrow!” (WL 192).

Maud’s wireless provides the symbol marking the transitional moment.

She turns it on to hear Big Ben strike nine o’clock, and the “sound of Time, inexorably coming as it did, at once was absolute and fatal [. . . N]ow came

Now—the imperative, the dividing moment, the spell-breaker—all else was thrown behind, disappeared from reality, was over” (WL 193). The past holds only the power that those in the present give to it, and that power is now symbolically released. Jane and Antonia look “Simultaneously [. . .] at the head of the table” toward a final visitation from Guy: “Gone for good, he had never appeared more clearly than he did at this last.” Fleeing the reverberations of Big

Ben, “at bay for no reason that she knew,” Jane “had backed back into a window- curtain.” But on some level Jane does know that Guy’s passing means that Lilia 112 and Antonia’s lives, stopped on some internal plane with his death, will now resume. She notices suddenly that Antonia is aging; her day is passing, and

Jane’s day, with its “bridal ascendancy,” is dawning (WL 194, 98). Apparently, just as it does for Leopold in The House in Paris, gaining a past—in her case by relegating Guy to yesterday—frees Jane to acquire a future. Antonia acknowledges this: “ ‘But for the future,’ she said, ‘we’d have nothing left’ ”

(WL 212).

The next day, as Antonia accidentally foresaw, Jane, coerced by Lady

Latterly into meeting her former friend’s son, Richard, at the airport, steps over the brink into adulthood with its multifaceted associations. Perhaps she approaches new happiness. As she explains to Lady Latterly’s chauffeur, Maud has an imaginary playmate “To keep her happy” and “Anyone must have somebody, don’t you find?” (WL 215). When her eyes meet Richard Priam’s, and

“They no sooner looked but they loved,” Jane finds her somebody. Moreover, for once, apparently “youth really end[s] with a bang” (WL 33). But Jane has been sitting in the airport, waiting. She makes “one of her beautiful blind impatient movements, perhaps the last” as she watches “partings and meetings, heartbreaking last moments and eager first ones not to be lived up to in after life”

(WL 222). Bowen thereby may signal both the end of childhood for Jane and foreshadow the end of idealism in the closure of adulthood. Bowen even suggests an alternative that could close off the vista of the future by calling into question its existence: “But were there not those who said that everything has already happened, and that one’s lookings-forward are really memories?” (WL 221). 113

Marriage

The next stage of life that seems fraught with its own set of confinements, particularly for women, is marriage. After achieving or being caught up into adulthood—and sometimes simultaneously with or even before coming of age— most early twentieth century females naturally turn to the next milestone that society confidently places before them. Since every Bowen protagonist is a woman, her novels consequently abound with young women who, like Jane, choose the ideals of love and marriage for safety, completion or a way out. Time and again, Bowen emphasizes that for women marriage is another step in the process of trying to live successfully—though not necessarily freely. In fact, with only rare exceptions Bowen presents the social expectations of marriage and its maintenance as confinements—and often the marriage itself as well.

Frequently, for example, the average Bowen couple is one that has mutually consented to maintain the marriage for the purpose of continued social acceptance, an arrangement often confining to at least one member of the unit, usually the woman. The matronly women in The Hotel provide a striking general example of women’s confinement in and dissatisfaction with marriage. These women escape enforced isolation to band together and share grievances. Those among the matrons who have had a home, for example, complain of woman’s role as homemaker:

“If one does make a home for anybody one is still very much

alone. The best type of man is no companion [. . .] Besides, [. . .]

make a home [. . .] ! Of course, it’s what one would love to do, but 114

it nearly kills one and it’s so expensive; and when all’s said and

done it’s still so uncomfortable these days with all the difficulties,

one can’t expect a man to stay in it. Of course we don’t mind in

the same way about comfort, but really it is scarcely fit for

oneself.” (H 90)

This passage hints at possible household budgetary limitations upon the wives of even the wealthiest men, at the husbands’ own need to escape their wives or homes, and at the loneliness of marriage.

Nevertheless, for many young Bowen women, marriage seems at first an escape rather than a confinement. Sydney Warren of The Hotel is the first of several Bowen female protagonists to grasp at marriage as an escape from some adult crisis. Originally, twenty-two-year-old Sydney, whom Bowen repeatedly describes as clever or intelligent, is not interested in marriage, though her relatives are. They have sent her to Italy to escape too much immersion in academic achievement. Though she is apparently studying for a career as a doctor, they hope for a more conventional result of her Riviera vacation:

The girl had passed too many of these examinations, was on the

verge of a breakdown and railed so bitterly at the prospect of a

year’s enforced idleness that the breakdown seemed nearer than

ever. Now an ideal winter had offered itself: sunshine, a pleasant

social round. Sydney could be out of doors all day long; she might

distinguish herself in tennis tournaments; she might get engaged.

(H 23; italics added) 115

At first, Sydney feels constricted by the expectations of those around her. She closely observes the habits of married couples in the hotel, and “It seemed odder than ever to Sydney [. . .] that men and women should be expected to pair off for life” (H 25).

But women in particular of Bowen’s—and Sydney’s—social class are clearly expected to marry. A young man like Ronald Kerr might state

“despondently” that “There is nothing now to prevent women being different [. . .] and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?” (H 197). And an older, fatherless man like Colonel Duperrier might agree: “I thought [. . .] that girls could do pretty much what they want to nowadays” (H 223). But the Lawrence girls, three daughters staying at the hotel with their father Dr. Lawrence, see a need to conform to current cultural expectations. They feel the coercive force of patriarchy when their father insists that his daughters “must marry somebody” although he is personally not “keen on” any young men available, nor on “any career any of us ever want to take up” (H 222, 223). In fact, “[o]ne is tempted to wish . . . that, for purposes of marriage at least, one hadn’t got a father at all, like

Sydney Warren” (H 224). Indeed, Veronica Lawrence confides to Sydney, she has just accepted Victor Ammering’s proposal of marriage—arguably a form of voluntary confinement to which both parties have mutually agreed. She has done so because the alternatives for women are few; unfortunately, World War I, by decreasing the number of eligible men, has narrowed her choices even further.

Her father expects her to marry, and she has come to expect marriage of herself, 116 but she feels the avenue of escape offered by a future of multiple possibilities closing before her. Her somewhat cynical choice is based on her observation that

“this world is entirely divided into rather stupid men and very silly women” and

“the stupid are all one will ever have to hope for and [. . .] the silly are all one can ever become” (H 172). As Veronica looks at her attractive reflection in the mirror, Bowen suggests that Veronica’s potential is greater than that which her society has placed before her by stating ironically that “for all she had been designed for she was tragically more than adequate” (H 174). But Veronica herself says impatiently, “Everybody’s the same and I must have somebody [. . .]

It’s all very well to say, ‘Don’t marry!’ [. . .] but I must marry somebody. You see, I must have some children” (H 180). Young women are clearly expected to conform to the external pressure of social expectations—to such an extent that they mistake society’s wishes for their own.

At first Sydney condemns Veronica’s solution to her constrained state as

“a wide but horribly purposeful groping about” common to women, who are “all tentacles” (H 174). Yet Veronica becomes philosophical about her prospects: “if we don’t get married—I mean, to each other—there will always be this to look back on” (H 182). Marriage to someone is apparently inevitable, and the

“undefeated gracefulness” with which Veronica accepts her lot gradually earns

Sydney’s admiration and, later, emulation. Sydney comes to believe that

“Veronica had taken up a sound position midway between defiance and resignation and seemed likely to achieve serenity” (H 181). First, however,

Veronica, caught in her attempt to find a middle way between having to get 117 married and not pleasing her father with her choice of fiancé, turns to passive aggression by “announcing that she had a headache” and “then retir[ing] to bed for two days” (H 222). She eludes two external confinements by imposing her own self-confinement.

Sydney initially attempts to be, as Ronald suggests, different from girls like Veronica who submit to the prevailing expectations for upper-middle class women. She chooses a woman as the object of her affections, shocking Veronica, who cannot understand why Sydney would “sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive” (H 52). But

Mrs. Kerr uses the arrival of her twenty-year-old son to throw off the unwelcome intensity of Sydney’s attentions, and Veronica offers Sydney unwelcome pity: “It was ‘Sydney this’ and ‘Sydney darling that’ and ‘Where’s Sydney?’ and ‘Sydney and I are going together,’ and now he’s come she simply doesn’t see you [. . .] Of course I’m sorry for you. Everybody’s sorry for you.” Although Sydney changes the subject quickly, “making a dart for this way of escape from herself,” after

Veronica leaves her words echo inescapably (H 178).

In the wake of the unwelcome freedom given her by Mrs. Kerr, Sydney, on the rebound, turns to the first available alternative, James Milton, a big, independent clergyman “of about forty-three” who comes to the hotel to escape his clerical role temporarily. Sydney has already rejected Milton’s proposal of marriage by this point, but, when he gathers up his papers “to escape from” her evident devastation at Mrs. Kerr’s rejection, she even asks him not to go, and he finds her unlike herself: “That’s not the girl who wouldn’t marry me.” Until now 118 her refusal of him had given him “his pang of pride in her, his clearest feeling of her being incomplete and so beyond the doom of limitation” (H 217). Milton, with his usual acuteness, sums up a central idea of Bowen’s—that one of the attractions of youth is not its promise of fulfillment but its present lack of fulfillment. Adults, she implies, are doomed by completion to “a row of cages.”

Bowen shines “the long ray [. . .] upon them that showed them all up”—and she reveals each adult character in his own cage (H 191).

Later Sydney and Milton walk together “with a sense of escape from a funnel.” They are each other’s release from the hotel, and from their separate but similar pain. Though Sydney looks around her “as though a paradisal perspective should have opened for them, [i]t was the same road, not to be changed for her”

(H 219). This is the road to adulthood, with its multiple associations of completion, realism and confinement, down which all young Bowen protagonists walk. Sydney volunteers to effect her own confinement by marrying Milton, not because she loves him but because “I do want to.” One of her motives, her need for external reassurance of her worth and desirability, is evident in her anxious question, “You did really want to marry me, didn’t you?” (H 221). At first

Sydney is determined to create her own cage against her better instincts. Thus she

“rather fiercely” insists, “Aren’t we happy?” and protests “Oh, yes, yes, yes, . . . I do love you” (H 264, 266). When Milton, observing her more accurately, cries,

“Sydney, you’re not happy!” she replies “obstinately and coldly[,] ‘if you’re happy, I’m happy[. . . .] Anyway—happy! [. . .] Why must we always be feeling each other’s pulses to see if we’re happy?’ ” (H 271, 272). 119

Sydney does, however, admit her fear that “Haven’t we—or I, at least, for my part—undertaken rather too much?” Milton tries to make her see their marriage as an escape—“It’s a way out for us both [. . .] a way out of ourselves”

(H 270)—but this turns out to be only the way he views marriage. For her, marriage marks the end of possibility; the dialogue, with its emphasis on “what might become of her after marriage” (H 267), strongly suggests a future of confinement. Like Colonel Duperrier, who “had asked not more” of his wife

“than [. . .] to be twenty at any age” (H 227), or Eddie in The Death of the Heart who doesn’t want Portia to change, Milton admires Sydney as she is: “I like all the colours you wear [. . . .] Don’t ever be frightened and muddled and dark, my dear, even in clothes [. . . .] Don’t change, don’t be different [. . . .] I love you so much as you are” (H 268, 269).

But Sydney has already changed. The relationship with Mrs. Kerr has killed her “faculty of wonder,” and she tells Milton, “I’m not the stuff for a fairy tale [. . .] Nothing is new to me” (H 271-72). When Sydney goes on a surprise outing that her cousin Tessa has planned, ironically, because she “thought it would be so nice for James to get to know Sydney’s great friend Mrs. Kerr,”

Sydney stops lying to herself and starts looking for another escape (H 275).

Something, probably “Mrs. Kerr’s hand lying on Sydney’s,” precipitates the crisis and forces Sydney, in flight from confinement to endless release, to suicidal thoughts: “If it could be the next corner [. . .] we should go over clean—there is that clear drop. Let it be the next corner” (H 280, 281). 120

But fate and “a long wagon of timber jammed crossways” in the road thwart her death-wish and, instead, take her beyond death as an imagined abstraction. She suddenly sees life as concrete and inescapable, and her epiphany leads her to perhaps her most liberating action of the novel. Having perceived that she is only replacing a hoped-for attachment to Mrs. Kerr with a more socially-acceptable substitute confinement to Milton, she tells him, “I’m afraid

[. . . ] that it’s quite impossible” (H 285). Here Sydney grows up—“graduates,” as Mrs. Kerr terms it (H 238), into reality, leaving behind the idealism of youth.

She goes “round the bend of the road” and enters adulthood (H 286). She achieves enough autonomy to refuse an invitation from Mrs. Kerr to come up to say good night and to go “straight to her own room.” The journey to adulthood may be unpleasant and the destination disappointing, but there is no alternative (H

286). Her dream that night reveals that the uphill road of adulthood may only have “an empty town at the top” (H 290).

Marda Norton of The Last September also uses marriage as an escape from reality—and eventually as a way back to reality again. Though Marda is twenty- nine, because she is still unmarried eighteen-year-old Lois considers her “a girl— at least a kind of girl” (LS 131). Marda is tall, and she “escaped the feminine pear-shape [. . .] Standing vaguely she had still that quality of directness [. . .] her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference” (LS 117). Veronica Lawrence of The Hotel seems to indicate that a

“modern” woman, unlike her, is one who would not get married, who might 121

“want to be” something, and Marda “seemed to [the residents of the Big House,

Danielstown] very modern” (H 175, LS 115).

In fact, Marda has apparently been successful at avoiding marriage for some time by following a program of successive engagements broken off. Once she “lost her engagement ring at a [Danielstown] tennis party” and “wrote afterwards to say it didn’t matter because she had broken off her engagement anyhow and the man said he didn’t want the ring, he said he wished it were at the bottom of the sea” (LS 109). His disgruntlement over not managing to bind

Marda to him may be explained by the fact that practically every man she meets is riveted by her presence. Laurence, twenty and an Oxford student, wants to run all her errands for her. Married, near forty, Hugo Montmorency entertains an awkward, ill-concealed passion for her. Even native Irishman Dannie, living in a whitewashed cottage outside the desmesne, declares that “she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes” (LS 127). But so far Marda has eluded capture— though she is engaged again during the course of the novel.

Her current state in relation to matrimony is a constant subject of conversation among both young and old because everyone maintains a different set of expectations for her. Livvy, Lois’s friend, believes it “odd [. . .] that she shouldn’t have brought anything off by this time” though she makes allowances for a past “disappointment” (LS 110). Laurence “had learnt—from leaning out of his window while his aunt talked to Mrs. Montmorency down on the steps—that they all thought she contemplated breaking off her [current] engagement” as well, but “Personally he thought this improbable.” He contemplates rather enviously 122 the fact that “she would be getting a good home and what went with it—money, assurance and scope. He himself only wished he could do so as easily” (LS 177).

Of course, Laurence’s opinion of marriage demonstrates a double standard: women are secure, but men are confined by it. He thinks of Hugo, for example, as someone who “was married, had given away his integrity, had not even a bed to himself” (LS 61). Francie, Hugo’s wife, “talked of Marda’s engagement and said she was glad. She was glad as a wife that the net should be flung wider,” and as Hugo’s infatuation becomes increasingly apparent, she becomes gladder still.

Even relatively imperceptive Sir Richard says, “I shall be relieved when Marda is married” (LS 278). Perhaps Mrs. Carey, an Anglo-Irish neighbor, though reversing her words “distractedly,” expresses the sentiments of the older women—those with most reason to want her attractiveness confined—most honestly: “I am glad you are going to be happy: I hope you will be really, really married” (LS 174).

For Lois, only eighteen, Marda is the soul of experience. Even when manicuring her nails, her “deftness seemed to Lois inimitable. One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with just that [. . .] detachment in smile and absorption in attitude [. . . T]he very room [. . .] took on awareness, smiled with secrecy, had the polish and depth of experience” (LS 143). In a moment of liberation from herself in another’s personality, Lois tries on Marda’s fur coat and rhapsodizes, “Oh, the escape in other people’s clothes!” (LS 112). Lois inquires avidly of Marda what it is like to be engaged and feels that her own growing up 123 and leaving school “seemed an achievement, like marriage or fame” (LS 23).

Nevertheless, she instinctively feels avenues of choice shrink and chances for companionship dwindle when Marda first tells her of her most recent engagement.

Though she says, “Oh, how lovely!” it is with a “shock of flatness,” and she “felt certain that Leslie would die or break off the engagement” (LS 142, 154).

Marda herself succeeds in not being pinned down by anyone’s preconceptions. She tells Hugo, as part of her campaign to “repel, to annoy and to bore him,” that she is going to marry a stockbroker. Indeed, Marda seems flippant and determined to have her own unconfined way with everyone—except, perhaps, her fiancé; several of her comments seem to support Laurence’s opinion that she really will marry Leslie Lawe. When she is almost shot by an Irish rebel, her brush with death brings the future again to mind in a way reminiscent of

Veronica Lawrence in The Hotel: “I hope I shall have some children; I should hate to be barren” (LS 192). At her most candid, she tells Lois, “I need Leslie

[. . .] If you never need anyone as much you will be fortunate. I don’t know for myself what is worth while. I’m sick of all this trial and error” (LS 151).

Certainly this does not seem to be an admission of love, and at one point Marda says “impatiently” to Hugo that, in spite of the fact that “one has those ideas,” it is not strictly necessary, “at any age,” for a girl to love anyone (LS 122-23). Though she enumerates for Lois a rather negative list of qualities of an engaged man, it seems clear that she plans to overlook most of these for marriage itself. She packs

Leslie’s photograph “in talc” to render it “unbreakable” (LS 200). She “daren’t wear” her engagement ring for fear of losing it, and, as Lady Naylor notes, she 124

“has got into a kind of nervous habit of sending telegrams [to Leslie . . .] Surely that is abnormal in an engaged girl?” (LS 150-51, 170-71). On Leslie’s account, she seems to exhibit some of the signs of “female wariness, guardedness, circumspection she had always despised” (LS 173). Marda even seems to expect a certain conformity by a woman to the expectations of a man: “So much of herself that was fluid must, too, be moulded by his idea of her.” Mobility narrows as “Essentials were fixed and localized [. . .] to become as the bricks and wallpaper of a home” (LS 193). Though Marda laughs as she imagines “the subdued surprise with which [all the older women] would come to her wedding; barely dressed as befitted because of that unshaken disbelief in her,” the “origin of their disbelief [. . .] had acquired for her, in fact, a tragic vulgarity” (LS 178). While

Bowen leaves her future open-ended by never disclosing whether she marries,

Marda’s opinion of marriage has clearly changed since her other curtailed engagements, and she seems somewhat resigned to the necessity of marriage for someone of her own age and social class. Indeed, her presence in the novel seems to be to demonstrate to Lois that marriage, viewed from a different perspective, could be a confinement, however secure, instead of the escape that Lois perceives it to be.

Although Janet Studdart of Friends and Relations feels the same pressure of social class, her motivation for marrying is more like Sydney Warren’s in that, in part, she wants to attract attention from the person that she really loves. She also, like Marda, wants the security of marriage—the participation in a common rite leading to a greater range of social acceptance. But the complexity of Janet’s 125 situation makes her motivations likewise more complex. After her older sister’s marriage to Edward Tilney, the son of Elfrida—who left her own husband for

Considine Meggatt and then did not marry him—Janet, courting the connection between Tilney and Meggatt, begins to see and ultimately marries Considine’s nephew Rodney Meggatt. Theodora Thirdman, a single woman in love with

Janet, can spot that Janet is not in love with her husband, and her letter hinting as much to Laurel Tilney, Edward’s wife, deliberately sets out to precipitate the crisis of the novel. Theodora, annoying but never obtuse, tells Laurel that Rodney and Janet “can’t love reciprocally” and therefore produce much of their lives together as “a spectacle” (FR 159). Laurel then shows the letter to her husband without realizing the never-acknowledged but quite reciprocal love that exists between Janet and Edward. Then Laurel sees that “It was more than just his mother” (FR 226). Without his wife’s approval, Edward in turn rushes to Janet’s home with the spurious intention of taking his children away from the evil confluence of Elfrida and Considine but the actual intention of showing Janet the letter. At first Janet only says that Theodora “thinks Rodney’s and my marriage dull; I daresay most marriages do look like that” and suggests that “As

[Theodora’s letter] regards me and Rodney, I think it is something you, Edward, might leave alone” (FR 162). First, however, Edward pushes Janet to an admission of her own love while withholding his own acknowledgement. In extremis, she says,

“I do hope, Edward, we shan’t quarrel again—Because

they’re your children!” 126

He committed her fully to this, underlining the remark by a

complete silence [. . .] “Edward—” she began; this was the first

break in her manner; despair came through, so personal, so

positive[. . . .] “This does do no good,” said Janet.

Silence took this again on its surface, a glass wall against

which she stood excluded. She stood powerless, looking through

at her life, at, not regainable, her whole habit of mind. This, like a

house long inhabited without feeling and vacated easily, bore in,

revisited in its emptiness, an anguishing sense of her no-presence

even in the past. (FR 156)

Janet’s escape from years of deliberately not feeling reveals to her the confinement of at least a decade of her life and results in a sense of lost identity as well as lost years.

In turn, Janet’s accurate accusation that “You wanted to show me that letter” forces repressed Edward to a liberating “delirious boldness” of thought comparable to that in a fever:

And as when in fever the freed, weightless thought going down

street after street or penetrating a forest, halts, finds one house or

one tree and fuses with this utterly, becoming the house or tree past

hope of escape, Edward’s thought stopped and flared at a point

where dread and desire ran round the circle to meet. He was Janet.

“If you and I had fallen in love— But I didn’t want that,” he said 127

clearly. He had less than a moment to take up her first full look

that passed his almost in flight as she turned to the door. (FR 163)

Edward’s admission of love for and moment of identity with Janet, reminiscent of

Catherine Earnshaw’s with Heathcliff, shows that he also has for over ten years willed away feelings of love. He chose Janet’s childlike sister Laurel instead because “Life after all,” he tells himself repeatedly, “is an affair of charm, not an affair of passion” (FR 170).

While it is true that all of life cannot be lived at the white heat of passion,

Bowen also demonstrates that life has not been fully lived without passionate moments. She weaves these into the charming fabric of life like a pattern that gives definition and meaning. Only those who love each other transcend at all the weights of confinement pulling the rest of humanity earthward. In contrast, a loveless marriage is confining to whomever within the marriage feels constricted by the lack of emotion. Among the many married couples in Bowen’s novels, usually at least one of the partners finds security—or toleration or charm— insufficient.

Therefore, Janet and Edward’s dual declarations of love, because of the prior marriage vows with which they conflict, are only briefly liberating. Though

Janet asks Edward not to “waste [her] courage at the very beginning,” she retracts her thoughtless construction of the situation: “What am I saying? This is the end

[. . .] We made each other no promises.” They mutually decide to honor their marriage vows, not because they are “less free” to break them than Elfrida was, but because they “have no—no bitter necessity.” They value the respectability of 128 their homes and jobs, the esteem of beloved sisters and other “friends and relations,” more than their own desires. Though they momentarily entertain the question, “is there [. . . a]ny future?,” both agree, “No. None” (FR 216-17). They part, “each shut up in a confusion of aching senses,” each to return to an apparently successful marriage which is in fact a life of confinement from each other (FR 236).

The confrontation reveals that Janet too has not married for passion. She saw in Rodney something “really more like what” she’d expected of Considine.

Knowing the impact that Elfrida’s relationship with Considine had on Edward’s life, and realizing that any impact she herself might make at this point can hardly be positive, she perhaps tries to replicate at least the concussion by approximating its original cause. “I meant him to notice me [. . .] I suppose—if I thought—I knew I should make him angry,” she admits (FR 183). At any rate, she tells

Elfrida, “You were the reason I married Rodney” (FR 181). When Elfrida, referring to Rodney and Considine, says, “So you’ve married them both,” Janet concurs: “It seemed something for me—I wanted to be related” (FR 182). She confesses feeling excluded from Edward’s life and marriage in general as she insists that “all I thought [. . .] was, ‘Here is a place for me’ ” (FR 183).

Considering the fact that the narrative voice, apparently representing nameless concerned relatives and friends, refers four separate times to Janet’s engagement as her “happiness,” it becomes ironic that her actual place with

Rodney is one confined to doing rather than feeling, or limited to feeling affection rather than passion (FR 19-22). Generally, she embraces her rôles of wife of 129

Rodney, mother of Hermione, sister of Laurel, daughter of the Studdarts, niece of

Considine and friend of Elfrida because these keep her busy and introspection- free. She works unceasingly to make Rodney’s days smooth and comfortable; he loves her, and she “would not oppose him” (FR 195). To fill any free spaces in her days, she is a model of social and civic involvement. She hosts the Mothers’

Union on the same day that she says goodbye to Edward-as-lover and makes plans for the League of Nations on the following day. Janet proves that she has the determination to continue to hide her secret from Rodney, and never to discuss it again with either Edward or Laurel. Janet has chosen her confinement and carries it off so well that even those inside the secret’s circle believe her to be, as her parents do, “the born married daughter” (FR 273).

Cecilia Summers in To the North becomes sympathetic to marriage for more shallow reasons. She has already been married, and she is no longer looking for passion; she wants to escape from the financial constraints of widowhood.

Therefore wealthy, eligible Julian Tower, though hardly the love of her life, becomes increasingly attractive.

For Karen Michaelis of The House in Paris marriage is at first not an escape. Though sometimes with resignation, she sees marriage to Ray Forrestier, a parentally-approved member of her own social class, as a way of fitting smoothly into her parents’ upper-middle class world. She and Ray “had been friendly and watching each other for four years,” and “Just when she was beginning to wonder why he did not want to marry her, he had asked her to marry him.” When she told her mother of the engagement, “Karen then saw that in Mrs. 130

Michaelis’ view a woman’s real life only began with marriage [. . .] Her own last four years showed up as rather aimless; [. . .] she seemed to have lost sight of her ambition [to be an artist]. There is more art in simply living, Mrs. Michaelis said.

Karen was glad to fall back on her mother’s view of things.” Even then, however, her doubts surface. She found herself still asking, “What next?” and, though “she had firm ground under her feet, [. . .] the world shrank; perhaps she was missing the margin of uncertainty” (HP 84). In becoming engaged, she has gained security but lost scope.

Briefly, during her affair with Max Ebhart, the idea of marriage, so instinctive for women of her age, becomes associated for her with love and passion. She again meets Max, with whom she’d fallen in love four years ago when she was nineteen and in Paris. Then, the fact that Karen had been under

Madame Fisher’s roof and chaperonage precluded any association between her and Max, Madame Fisher’s friend. When they meet again, circumstances are still unpropitious as both are engaged to be married. But as “Max put his hand on

Karen’s, pressing it into the grass [, t]heir unexploring, consenting touch lasted,” just as their love has lasted in spite of the intervening years (HP 155). She says goodbye to Max and his fiancée, thinking, in order to displace other thoughts, “the great thing now is to marry Ray.” She must consciously erase Max from her mind and can no longer picture Ray’s face, but “she thought of their marriage constantly.” She thinks of their house, a child, Ray’s job, and looks forward to the day when “I shall be different” (HP 160). She is, however, already different, dwelling now on “whatever in marriage stays unmapped and dark” rather than on 131

“the daylit side of marriage” she had formerly pondered (HP 161, 160). Now the anticipation of marriage has become an escape from memories of Max: “She must rely on marriage to carry her somewhere else” (HP 161), by which, of course, she continues to mean marriage to Ray.

Four weeks later Karen prophetically sees that the telephone is “going to speak” and picks up the receiver to find Max and the operator already “on the line” (HP 171-72). They arrange to meet in Boulogne, where Max asserts that, because of their different social classes and personalities, “It is more or less impossible” for them to marry, and they would “be wretched” if they did (HP

190). Yet they arrange to meet again in Hythe, where they stay the night together

(HP 105). Karen finds the entire experience “escape”—from social class, from parents, from propriety—and now “She was washed back ashore again.” She thinks that she is “let back, safe, too safe” because “no one will ever know.” Part of her abstractly regrets the safety since it marks the end of escape. Karen has come to Max thinking that their meeting was the culmination of the “year in Paris when I used to want you so much even to look at me” and that that Max loved

Naomi, his fiancée (HP 210-11). Max, on the other hand, finds that he can no longer marry for his own comfort alone: “I do not want peace, I do not want a pillow” or someone who is, like Naomi, “like furniture or the dark” (HP 214,

190). Although Karen “never let [herself] think” after Max told her marriage between them “was not possible,” when she sees “what was in his eyes”—that he loves her and not Naomi—she agrees to marry him (HP 216). Karen no longer asks “What next?” Once she realizes that marriage to Max is a possibility, her 132 need for escape ends. Her relationship with Max represents the best of all possible Bowen worlds, one in which two individuals love each other; their marriage would free them both, going beyond charm to passion.

Yet Madame Fisher ruins Max’s pleasure in Karen, driving him to look at

Naomi “like someone through bars in a death cell” and then to escape them all through suicide (HP 240). At this point marriage becomes for Karen—or at least for her mother—a way of gracefully escaping the consequences of her actions.

Because Karen is now pregnant, Leopold, her son, unexpectedly becomes

“something that had to be,” and Karen has to do what she dreads, to see her family realize that she has deliberately eluded all their careful safety measures for her (HP 200). But, as she acknowledges, she has exchanged one trap for another because she must now experience pre-natal “confinement” for having been

“caught.” She explains that “Being caught is the word for having a child, sometimes,” but it used to be, when playing hide and seek, that “Once you were

‘home’ you [. . .] could not be caught” (HP 202). With no other alternative but to try once again to regard the confinement of parents as security in order to protect her pregnancy, Karen turns home.

Once there, Karen’s mother sends her to Germany and then stays with her through Leopold’s birth. Karen, not well, had allowed Naomi to make arrangements for her son’s adoption. Then “Mrs. Michaelis—with whom, after the terrible weeks in Germany, it had become difficult for her daughter to be— had died more or less peacefully not long after Karen’s marriage to Ray” (HP

290). Ray later tactfully withholds the truth, “Your grandmother died of you,” 133 from Leopold (HP 310). Ray, “[t]o make marriage with Karen entirely possible [,

. . .] had exchanged the career he had once projected for business, which makes for a more private private life” (HP 283). No one ever told Mr. Michaelis, and life appeared to progress relatively unchanged.

Indeed, on the surface, Karen and Ray’s marriage is comparable to the equally long union of Janet and Rodney Meggatt in Friends and Relations:

The happiness of the Forrestiers’ marriage surpassed the

hopes of those friends who had [once] received the engagement

with so much pleasure[. . . .] They were a little envied, also

sometimes held up to heady younger people as not having rushed

into marriage: had they not suspended matters a year? No wonder

it worked; they had been sure of themselves. It was understood

that their childlessness, though an infinite pity, kept their

companionship uninterrupted and close; [. . . Karen] simulated the

married peace women seemed to inherit, wanting most of all to live

like her mother. In nothing spoken did he and she disagree. She

could not do enough for him. (HP 290, 289)

Underneath, however, the marriage is even more constricting than the Meggatts’ because both parties know and are haunted by the hidden secret. In three full pages, Bowen represents the unceasing, unspoken dialogue between Karen and

Ray, commenting that “Such a dialogue, being circular, has no end” (HP 289).

The dialogue, which has traveled this confined path for almost ten years, concerns

Leopold and the fact that “We are not alone” because “there is Leopold” (HP 134

287). Ray argues that “we never are alone, while you’re dreading him [. . .] If he were here with us, he’d be simply a child, either in or out of the room. While he is a dread of yours, he is everywhere” (HP 288). Karen, like Janet, either cannot or will not release herself from her chosen confinement, her childless, loveless marriage to Ray. Perhaps she sees it as penance for her past sins. Thus it is Ray who acts to break them free from a decade of imprisonment by the past when he takes Leopold back to Karen, back home. As with Marda Norton, Bowen leaves the outcome uncertain, but the airing out of previously stifling memories offers hope that the Forrestiers will enjoy a freer future as a family.

For Anna Quayne of The Death of the Heart, marriage is also an escape from past actions and experience: “When she and [her future husband] Thomas first met, she was reticent and unhappy: she had not only failed in a half chosen profession but failed in a love affair. The love affair, which had been of several years’ duration, had [. . .] just come to a silent and—one might guess from her manner—an ignominious end.” Indeed, much of Anna’s past had been predicated on a fear “to commit herself, in case she could not succeed”—and, as a whole, she has neither committed herself nor succeeded. She “posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish” (DH 51).

Thomas marries her out of some of his own fears, including the dread of being

“loved with any great gush of the heart.” After they married, however, “Thomas discovered himself the prey of a passion for her, inside marriage, that nothing in their language could be allowed to express, that nothing could satisfy.” Bowen’s clarification that “to be exact, he dreaded at that time” being loved passionately 135 seems to indicate that, in fact, after he discovered his own passion for Anna, he would not have minded having it returned (DH 52). But Bowen’s narrative reveals no reciprocal feeling for Thomas. When he tells Anna that one night he

“woke up and heard [himself] saying [. . .], ‘We are minor in everything but our passions,’ she merely responds, ‘How pompous you were in the night. I’m so glad I was asleep’ ” (DH 50).

Apparently Anna’s grand passion was Robert Pidgeon, with whom she had had the affair and from whom she had received only rejection. From her failure with Pidgeon, she dates all her failures: “Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn—as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work” (DH 342, italics added). After Pidgeon, the only man she ever professes to love, she suppresses all emotion. Later, years of marriage and perhaps the acquisition of more wisdom with age allow her to consider that

“she could have been in the wrong [. . . ;] had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through?” (DH 342).

Perhaps, like Thomas, she had had “some nerve in [her] feeling [she] did not want touched,” that she “protected [. . .] without knowing where it was” (DH 52).

Generally, guarding her feelings has always been Anna’s way. After marriage, the “Quaynes had expected to have two or three children,” but two miscarriages—“exposures to false hopes, then to her friends’ pity”—had “turned her back on herself: she did not want children now. She pursued what had been her interests before marriage in a leisurely, rather defended way” (DH 53). Anna 136 stays in her fortress of shut-out feeling, not loving Thomas, Portia, or indeed anyone, because she fears that emotion expended is too expensive.

Lilia and Fred of A World of Love marry for a variety of familiar reasons.

As a practical matter, Fred marries Lilia because Antonia, owner of the Big House

Montefort, needs a caretaker for her house and lands and will not offer him the living unless he also takes Lilia. But Fred’s other motivations help to persuade him: he feels quite physically attracted to Lilia, and, insofar as Fred has ever had a home, his home was Montefort. So, to some extent, Fred marries to escape financial uncertainty and to gain a future of some sort that has at least some continuity with his past.

The latter reasons are also among Lilia’s for marrying Fred, but Bowen traces her motives in somewhat more detail. At “nearly thirty” she attracted Fred, who “loved her for what she once was,” for the fact that, at seventeen, she had been “a wonderful golden willow of a girl” and fiancée of the prior owner of

Montefort, Guy (WL 19, 17). After Guy’s death, “Lilia did not know where to turn” and passively allowed Antonia, who did now know “where to stop,” to push her “off into a series of occupations” in gift shops and tea shops (WL 18). She is not successful at any of these, and finally Antonia in desperation has the inspiration of marrying her to Fred (WL 18-19). Lilia, hardly royalty herself,

“incontrovertibly” protests that “Fred was common” and “once I was good enough for Guy.” She, as a further but largely token protest, says that it “would have been better [. . .] if I had thrown myself off that ship” that brought her to

Ireland. She intimates that “if I had chosen to lift a finger, instead of staying 137 faithful to Guy’s memory,” she might have had numerous other offers of marriage

(WL 21). The point, of course, is that she did not lift a finger; as in the case of

Anna Quayne, her acute passivity becomes a form of confinement. In addition to thinking Fred beneath her, Lilia believes that Montefort “is a dreadful house” (WL

22). Though she “refused to address Fred or meet his eyes,” she is “slowly worked upon” by Fred’s looks of “respect, pity and increasing desire” and finally gives in. She realizes, but will not acknowledge, that after almost thirteen years she still does not know where to turn, that the options once open to her no longer exist.

The situation of Sheila Artworth, née Beaker, of The Little Girls has similarities. Sheila, too, marries not for love but because she has run out of options. Her true love, a wounded survivor of the war that killed Guy, also died.

Sheila, however, is not passive like Lilia nor even afraid of failure like Anna. She belongs to a well-to-do family that has apparently always lived in and dominated

Southstone, an English coastal city reminiscent of Folkstone. She is Southstone aristocracy and even as a child had brought glory to her parents and local fame to herself through dancing. Though her parents would have been “shocked [. . .] out of their skins” at the idea of their daughter’s dancing for money, Sheila “wouldn’t have hesitated [. . .] to have done that to them, or indeed worse.” She bides her time and plots her escape. Finally, at eighteen, after finding the place “that was tops then [. . .] for anybody going truly to be a dancer,” she flees her sheltered home and “took [herself] up there” to London (LG 198). But the judges for whom she dances tell her that she would have “too much to unlearn [. . .] More than you 138 could by now,” and the audition is a failure. The experience is considerably more devastating than Lilia’s failure to do well in flower shops or Anna’s failure to succeed as an interior decorator because Sheila has invested years of preparation and anticipation in the idea of being a professional dancer. But, unlike either Lilia or Anna, she can face truths about herself. Realizing that “they were right,” she admits that she escaped them as well: “I can’t say they sent me away; I took myself off.” Unfortunately, she could only return home, “So back I came” (LG

199).

If she has nowhere to go but home, she also has nothing to do but marry:

“what else had I but that, with my dancing gone?” Yet between eighteen and thirty-two, Sheila “stayed on” in Southstone, living further down the street on which she had always lived, for “a man”; she “nursed a friend to the day of his death” (LG 199, 247). He’d “been through that war. One lung left, coughing his guts out.” When she’d known him, he was a “car salesman, doing a bit of racing on the side.” Sheila had wrecked one of the cars for sale due to his encouraging her to speed; he used a command that seems curiously to summarize her life with this man as well as her life after his death: “Let her out!—let her out!—let her out!” (LG 268). When his “sickness [. . .] got the upper hand,” he had asked

Sheila, “Stay with me [. . .] it’s not much to ask, is it? You never loved me.” She does stay “Till the day came [. . .] when I said to him, ‘That is all you know,’ and went out of the room [. . .], leaving him [. . . T]hat was to happen to be the day he died.” Later, she’d felt guilty, as if she had helped to hasten his death by leaving.

But at the time she’d been angry because “I’d loved him. I’d never ceased to 139

[. . .] If anybody doesn’t understand, what more can you do?” Her friend Clare tells her, however, “You never show much,” and his lack of understanding may have been in part her need to “Let her out” a bit more (LG 269).

Certainly, since that time her emotions have been even more carefully guarded; she is the most elusive and unforthright of the three little-girls-as- women. Not long after the soldier’s death, at thirty-two, she’d married Trevor, a widower who was hardly a top choice either as a child or as an adult. Though at this point she probably could have “got out” of Southstone, “Where to—by then?

And Trevor had come along. One prefers to marry” (LG 200). One of the reasons she’d preferred to marry was so that she might have offspring: “What do people expect to have when they marry? [. . .] Trevor, as had been demonstrated, could have children. What else do you think I thought there would be, when I went into that?” (LG 202).

Her level of self-confinement has been, like Janet Meggatt’s, of almost heroic proportions. Though time has “failed to give coating” to Dinah or Clare,

Sheila’s “coating”—like Anna’s, Matchett’s or others with protective layers that have accreted with the steady advancement of age—is by now quite deep (LG

168). “Never have I told” the story of loving and almost killing the former soldier, she admits (LG 269), just as she has never till now admitted that she really wanted children (LG 202). “With time and patience,” she has lived such an irreproachable life since her true love’s death that she has “live[d] down” her past. She still resides on the same street. She has reinvented her husband in a more palatable form, leading Dinah to exclaim, “We all knew Trevor. That 140

‘Trevor this,’ ‘Trevor that’ she is always quoting is not Trevor” (LG 169). The

“flesh of her face had hardened, perhaps through the effort involved in resisting change” (LG 31). She ultimately became the “daughter of Beaker and wife of

Artworth, of Beaker & Artworth, Southstone,” having “married into the firm, like a good girl” (LG 31, 32). Though Dinah disapproves of her methods, they are, apparently, some of the “ways people have of keeping themselves going, at [. . .] endless expense of time and money” (LG 194). Sheila even manages to state, with some pride at having achieved someone else’s ideal, “I’ve returned, I think I may claim [ . . .], to being as Daddy would have liked to see me [. . .] That is the one thing I have done” (LG 202). Yet her escape from the past by returning to the even-more-distant past costs her more than time and money; in her chosen confinement, Sheila is also “into the drink” and, for the most part, out of friends

(LG 60, 67).

In addition to those who marry as some sort of escape from failed love into the confinement of a secure but incompletely loveless union generally characterized by hiding any emotion associated with the past, there are those who perhaps feel the need, after marrying, to escape from the marriage itself. Among these, the independence of Elfrida Tilney of Friends and Relations truly stands out. It seemed to her family, and to her son Edward in particular, “as though she had thought out what she ought not to do, what to avoid, what would hurt people most, and done it all.” When Edward was five years old, she left her husband for

Considine Meggatt, a lady’s man and big game hunter. Edward’s father, “notably sinned against, had broken-hearted declined and died: her victim” (FR 115). 141

Furthermore, in striking contrast to the norm in all of Bowen’s work, Elfrida and

Considine “did not marry” (FR 35).

What actually happened between the two of them seems rather ambiguous, with everyone tending to blame the other person. From Considine’s perspective, she “had not [. . .] treated him well.” She had

countered any approach from him, forbidding tenderness by her

discernment, by her lucidity [. . .] She undid passion [. . .] Having

now only him, she sent him away finally. She had perhaps injured

him, perhaps even vitally [. . .] Under her dry-eyed farewell look,

her last tragic un-regret, [. . .] he left behind with her [. . .] the

whole spring of his being, a manhood she had demanded then

undone. (FR 114)

Considine seems to believe that he may have been used as an excuse for Elfrida to escape Edward’s father and that, to escape fully, she sent him away, too. Janet, on the other hand, watching Considine, thought “He regretted [. . .] no one. They were all scattered, tarnished, unwillingly dead” (FR 113).

For years after Elfrida “ruined herself,” she lived alone, “so reproachfully,” in Paris while time and fading public indignation gradually reinstated her to some measure of respectability (FR 154, 34). Part of her plight illustrates that, for all its confining characteristics, marriage, even a second marriage to a disreputable rake, affords some protection and power. From her perspective, without the security of that institution, “I lost my hold; I couldn’t even dismiss a servant. Never to be in the right—it’s the only possible ruin, I 142 daresay, if one’s nothing besides a woman.” She recalls the total collapse of any

“moral privilege” with its consequent power. She refers to the experience as being “put away” or “Being shady” and claims that she was “grateful when anyone trod on my toe and apologized” (FR 185).

She also recalls how a loveless infatuation can turn into a confinement, as was the case in her relationship with Considine. She remembers a number of his

“precious exasperations,” things that “madden one at the beginning. They pull something right out taut; one thinks ‘Perfection’ [. . .] until exasperation itself sets in [. . .] Then suddenly [. . .] something goes, all the pleasure. ‘I never saw you:

I’ll never see you again!’ ” (FR 187). Thus she explains her motivation for not marrying Considine.

Though later she does think, on occasion, that she’s ruined, for the most part Elfrida seems freed by her choice (FR 180). Edward, who early in his life was constrained from asking about her and “had grown up always meaning to comfort her and to reestablish her,” was thus “absolutely nonplussed” when he did meet her, apparently by how little she seemed to need comfort or reestablishment (FR 35). Janet tells Edward that he is jealous of his mother because “she seems to have such a lovely time. Perhaps we all are” (FR 161).

A few divorcées, never numerous though understandably all in Bowen’s later novels, complete the list of escapees from marriage. The first of the divorcées, protagonist Stella Rodney of The Heat of the Day, does not attempt to escape her marriage. Rather, she allows her relatives, even her son, to believe that she had divorced her ailing World-War-I-veteran husband rather than face the 143 ignominy of having them know that he had left her for another, supposedly more sympathetic woman, a nurse. However, Antonia of A World of Love may have married to escape memories surrounding the death of Guy, a victim of the first world war, whom she loved. If so, the ploy had not worked, and the marriage—

“so soon over, so long ago”—had failed. The separation had not been bitter: more a mutual admission of a mistake. Alex “never thought less amiably of

Antonia, would have been happy to lend her money, and had, last time they’d happened to meet, offered her the use of his flat in Paris” (WL 202).

Clare of The Little Girls feels somewhat more bitter, perhaps because the need to escape the marriage was not hers, or not mutual. Regardless, the relief at being beyond marriage comes through clearly, “Mr. Wrong came along, all right.

That was a mess. So when I wrote that off, I took back my name” (LG 32).

Moreover, she has “No issue” because “Mr. Wrong gave me but scant chance to show my form” (LG 45).

Iseult Smith Arble of Eva Trout is reminiscent of Lilia of A World of Love in that she temporarily escapes marriage without actually divorcing or being divorced by her husband. Both flee from more than one intolerable irritant: Lilia from Ireland and Fred, Iseult from Eva and Eric. While Iseult’s flight is less token than Lilia’s, it is no less unsuccessful.

Eight years before the novel opens, Iseult Smith had been Eva Trout’s

English instructor at Lumleigh, “a first-rate, unambiguous girls’ school” where she had excelled as a “dazzling teacher.” She had, however, “thrown herself away,” abandoning “a star career for an obscure marriage” as the result of “a 144 cerebral young woman’s first physical passion” (ET 10, 11). As Iseult herself admits, “That kind of passion at its height can wipe out anything that’s an obstacle.” Eight years later, however, she sees that act as a sort of suicide: “In this case, the obstacle was my life [. . . .] I murdered my life, and I defy anybody to defend me. I should hang for it” (ET 94). Romantically unrealistic, Iseult had envisioned their life together as an idyll of sexual liberality and fruitfulness,

“embowered by dazzling acres, blossom a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later—fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums.” But Eric

“had failed as a fruit farmer” and the “Arbles had now been the Arbles for some years—so far, no children” (ET 16, 11).

In the meantime, Iseult helps to support them by translating works from the French. She will not, as Eric finally suggests, “Go back to teaching again”— though this is obviously what she’d been born to do—because it would imply failure. “I never go back!” she exclaims. Instead, she chooses the the loneliness of staying home even though home is neither a natural nor a comfortable setting for her: “Her movements as housewife were those of a marionette.” At this point, Eva, ever a catalyst and, on both literary and personal levels a complication, “had come along” (ET 17).

Iseult claims to have been ripe for a change. Though she and Eric “needed the Eva money, to make ends meet,” Iseult states that they “need not have had

Eva here,” but “I’m glad we did.” Because “the passion I had for Eric was becoming less than a memory” and “now it’s more than one,” Iseult, she says, 145 welcomes the “antagonism she’s sparked alive between him and me” (ET 94). Of course, Iseult accuses Eric of dissimulation but immediately gives an example of a lie that she has been telling herself. However stimulating her presence may sometimes be, Eva is also a reminder for Iseult of her own unfulfilled potential as a teacher—of “what you could do,” of “what you used to be when you liked” (ET

20). Her presence, unwittingly or not, also forms a barrier between Iseult and

Eric. Eric complains that “you and I seem to have never a chance to talk” because

“There she is” (ET 15). Iseult asserts that even when the two of them are alone they are really only “Waiting [. . .] for her to come back [. . .] We are never alone

[. . .] except in bed,” and, “We never make love” because Eva is “always there, always there, always there” (ET 15, 20).

Eva, unable to endure the disappearance of Iseult’s affection for her and only subliminally able to recognize it for the jealousy over Eric that it really is, flees the Arbles’ house. Years later, Iseult eventually comes to ask Eva, “Can’t we begin again?” She is motivated not by remorse over her past behavior but by guilt associated with the fact that Eva, before fleeing more permanently, gave her a check for “an enormous sum” because “There was some damage” in the relationship between Iseult and Eric. Apparently Eva paid ahead for damage to come. Her statement that she cannot come to see the Arbles at Christmas—when it will be nine months since she has seen Eric—because “In December I shall be having a little child,” obviously implies Eric’s participation in the event and, as

Eric later says, “injured my reputation” (ET 128, 176). 146

Certainly this action causes the breakup of the Arbles’ marriage for eight years. Iseult, saving face with the claim that she had wanted to escape all along,

“made a beeline for France,” and the rumor which circulated after Eva’s departure was that she “broke them up” (ET 163). The local vicar acknowledges that change does not happen so rapidly, that a “marriage [. . .] does not simply break like a china cup; it ends when it has been infinitely corroded.” But he also notes prophetically that the Arbles “had surmounted so much [. . .] The fruit farm disaster. Their to the outer eyes very great incompatability. Their continuing childlessness” (ET 173).

In the intervening years of freedom from Iseult, Eric has lived with a

Norwegian woman and fathered two children, admitting that he’d “wanted a kid all that time” (ET 175). Ironically, it is Eric’s “wish to contact [Iseult] with a view to obtaining [his] legal freedom” that brings the Arbles back together, both momentarily and then, it seems, permanently (ET 175, 176). Eric’s determination to interpret Iseult’s part in their separation in the best light makes it clear that his feelings for her have never materially changed—though he, too, at the outset of the parting seemed eager to escape his wife.

Iseult, however, consistently lies to herself about her feelings for Eric.

She tells Eva, “On the whole I am grateful to you [. . .]; if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. We could never have lasted” (ET 211). She has confined her emotions quite thoroughly, telling others that “I can’t [feel], I’m cleared. I’m as dead as a doornail” (ET 235). Observing Iseult’s skilled repression of feeling, Constantine accuses her of having had an “emotional 147 hysterotomy” (ET 252). Yet the experiment of going to France and trying to write a novel has cleared the way for her return to Eric. She has taken an opportunity to try to fulfill the dream of herself that she had destroyed by marrying Eric, and she has found herself unable to—her great novel “was born dead”—and Eric not at fault (ET 253). She has “been plunged in romance” with others and has the

“trophies” to show for it, but “Nothing went even as well as it did with Eric” (ET

254). Freedom was not liberating, but neither, Bowen implies, is marriage really necessary. In Bowen’s last novel, the number of confinements and dead ends multiplies.

In spite of her former vow that she “never go[es] back,” coming back to

England marks the first of several returns for Iseult (ET 17). She has already

“gone back” to “teaching as a fill-in” and discovered that she doesn’t teach as she used to, but her success in reaching and teaching Eva’s deaf-mute son renews some of her faith in her rightness for that profession (ET 252). Ultimately, though

“There are complications,” she returns to Eric as well (ET 275). At Eva’s departure for her wedding, Iseult appears “side by side with her husband,” who has achieved his own return to “coppery manly glowingness” denoting contentment. Each seems now literally attached to the other: “A retaining hand of his was under her elbow,” and he shows “no objection to her having him in tow, to an extent” (ET 291-92). Bowen gives no indication that Iseult and Eric will ever again be other than “the Arbles,” a unit.

More commonly, however, couples in Bowen’s novels reveal marriages of mutual consent for the purpose of continuing social approval. The following 148 passage from The Hotel vividly describes the bleakness of an enforced marital isolation in which women are encouraged only in social and domestic activities, but “One can’t always be going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one”:

“As winter comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel

hardly human, sitting evening after evening in an empty room [. . .]

If I shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it

feels so unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one

hears the servants laughing, or something to worry one. I am fond

of reading, but [. . .] well, it’s not fair, is it, to expect a book to take

the place of human society? [. . .] Once I [. . .] could hear four

different clocks ticking—I counted them—in different parts of the

flat . . . I really begin to feel [. . .] as if I didn’t exist. If somebody

does come to the door or the telephone does ring, I’m almost

surprised to find I’m still there. One would go mad if one were not

able to get abroad.”

She looked around with a shiver of retrospection at the

semicircle which was her pleasant asylum. The others expressed

their entire agreement. What they had all escaped was terrible. (H

88-89; italics added)

The essentially narrow and empty core of their lives is apparent despite the irony.

Their identities consist of being noticed and affirmed by others in the daily social or domestic realm; alone, they almost literally lose face. For them society—or at 149 least the society of women—is a balm, a corrective, an escape from self that reaffirms self.

Other examples of “working” marriages demonstrate similar deficiencies.

In The Hotel, the Lee-Mittisons’ union works primarily because Mrs. Lee-

Mittison’s every thought is devoted to pleasing and pampering her comically self- satisfied husband. She entertains a certain ideal of him as husband and herself as wife and works tirelessly to see that both conform to her image. She “gather[s]

Herbert’s happiness, all his little plans for the day, for protection under her feathers” and gives “such an impression of being ruffled-out, apprehensive and angry” that she is reminiscent of a hen (H 60). Mr. Lee-Mittison doesn’t seem aware of the strict parameters within which he operates, but others suggest that he would not be such an annoying “old blighter” if it were not for his wife’s encouragement (H 50). As long as the partner is not aware of or annoyed by the restrictions—like Rodney in Friends and Relations who is similarly though less humorously managed by Janet—then the limitations imposed do not constitute confinement.

Sydney, however, considers the wife’s perspective, wondering “if she

[. . .] ever wanted to marry him, or whether they had to” (H 32). With a shift of point of view, Bowen gives the reader a glimpse into Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who is limited to only a surname. While sitting in a “little oasis of solitude,” she sees a cottage with a blue door and lemon trees and briefly imagines a scene beyond the limitations of her own existence. In her reverie the little house becomes a place of her own, and she projects herself into its setting. But, just as she is going inside 150 with a pottery jug of warm goat milk, “something turned her back and she could not follow herself; she saddened, feeling excluded from some very intimate experience.” She “felt sick at the thought of their hotel bedrooms that stretched

[. . .] in unbroken succession before and behind her” (H 36-37). Unlike the hotel matrons, she feels shut out rather than shut in, and her rootlessness gives her a

“queer little pang” (H 38).

Another resident of the hotel, Colonel Duperrier, reveals the closing off of possibility that marriage represents when he reluctantly looks at his own situation.

By taking two of the Lawrence girls, all of whom are in their late teens or early twenties, to tea in town, he is also avoiding the wife “of whom he had asked no more than all she triumphantly promised, to be twenty at any age” (H 126).

Somewhere, he acknowledges, “Someone had lost herself, been lost to one, vanished” (H 125). His description of his wife, with its extremes of confinement and even a welcoming of obliteration and loss of identity, reveals Mrs. Duperrier as a minor “madwoman in the attic,” though more passive-aggressive than actively violent:

She was lying alone now up there, up in her room, waiting angrily

for the sun to go down and the light to go quite out and the

darkness to stifle her, [. . .] tossing to and fro in her poor mind

while her body lay rigid, silent though she was so pent up, storing

up her cries for him: “Oh, here you are, Alec [. . .] No, I didn’t

really expect you to come in. Why should you have come in? I

dare say you were happy down there” [. . . ] up there she would be 151

half insane with speculation; by this hour he had till now never

failed to present himself. (H 128, 131)

If he is happy, Colonel Duperrier’s happiness derives from denial. He

“shie[s] away from” looking too closely at himself or his wife. Moreover, he, too, is confined; he must take Joan Lawrence back to the hotel when she admits to being cold when he would probably rather whisk her off to a romantic villa. As a result, he “looked at Joan helplessly, because it would be ultimately beyond his province whether she were frozen or not” (H 127, 130). The solidity of conventions prevents his taking any other action.

In The Last September the Naylors and Montmorencys provide dubious representations of working marriages. The Naylors’ marriage persists because they mutually agree to shut out so many external influences. They employ native

Irish servants who may or may not be loyal to them and live near native Irish neighbors who may or may not be their friends. They entertain and their niece is entertained by British troops sent to subdue Irish republican activity. Yet the

Naylors adopt a policy of not noticing how awkward their situation is and of refuting any implication that anything is amiss. The excitement, Lady Myra and

Sir Richard agree, all seems to be the fault of “Something said in the English press” which “has apparently given rise to an idea that this country’s unsafe”—a quite erroneous idea, they insinuate (LS 80).

Beyond the constraints of an external life ruled by confinement, Lady

Myra Naylor also limits her husband’s knowledge of certain social or domestic issues that she believes he might find disturbing. She may want to guard her own 152 authority in these matters, but her dominance never seems in question. She insists, for example, that nothing at all exists between Lois and Gerald Lesworth.

Lady Naylor will not directly confront Lois about her behavior with the young man because Lois is Richard’s niece, not her own. She is adamant that she “really cannot have Richard bothered, it makes him so difficult. When he feels he ought to do something and isn’t sure what, there’s no saying at all what he may do” (LS

83). Thus Sir Richard, through his wife’s protective restrictions of his knowledge, is oblivious to one of the central conflicts of the novel.

The Montmorencys, like the Lee-Mittisons of The Hotel, move homelessly from place to place. Francie, some ten years older than her husband, provides the relatively unmoving center for the relationship. She has fragile health and was

“ordered abroad for successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure.”

Thus, “He came and went without her” (LS 14). She is afraid of limiting Hugo in any way; after their marriage, she was “anxious to compensate him for what she was not” by generally succumbing to his decisions—or lack thereof. She “had tried, but had not been able, to keep him—first from marrying her, then from giving up Canada, leaving his friends when she had to go to the south of France, or from brushing her hair in the evenings.” Elsewhere she adds that she was also unable to dissuade him from selling his house, Rockriver. She is needlessly afraid that others will see him as “Uxorious,” that they will “say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her dresses” (LS 19). Though the evidence points to a number of

Hugo’s decisions that make their marriage one of continual movement, she sees 153 their life together as characterized by “the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her minor relinquishments” (LS 14).

Others are not so charitable in their assessment of Hugo, whom they correctly believe to have handicapped himself. Lois sees “with a jar” the disparity between “What he might have been” and “what he persisted in being” and comes to regard him as “a limitation, Mrs. Montmorency’s limitation” (LS 34). Marda declares that, if Hugo brushes Francie’s hair, then their relationship “is mutual.”

But she also asserts that his disabilities and, possibly, his responsibility for the marriage’s childlessness—a reoccurring Bowen theme of confinement—extend even to procreation: “He couldn’t be anything’s father” (LS 113, 192).

Moreover, “Nothing [. . .] will become of him” (LS 192).

It is ironic, then, that Hugo sees himself as a “born lover.” He painstakingly charts the course of “cycles within him, springs and autumns of desire and disenchantment” (LS 123). Perhaps his wife is “disenchantment” and other attractive women “desire.” When in spite of her bad heart Francie pursues him down the avenue, insisting in a motherly fashion that he must carry an umbrella, he “walked on with a back view of positive hatred” (LS 155). When they are alone that evening, “he was still too angry about the umbrella to speak,” so they “lay beside each other under the darkness in an intent and angry silence.”

Feeling confined by her presence, he “could not bear her to intrude upon his wakefulness. Whichever way he turned in that mournful freedom—and the perspective of his regret opened fanwise [. . .]—she would come stumbling after 154 him, hand to heart” (LS 156). Certainly this is disenchantment, and worse, but it is only one side of a relationship that, at other times, provides a home for Hugo.

For her part, she “feigned sleep rigidly, [. . .] Her mind clenched tight, like a fist, at the isolation of this proximity.” She remembers times in France when she had lain awake, missing Hugo, but now she feels “a nostalgia for that solitude.” The “tenderness of imagined contact” far surpasses the intolerant detachment of reality (LS 157).

Indeed, both the Montmorencys, and Hugo in particular, often prefer imaginary connections. Hugo makes a point of yielding to the springs of desire when they occur. Apparently he has a reputation for falling in love—or at least with the idea of being in love—with regularity, though not necessarily of acting upon his infatuations. He had once supposedly been in love with and almost married Laura Naylor, who later became Lois’s mother. With the arrival of

Marda, “Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus,” and he realizes, almost twenty years later, that “he had never loved her.” Instead, “his anger released from

Laura, settled upon” Marda. She had immediately “been real to him as a woman,” and now, he thinks, “He loved her: a sense of himself rushed up, filling the valley” (LS 118, 181). Lady Naylor realizes that Marda does not have “at all a good effect on Hugo,” and that “Francie notices” and “is unhappy.” She confides that “one does know what Hugo is” and suggests that he needs “real trouble” to make him grow up, an indication that society obviously expects certain behavior at certain ages (LS 171). His “unfortunate ability to be young at any time” has already resulted in years of aimlessness and self-pity rationalized by the excuse of 155

“my wife’s health” (LS 182, 183). When Marda leaves, the fact that “There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be rather painfully not said” leaves him to continue to feel martyred by all his missed opportunities. He has passed by these chances, he frequently though not always believes, due to the confinement of his marriage.

The marriages of Laurel and Edward Tilney and Janet and Rodney

Meggatt in Friends and Relations also demonstrate confinement within relationships externally even more solid than that of the Montmorencys (FR 200).

Laurel and Edward do love each other, but Edward also loves his sister-in-law

Janet and could have married her if he had acknowledged to himself his repressed feelings for her. Instead, in acts that combine the confinement of childhood with the confinement of marriage, he proposes to and marries the safer, more charmingly childlike Laurel.

For ten years after this event, proximity and a tacit mutual agreement never to grow up—another self-confining flouting of societal expectations—keep

Edward and Laurel’s marriage going. Laurel “would not condone [Edward’s] mother’s infidelity to his childhood,” so “they went to sleep hand-in-hand” and

“she made up arrears of nonsense right back to his infancy” (FR 170). Edward, meanwhile, demonstrated “charmingly adolescent reserve in love” and

“kindergarten paternity” (FR 254). Hardly ever apart, “Proximity was their support; like walls after an earthquake they could fall no further for they had fallen against each other.” However “delicious” Laurel remains when close by, marital continuity does require “this necessity of never being divided” (FR 169). 156

Then, when Edward chooses to divide them spatially by travelling a hundred miles to confront Janet with the hollowness of her apparently perfect marriage to Rodney, the façade of Tilney marital bliss erodes. Wanting yesterday to return, Laurel retreats further into childhood. Her “nostalgia for girlhood became acute,” and she tells Janet, “I wish we could just go back” (FR 201, 225).

She regrets her decision to become Edward’s wife: “What a wedding day, what rain, what a frightful mistake!” She points out the hidden irony of her life:

“Funny, I seemed to have everything, didn’t I?” but “I’ve never been anything but a daughter” (FR 226). When she goes for her annual visit to her parents’ home, she falls into former habits with her father: “Her arm was often through his; as of old, she kept pressing into his shoulder her sharp chin.” When her mother turns off the light in Laurel’s old bedroom, “there was a movement, as though Laurel held her arms out, as though she were nine years old” (FR 275). Mrs. Studdart repeatedly “felt it proper to pick up Laurel’s life, like a piece of unfinished sewing, and hand it back to her” (FR 276). For Bowen, adulthood is the step that finishes or completes life, and Laurel will perhaps always be confined to childhood.

In contrast, Edward seems finally to grow up. He is sure that Janet, when he would not recognize his feelings ten years ago, had “thought him infantile,” but after admitting his love to Janet at her home and reaffirming it in London, “he felt too old for his world; he had graduated” (FR 169, 228). He tells Janet, “I never guessed what a woman was,” because till then he had been in many ways a boy married to a girl (FR 236). 157

For both of them, proximity has now changed. Despite “her nearness to him in the spaceless present,” between them stretches the “agonizing tension [. . .] of a silent telephone-wire,” of a call that would have told Laurel that Edward had not gone away with Janet—a call that Edward never made (FR 264).

Nevertheless, the pressure of propriety keeps their marriage together indefinitely.

Laurel tells herself “that marriage was a good thing: she had no pride, it was a good thing he should be obliged to love her” (FR 230). By “love,” she apparently means care, support and, of course, proximity. Perhaps since it is the woman’s role to be at fault, when she reminds him that he could have called, she then apologizes for having mentioned the telephone. She “remembered nothing; it was impossible to speak of forgiveness; that meant nothing, nothing. She was so happy, she said again.” Because speech confines, defines and thereby makes real,

“Once or twice she silenced him with her fingers or her lips.” Resigning herself to pretending happiness, perhaps for years, she “thought of sleep and of a hundred solitary woman’s wakings, beside but without him” (FR 269). With a final image of confinement, inexorably, time is carrying them forward: “they had only to keep still, not rocking their boat” (FR 270).

Janet and Rodney’s situation is similar. When Janet orchestrated her marriage to Rodney through fear of being left out and anger over Edward’s rejection, she unwittingly “graduated” to an adulthood of confinement. She tells

Elfrida, “I thought being afraid or angry were like stones; I didn’t see they had a life of their own [. . . ] and could be so strangling—” (FR 184). Janet has already achieved ten years of being the ideal wife. Rodney loves her and apparently 158 suspects nothing. Thinking only of keeping too busy to consider her own desires,

Janet fills her days with good works. When she finally admits her love to

Edward, she creates “A woman, an unborn shameful sister” that “had come to interpose between herself and Laurel” (FR 213). The woman “materialized on the upward train journey” to London, and “the porter shutting the door shut Janet in with it.” Eventually the woman “enlarged, took Janet within its outlines, occupied her own corner place.” Janet’s fate is to co-exist with this figure—“less than a sinner” yet “the prey of all speculation, the unpitiable quarry of talk”— forever confined with her and by her (FR 214). Her mother becomes aware that

“another woman was present” and “felt constrained, perhaps, by this constant company in which her own daughter Janet, Rodney’s wife or Hermione’s mother remained impossible to discuss.” And “once or twice, Colonel Studdart perceived a stranger.” He also detected that “here something forgotten stirred—a beautiful woman” (FR 274). Neither Janet nor Laurel escapes her marriage. Laurel remains childlike while womanly Janet is beautified—whether by suffering or behaving morally is not clear—though forever confined to her dark, silent self.

While the two couples satisfy societal expectations and make the best choice for the largest number of people by living acceptably within the marriage structure, their obvious awareness of confinement reduces the quality of life for three of the four married individuals.

In The Death of the Heart, Anna and Thomas Quayne are yet another example of a marriage confined by having only a one-sided love. Apparently, they “eat each other [. . .] the whole time. And that’s what they call love” (DH 159

294). A good example of their behind-closed-doors exchanges occurs when the

Quaynes return home from their vacation abroad. The real motive for the politely-worded fight is the ever-confining presence, downstairs, of Portia, but

Anna can never be direct and so attacks obliquely. After she sends Matchett away because she “could see from her face she was going to say something,” Anna tells

Thomas, “I wish you would say something. Our life goes by without any comment.” She gives “Thomas’s head a light friendly-unfriendly cuff,” repeating her complaint, “We’re home, Thomas: have some ideas about home—” His reply, “Shut up: don’t knock me about. I’ve got a headache” is hardly more promising. She accuses him of “creating [a situation] by having a headache” and of “making creases in my quilt” while contradicting herself by explaining, “What

I really want to do is to dress and not have to talk” (DH 334, 335). She elaborates, “All the time we were there, I kept imagining England coolish and grey, and now we land into this inferno of glare.” With fine understatement, he responds, “You don’t much like anything, do you?” and Anna, “smiling her nice fat malign smile,” says, “No, nothing” (DH 336). Certainly marriage must be included in such a sweeping generalization.

Actually, Anna does seem to enjoy the outer trappings of marriage. She likes having a comfortable, secure, well-decorated home to which she may invite male friends for tea to vary the monotony of her days. Only the assumption— which Thomas rarely broaches but of which Portia provides a constant reminder—that marriage, or indeed life, should have an emotional core seems occasionally to penetrate Anna’s thick armor of heartlessness. 160

Minor couples in the novel experience less confinement. The Studdarts tolerate each other’s foibles well. They are able to make major decisions without discussion (FR 23). When at the Meggatt home, Batts, Colonel Studdart “was at a loss without his wife” (FR 94). Alex and Willa Thirdman, as their name suggests, are like an unwanted third party everywhere they go, but they live in harmonious ignorance of their position as nonentities. When they attend Laurel’s wedding they “were satisfied [by] having been overlooked with such affability” (FR 40).

Alex, one of countless Bowen males deserving the title, is the only one that

Bowen actually labels “ineffectual” (FR 50). If the Thirdmans are confined at all, it is not by each other but by their daughter, whom they send off to boarding school at the “difficult age” of fifteen (FR 41). Ironically, Theodora, difficult at every age, feels even more confined by their cordial passivity.

In To the North, comic Lady Waters considers it her sacred duty to make matches for everyone who is not yet married and to make sure that any already- married couples experience enough confinement and discontent to disengage them from each other. Moreover, she completely dominates her likable but rather ineffectual partner. Likewise, the Michaelis parents of The House in Paris are somewhat reminiscent of the Naylors in The Last September. They coexist peacefully in part because Mrs. Michaelis and her daughter Karen confine information from Mr. Michaelis. Taking the burden of Karen’s domestic troubles on herself while shielding her husband, Mrs. Michaelis dies before he does, confining Mr. Michaelis to living alone and wishing, from his limited knowledge, for grandchildren. 161

The marriage of Cousin Francis and Cousin Nettie Morris of The Heat of the Day suggests more strongly than most of Bowen’s relatively homogenous upper-class marriages that inbreeding may impose confinement. Nettie seems to have admired Francis when he was only her relative: “Oh, I wish you could have seen him when he was a young man, when he was my cousin. Head and shoulders above all the rest of them, full of schemes and life!” But the idea of primogeniture grips Francis, and “he had to go out looking for a son” (HD 201).

Nettie, for whom “it must have been impossible [. . .] to look at the surface only,

[. . .] could not help seeing what was the matter—what he had wanted me to be was his wife” (HD 199, 209). While Francis decides that she is the one for him,

“it was only for [Nettie] that there was nothing to do but what [she] did” (HD

205). Eventually, as she finds herself “Day after day [. . .] sinking further down

[the] well” of their life together, what she must do includes voluntarily committing herself to an English home for the mentally unstable in order to escape Francis and Ireland (HD 208, 205).

The “working marriage” of Fred and Lilia in A World of Love works only in a rather halting fashion. Though forced into their nuptials by Antonia, they harbor a physical attraction stifling to others though liberating to themselves.

When they first wed, the two “engendered a climate; the air round them felt [. . .] sultry, overintensified, strange; once could barely breathe it.” Fred at least feels an “unforeseen passion” for Lilia that, “Unleashed by marriage, [. . .] ran its unspeaking course, just outlasting the birth of their first child, Jane” (WL 23).

Then the two go their separate ways—insofar as is possible for a couple confined 162 more by unspoken contract to Antonia’s house and land than by vows to each other. They sleep “for years [. . .] at opposite ends of the house” while Fred goes

“back to [the] loves in the lanes” for which he’d been known before marriage (WL

24). The continual physical labor of farming also enables Fred to escape from

Montefort and Lilia. Once, when Jane was seven, Lilia “had made a bolt for

London,” but Antonia threatens Fred into bringing her back to Ireland. A shortlived “reconciliation,” further demonstrating the cyclical nature of their attraction to one another, ensues. When Jane at twenty releases the ghost of Guy to haunt Montefort once more, her act takes Jane, enamoured of Guy, further from

Fred, who has worshipped her since her birth in lieu of Lilia. And, after Lilia confronts her own past truthfully, the return of Guy’s shade takes Lilia, who professes that she had stayed “faithful to Guy’s memory,” further from Guy (WL

21). The vacuum left behind creates space anew for Fred and Lilia, who turn to each other. Fred finds Lilia in a walled garden where they “used to go [. . .] when we first got married” (WL 153). In a sort of positive confinement, Fred suspends

Lilia by the elbows, giving her “the sensation that her feet were being washed away from under her, but that she did not need them.” She “studie[s] Fred’s chest

[. . .] from nearer to it than she had been [. . .] for years” (WL 147). They have a conversation that amounts to a mutual apology, and, though the days that these two “have still to live stay so much the same,” and though they can hope only for survival, “Survival seemed more possible now, for having spoken to one another had been an act of love” (WL 156). Bowen seems to imply that even a physical bond, having once existed, may be forged again, and that, when those within the 163 bond agree to its limitations, their sense of confinement diminishes: “This was not so much a solution as a dissolution, a thinning-away of the accumulated hardness of many seasons” (WL 155). The two reconciliations of Fred and Lilia recall that of Iseult and Eric Arble. Both relationships began with physical passion and, after departures from strict marital fidelity, show hope of renewed physical closeness and at least shared forbearance. Marriage in Bowen’s novels is not always a prison, but the exceptions are rare.

The working marriages within The Little Girls revert to the more common pattern of marriage for convenience or escape. Major and Mrs. Burkin-Jones married because, like him, “She was born Army,” and “We make dynastic marriages” (LG 216). Later he falls in love with another woman with whom he seems limited to having only a few less-than-private conversations. Like Edward

Tilney, he chooses to leave love and to continue marriage—though shortly thereafter he is killed in World War I.

The elder Beakers, undoubtedly both long-term Southstone residents of the same social class, stay together in spite of Mrs. Beaker’s rabid perfectionism.

Mr. Beaker bequeaths to Sheila the conviction that staying together and becoming pillars of the community is the only proper course for a faithful Southstone daughter and wife. So, in spite of the fact that Sheila doesn’t love Trevor and married him for social acceptance and an escape from memories of the man she did love, she can say, “I’ve returned [. . .] to being as Daddy would have liked to see me” LG 202). Sheila embraces security at the cost of endless emotional confinement. 164

Most Bowen couples marry to escape the past or to secure the future rather than for love or even lust. Some women marry “to keep up the fiction of being the hub of things” (HP 94). Some men marry to solidify assets and to produce an heir (HD 201). All would agree with the platitude, “Marriage was always difficult” (FR 200). Most who have escaped some painful past episode find that, without love, marriage becomes only a new confinement accompanied by new pain. Most who have married only for a secure home feel confined because they fall in love with someone outside of marriage who is often doubly inaccessible due to his or her own marriage. But almost all of them, both men and women, ultimately prefer the social acceptance and solidity associated with marriage to the ostracism and uncertainty of divorce. Only Elfrida of Friends and Relations voluntarily leaves husband and child for another man and is divorced

“punitively.” Afterward, Elfrida enjoys freedom in a way that continues to

“exasperate the affection” and to defy complete explanation (FR 28). Once, however, she has “this less than moment for consternation” when her face is briefly “ravaged” and she believes that “her own life was ruined, ruined—” (FR

15). This glimpse of ruination seems to contradict the visage that Elfrida presents to the world—or to reveal the extent to which she has carried emotional confinement. Yet Elfrida chose not to marry her “co-respondent,” Considine (FR

21). She finds herself not in love with him after all and sends him away. Perhaps, in spite of moments of regret, she agrees with Dinah, a widow with ample opportunity to remarry, from The Little Girls. When asked whether her mother

“should have married again,” Dinah responds unequivocally, “Again?—Even I 165 have never wanted to do that. Oh, no. No. There are shocks you don’t take the risk of twice” (LG 225). This statement, from Bowen’s penultimate novel, seems close to her last word on the subject of marriage, and the limitations of a union with a single human being, not always for the best of reasons, must constitute much of the shock to which she refers.

Death

The final confining stage of life in Bowen’s novels which requires close attention is, inevitably, death. Death seems to confine the deceased only insofar as it gradually erases the recollections of the dead by the living. Bowen primarily emphasizes, therefore, the confining effects of death on the living. The Hotel’s protagonist, Sydney Warren, considers these effects warily. If adulthood equals completion of personality for Bowen’s characters, then death represents an even more comprehensive finality. Sydney feels confined by ideas associated with death, by “the treachery of a future that must give one to [death] ultimately [. . .] it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one, the last and most humiliating of

[the] deprivations” of adulthood. Death, she believes, will be the end of any hope of escape: “It is all very well to escape to the future and think it will always be that; but this is the end of the future” (H 152).

The novel most permeated with the effects of a single death is A World of

Love. No major character escapes the repercussions of Guy’s death, and the predominant effect is confinement, particularly confinement to the time and circumstances of his death. Antonia is the principal victim of his death. She apparently married on the rebound soon after Guy “abandoned” her by being 166 killed in World War I, but the union was ill-advised, short-lived and childless.

Effects of Guy’s death finish Antonia’s career as a photographer. Now she smokes too much, drinks too much, and travels aimlessly on finances which also seem to be dwindling. She cannot progress beyond Guy’s death to make anything of her own life. She remains angry with Guy, whom she loved with a depth unrequited by her cousin. She tortures herself by retaining the property he bequeathed to her, with all its accompanying memories, more for the sake of those memories than for any substantial profit.

The one unconfined act that demonstrates any interest by Antonia in her current surroundings is her virtual adoption of Jane as a sort of surrogate daughter. However, since Jane is in fact the daughter of Guy’s fiancée and another more distant cousin of Antonia’s, this act is an attempt to recreate one- who-would-have-been-Guy’s daughter. At one point Antonia thinks, correctly but with significant emphasis, of Jane as “Our blood, his and mine, roundabout by way of the byblow Fred” (WL 117). Moreover, Antonia’s interest in Jane, while it provides for her a better-than-average education and travel beyond a rather limited Irish sphere, also often removes Jane from her parents and their voice in her upbringing and future. The alienation of Fred and Lilia during much of their marriage, and Fred’s obvious preference of his daughter to his wife, however, suggest that her confinement from them could be positive.

In any case, Jane proves to be redemptive for Antonia, for her parents, and for herself. Her simple act of rummaging through the attic brings her to a packet of Guy’s letters through which the shade of Guy is released and consequently 167 purged. Bowen presents Guy’s reappearance in a series of pivotal ghostly visitations, to Jane, Antonia and Lilia in turn. Guy brings Jane, who suffers her last infatuation of childhood with him after reading his love letters, to the brink of adulthood and frees her to go beyond.

For Antonia and Lilia, who do not read the letters but knew Guy personally and loved him, his return frees them from twenty years of a past that, unthinkably, did not include Guy. One evening after Antonia returns from a failed attempt to escape to the sea, she then works herself into a heightened emotional state by angrily retrieving Jane from a “seedy outing” at Lady

Latterly’s. She seems almost schizophrenic as she objectively regards the two halves “of the self which had come apart.” One half, it seems, wanted to find in the sea an escape, possibly even the permanent escape of suicide; the other half considered finding at least a momentary escape within life, in “Fred’s arms.”

Foiled in both these attempts, Antonia finally contemplates the question that characterizes her entire life: “could one continue what was never begun?” (WL

111). With her newly “unpent senses,” she perceives the “annihilating need left behind by Guy.” She suspects that “the scene had a witness other than her,” and that the witness is Guy: “Was he [. . .] looking on now?” (WL 112). She feels drawn by the front door, “left wide open upon the allaying night” and outside meets “a windlike rushing towards her” that she interprets as “her youth and

Guy’s, from every direction.” The experience is a return to the past, with Guy and Antonia, “now one again, [. . .] entering back into possession,” but it is also a

“going forward” in which “all there had been to be, do, know, dare, live for and 168 die for [. . .] came flooding to this doorstep” and, finally, “Doom was lifted from her” (WL 113). Time, which has stopped throughout much of the novel, resumes, and “This was not the long-ago, it was now or nothing [. . .] What was returned to her was the sense of ‘always’—the conviction of going on, on and on.” She recalls when she and Guy once repeatedly tested immortality together, conceiving

“of no death, least of all [the] death-in-life” which she has lived for twenty years.

Antonia feels that they again have time—or perhaps eternity since she describes the phenomenon as “an endless rushing, or rushing endlessness”—within their control. Guy gives her “the signal to go on again”—though Bowen includes suggestions that what Antonia has been freed to experience may indeed be the afterlife. Lilia mentions her rheumatism, a sign of growing older, and Bowen uses Jane as her mouthpiece for a pronouncement that makes Antonia seem already on the other side: “I shall never see Antonia again, Jane thought.

Something has happened. Somehow she’s gone.—She’s old” (WL 200, 194).

If Antonia’s liberation suggests eternity, Lilia’s is more of a return to life.

At the beginning of the causal chain, Antonia suggests a trip to London for her, and this anticipated change in turn sends Lilia to Clonmore for a new hairdo.

There Jane’s questions about Guy force her into a “brought-about recollection” that, after her return to Montefort, leaves her “worn down” enough for Guy’s final visitation (WL 141). The memory that exhausted her was that Guy had not wanted her to come to see his departure for France and the war, and that he had been looking for someone else when she had arrived in opposition to his orders.

She had waited, after his goodbye kiss, trapped in the nearby crowd, until Antonia 169 too had come to say farewell and been rebuffed by the fact that Guy had also not been looking for her and was also not pleased to see her. The conclusion, that there was another woman, supremely loved by Guy yet neither his cousin nor his

“Beloved” fiancée, “was not to be thought of, so never was”—till now (WL 143).

Now, finally, he appears as something of a false idol, or at least human enough that Lilia can direct her anger toward him—and thereby free herself from having repressed the emotion for twenty years. He becomes culpable, from the perspective of Lilia and Antonia, in the deterioration of the lives of those who have lived on because he “carelessly turned away, having somehow hastened the trend to ruin in such life or lives as his own had touched.” He becomes a

“defaulter, a runner-out upon his unconsummated loves” (WL 144).

Yet, because he continued “affecting them, working on them, causing them most to dread to decline from being as once he saw them, [. . .] He had not finished with them [. . .]” (WL 145). Lilia feels that “something more than human was at its intensity” and, unable to abide “the waiting to know,” Lilia, no longer

“retreating but advancing,” moves to confront Guy’s shade. Then, “as one does see the brilliant image of him [. . .] whom one is to meet in reality in a moment,” she “saw him.” She tries to “transfix” Guy and, unable to, rationalizes that “to be gone, a man must have been here!” (WL 146). The setting, a “vanishing garden” comprised of walls hidden by vines, symbolizes both the life of the Anglo-Irish

Ascendancy and the chronic confinement of Lilia’s existence, but now “The door was open”; significantly, it was opened by her husband, Fred (WL 145, 146).

Arm in arm, “they went through the door,” with Lilia mutely indicating that she 170 wants to go outside, away from walls. In retrospect, Lilia realizes that who she had seen was Fred when he first entered the garden looking for her, but “who was

I to imagine it could be you? As we are now, [. . .] Guy seemed more likely, dead as he is” (WL 152). Fred has rescued from Maud what he believes to be Lilia’s letters to Guy, and he offers them to Lilia, again with a suggestion of releasing something: “Go on, untie them!” (WL 149). But Lilia, who knows that the letters are not hers, and who does not really want to know whose they are, suggests that

Fred should have burned them and ultimately leaves them behind, forgotten.

Finally, the specter of Guy does seem to be dead, freeing both Lilia and Fred to explain, to apologize, to begin a long-overdue reconciliation. Nevertheless,

Bowen surely gives Guy his universalized name, without surname, to demonstrate, Donne-like, that all are involved in mankind and each “guy’s” death diminishes the whole.

Some Bowen characters—a remarkable five in ten novels—seek to escape the limitations of the present rather than the confining influence of the past as represented by someone like Guy. Having no recoverable past, no guarantee of a better future, or only confinement by or to something intolerable in the present, they effect their own deaths by choosing suicide as escape. In doing so, however, they also break out of the linear progression from childhood to death and may, therefore, be any age. However, to an even greater extent than death by other means, their chosen method of release confuses and confines the living, who must deal with its consequences. 171

The first character to feel drawn to taking her own life, Sydney Warren of

The Hotel, only contemplates suicide before experiencing an epiphany that life is real and not the romantic abstraction that she had thought it. At twenty-two she chooses life, even with all of its complications. Two others, Dicey Piggott’s father in The Little Girls and Eva Trout’s father in Eva Trout, are minor characters disposed of by Bowen to account for some of the psychological propensities of their offspring. Dicey lost her father even before she was born.

“[S]omething he couldn’t bear,” something that “gave way underneath him, all of a sudden” caused him to go “under [a] train.” His daughter later speculates that the reason was “some worry, partly money?” but “Nothing to do with” her mother because “They’d been so happy.” Certainly Bowen paves the way for Dinah, who is “Too happy, possibly,” to feel something give way underneath her and to experience a breakdown as a result (LG 224). She too becomes self-destructive, telling her friend and servant, “If you bring anybody in here, I’ll go through that window. I don’t mind glass” (LG 240). Later, however, her crisis passes, and she becomes more flippant. She explains to Sheila “through the bathroom door” that she is “not opening a vein,” and later tells her, “Since you say I’m not dotty, then I’m just failing” (LG 243, 246).

The effects of the suicide of Willy Trout, whom his daughter Eva “closely resembles,” on that daughter are even more far-reaching (ET 148). Her mother having already died in a plane crash before Eva could remember her, her father then commits suicide when Eva is in her upper teens, leaving her an orphan.

“How [. . .] could a thing belong to anyone dead?” Eva asks, and she declares, 172 furthermore, “Never [. . .] have I been anyone’s” (ET 8, 88). Specifically, she was never her father’s even during his life because there was “Always Constantine,” her “father’s friend” (ET 88, 8). Eva associates Constantine, who became her guardian after Willy’s death, “with her father’s suicide, and no doubt rightly” (ET

96). The homosexual relationship between Willy and Constantine lasted, as Eva says ironically, “till my father killed himself,” and Iseult Arble, Eva’s teacher, mentor and sometime confidante, maintains that Eva “had watched him being destroyed” (ET 202, 271). Then, Iseult continues, “Eva could not or would not forget her father. There was something she fanatically wanted to redress. That

Willy image, it became her object to repair, or reconstitute.” And, because of the flaws that Eva perceives in herself—her lack of education, her inarticulateness, her gender with its vulnerabilities—“The means [. . .] would be a boy” (ET 271,

272). Thus Eva buys a stolen male child on the black market and makes her own attempt at reconstructing the past through Jeremy, “scion of Willy Trout” (ET

208). When, for several hours, the boy disappears with Iseult, Eva further confirms Iseult’s words, “If he is in the past, there is no future. He was to be everything I shall not be” (ET 219-20). After eight-year-old Jeremy kills Eva with Iseult’s gun, her rather final use of the future tense seems prophetic. Eva, confined by her dream of re-creating and bettering the future to compensate for and avenge a past gone terribly wrong, makes an irrevocable decision with similarly irrevocable consequences.

In addition to the minor characters, three major Bowen characters provide climactic moments in her novels by using suicide to escape from the horror of the 173 present. In the case of one such character, Robert Kelway of The Heat of the Day, it is not entirely clear whether he killed himself or was killed while attempting to flee arrest. Regardless, Robert makes it plain, after admitting to Stella that he is a spy for the Nazis, that he expects death when he goes out onto the roof.

Preferring to evade “the trap” of living on his mother’s terms, Robert chooses to come to see Stella though he realizes that his choice may mean dying on his own terms (HD 269). Robert acknowledges that the two of them would never “have come to the point of breaking silence if we had not known this was goodbye,” yet he professes that he does “want to make it” because “my ideas [. . .] are too good to be merely died for.” Nevertheless, at least in part because he dreads the “stink” it would make for Stella if he stayed to “face it out,” he asks for “a way out on to the roofs” and remarks, “There’s one great thing about a roof; there’s one way off it” (HD 278-79). Bowen characterizes Robert’s consequent death as a “fall or leap” into darkness, one final “fifty-fifty” escape attempt in a lifetime characterized by running, primarily from maternal mantraps (HD 281, 280).

Robert’s death results in a number of releases for himself and others. He eludes, permanently, his mother’s baiting of him and the consequences of his treasonable decision to work as a German double agent. His death, however, also inadvertently confines Stella as she chooses to keep his secret. She conceals the real reason for his escape to the roof from everyone except herself, Rodney and various members of British and German intelligence. With undoubtedly mixed motives, she even frees Robert’s family from any burden of knowing his real 174 activities and enables them to keep their ideals about a patriotic English home front intact.

In contrast to Robert Kelway’s “fall or leap,” Max Ebhart’s suicide in The

House in Paris is one about which there is no doubt. Like Robert’s, Max’s history also includes fleeing from the machinations of a woman. Mme. Fisher, a widow old enough to be Max’s mother, has for twelve years been his mentor and confidante. Max explains the process through which she molded and manipulated him:

We met in her house, in all senses [, and] as she saw me, I became.

In my youth, she made me shoot up like a plant in enclosed air.

She was completely agreeable. Our ages were complimentary. I

had never had the excitement of intimacy. Our brains became like

senses, touching and drawing back [. . .] Women I knew were as

she made me see them [. . .] Any loves I enjoyed stayed inside her

scope; she knew of them all. She mocked and played upon my

sensuality. She always had time to see me; she did not turn upon

me however angry she was. (HP 180-81)

Obviously her methods, however ultimately confining, were at first welcome to

Max. But from the moment that she had observed that Karen Michaelis—one of the “well-bred, well-fed, well-read English-speaking girls” who passed “two at a time” through the house in Paris to help with expenses since Mme. Fisher’s husband’s death—was in love with Max, she had entertained plans for their future together. Karen remembers him in the salon, “waiting for Mme Fisher to come in 175 or be free to talk to him,” and she also recalls “How [Mme. Fisher] used to smile when she found me in the hall” outside (HP 137, 169).

Then, at thirty-two Max on impulse proposes to Mme. Fisher’s daughter,

Naomi, “[b]ut Mme Fisher did not want Max as a son-in-law” (HP 136). All along she has pushed him to greater ambition, telling others that “His decision to marry Naomi was a surprise to me, as I believed he had other prospects in view”

(HP 168). When Max comes to England with Naomi, who must pack the effects and settle the estate of an aunt who has died, Karen justly suspects Mme. Fisher’s scheming: “Did she send Max to England?” (HP 169). Upon his return to

France, Mme. Fisher tells Max that Karen loves him “to show that I should set my cap higher than Naomi,” and the information precipitates the call to Karen which results in their meeting secretly on two occasions and finally agreeing to marry

(HP 183). Karen astutely observes to Max, “I think she is in love with you” (HP

181).

But finally Mme. Fisher’s will to power overrules her love for Max and destroys him. Her other motive for informing Max of Karen’s love for him, according to Max, was “The wish to hear me say what I would hate” (HP 183).

She wants to control Max completely and cannot resist gloating when she discovers that he has in fact broken off his engagement to her daughter in order to marry Karen. Mme. Fisher admits, “It was commendation he could not bear. I was commending him when he took his knife out. He struck myself, himself, my knowledge of him” (HP 242). 176

Because “he dreaded to be with her,” after his tryst with Karen, Max had refused Mme. Fisher’s written request to come and see her (HP 236). Undaunted, she orders her daughter to see him and arranges for the maid and the American girls staying at her house to be out. Then she stands outside the door to listen to their conversation until Max catches her doing so, when she directs her daughter to go to bed (HP 238-40). Naomi reports her realizations at this point:

I saw Max’s face as he stood opposite my mother, after his love for

you had fallen into her hands [. . .] I saw then that Max did not

belong to himself. He could do nothing that she had not expected;

my mother was at the root of him. I saw that what she had learnt

about you and him pleased her, that she had pleasure in it in some

terrible way. Her eyes were bright, she was smiling [. . .] I saw

then, that evil dominated our house, and [. . .] that all her life her

power had never properly used itself. (HP 239-41)

Mme. Fisher continues to uncover the depths of her power over Max. His having met and made love to Karen she cruelly describes as having “already secured your position” (HP 240). In his desperation to flee her influence, he swiftly cuts his wrist, and, even at this moment, Mme. Fisher believes that Max’s every move is about her: “He cut his wrist across, through the artery, to hurt me.” Afterward,

“now that [her power] had used itself she was like the dead, like someone killed in a victory” (HP 241). When she recounts to her daughter the details of his flight,

“she stopped and smiled and said: ‘He needed so much to escape’ ” (HP 243).

And escape he does, but at the price of leaving behind Karen and his unborn son 177 to deal with the consequences. In the context of the novel, it is the act of “a foreign man,” a Frenchman who, unlike the English, has “no idea of saving anyone’s face” (HP 141).

As an act of extremity, Max’s death is surpassed in Bowen’s novels only by the suicide of To the North’s Emmeline Summers , a young Englishwoman who manages to destroy both herself and her tormentor. While Max Ebhart’s suicide is clearly an intentional and physical act both escaping and inflicting pain, hers reflects a more involuntary and psychological need to be elsewhere.

Generally Emmeline is elsewhere quite effortlessly. She is the twenty- five-year-old sister-in-law and housemate of Cecilia Summers, a twenty-nine- year-old widow. Bowen presents Emmeline as looking “very young, or perhaps rather ageless [and] and her air between serenity and preoccupation made her look rather like an angel.” Though “not quite angelic,” she is somehow pre-adolescent in her innocence (TN 17, 136). Hardly any men who meet her fail to fall for her, and the nickname that Markie Linkwater most often uses for her is “angel” (TN

90, for example). She seems remote, rarely noticing or being affected by events around her. In contrast to Cecilia, who craves society’s affirmation of her existence, Emmeline does not find solitude confining and seems self-sufficient:

“Nothing could be as dear as the circle of reading-light round her solitary pillow”

(TN 32). Almost unique among Bowen protagonists, Emmeline has a career as the more competent partner in a successful travel agency. She “adored fact—the exact departure of trains” and immerses herself in her work, apparently needing little else—until she meets Markie (TN 32). If, as Sean O’Faolain asserts, 178

Bowen’s novels abound with kids and cads, Markie Linkwater most thoroughly deserves the appellation “cad.”

Markie, whose diminutive name may signal his small-mindedness just as his reptilian description denotes his cold-bloodedness, is a barrister, an articulate juggler of the facts beloved by Emmeline (TN 7). At about thirty-three years of age, Markie has a reputation for being brilliant and amusing, but Bowen tells the reader explicitly that “Neither Cecilia nor Mark had nice characters,” and “the idea of personal intimacy with a woman was shocking to him” (TN 7, 11, 10).

When Markie rings up and “invite[s] himself to see” Cecilia, she asks him to dinner but begs Emmeline to be there as well. Markie, accustomed to domination,

“came and [. . .] conquered” both the conversation and the heart of Emmeline: “A splinter of ice in the heart is bombed out rather than thawed out” (TN 61, 60).

Though Emmeline tells her, “I like Markie [. . .] I think he’s so funny, Cecilia

“never expected anyone to act out of character” and “dispose[s] of” Emmeline’s comments: “You wouldn’t care for him really; he isn’t at all your sort of person”

(TN 61, 62). What Cecilia means is that he isn’t at all her own sort of person, and she soon stops seeing him. Then, “it was as though a door shut upon [Emmeline] and Markie, leaving them quite alone for the first time.” Emmeline, whose

“[r]eserve had kept her at all times from discussing her friends with Cecilia,” now deliberately withholds information and experiences “her first break with innocence.” Only those who know Emmeline least, without preconceived ideas about her, can recognize the fact that “Something weakened in her defences that 179 were not till now defences, so unconscious had they been and so impassable” (TN

64).

The rapid progression of Emmeline’s intimacy with Markie increasingly cuts her off from contact with anyone other than him. When Emmeline comes alone to his flat for this first time, the cynical regard of his sister makes her “feel like a tramp”—or at least like one among many female visitors (TN 89). The first reference to suicide follows this foreshadowing. Emmeline’s partner’s friend, who had “just gone bankrupt over a bookshop,” was staying with him, and the partner states with unconscious humor, “Of course I’ve got no pistols or anything in my rooms, and there’s nothing that one could hang from, but I see him look at the gas fire every night when I put it out” (TN 115). And Emmeline, Bowen makes clear, at this point likes “life better than ever” and so “took no chances”

(TN 119).

A dawn visit from Markie precipitates an epiphany on Emmeline’s part.

She had written Markie a letter, but, when he arrives, she realizes how greatly superior shared pleasure, the visit, is to solitary pleasure, the act of writing the letter. Here Bowen makes a clear connection between her title, To the North, and solitude. Suddenly the

idea of pleasure as isolated, arctic, regarding its own heart only,

became desolating to Emmeline as a garden whose flowers were

ice. Those north lights colouring the cold flowers became her

enemies; her heart warming or weakening she felt at war with

herself inside this cold zone of solitude. (TN 135; italics added) 180

Her choice made, Emmeline burns the letter and her bridges. When she mentions a business-related trip to Paris to Markie, he “had suddenly said he thought he should like to come too. He was very busy, but they could go at a weekend.” Thus Markie again exerts control, remaking her project on his own terms. She goes along, rationalizing that “she could [. . .] do nothing if he elected to book by the same plane” (TN 150).

The Parisian idyll is in every way the high point of Emmeline and

Markie’s relationship. They fly to Paris together, a first for Markie, for whom

“the earth was good enough” (TN 173). The experience is both confining, as they sit “encased in a roaring hum,” and liberating, as when the “earth had slipped from their wheels” and “No noise, no glass, no upholstery boxed [Emmeline] up from the extraordinary”; the angel is in her “shining element” (TN 173, 174).

Now, she thinks, “no stop was possible,” and, though she “could not see [. . .] from what point she was committed: committed, however, she felt” (TN 177).

The relationship here of freedom and confinement to gender is obvious.

Emmeline gathers speed and height with new commitment, glad when events seem to be beyond her control and anticipating, however unconsciously, marriage and a home. On the other hand, Markie felt “perhaps for the first time, not quite all he could wish” when Emmeline had disarmed him with her obvious discomfort at dining alone with him in his apartment (TN 90). In Paris, with “each forced so close to the other as to be invisible,” he looks her way “in an instant of angry extinction as though he would drown” (TN 181). He resents powerlessness, even the momentary powerlessness of waiting for Emmeline, during which his eyes are 181

“in a kind of extinction”; he is “a little checked Napoleon.” As if the relationship were a competition, he feels somehow bested by it, and “he had been oppressed since last night by sensations of having been overshot, of having, in some final soaring flight of her exaltation, been outdistanced: as though a bird whose heart one moment one could feel beating had escaped from between the hands” (TN

182). Emmeline, now fully committed to one man, experiences nesting impulses.

She “longed suddenly to be fixed, [. . .] to see out the little and greater cycles of day and season in one place, beloved, familiar” (TN 184-85). Markie, “unused to going about with a woman on these terms,” feels confinement which leads to a renewed “incapacity to be satisfied” (TN 187, 186).

When Emmeline says, “I wish this were for ever,” Markie feels “alarmed by the first approach of something he had been dreading.” Though he briefly tries to make his refusal to consider marriage sound advantageous to her, he soon states, “I couldn’t live with you: point blank, Emmeline, I don’t want to” (TN

192). He even congratulates himself for taking, “if an ungentle, the honest way,” not considering that marriage and home are the inevitable next step, in her mind, for two people who “love each other.” Because she holds the “deep and innocent preassumption that they were each for the other,” she, in turn, does not realize that the “always parting” and “always going away” which seems unnecessary to her is for him escape (TN 234, 193). What has escaped in her—“Feeling of all kinds had stolen from her”—is confined in him. While “feeling crept out in him from some unmapped region,” reason, like “the solid advance of imperial forces,” had pushed emotions and “all sense of the immaterial” in him “to some craggy 182 hinterland where, having made no terms with the conqueror, they were submitted to no control and remained a menace” (TN 194, 193). The remainder, having been made way for, the conqueror firmly confines: “His brain held his smallish, over-clear view of life in its rigid circle.” Though “he was unwilling ever to love her too much,” he says airily and dishonestly, “we’re in love, aren’t we?” He then salves his rather poor conscience by announcing more straightforwardly, but with every confidence in not being heeded, “If I shot anyone, I am the sort of man

I should shoot” (TN 234, 194).

To corroborate this point, Bowen offers more evidence. In conversation with Emmeline, Markie mentions Daisy, whose name denotes her commonness, as a girl he once knew. Bowen indicates that Daisy’s “constant acute sense of having departed from virtue”—though not, perhaps, originally with Markie—her providing “just enough resistance to please and enough repentance to gratify [. . .] had been a source to Markie of endless satirical pleasure [. . .] In fact, he liked women lowish” (TN 230). It becomes ironic, then, that Emmeline, finally preferring companionship to solitude, had expressed it in these terms: “She desired lowness and fallibility, longing to break the mirror and touch the earth”

(TN 135).

Because Emmeline clings “with intensity to one bright prevailing idea,” it is not immediately obvious to her that her flight beyond Markie in Paris will be followed by a drop to earth—if in fact the flight and the fall are not already one.

While she has a “new smiling power” in the weeks that follow, she also admits that Cecilia, if Emmeline had told her everything about the Parisian visit, would 183

“think I was ruined” (TN 227, 272). So, indeed, would everyone else that

Emmeline knows.

Markie does not understand what can continue to elevate Emmeline, who

“stepped in Paris clear of the every-day [. . .] into the region of the immoderate, where we are more than ourselves” (TN 237). While Markie is “first now, everyone” to Emmeline, she “was not everyone” to him (TN 271, 234). While

“something that she still withheld unawares renewed the hunter in him,” and “her unconsciousness still had him wholly at its command,” he continues to miss Daisy

(TN 233-34). Furthermore, he is watching Emmeline soar with growing trepidation. He sees “how very high a structure there was to come down” and tries to warn her, “we are riding for a fall” (TN 236).

Emmeline, meanwhile, though denying adverse effects, becomes increasingly distracted from and ineffectual at her job. Her “temper was less angelic” and her “candour [. . .] had lost transparency” (TN 240). She tires easily, and her conversation with Julian, Cecilia’s fiancé-to-be, reveals the psychological dislocation that having neither home nor marriage is causing inside her:

This house is Cecilia [. . .] Nothing feels part of me, yet I live here

too [. . .] I should like to live somewhere [. . .] If you were to

marry, Julian, your wife would locate you: somewhere would

become special[. . . .] But no one could do that for me, and no one

seems to expect me to do it for them [. . .] Nobody wants to marry

me [. . .] If I died, [. . .] it wouldn’t [. . .] be very noticeable [. . .]

What [. . .] ever becomes of anyone? (TN 247, 252, 249) 184

A weekend in the country provides another epiphany for Emmeline, and escape for Markie. The outing offers Emmeline a chance to act “the domestic rôle” with Markie, and “fresh wide air and escape from the pressure of London had restored her equanimity” (TN 256). She “longed to inhabit with Markie the heart of the country, inaccessible, green and quiet” (TN 225). But Markie, who dislikes the country and to whom repose is foreign, views her evident need “To play at house” with suspicion, and thwarts her happily-anticipated plans for an intimate dinner by wanting to dine out (TN 257). Again her escape is his confinement, and she ponders, “For ever coming and going, no peace, no peace.

What did Markie always want to avoid?” (TN 259).

Back at the cottage after dinner, Bowen’s imagery reveals that Emmeline is symbolically, in regard to Markie, not only angel but moth. Emmeline hears “a moth on the window-pane” and “caught it and threw it into the dark” (TN 266).

Having freed it, she turns to face the man to which she has been inescapably attracted and who “was all the time formlessly near her like heat or light” (TN

231). A telegram for Emmeline from Cecilia requests urgently that Emmeline return early from her weekend away, a weekend that she is supposedly sharing with a rather boring female friend. Emmeline correctly perceives that Cecilia has agreed to marry Julian, and she sees her home—perhaps the only heretofore unaffected element of her life—fall “to bits” (TN 267). Markie can only see that his weekend will be marginally shorter; thus, the lovemaking that night is unsympathetically “rough” and “violent,” perhaps further suggesting the moth beating against the heat or light (TN 268). 185

The next day, Markie’s real lack of love for Emmeline surfaces: “A profound and slighting contempt for her point of view, that must have underlain at all times his tenderness, was apparent in all that he said and did, most of all in silence” (TN 270). She suggests his almost fatal confinement of her—“I think you will kill me,”—and he only tells her to make her “fuss” elsewhere.

Emphasizing his own confinement, he finally states, “Quite frankly, I don’t care to stay in a cottage this size with a cold and hysterical woman.” Her reply, “I see,” is comprehensive (TN 272, 273). Later she sees that all their time together was a “struggle: first trying to understand, then trying not to” (TN 310). By three o’clock they left for London, Emmeline fleeing Markie “with battered wings” like a moth in a flame (TN 269). The plummet from the heights has begun (TN 269).

For Emmeline the fall consists in part of a continuing attempt to escape something that she had told herself was positive. After she tries to locate Markie and finds that he has gone back to Daisy, she tries to accept their estrangement, but her escape attempts continue. First, she tries to escape by vicariously experiencing Cecilia’s bridal happiness: “Emmeline liked to be told little things, to be made to laugh, to enjoy through Cecilia the hundred happy banalities of an engagement.” Then she tries to walk away her unhappiness. When Cecilia was not there, “Emmeline walked the roads of St. John’s Wood [. . . .] Wet or fine, when [. . .] moths from the sycamores whirled in brown air round the lamps, she walked late [. . . .] She walked, too, by day, the streets of east Bloomsbury” (TN

287). She writes to Markie but receives no answer. She continues to walk, and 186

“if anyone looked at her in the streets it was to wonder from what she was running away” (TN 289).

Ironically Cecilia, goaded by her aunt to put Emmeline’s relationship with

Markie on more conventional footing, invites him to dinner though Emmeline tells her, “But I don’t see him now.” Emmeline, “seeing this at once as a trap and a door opening,” tries as forcefully as her perfect manners will allow not to be included in the event (TN 292). When her attempt to escape fails, she attends but withdraws, contributing almost nothing except her presence. In contrast,

Emmeline’s “distance and her renewed unconsciousness of himself” for Markie occasion both a “violent resurgence of his desire and renewed feelings of confinement: a “maddening resentment of his desire” and a “confused struggle against this renewed domination.” He “found himself ambushed and did not know how to get free” (TN 301).

Then, expecting to hear something that Markie insists he has to tell her,

Emmeline volunteers to drive him quite some distance north to Baldock, where he has been staying (TN 260). The unexpectedness and excessiveness of the announcement seem suspect even to Cecilia, and she tells Julian, “don’t let her go; it’s all wrong” (TN 270, 303). Because of the forebodings in the room, it “felt very close,” and Julian “opened a window and let in a rush of dark air” which

“made the room darker and less secure” (TN 303).

Inevitably, Markie and Emmeline set out toward the north. As tension mounts, so does evidence that Emmeline perceives all her escape routes being cut off one by one. She believes that she and Markie can’t go back—“To where?”— 187 and that “There’s nothing more left ahead of us” (TN 308). Furthermore, she believes, even though he at last grudgingly offers, that she “can’t marry anyone now” (TN 309). Increasingly desperate, she attempts to escape by disappearing, retreating back into the solitude from which she has come. Silence and darkness are solace, and Markie “found only night in her pupils” and “an absence in her surrender” (TN 311, 312). He asks her to “Come back,” but she avows, “I can’t”

(TN 312).

Instead, she turns again to escape through forward motion, and both acceleration and escape imagery increase. Their speed now has “the startled wildness of flight,” but Markie taunts her, predicting that she will be unable to escape: “Keep driving all night, angel: you won’t get away from this! (TN 312-

13). Markie himself is torn between confinement of himself and Emmeline, “his cold resolution to keep her,” and escape, “desire to throw her off.” Trapped in pain against his will, he shouts at her until “Something gave way.” At last

Emmeline has managed to disconnect herself from all feeling, and only “An immense idea of departure [. . .] possessed her spirit, now launched like the long arrow” (TN 313, 314). Psychologically, Emmeline has achieved her escape—she

“was not here, he was alone” (TN 315)—and comes back only for a brief glimpse of “what was past averting” just before the end. Though she had said, in response to Markie’s former fear for his life in the face of her fast driving, “I wouldn’t kill you,” neither of them is able to predict the consequences of a truly desperate need to escape (TN 309). Emmeline does outpace her pain, killing them both in the process. 188

In many ways Elizabeth Bowen’s novels could be read as a series of representations of the flight metaphor. Her children and adolescents desire to flee lives controlled by parents who exercised their own authority poorly. Indeed, though graduation to adulthood seems the ultimate goal for her younger characters, Bowen’s adults only demonstrate that an individual never completely controls his life. If he is human, he is always at the mercy of others to whom he gives the power to cause him pain. To survive is always to attempt to escape something, usually emotions that have betrayed one in the past. Often the path of the adult is away from the immediacy and simplicity of emotion to the calculated complexity of conventions to hide, guard or limit emotion. Sometimes the lessons of confinement of emotion in order to escape its pain are incompletely learned, or something happens to reopen an old emotional wound. Occasionally, then, a new vision of how life might be lived opens before a character. More often, however, the need to escape becomes so intense that it is an end in itself. There may be nothing better beyond the present moment, but at least there will no longer be this.

189

CHAPTER 4

SOCIAL CLASS

“Emmeline is being far worse than simply silly and intellectual: she is doing herself real damage in her own world.”

“Which world?” parried Cecilia.

“There is only one world,” said Lady Waters.

—To the North (284)

She was nouveau riche; but, as Antonia said, better late than never.

—A World of Love (83) Elizabeth Bowen’s novels comprise, to a far greater degree than most fiction, a study of the social stratification of a particular time and place. Her characters include members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy; the English gentry, who once, at least, were “landed”; the English middle class nouveau riche who have achieved affluence through trade; and the English lower-middle working classes. At first, however, in the 1920’s and ’30’s, the relative homogeneity of

Bowen’s social classes is striking. Her characters are almost exclusively landed gentry—and exclusivity describes, as well, much of their lives. As Lady

Bracknell warns in The Importance of Being Earnest, “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that”

(Wilde 1662). Members of Society fill their elevated positions almost unconsciously, performing within a strict but unspoken set of social rules countless well-mannered acts of kindness and consideration—as well as unnumbered deeds, often of equal politeness, designed to bar outsiders from their select circles. 190

These rules are instilled early and thoroughly. Eleven-year-old Henrietta of The House in Paris, for example, already has such a firm grasp of the system that she can judge, rank, and place almost as well as her elders. An exemplary

English child of “utmost primness,” Henrietta “had been brought up to think it rude to interrupt thought” and to effect many another model behavior (HP 29, 10).

She has been tutored in an “exact snobbishness,” and her character, guided by

“admonitions and axioms,” was a “mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice” (HP

16, 20). She can recognize the evidence of money by which to categorize others

(HP 19). Foreigners, not being so familiar, give her something of a pause. When in Paris Naomi Fisher dips a croissant into her coffee, “Henrietta was sure you did not do this with bread,” and she believes, after meeting Mme. Fisher and Leopold, that “the proper French [. . .] cannot be like this” (HP 20, 55). She is easily shocked and frequently concludes, “It would certainly never do” (HP 54). Even her hair, “held back” by a comb that she “pushed into place more firmly” shows evidence of her growing ability to confine and be confined (HP 23).

The irony is that the system of what may be done and what may not confines most completely those within it—though some of these confinements are arguably positive. Within society, the inconceivability of divorce keeps almost every marriage at least externally intact. The smallness of the social circle makes it quite intimate and comfortable, and one knows what one may expect of people so like oneself. Individuals interact politely, taking care to save face and to allow the other person to do so. At the same time, the system fosters much verbal insincerity because one can rarely say what one actually thinks, and much 191

“prefabricated feeling” because one can only rarely reveal what one really feels

(LG 193). Snobbery and intermarrying may be tolerated or even encouraged so long as they are not acknowledged. And only when someone threatens to break through the circle’s fairly rigid boundaries—either from within or without—do the ranks close.

Every Bowen protagonist threatens the social norm of the upper classes to some degree from within. In The Hotel no character except the most insignificant is outside the inner circle. Indeed, the resident matrons form their own circle within the larger one of hotel society and sit, door closed, inside the drawing room commiserating about the almost identical hardships of their lives. In Sydney

Warren, however, Bowen fashions a protagonist who even at twenty-two does not conform to the mold.

First, Sydney contemplates a career in medicine and denigrates the idea of marriage. Then, the novel offers the even more nonconformist possibility that

Sydney’s dislike for marriage stems from her lesbian nature. Certainly Sydney forms an attachment to another woman, Mrs. Kerr, and exhibits all the classic conventions of lovesickness. She is extraordinarily aware of Mrs. Kerr, to such an extent that, when the older woman watches her play tennis, her generally good performance goes “all to pieces” (H 13). She wants to be with Mrs. Kerr constantly, jealously guards their time together, and resents any whom she perceives as trespassers, including Mrs. Kerr’s son. Though Mrs. Kerr is approximately old enough to be Sydney’s mother, Sydney even thinks “with great pleasure of the thousands of villas [. . .] where couples are living [. . .] for one 192 another” and imagines that she and Mrs. Kerr might live in a villa in some vague future together (H 92).

Naturally, the hotel matrons discourage such a relationship—though politeness constrains them from doing so directly. They mention “other cases” of

“very violent friendships” which “One didn’t feel [. . .]were quite healthy.” They suggest ambiguously that Sydney “is very much . . . absorbed [. . .] by Mrs. Kerr.”

They point out, “I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an older woman” and warn that “It is never the best women who have these strong influences” (H 87). They excuse Sydney’s “eccentric[ity]” because, as a result of

World War I, there is “not a man to be had [. . .] out here” (H 88). Statistics reveal that 723,000 British servicemen or six and a half percent of Britain’s adult male population died in the First World War, and of course only a marriage with a member of Britain’s upper-middle class will do (“End of It All” 82).

Nevertheless, Bowen suggests a less socially-acceptable reason why “Sydney seemed as a rule to be so unfortunate in her choice of friends” (H 24).

Friends and Relations, Bowen’s third novel, also illustrates homogeneity and resulting confinement. The Studdarts and the Meggatts live, respectively, further into the country than the Tilneys, who reside in London, but otherwise the families that intermarry or intermingle are similarly upper-middle class. In the generation before the novel opens, Elfrida Tilney breaks out of her marriage and the respectable inner circle of society by abandoning husband and child for big game hunter and rake Considine Meggatt. To a degree that she had not anticipated, she encounters new confinements. Respectable families no longer 193 know her, and she may not comfortably return to England from Paris—Bowen’s great “city of sins” (TN 192)—until after war, a great if temporary leveler of social classes, and time have passed. Regardless, however, of the fact that she experiences temporary discomforts, some of them self-imposed results of her choice not to marry Considine, she never again elects to forsake her new freedoms for greater respectability.

Janet Studdart, on the other hand, marries Rodney Meggatt, Considine’s nephew, when she cannot have Edward Tilney, Elfrida’s son, who has already married Janet’s sister Laurel. Janet first began to love Edward before even his proposal to Laurel, and Edward originally commits the greater crime against the heart by marrying Laurel, whose childishness and charm he loves, rather than

Janet, whom he also loves but on some level fears as well. Edward’s tie with

Laurel, followed by Janet’s with Rodney, leaves the two for all conventional purposes separated from each other. After a decade a crisis manufactured by

Edward brings them back together to admit their love for one another. But it is

Edward’s horror of departing from the inner circle of upper-middle class respectability, instilled in him by his mother’s past deeds, and Janet’s love for her sister and conventional morality that keep the lovers married to their original spouses. Though they have already enforced years of confined and denied emotion and will enforce further decades of confinement and subterfuge, the conduct rules of polite society and their perceived benefits—continuity, social acceptance, exclusivity—protect the marriages and their offspring by maintaining the status quo. 194

With To the North a little diversity begins to break through the closed circle of upper class society. Markie Linkwater appears to be the up-and-coming man of the hour; he “was ‘rising’ with the inevitability of a lighted balloon” (TN

90). His traditional public school tie and profession of barrister, originally

Bowen’s father’s own profession, proclaim him as monied, and a man of integrity like Julian Tower finds it in many ways difficult to fault him (BC 391). Julian has

“a very solid respect for the young man’s ability,” and, “impressed [. . .] by the amount of noise Markie made and his personal vigour,” he “discounted a good deal else that one heard” (TN 143).

Nevertheless, one does hear of another sort of reputation as well. In addition to working hard, Markie “lives hard” (TN 143). At first Cecilia Summers only invites him over for dinner-for-four to escape the greater intimacy of his coming over to see her alone. She “did not feel Markie would mix at all well with most of her friends,” however, and later dismisses him generally as a “frightful young man” (TN 61, 111). Later, when his relationship with Emmeline begins to emerge, Cecilia calls him a “bully” and a “bounder” (TN 213, 121). Perhaps

Markie’s family has money, but it either has not the manners to match or is deliberately flouting convention. In his family, “Delicacy did not exist,” only

“brutal good sense”; Bowen describes Markie as having “rather imposing, finished bad manners” (TN 84, 87).

Cecilia’s aunt, Lady Waters, also does “not care for his manner,” but when she learns of Emmeline’s having dined with Markie in questionable circumstances—at night, and “some way from London”—she becomes alarmed 195 that Emmeline may indeed be “ruined” (TN 55, 283, 236). All the outrage of society surfaces in Lady Waters’s attempt to awake Cecilia’s conscience—or that of Julian, Cecilia’s fiancé—to do the right thing in regard to Emmeline, who

“seems to be taking directions one cannot approve.” Lady Waters hears “on all sides that she’s going about with a young man of whom neither Robert nor I can approve” and, as a result,

“is doing herself real damage in her own world.”

“Which world?” parried Cecilia.

“There is only one world,” said Lady Waters. “That young

man’s reputation is shocking [. . .] How well do you know this

young man? Does he come to your house? Have you attempted to

put his relations with Emmeline on any regular footing? [. . .] You

are in a position to act: you must act, Cecilia [. . .] As your

connection, Emmeline’s good name becomes [Julian’s] affair [. . .]

invite Mr. Linkwater to your house, be as civil to him as you

please but make him feel clearly that Emmeline has you and Julian

behind her, and that her affairs are your own.” (TN 284, 285)

Of course, as Julian recognized some time ago, society may confine behavior only insofar as a person is willing to submit to its rules. Julian acknowledges Emmeline’s own pivotal role: “Championship has to discount in the woman anything but passivity, to deny that she could not have been undone without some exercise, however fatal, of her discretion and was in fact her own to ruin” (TN 246). Emmeline is another Bowen protagonist who steps over lines of 196 propriety: she not only is a working partner in a small business, but she also has an affair with Markie that could hardly be termed premarital because the question of marriage has already been raised, and summarily dismissed, by him.

Nevertheless, she has not completely dismissed the possibility, and at first the affair gives her a spurious feeling of power engendered by the self-delusion that surrender to one man would result in one life with that man. Then she gradually realizes that marriage will not automatically follow and that not to marry under the circumstances is, in her world, its own limitation. Like Elfrida in Friends and

Relations, she would be ostracized from the inner circle of society because she is

“ruined.” For Emmeline, society’s attempt to save her—in the person of Lady

Waters—comes too late to rectify the social damage that she has already caused herself.

The two novels in which society most clearly opposes some perceived usurper of a different rank and race are The Last September and The House in

Paris. Indeed, Bowen writes in The House in Paris lines representative of all the upper-middle-class households in her early works: “In her parents’ world, change looked like catastrophe, a thing to put a good face on: change meant nothing but loss. To alter was to decline. ‘Poor So-and-So is so changed.’ You live to govern the future, bending events your way” (HP 160). Naturally, then, one must resist the change in the social status quo that letting in someone new necessitates.

In The Last September, protagonist Lois Farquar longs to break free of the confines of her adolescence and her exclusive but declining Anglo-Irish

Ascendancy class. She is twenty-two and sees marriage as the only socially- 197 acceptable way out. According to Marda Norton, Lois “is like some one being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train [. . .] and looking wildly out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that final train go out without her [. . .] I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well, so anxious to love soon [. . . .] She really prays for somebody to be fatal” (LS 121,

122). Lady Myra Naylor, her aunt by marriage, equals her in determination to prevent any actual stepping over the boundaries of propriety from occurring.

With little to do except arrange flowers and play tennis, Lois naturally welcomes the addition of English troops to Ireland; even if their political position is equivocal, they make lovely young additions to the local social occasions. In particular Lois finds “affecting” the company of a young English soldier of noticeable “eagerness and constancy,” Gerald Lesworth, but Lady Naylor’s social skills prepare her to deal with this outsider (LS 71, 42). When Francie

Montmorency comments on how “very devoted [. . .] that young Mr. Lesworth” was to Lois at the Naylors’ tennis party, Lady Naylor insists that she must have

Gerald mixed up with another young admirer and that any rumors to the contrary amount merely to “a fuss about nothing [. . . j]ust because they’ve played tennis together and danced once or twice”(LS 56, 57). If God can create with a word, a woman of society can uncreate with a few words and a little well-placed overbearingness. As Lady Naylor explains to Francie, “I suppose [. . .] you must have gathered that as I don’t understand what you do mean, what you mean cannot really be so” (LS 80). She further pronounces the idea of any alliance of the two names “impossible” because “he’s a subaltern” and subalterns 198

can’t marry [. . .] until they are captains and thirty [. . .] No, he of

course is charming, but he seems to have no relations. One cannot

trace him. His mother, he says, lives in Surrey, and of course you

do know, don’t you, what Surrey is. It says nothing, absolutely

[. . .] Practically nobody who lives in Surrey ever seems to have

been heard of, and if one does hear of them they have never heard

of anybody else who lives in Surrey [. . .] Of course, I don’t say

Gerald Lesworth’s people are in trade—I should never say a thing

like that without foundation. Besides, if they were in trade there

would be money, money on English people shows so much and he

quite evidently hasn’t any. No, I should say they were just villa-ry.

(LS 82, 83)

Lady Naylor reveals an entire enclosed world of anti-English and class prejudice.

Because she cannot look up Gerald Lesworth’s family in Who’s Who as Markie resourcefully does Sir Robert Waters in To the North, he cannot be anyone (TN

59). Without land or money, he is clearly, as Bowen so pointedly discloses in his reversed surname, worthless. Therefore, if Gerald “should have any [intentions] they would have to be quashed immediately” (LS 83-84).

Though Lois is her husband’s niece rather than her own, Lady Naylor

“cannot have Richard bothered” and thus undertakes the quashing herself by scheduling “an assignation” one afternoon with Gerald (LS 83, 267). Gerald, who misunderstands the purpose of the meeting, arrives “elated” but soon finds himself quite out of his social depth when confronted with Lady Naylor’s smooth 199 manipulations (LS 267). She will not sit in the chair he chooses for her, she traps him into smoking when she does not, and she introduces an analogous relationship of a friend of Lois’s about which he can make unsuspecting comments such as “They are engaged, as a matter of fact.” Lady Naylor’s

“pleasant” reply is, “nonsense [. . .] the Thompsons would never hear of it [. . .] naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois! The point would not even arise” (LS 269, 270). And so, despite Gerald’s attempts to rally, the point is not allowed to arise. Lady Naylor suggests that “It can all pass off so quietly,” and he understands her perfectly: “You’re going to stop it because I’m too young and too poor and not ‘county’ enough [. . .] I’m all right for tennis,” but for nothing more. Although she says, “the less indirect discussion round and about things, I always think,” indirection is the modus operandi of society, and her response to his direct approach is “You have entirely misunderstood me” (LS

272-74).

Thus with apparent warmth and graciousness, Lady Naylor handily blocks

Gerald and Lois’s engagement before anyone who matters even discovers its existence. Indeed, she tells Gerald, “you do quite understand you are not engaged” (LS 275). She then lies to Lois about her conversation with Gerald, saying that he “thought [Lois’s friend’s engagement] a pity, in view of the young man’s future” but that she “cannot remember” what else he said (LS 279, 280).

Lois must learn from Francie that Lady Naylor “has interfered” (LS 281). She has protected her own from “villa-ry”; the circle of society remains unbroken. 200

A similar protection of the status quo occurs—though in a less elevated social climate—in The House in Paris. The Michaelises, residents of Regent’s

Park, London, are a model upper-middle-class family. Though they

lived like a family in a pre-war novel [. . . ,] they saw little reason

to renew their ideas, which had lately been ahead of their time and

were still not out of date [. . .] Their relatives and old friends, as

nice as themselves were rooted in the same soil [. . .] Karen, their

daughter, had grown up in a world of grace and intelligence, in

which the Boer War, the War and other fatigues and disasters had

been so many opportunities to behave well [. . .]; they were not

only good to the poor but kind to the common, tolerant of the

intolerant [. . .] The Michaelis were, in the least unkind sense, a

charming family. (HP 85, 86)

Karen, like prim Henrietta, was reared to accept the social mores of her class by possibly the most paradigmatic example of social class in all of Bowen’s novels,

Mrs. Michaelis. At twelve, therefore, Karen was “a discriminating little girl who spent her tips on antiques” and agreed that “What would not do, did not do” (HP

138).

At eighteen Karen went to Paris, to the house of Mme. Fisher, a house attractive to mothers “to whom the trimming and stuffing of daughters [. . .] for an immediate market did not commend itself, or who wanted for their dependable daughters freedom inside the bounds of propriety” (HP 130). Nevertheless, there

Karen steps over the line into impropriety by falling in love with Max Ebhart, a 201 twenty-seven-year-old man whose “mother had been French and his father an

English Jew” (HP 135). “Every movement he made, every word she heard him speak left its mark on her nerves” (HP 137). Karen later muses that “young girls,

[. . .] not seeking husbands yet, [. . .] have no reason to see love socially.”

Therefore, they indulge in a “natural fleshly protest against good taste” and a

“love of the cad” which “is outwitted by their mothers” (HP 138). Particularly

“[w]ise mothers,” however, “do not nip [such ‘vulgarity’] immediately” because

“that makes for trouble later,” and “Mrs. Michaelis was wise: whatever she saw, she did nothing. Only, when Karen came back from Paris, her mother saw to it that Ray” Forrestier, an eligible young man of Karen’s own social class, “was about. The rule of ‘niceness’ resumed in Karen’s life” (HP 138).

Karen attends an art school at which she makes friends who, because her parents are not “bigoted, snobbish, touchy, over-rich, over-devout, militant in feeling[,] given to blood sports [or] absurd in any way,” hold a “writhing antagonism” towards them (HP 85). She later understands that, to a young Irish girl, she must look “like something on a Zoo terrace, cantering round its run not knowing it is not free, and spotted not in a way you would care to be yourself”

(HP 119). Thus she “saw this inherited world enough from the outside to see that it might not last, but, perhaps for this reason, obstinately stood by it” (HP 86). At this stage in her life, the apparent limitations of her ideal, enclosed existence do not overshadow her determination to help perpetuate it.

After almost five years Ray proposes, and at first all seems propitious:

“she had been born and was making her marriage inside the class that in England 202 changes least of all [. . .] Her marriage to Ray would have that touch of inbreeding that makes a marriage so promising; he was a cousin’s cousin; they had met first at her home” (HP 85, 86). After her official engagement announcement, however, she finds the patness of everyone’s response grating; all express

“pleased excitement” that she finds quite “uninfectious.” That “everybody knew everything” begins “to atrophy private tender thoughts,” and, admitting that “This was the world she sometimes wished to escape from,” she writes her mother’s sister and temporarily leaves London behind for Ireland (HP 84, 86).

In Ireland a letter from Ray asking where they stand makes Karen reassess her reasons for marrying him. Her reasons—or, rather, rationalizations—are all related to social class: “we are the same kind of people, we think the same things are funny, we do not embarrass each other, we should have enough money and everybody we meet out at dinner will say what a charming couple we are” (HP

105). While on one hand she tries to convince herself that she “couldn’t bear him to marry anyone else,” underneath she feels confined by the very fact that “With

Ray I shall be so safe.” She would like “the Revolution” to come soon, to have

“everything that I had to depend on gone.” She concludes, “I sometimes think it is people like us, [. . .] people of consequence, who are unfortunate: we have nothing ahead” (HP 105, 107). Dissatisfied with herself for going, in her marriage, through “still one more door held courteously open for her,” she dislikes even her understated, appropriate pearl earrings “for looking bloodless”

(HP 104, 118). 203

Then Naomi Fisher, having also seen Karen’s attraction to Max Ebhart in

Paris, brings him, now her fiancé, to London to see Karen again before she will marry him. From the safe distance of her own world, Karen had “come to look back on Max as a person who would not do,” and had written to Ray, “He is not the sort of person you would care for at all” (HP 138, 112). But, upon seeing him, she finds that “she had been unjust” because “Max was very nice”; “as

Naomi’s husband he would do very well.” Her “Michaelis view of life quickly fitted him in,” and his niche corresponds exactly to the pigeonhole into which her mother fits him (HP 138): “Mrs. Michaelis, who had met Max once, yesterday afternoon, thought him an excellent person for Naomi to marry.” She instantly classifies him as one of “an order of people she felt about most kindly, who agreeably present when they are present, melt into thin air when the servant has shown them out [. . .] Being a very exact and sincere woman, she knew where a thing should stop [. . .] Though he has such good manners” and “was charming” at tea, she elaborates,

if we had had him here with so many other people no nicer than he

is, [. . .] he might have been different, on the defensive at once.

Yes, it is curious: social things matter so little, yet somehow one

cannot be intimate with people who do not ‘mix’ when they have

to [. . .] So Mrs. Michaelis dismissed Max; he melted into thin air

while still on his way to the bus. Should he ever come up again—

which was unlikely, for no one they knew in Paris had heard of 204

him—she would have him at her fingers’ ends, to discuss once

more with understanding and tact. (HP 151, 152)

But Mrs. Michaelis’s understanding and tact are ultimately inadequate because they do not allow for the fact that love breaks through social class barriers. What she said about Max, Karen realizes “would be, no doubt, true—if you pressed him flat like a flower in a book” (HP 153). But, in their three- dimensional reality, Max and Karen embody “the Revolution” for each other (HP

107). She again steps over social boundaries, as does he, agreeing to meet him secretly in France and then, crossing a new social and moral line, to stay overnight with him in Hythe, England. Perhaps Max is a cad to risk Karen’s reputation without originally intending to marry her, but, as Bowen points out, taking care to save another’s face is an English trait (HP 141). Furthermore, it is because of social class and both of their prior commitments that Max does not even consider marriage to Karen. All the inversions of Karen’s reasons for marrying Ray exist: Max and Karen are too different, and their differences create

“unmeant mystification,” perhaps even distrust, between them (HP 179). Being of different social classes and countries, “Their worlds were so much unlike that no experience had the same value for both of them,” and thus they do not speak exactly the same language (HP 186). They would not have enough money, and considerations of “dot [before marriage] rank high” in France (HP 168).

On the level of social class, both Max and Karen see why they should not marry. Max even tells Karen, “You should stay with your own people” (HP 191).

Both are naturally cautious. “[T]o love you would be a leap in the dark,” Max 205 states, and “You were not made to leap in the dark either.” He does see, however, that she is “anxious to run away from home” (HP 185). She has come to view her engagement to Ray as her parents’ choice, not her own: “my marriage was their affair. They don’t like change” (HP 189). She sees that “To be with Ray will be like being with mother; that is why my marriage makes her so glad. Max was the enemy” (HP 200). Since she first saw Max again after five years, she tells him, she has found freedom only in consorting with the enemy:

I have been either possessed or else myself for the first time. I

found I was in prison—no, locked into a museum of things I once

liked, with nothing to do now but look at them and wonder why I

had. They keep me away from everything that has power; they

would be frightened of art if I painted really well. When it

thundered last month I used to wish I could be struck by lightning.

(HP 211)

Thus, when Karen and Max are able to go beyond conventional restraints to admit their love for one another, both willingly take the leap. Each is for the other the lightning striking, “the Revolution” whose time has come (HP 107,

211). Just as Karen had given in to the attraction of safety with Ray, Max had succumbed to the illusion of safety with Naomi. Now, he sees that his attraction to Naomi’s undemanding presence, like a piece of furniture, “was the madonna trick—my nerves tricking my senses with the idea of peace, making someone to make for me an unattackable safe place” (HP 213). And what Karen had believed because of its transience to be “no escape for me after all” would become 206 permanent; they will marry and damn the consequences (HP 199). Karen chooses

Max and an existence possibly “more cut off from her own country than if they had been in Peru” (HP 206).

However, upon returning to England, the network of social class closes about Karen once more, and Karen thinks, “I was right: we were being threatened” (HP 220). Her mother has discovered that Karen did not spend the night with a female friend as she had said, and Karen discovers that her mother knows of her lie. Because Karen confronts her mother, the truth emerges, and, quite correctly from her perspective, Mrs. Michaelis paints a socially- and racially-prejudiced portrait of Max as a deliberate tempter and opportunist.

Karen, having “grown up in a world where people behave well,” cannot “see into the mind of a man like that.” Anyone who “has let you behave as you have behaved [. . .] would not be likely to make you a good husband” (HP 231). Karen has “behaved like [. . .] an ‘easy’ woman, and he is a very astute man. No Jew is unastute.” Having been to her house, Max knows that Karen is “very much wealthier” than Naomi, and “now something better offers, he naturally jumps at it” (HP 232).

Karen and Max never get the opportunity to discover whether their leaps in the dark constitute new freedom or merely different types of unforeseen confinement. Max, pushed beyond bearable psychological limits by Mme.

Fischer, escapes through suicide, and Karen, stunned and pregnant with his child, finds herself under the circumstances unable to rebel further. The social system does protect its own, and Karen now needs its safety and secrecy. Although Mrs. 207

Michaelis “wrap[s] Karen up in gentleness and in a comprehension that sometimes came too close,” Karen submits to her confinement (HP 235). When reaction sets in, Karen becomes reactionary. She wants “very much to be ordinary again” and to marry Ray becomes “what I wanted most.” But, upon discovering her pregnancy and the fact that “Nothing makes life safe,” she eliminates this possibility because her ingrained social sense functions automatically, and she knows that “Ray has to have an irreproachable wife” (HP

246, 247).

Therefore, Karen plans to travel with Naomi to Germany to have her baby, a choice that should not “hurt [her mother] from the outside” because “people she knows [. . .] take for granted everyone is all right. ‘Such things do not happen’ ”

(HP 246). Partially because of illness, partially due to a belief that her child

“would be better without me,” she allows him to be adopted while she—with some career adaptation on his part to her new non-irreproachability—marries Ray

Forrestier (HP 247-48). Mrs. Michaelis rises to new heights of self-sacrificial greatness by getting Karen through her child’s delivery and her subsequent marriage to Ray and then “passing [it] off” back at home with her husband and friends. Karen once thought that Mrs. Michaelis “would die if [she] knew” that

Karen had had an affair with Max, but it is the social necessity of confining the truth of the matter, as much as the shock, which finally kills her (HP 199, 310).

The reality of life is never peaceful or safe for Karen again even behind the respectable curtain of marriage, but “she simulated the married peace women seemed to inherit, wanting most of all to live like her mother” (HP 289). And, as 208 she had foreseen, no one suspects the truth and “everybody [they] meet out at dinner [says] what a charming couple [they] are” (HP 105, 289-90).

Bowen never again reaches the heights of manipulation and confinement to maintain a veneer of social respectability that her characters attain in The

House in Paris. By her next novel, The Death of the Heart, though she once again includes a family, the Quaynes, that resides in Regent’s Park, London, the respectability and tradition of that family are themselves suspect. The upper- middle-class dominance of behavioral standards is deteriorating. Anna Quayne, after her mother’s death, was reared by a governess who marries and leaves just when her chaperonage would have been most beneficial and a father who prefers not to notice anything that might require his intervention. Anna had an affair under her father’s willingly oblivious nose and later marries for security a man,

Thomas Quayne, who would not require of her too much emotional involvement.

In short, Bowen confides, Anna is not “properly upper class” (DH 200). Thomas is himself the product of a union between an overbearing mother and a browbeaten father who, at his wife’s insistence, reluctantly does the right thing by marrying a young middle class woman whom he has gotten pregnant. When the offspring of this second marriage, a girl named Portia, after the death of both of her parents enters the Quayne household for at least a year, the only evidence of anything traditional within that house is Thomas’s mother’s furniture and the servant who tends it, Matchett. “No, there’s no past in this house,” Matchett states, and “Those without memories don’t know what is what” (DH 110). 209

The Quaynes inherit both Matchett and furniture when Thomas’s mother dies, and, to those who because of their own pasts have been trying to keep memories at bay, the inheritance is not entirely welcome. According to Matchett,

“furniture like we’ve got is too much for some that would rather not have the past” because, since “chairs and tables don’t go to the grave so soon [, . . .]

Furniture’s knowing” (DH 111). And, of course, Matchett is knowing as well— and considerably more talkative despite the fact that she claims to have been

“born with [her] mouth shut” (DH 110). Nevertheless, Matchett “gave, in return for hire, her discretion and her unstinted energy,” and, furthermore, Anna “likes the look of a thing” and so accepts both the “lovely furniture” with polish “[y]ou can see ten foot into” and the hard worker who has for years given it the best care

(DH 55, 111). The furniture, moreover, goes well with the Regent’s Park house, which is “leased direct from the King” and has “an outlook fit for Buckingham

Palace” (DH 112). As long as the people associated with the furniture are gone and rarely mentioned, the fine upper class appearance may stay though the house itself be inhabited by what Thomas Quayne calls “us bourgeoisie” (DH 128).

When sixteen-year-old Portia, the protagonist, arrives, she upsets this impetus toward confinement of memories and personalities from the past. Even

“the forecast shadow of Portia [. . .] started altering things”—though Anna attempts to control all involved with her sister-in-law’s appearance (DH 56).

Anna quite enjoys the distanced, external activity of fixing up Portia’s room before she arrives, but she will not take on mothering a real adolescent who, having been in her opinion born and reared improperly, comes psychologically 210 too close to home. Thus, she buys Portia tasteful clothes and sends her to an expensive school at an “imposing address” where Miss Paullie, daughter of a successful physician, “organized classes for girls” at the back of her father’s house (DH 68). Nevertheless, merely by existing, Portia crosses class lines, and

Miss Paullie is “very particular what class of girl she took.” Miss Paullie implies, when she catches Portia reading a letter from Eddie, that she is “mortified on

Portia’s behalf, in front of these better girls [. . . . M]isdemeanours show a certain level in life” and Miss Paullie, “who had thought well of Anna, was sorry about

Portia” (DH 76, 77).

Because of the exclusion of the past from the house by Thomas and Anna,

Portia must look elsewhere for her own roots and story. Matchett, who alone in the household admired Portia’s father, provides her with this—as well as any mothering that she receives. Nevertheless, this arrangement too upsets tradition and the confinement of class to place. Portia often goes downstairs to visit with

Matchett to have tea or a talk, and Matchett comes upstairs to tuck Portia in bed whenever the Quaynes are out. Even before Portia’s arrival, Matchett shows “an unheard-of tendency [. . .] to put in her own oar” by explicitly disapproving of some of Anna’s ideas about the young girl (DH 56). Yet “something steadily stood between” Matchett and Portia, and social distinctions contribute to the unassailable barrier. Matchett, for example, “went in [2 Windsor Terrace] at the basement, but she made [Portia] go in at the front door with [her] key” (DH 158).

Portia steps over another line of propriety by falling in love with Eddie, who is not “quite-quite,” but her own untraditional background makes the move 211 in her eyes relatively minor (HP 114). Eddie, the “brilliant child of an obscure home,” came up to Oxford, where he was “taken up, played up, played about with, taken down, let down, finally sent down for one idiotic act.” Thereafter his family, “obscure and living in an obscure province, [. . .] were not [. . .] in a position to do anything for him.” But with his “proletarian, animal, quick grace” and reputation for being “clever as a monkey,” he represents, like Markie

Linkwater with his successful career as a barrister, the rise of the middle class on the basis of ability (DH 85). Eddie scrapes by, in part because Anna gets him a job at Thomas’s advertising agency. The fact that Anna has already invited him to her drawing room, and that she has previously visited Eddie’s flat as well, make it clear that lines of social distinction around Eddie have already been much traversed. Though occasionally Anna at thirty-four desires to put twenty-three- year-old Eddie “back in his place,” she has “never quite clearly defined” it (DH

91). In fact, one look at Eddie engenders in Anna’s former governess, now Mrs.

Heccomb, “its first misgiving for years [. . .] about Anna [. . . . ] No doubt it must be in order [. . .] since Portia said that he was a friend of Anna’s. But what was he doing being a friend of Anna’s?” (DH 262-63). And while neither Mrs. Heccomb nor Matchett can dictate propriety to Anna, Portia’s unwavering interest in Eddie,

Matchett makes clear to her, is unacceptable. Because of him, Portia felt, “the door between [she and Matchett] had been shut for ever” (DH 178).

Anna’s own indiscretions—having had a pre-marital affair, “making a tart” of Eddie because she would “never dare be a proper tart herself,” reading

Portia’s diary and then talking over its contents with Eddie and St. John— 212 demonstrate her inability to follow social codes on any except the most visible public level (DH 142). Though, with Thomas relegated to his office and Anna reigning over the drawing room, she and her husband make every apparent effort to avoid each other in their fine home, the Quaynes at Anna’s instigation delegate responsibility for Portia and leave her to go abroad together. Having no other family of their own, or, evidently, any friends with children, they place Portia with Mrs. Heccomb and her stepchildren.

At Waikiki with the Heccombs, Portia learns of a life less socially elevated but also less confined in conversations and relationships. The seafront in

Seale is “rather commercial and not very select”; most of Mrs. Heccomb’s friends

“lived in those pretty balconied villas” and seem to be, in short, the “villa-ry” of whom Lady Naylor speaks so disparagingly in The Last September (83). Life there centers much more around what the children—young adults whose mother, like Portia’s, “had not been quite-quite”—do, say and want than life in London, where Portia should be seen and not heard, or, better yet, not seen either (DH

177). Mrs. Heccomb, indeed, “talked so freely to Portia [. . .] that Portia, used to the tactics of Windsor Terrace, wondered whether this really were wise” (DH

187). The Heccomb life is “unedited[,] pushing and frank. Nothing set itself up here but the naïvest propriety” which was “no serious check to nature [. . .]; thus eyes constantly bulged and skins changed colour with immediate unsubtle impulses. Coming from Windsor Terrace, Portia found at Waikiki the upright rudeness of the primitive state”—a primitivism echoed even by the name of the 213

Heccombs’ house. Here is “free living,” a stark contrast to the studied confinement to which Portia has been accustomed (DH 237, 238).

Loud, less educated and in real danger of “growing up common,” Bowen suggests that the Heccomb children may nevertheless represent the family life of the future (DH 178). Certainly neither Waikiki nor the house in Regent’s Park is the “family house” of the past with which Matchett has been familiar, “where the young ladies, with bows on flowing horsetails of hair, supped upstairs with their governess [. . . .] But Matchett [. . .] did not recognise that some tracts no longer exist. She seemed, instead, to detect some lack of life in the [Regent’s Park] house, some organic failure in its propriety” (DH 57), and from the perspective of her own Victorian background, she is certainly right.

Propriety continues to lose ground in Bowen’s last novels. Though

Bowen describes the “portentous” houses of the nouveau riche as “homes of a class doomed from the start, without natural privilege, without grace,” this class constitutes one of those which steadily increases in significance in her works (DH

399). In The Heat of the Day, the characters exist in the context of a great class- leveling influence—war. Stella Rodney, the protagonist, loves and sometimes lives with Robert Kelway, a member of the middle class of whose background she knows all too little. While Stella descends from the landed gentry, she now resides in various well-appointed flats in London and wonders whether the land but little wealth that her son inherits from a distant cousin in Ireland will be a liability. Just as Matchett, a servant, becomes a major character in The Death of 214 the Heart, in The Heat of the Day a couple of middle class women and a man of decidedly questionable past come to the foreground.

Robert Harrison’s position as a British agent, by its very nature, partakes little of propriety, and Harrison himself provides a telling example of the temporary social dislocations of war. Though Harrison in times of peace might have been a crook, now “it’s a time when I’m not a crook,” he says, because “War

[. . .] put the other lot of us in the right” (HD 31). Nevertheless, Bowen makes it clear that he oversteps even the increased latitude that being an agent permits when he offers, if Stella will have an affair with him, not to turn in Robert

Kelway, her lover and an outwardly upstanding man who is in fact a spy for

Germany. There is something of the crook about Harrison even when he is among those currently in favor. He may occasionally masquerade as a

“gentleman-type,” but those who know would never mistake him for a gentleman

(HD 73).

Robert Kelway, on the other hand, has every apparent reason to be in favor. He fought with distinction earlier in World War II, he has an important government job during the remainder of the conflict, and he has money and a satisfying, mutually-loving relationship. He has gone with success through every stage of growing up, as faithfully documented by a virtual gallery of smiling family photographs. But he knows the shallowness and emptiness of these outer trappings from his past. He has no place, only a house that has always been in danger of being sold; he has no living family member who has not espoused or been brainwashed by jingoistic ideas of English uprightness. His family’s 215 extravagant nationalism, manufactured at the expense of any more personal feeling, precludes any vestige of patriotism in Robert. When Stella encounters the

Kelways, she thinks, “You could not account for this family headed by Mrs.

Kelway by simply saying that it was middle class, because that left you asking, middle of what? She saw the Kelways suspended in the middle of nothing. She could envisage them so suspended when there was nothing more.” Though hardly entirely admirable, the Kelways are a striking example of the resilience of their class and “[N]ot to be denied” (HD 109). Robert’s family represents a home front so absolute and all-encompassing that ideologically Robert must travel far to avoid their circumvention (HD 109).

Stella, the dispossessed, looks for a place, “a habitat,” in Robert Kelway

(HD 85). With the loss of ancestral place, family, even reputation, little else seems to have any meaning for her. When she and her former husband, Victor

Rodney, divorced after only two years, his Anglo-Irish relations believed that “It could but be that there was someone else in her life” (HD 78). They misunderstood—willfully, it seems—that the “kindly middle-aged woman who had already nursed [Victor] during the war” and with whom he “had taken refuge” after two years of marriage to Stella was in fact the woman for whom he left Stella and whom he intended to marry (HD 79). Cousin Nettie, the only family member odd enough to whom Victor could admit as socially “terrible” an intention as this, later reveals to Roderick, in a lowered voice, that the woman

“was quite common” (HD 204). Other, less-informed members of Victor’s family labeled Stella a “bad mother” responsible for hastening her husband’s death, and, 216 because the “world in which one could still be seen as déclassée was on the whole ignored by her, but not quite yet,” she estranged herself and her son, Roderick, from those people (HD 67, 57). Uprooted, she lived, the relations note with evident satisfaction, “in a succession of little houses about the country” (HD 79).

Upon Roderick’s entrance into the Army before The Heat of the Day opens, Stella has stored her own belongings in order to increase her mobility, and she lives in two different flats among the paraphernalia of others during the course of the novel. She has no servants and, early in the novel, only a small kitchenette with

“room for one slender person to stand and turn” (HD 44). Stella, though “born to some idea of position,” has “come loose from her moorings,” and the “abandoned past [has] “dissolved behind her” (HD 109).

Roderick, however, from “a cousin of his father’s,” inherits “a house in the south of Ireland, Mount Morris, with which went about three hundred acres of land” (HD 46). With this inheritance, the privileged past he has never experienced takes on very attractive solidity for Roderick. Indeed, this place and the Anglo-Irish social class that it represents are to him not merely the past but

“an historic future” that suits his “growing capacity for attachment”—not to individuals but to ideas and patterns (HD 47). Roderick seems captivated by the thought of himself as a landowner in Ireland and hopes that he will obtain a commission in the Army so that he can “be known as ‘the Captain’ ” at Mount

Morris (HD 51). His mother only worries that this vision splendid enthralls him too much, and too unrealistically. Stella sees that Roderick “was ready to entertain a high, if abstract, idea of society,” symbolized by a “painted fan,” 217 representing a “beau monde of figures, grouped and placed and linked by gestures or garlands,” with which she had entertained him as a baby. Though he has never

“lost interior sight” of that idealized world, the “fan on its fragile ivory spokes now remained closed,” and “how if he came to set too much store by a world of which she, both as herself and as an instrument of her century, had deprived him?” (HD 57). Rodney has not yet adjusted to the reality of the twentieth century, with people “patternlessly doing what they liked” and “expecting to be liked for their own sakes” rather than for any social identity or place in a pattern

(HD 58). A relative recommends that Rodney “get rid of” Mount Morris—“sell outright, before he ties himself up” because “At his age, one has got to move with the times” (HD 78). Roderick, however, has been born after his time; even his eyes look “anachronistic” (HD 48). Fatherless and homeless, he ignores and apparently disagrees with everyone’s cautionary tales. For him, Mount Morris provides the solidity of an inherited past combined with the prospect of a rooted future for himself and his posterity.

If the Kelways represent the rise in affluence of the middle class, Louie

Lewis, a young, lower-middle-class woman and wife, then widow, of a World

War II soldier, represents the brief empowerment of the working classes during that war. She has undistinguished features in a “sun-coarsened face” and works in a factory in London not too far from her flat (HD 9, 13). Though a “[c]hild of

Kent,” since her parents were killed by a bomb and her husband, “a serious and progressing young electrician,” was drafted abroad to India, she “never left

London, having been left with no place to go” (HD 14). With an immoral sort of 218

“piety,” she brings “any other man” to her husband’s favorite spot in the park and

“had thus the sense of living their Sundays for him” (HD 16). Oppressed by her time alone, she is “not always [. . .] disobliging” to men who pursue her for sex— though she finds that “no sooner were [men’s] lips unstuck from your own than they began [. . .] to utter morality” such as “You ought to be ashamed, with your husband fighting” (HD 15, 17). To evade those whom she does not care to oblige, she invents lies freely, “glib when she improvised” but otherwise inarticulate (HD

229).

A born follower, she “looked about her [. . .] for someone to imitate” and one evening quite by accident finds Stella Rodney dining with Harrison during the climactic scene in which he finally reveals enough details fully to implicate

Robert Kelway as a spy (HD 13). Louie escapes from herself by wondering how

Stella achieved the effect of “invisible powder, [. . .] sparkle-clip on black and clean rigid line of shoulders” and “hat of small type nothing if not put on right”

(HD 237, 239). Yet her politeness in spite of extreme emotion reined in tightly forms an integral part of the classy impression that Stella makes. She introduces herself, picks up Louie’s dropped gloves, and apologizes for Harrison’s rudeness, all with “terror somewhere knocking about inside her like a loose piece of ice” and “agony ironed out of [her] forehead” (HD 239). Louie, watching, believes

Stella to be the pinnacle of “refinement” and “respectability”:

Stella had given the impression of being a soul astray—but how

[. . .] should she not be? What indeed, was there for her? She

could not but be out of her sphere here, nonplussed, a wanderer 219

from some better star. It had been much to find in the world one

creature too good for the world. (HD 296)

But Stella’s reputation undergoes a second and more public drubbing when following Robert’s death she has to testify in court about her relationship with him and the newspapers publish accounts of the inquest. Just as she had allowed her dead husband to save face with his relations, so Stella protects

Robert’s reputation, lending his official death by “misadventure, outcome of a crazy midnight escapade on a roof [, . . .] colour, odour, [and] scandalous likeliness” with her Mayfair address (HD 291). She leaves the coroner’s court with only “one kind of reputation, that of being a good witness,” still intact (HD

294).

For Louie, with her middle class morality, “Stella’s fall,” means that

“there was no refinement [. . .] It all only came to a matter of expensiveness [. . .]

A nicer look and a nicer voice, but there she was with someone she was not married to.” Henceforth, “[v]irtue became less possible now it was shown impossible by Stella, less to be desired because Stella had not desired it to be”

(HD 297, 296, 295). And Louie, who for a time had, under a friend’s vigilant eye and Stella’s positive influence, ceased her “usual habits” of picking up men, gradually “drop[s] back into vagrant habits” (HD 234, 297). Inevitably, she becomes pregnant and chooses to have the child though “there could, of course, be one way out” (HD 315). For Louie, personal freedom has always been more oppressive than attachment to someone, and her search for “what should make for 220 completeness and cast out fear” that she thought she had glimpsed in Stella ends with this child and “her now complete life” (HD 296, 319).

Roderick, finally given the opportunity to visit his inheritance in Ireland, finds himself subsumed by it: “The place had concentrated upon [him] its being

[. . . .] He was left possessed, oppressed and in awe [. . .]; he was followed by the sound of his own footsteps over his own land” (HD 301). Then, spurred on by the thought that “It was a matter of continuing,” he too pauses to consider “the idea of succession” because, as yet, “there would be nobody but his mother to be his heir”

(HD 302). Even more optimistically, Roderick seems to have some practical ideas about how, in the absence of endless inherited wealth, Mount Morris “will definitely have to begin to pay” (HD 303).

In The Heat of the Day, Bowen’s most socially mixed novel, Stella’s apparent freedom from her past carries within it the perils of rootlessness and dispossession. The fact that, despite appearances, she protects others at the expense of her own good name seems to indicate the different social and moral standards by which the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy operate. That class no longer has the inbred familial closeness or political connections to protect its own. Thus

Stella, twice stereotyped as an immoral woman, passes from undeserved confinement to confinement in that those who label her limit not who she really is but who she is perceived to be by others. Stella does not seem unsure of her own identity, however, and acts with bravery in the face of those who try to manipulate her testimony. She is consistent and persistent, as befits her “extraction [. . .] from a class that has taken an unexpected number of generations to die out” (HD 221

109). Her son Roderick’s existence and plans for money and succession further demonstrate the tenacity of the Anglo-Irish upper class when confronted by a number of daunting obstacles.

For the most part, however, Louie’s presence as the frame for the novel indicates the triumph of the middle class in The Heat of the Day. Without roots herself, Louie begins to create them from nothing for her illegitimate son. She completely disregards correctness by naming the baby after her husband and then taking him “straight round to his grandparents,” not out of defiance but out of a sort of contentment and affirmation of the individual over the ideal (HD 319).

She certainly supports Bowen’s statement that “Life [. . .] selected its own methods of going on” (HD 314). With fewer resources than other classes, the lower-middle class also demonstrates tenacity. While Bowen does not embrace

Louie’s social and moral barrenness as freedom from propriety or morality, she does applaud the resourcefulness with which Louie replaces with new life the threat of extinction that war represents.

A World of Love is further confirmation by Bowen of the decline of the upper class. She returns to the Irish setting of The Last September, in which the classes represented were, in order of social rank, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the

English military, and the native Irish. Now, in A World of Love, money is the new ranking system, and the English nouveau riche are on top while the Anglo-

Irish have slipped considerably in both finances and social solidarity. By revisiting the same class some thirty years later, Bowen demonstrates that the 222 former class confinements of the Anglo-Irish have been replaced by the new confinements of poverty and social nonexistence.

The primary representative of the failing Anglo-Irish Ascendancy is

Antonia, who in her younger days with her cousin Guy was “something out of the common” (WL 120). Then, she attended somewhat to Roderick Rodney’s priorities of money and succession. In England she made money as a photographer, and she married. But her marriage, on the rebound following the death of her beloved Guy in World War I, was not wholehearted and soon ended, without offspring. As her pleasure in life waned, so did her enthusiasm for photography, and, though rather itinerant, she now lives primarily in Ireland because “It’s cheaper here” (WL 201). She attends to her inheritance there,

Montefort, a “small mansion” bequeathed to her by Guy, only indirectly and vicariously (WL 9). The non-Ascendancy have already inherited the property in everything but name.

Montefort itself, though retaining a few “lordly” appointments, has “an air of having gone down”; with no money even for keeping up appearances, its “door no longer knew hospitality.” The “trees had been felled around it”—probably sold for timber—and general shabbiness prevails, inside and out (WL 9). The new man of the house, though in year-round residence, does not own Montefort, and he is hardly the formerly-usual inbred upper class inhabitant. Antonia’s illegitimate cousin, Fred Danby is the “bye-blow son of roving Montefort uncle” and a mother of dubious class and some “foreign blood” (WL 19). Little educated, Fred is more tenant than caretaker; he “farmed the land” and gave to 223

Antonia half of the meager profits for the privilege, if privilege it is, of living there rent-free with his family. This consists of Lilia, an English woman whom

Antonia marries off to Fred despite her protest that he is “common,” and two daughters, Jane and Maud (WL 21). Apparently, if there is to be a succession at all, Jane, whom Antonia has had educated and whom she has generally treated like the daughter that she and Guy should have had, must marry money.

And Ireland “is rotten with money, if one could touch it,” but Antonia and the Danbys cannot (WL 52). Though they marginally keep up appearances by annually attending the Hunt Fête at a local castle, the castle itself is now owned by a “new English châtelaine,” the nouveau riche Lady Latterly (WL 39, 83).

Jane encounters the English, a new “race she did not know yet, yet somehow knew of” when, having seen Jane at the fete, Lady Latterly invites her over for an evening that “reeked of expense” (WL 85, 89). There the contrast between the

Latterly set and the Danbys is all too transparent. Even the one other Anglo-Irish person in attendance, Terence, who remembers Montefort, does not know Fred

Danby and had “understood that place had got into farmers’ hands” and was, therefore, “gone.” In “those days,” Terence reminisces, “we went where the people were,” but today “one goes where the money is” (WL 93, 94). And even those with money, like Lady Latterly, find it a trap. She lives a glittering but barren existence in a banal castle: victimized by her own poor taste, surrounded by locals who laugh at and exploit her, accompanied by a series of boyfriends who tolerate her only because of her money. 224

Jane, with an actual hayseed in her hair from having helped the “farmer” make hay that morning, clearly has no money and is no one (WL 104).

Nevertheless, the locals view the Latterly invitation as having “launched” her, and

“who is to say that before we know we may not hear of her moving among the crowned heads” (WL 130). Moreover, Antonia remembers that the Montefort line has overcome other snags in unsullied social class and succession: an ancestor

“Married the cook, [. . .] went queer in the head from drinking and thinking about himself, [and] left no children—anyway, no legits. So this place went to his first cousin” (WL 206). The inclusion of this memory, and the fact that Bowen introduces eligible and well-to-do Englishman Richard Priam to Jane in the final moments of the novel, offers hope that the “vanishing garden” of Anglo-Irish

Ascendancy life may in some small way continue, however fundamentally altered

(WL 145).

Nevertheless, social class as a significant issue seems to vanish with A

World of Love. In The Little Girls it constitutes only a minor part of the world that Dinah Delacroix sees disappearing behind her and, therefore, wants to preserve for the future. By Eva Trout, the upper class seems to have disappeared entirely unless it resides in Henry and his family of impoverished gentility and higher education.

Bowen criticizes and to some extent satirizes upper and upper-middle class societies, yet for fully half of her novels the upper classes triumph easily before their own gradual defeat or replacement. Until the later novels, every serious potential invader of the social status quo—Gerald, Markie, Max, Robert— 225

Bowen dispenses with handily. Yet, while Bowen spotlights the flaws and decline of her own class, she does not indicate that the classes which oust the upper class are an unmitigated improvement. Clearly the rising classes offer more freedom of expression and behavior, but within its confinement the upper class also offered grace and an altogether-more-aesthetically-pleasing world. Just as

Bowen’s beautiful protagonists, burdened by their adolescence, must graduate into an adulthood of successive confinements, so Bowen’s tradition-laden but lovely upper classes yield to the pressure of time, the twentieth century. Though not necessarily a beast slouching toward Bethlehem, a new order must replace the old. It is the way of things.

Generally, this inevitable progression does not offer liberation, only mobility. Each class seeks to break into the exclusive social circle of the class above it, and, by advancing up the social strata, each class replaces old confinements with new ones. The traps of ignorance, poverty, and insignificance yield to the trap of resisting change in order to preserve exclusivity, continuity and ascendancy. To keep the cycle in motion, meanwhile, those at the top regress toward ignorance, poverty and insignificance.

226

CHAPTER 5

AUTHORITY

“Oh, do beware of old women—you’ve no notion how they batten on things. Lock everything up; hide everything!

[. . .]The whole pack are against us.”

—The Death of the Heart (140, 141)

There is one kind of sublime officiousness, [. . .] love’s, that is overruling: [. . .] the seducer becomes the abstract of appetite or the thief.

—To the North (246)

Authority, which often functions as an antagonist or source of conflict, in

Bowen’s novels rests in two sources: the natural or appointed authority to which one is involuntarily subjugated, and the source of love or respect to whom one voluntary subjugates oneself. Because of the frequency of young female protagonists in Bowen novels, natural authorities—aunts, cousins or, occasionally, mothers—are also quite common. These authority figures are almost always female, and their authority derives largely from the fact that due to social class they have been reared to direct a domestic sphere that certainly includes servants of different ranks, frequently extends to children, and sometimes encompasses husbands as well. These women naturally attempt to provide the girls in their keeping with guidelines for dress, conversation, and general behavior, and many of the adolescent girls not surprisingly rebel against restraint.

Especially in the early novels, the particular task of the authorities seems to be to

“outwit” these girls’ “natural love of the cad” (HP 138). As Karen in The House in Paris explains, 227

Loving art better than life [young girls] need men to be actors; only

an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of

touch with the everyday that they dread [. . .] They are right: not

seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially.

This natural fleshly protest against good taste [. . .] unfolds with

the woman nature, unfolds ahead of it quickly and has a

flamboyant flowering in the young girl. (HP 137-38)

Among their many talents, most of Bowen’s natural authorities have the mission and the means to nip this flowering in the bud.

In The Last September Lady Myra Naylor enjoys being the primary power within her domestic sphere. Her first act in the novel sets the tone for the remainder of her confining actions: she “made” her guests take tea (LS 6).

During the past dozen years, “something set [. . .] in Myra; she was happier, harder” (LS 16). She has “argued with [. . .] many people,” has few friends, and in social realms makes a practiced, formidable foe (LS 15, 13). She delegates authority constantly, directing her nephew Laurence to move chairs or her niece- by-marriage Lois, both of whom live with the Naylors, to arrange flowers. She believes herself incontestably in the right. She feels that she should warn Lois to

“be careful” about how her relationship with English subaltern Gerald Lesworth might appear, “but as she’s Richard’s niece I don’t very well see that I can” (LS

59).

Meanwhile, though she firmly quashes any rumors that she hears, Lois’s interest in Gerald increases. He is primarily attractive to her as a way of escaping 228 the life of Danielstown, where she does nothing more dramatic than play tennis or change the books in guests’ rooms. Gerald’s profession as a soldier would at least offer the allure of travel to distant places. Because of the Troubles in Ireland,

Lois, though upper class and twenty-two, is not allowed outside the country.

Gerald, however, has not the visceral attraction of a cad, and Lois’s own feelings for him are far from certain. Upon her first kiss, she thinks, “So that was being kissed: just an impact, with inside blankness. She was lonely, and saw there was no future” (LS 131). These two feelings—lukewarm liking for Gerald and anxiety that she must provide herself with a future—war within Lois. Considerations about the future win, and soon she writes to her friend Viola that she “intended to marry Gerald” (LS 222).

On the other hand, because Lady Naylor “won’t hear a word of it, [. . .

Gerald] officially doesn’t [love Lois]” (LS 122). When Lois, out of loneliness and determination to escape, accepts Gerald’s proposal, Lady Naylor steps in.

Though she believes of herself that “no one could interfere less than I do,” Bowen characterizes Myra Naylor as “imperative” (LS 90, 177). She schedules an appointment with Gerald and indirectly informs him that he is not rich or socially elevated enough for her niece. That and the incontestable truth that “First and last, she does not love you” give Lady Naylor an unassailable position (LS 272).

Gerald, with his “invincible ‘niceness,’ ” can only admire “her four-square propriety, her sound sense, the price she set on his Lois” and can only reply,

“from your point of view you’re quite right” (LS 273). She is right, too, not to stop Gerald from seeing Lois because “it would be not only unkind but 229 exceedingly foolish” (LS 274). When Gerald is shot through the head by some locals whom the Naylors hope they do not know, the issue is resolved. Again making her choices for her, Lady Naylor packs Lois off to Tours “[f]or her

French” (LS 309). From Lady Naylor’s perspective—which represents that of

Anglo-Irish society in the novel’s setting—a little confinement saves young girls from the consequences of inexperience and keeps them safe; therefore, confinement is a necessity.

A new and much more comprehensively negative authority—one that will be echoed again only in Bowen’s final novel—intrudes briefly into the circumscribed domesticity of The Last September. At first, characters only reluctantly and randomly discuss the authority of power latent in the underplayed presence of English soldiers and Irish republicans at war with one another.

Whenever possible, the Naylors attempt to dismiss the civil war as “ambushing and skirmishing and hey-fidaddling” (LS 280). Nevertheless, the signs are on every side. Lois notices an unidentified man in a trenchcoat taking an illegal shortcut through the Danielstown demesne. Sir Richard reports, as a warning to

Lois, that “three young women in the Clonmore direction had had their hair cut off by masked men for walking out with the soldiers” (LS 87). Laurence, feeling overlooked by the raiders, is “considerably cheered” by an encounter with three armed men who take his shoes and, temporarily, his wristwatch (LS 285).

However, the novel’s most dramatic account of the confrontation with this authority occurs when in an old mill Lois and Marda accidentally awaken an exhausted Irishman. With the obvious intent of confinement and questioning, the 230 man says, “Stay there,” and “a pistol bore the persuasion out.” Though both “feel framed,” the only immediate result of the threatened harm is minimal and accidental (LS 186, 187). But the violence escalates as the novel continues, finally directly affecting the owners of Danielstown and shutting them forever from their Big House as it burns to the ground. The authority of power—first of collective force and then of political control with the formation of the Republic of

Ireland in 1922—ultimately eliminates the majority of the Anglo-Irish from southern Ireland and effectively ends their ascendancy there.

To the North signals a return to natural authority and its more positive, even necessary, confining effect on the young and inexperienced. Emmeline, at twenty-five still very naïve, is, like Lois, an orphan. She lives with her widowed sister-in-law, Cecilia, who finds her good company but cannot see beyond her own concerns. According to Cecilia, Emmeline is “not a jeune fille à marier; ever since she was twelve she has done what she likes” (TN 212). Thus Cecilia rationalizes away all responsibility for Emmeline, and the only authority figure willing to replace the missing parents is distant in both miles and relationship.

Lady Georgina Waters, “Cecilia’s aunt-in-law [. . . and] Emmeline’s first cousin once removed,” generally needs no excuse of relationship to meddle in others’ affairs (TN 14). She sets herself up as advisor and amateur psychologist to many young persons whose parents are either absent or deceased, and, as Bowen notes, most of the relationships in which Lady Waters meddles would have been fine without her interference (TN 56). Emmeline, however, unlike almost everyone else with whom Lady Waters or Cecilia associates, does not demand 231 social attention. Consequently, she exists in inattention and silence until finally, in response to Cecilia’s memory of remarking to Georgina that Markie “was too fat, a bore, a bounder, an egotist, altogether a frightful young man,” Emmeline blurts out, “He’s my friend: I like him so much, I see him so often” (TN 96).

At this point a little intervention might still have saved Emmeline, but

Cecilia is too much a young, thoughtless contemporary absorbed in her own romantic entanglements, too often “annoyed but not really concerned,” to have any positive restraining effect (TN 189). She “put[s] on a motherly air,” tells

Emmeline “I wouldn’t trust Markie an inch,” and asks her to “be sensible about

Markie,” but she is not concerned enough, apparently, to tell Lady Waters, who certainly would have tried to force Emmeline to see the impropriety of her position (TN 122, 125). Indeed, because Georgina is generally so thoroughly interfering, and so comic in doing so that she is difficult to take seriously, Cecilia instead attempts to keep new misgivings about Emmeline and Markie “from

Georgina at any price” (TN 213).

Finally, Lady Waters, who has had to rely on rumor instead of her self- absorbed niece, confronts Cecilia with Emmeline’s dilemma. Too late, she supplies the voice of authority and propriety that often provides order and protection in early Bowen novels. Because she has heard “on all sides that

[Emmeline is] going about with a young man of whom neither Robert nor I can approve,” she tells Cecilia, in an “outbreak of real perspicacity” that “you may have been just a little remiss” (TN 282, 283). When Lady Waters sniffs in response to Cecilia’s improvised and defensive assessment of Markie, Cecilia 232 feels the real force of social rectitude behind Georgina’s comic façade: “Cecilia’s heart went lower: that sniff was traditional [. . .] here spoke sheer Aunt, empowered by plain good sense. That voice when back through the schoolroom and to the cradle” (TN 284). Lady Waters, with the threat that “If you refuse to do anything, I must approach Emmeline,” finally forces Cecilia into belated action

(TN 286).

But all of Lady Waters’s authority cannot rectify Emmeline’s predicament now. Emmeline, with her extravagant love for Markie, has broken through all traditional bounds only to discover that he does not love her equally. She does not even want to marry the person that she has found Markie to be, but by current social standards she is ruined for anyone else. Ironically, too much freedom has backed her into a corner from which suicide seems to provide her only way out.

However, the limitations of social authority become all too clear. In The

House in Paris, Karen Michaelis’s mother safeguards her eighteen-year-old daughter from a fate similar to Emmeline’s in terms of sexual license, though not in onesidedness. When Karen came back from Paris, having fallen in love with

Max Ebhart there, her mother says nothing but sees that a more socially appropriate young man, Ray Forrestier, is close by, and, gradually, Karen’s

“regard for order overtook her sensations” (HP 138). Because Mrs. Michaelis believes that “a woman’s real life only began with marriage,” she approves when

Ray, the expected suitor with the right “touch of inbreeding,” proposes and Karen accepts. Mrs. Michaelis relaxes her guard just when circumstances put Max

Ebhart back in her daughter’s path. Now twenty-three, Karen is hardly beyond 233 the influence of her sensations—though she has been slow to realize her love for

Max because, being a “French-English-Jewish man in a bank,” he is not in her world socially acceptable (HP 89). While still being pleasant and serene, Mrs.

Michaelis, “who had met Max once,” reminds Karen of the proper parameters by swiftly summing him up and “dismiss[ing]” him (HP 116). Her daughter, while admitting “How right Mother had been, how right she was always,” sees that

“You could not fall in love with” someone whose outline is “too deadeningly clear”: “Without their indistinctness things do not exist; you cannot desire them”

(HP 118). This, of course, is precisely the point. By clearly fitting Max into a category other than Karen’s own, Mrs. Michaelis hopes to eliminate him from the realm of possible desire.

But she cannot protect Karen forever. Sensation reasserts itself, and

Karen rebels, embarking on a brief affair with Max. Accidentally, however, her mother discovers that Karen has been making her own choices: lying about where she has gone, covering up her real activities. Karen discovers in turn that her mother, when opposed, is “hard to be up against” (HP 71). Karen sees “what was ruthless inside her mother,” her “savage battle for peace,” her “deadly intention to not know” (HP 227). She tries to tell herself that, out of love, her mother “protects” her,

But was that love? [. . .] Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes

[. . .] Her resistance is terrifying; she would rather feel me almost

hate her than speak [. . .] But when mother does not speak it is not

pity or kindness; it is worldliness beginning so deep down that it 234

seems to be the heart. Max said: “Why are you running away

from home?” Now I know. She has made me lie for a week. She

will hold me inside the lie till she makes me lose the power I felt I

had. (HP 229)

Mrs. Michaelis plans to win the battle and, in the process, to “keep [Karen] away from everything that has power” (HP 211). First Mrs. Michaelis controls Karen with silence, and Karen feels the compulsion of her mother’s will and her own corresponding loss of power: “the house with its fixed eye was compelling Karen

[; . . .] things guided themselves” with “overruling coldness,” and finally, “the week got speed up and went triumphantly over her like a train” (HP 227).

Eventually Karen forces the issue by talking, but from Mrs. Michaelis still emanates the overwhelming feeling that order must prevail, that definitions must mean what she says they mean. She insists that Karen’s love for Max is “some kind of dream” and tells Karen, “You’re not yourself” (HP 230). They are discussing what “One cannot even discuss,” and Karen weakens visibly, realizing

“that everything that could be said was on [her mother’s] side.” Against her mother’s insistence that Max is pursuing Karen’s beauty and money, Karen has only feelings that cannot be so precisely defined and, again, that “one should not mention publicly” (HP 230, 232). Mrs. Michaelis exacts a promise of a month’s inaction from Karen, and, by the end of their conversation, the event that had been

Karen’s escape from a lifetime of predictability and protection is reduced to insignificance. When her mother asks, “And so—that was what had happened?”

Karen can only reply, “Yes, [. . .] that was all” (HP 234). 235

Even when the child who “would be disaster” materializes, Mrs. Michaelis is there to see that all the exterior of her daughter’s life—the trip abroad, the marriage to suitable Ray—still appears seemly. Her mother’s inflexible statement that “I think you will want to” marry Ray becomes socially necessary, and

Karen’s chronic fear that Ray is only her mother in another guise seems realized

(HP 201). Eventually, the mother and the society she represents have their way.

A final authority figure who draws strength from her secure social position and, even more, from her unassailable moral uprightness is Mrs. Quayne of The

Death of the Heart. Because she has died before the novel opens, her position and influence are fixed in the minds of those for whom she is a fairly recent memory, and most remember her with respect but without affection. Her housekeeper Matchett recreates for Portia and the reader a portrait of Mrs.

Quayne as a wife and mother who unyieldingly upheld standards of correctness which were for the most part sanctioned by society as well.

The relationship between Matchett and Mrs. Quayne lasted for fifteen years without ever being close. Matchett worked hard for her primarily because she took pleasure in a job well done, not because she wished to please Mrs.

Quayne, and this fact always stood between them: “she couldn’t forgive me [. . .] that I liked the work for its own sake [. . .] You’d never get right work from a girl who worked to please you: she’d only work to show” (DH 104-05). But, being much more concerned with how she appeared to others than with demonstrating any genuine affection, Mrs. Quayne understood and operated on the basis of show. She liked to be thought well of and presented a façade of concern to foster 236 good feeling. According to Matchett, “the one thing that put her out was if you made her feel she wasn’t considerate. She liked me to feel that she thought the world of me.” She could be patronizing, as Matchett remembers: “I couldn’t count how often I’ve heard her say to her friends, ‘Treat servants nicely, take an interest in them, and they’ll do anything for you.’ [. . .] No, she’d never lift her voice and she always had a kind word. But I couldn’t care for her: she had no nature” (DH 104).

In contrast, “Matchett thinks the world of” Mr. Quayne, who was “all nature” and would leave you “to go your own way” (DH 436, 105). As a result, it is Mrs. Quayne whom Matchett cannot forgive when Mr. Quayne, at 57, has an affair with a “scrap of a widow” named Irene (DH 23). Anna Quayne, the daughter-in-law, describes Mr. Quayne’s life as a variety of leisure activities supervised by his wife, who “always had him in the palm of her hand”: paving the garden, diverting a stream because Mrs. Quayne “let him,” and generally

“dangling round after” her. Though “She had never cared very much for

London,” Anna explains, “once she got him to Dorset, she was so nice that she was constantly packing him off to London [. . .] to stay at his club for a few days, see old friends, or watch cricket or something” (DH 21, 22). There, inevitably, as if his wife were trying to provoke such a conclusion, he met Irene and with her had an affair throughout one summer.

When Irene discovers that she is pregnant, Mr. Quayne confesses all to his wife, complete with letters from and photographs of Irene, and Mrs. Quayne,

“quite as splendid as ever,” takes control. She “stopped Mr. Quayne crying, then 237 went straight down to the kitchen and made tea.” After this fortifying repast, “she told him that now he would have to marry Irene” (DH 24, 25). Mr. Quayne “was not allowed a say for one single minute” though “he strongly disapproved of divorce.” He also “loved his home like a child” and did not want to leave, “But

Mrs. Quayne was, of course, implacable: in fact by next day she had got quite ecstatic. She might have been saving up for this moment for years” (DH 26, 25).

Even on Mrs. Quayne’s deathbed, Matchett cannot forgive her for her behavior toward her husband at this point:

“Not about Mr. Quayne—I could never forgive her that [. . .] he

had done her wrong, and she had to do herself right. Oh, she was

like iron [. . .] Go? He was sent [. . . ] away, as cook or I might

have been [. . .] She stood by while Mr. Thomas put him into the

car and drove him off as if he had been a child. What a thing to

make Mr. Thomas do to his own father! And then look at the way

your father lived, with no place in the world and nobody to respect

them [. . .] Who put him down to that? [. . .] You don’t break a

person’s nature for nothing.” (DH 107)

Sometimes nature, when Matchett uses the term, suggests “spirit,” as here; at other times it implies “naturalness,” a quality less artful or designing than those

Matchett associates with Mrs. Quayne.

When more objective Portia points out that Mrs. Quayne had “made such a sacrifice,” Matchett responds, “Sacrificers [. . .] are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice” (DH 102). Like Mrs. Quayne, Matchett 238 is implacable in her decisiveness, and when Portia says, “But Matchett, she meant to do good,” Matchett condemns Mrs. Quayne with the words, “No, she meant to do right” (DH 107).

Indeed, Mrs. Quayne demonstrates such unquestionable rectitude that, ironically, Mr. Quayne “fell morally in love with his wife all over again” (DH

27). Even Thomas, her son, must do what Mrs. Quayne considers the right thing, however embarrassing. She “made Thomas agree that he and she must do everything possible to help his father, Irene, and the poor little coming child [, and

. . .] Thomas was sent by his mother to visit them three or four times” (DH 26,

27).

Somewhere underneath Anna’s ironic and malicious tone, which undermines any heroism in Mrs. Quayne, and Matchett’s conspicuous affection for Mr. Quayne, which makes her represent his wife as an inveterate posturer always aware of her audience, is Mrs. Quayne herself. The fact that the reader only has access to information reported by biased observers makes her difficult to pinpoint, but, like Mrs. Michaelis, she has a character stronger than her husband’s, and she derives much of her power from an acknowledged moral source. Nevertheless, perhaps also like Mrs. Michaelis, there is no love in her, and its lack makes her transgress in several uncharitable ways. By interpreting morality in her own narrow way, she excludes other equally correct behavior, choosing a path that provides unending punishment in exile for her former husband and his wife. She ensures that the consequences of Mr. Quayne’s sins extend to future generations; certainly Mr. Quayne deeply feels his daughter’s 239 loss of conventional family life with its attendant proprieties. She abuses power, and her culture permits or even applauds the criteria by which she does it. Their only reservation might be that, as a natural authority, she is rather unnatural in that she inflicts her inflexible standards most completely on her husband rather than her son.

But all authority figures even in Bowen’s early novels are not upper class; indeed, perhaps the most completely confining character in all of Bowen’s repertoire is not. Madame Fisher of The House in Paris achieves this dubious honor because she is not only indomitable save by time and fate, but she also takes on a wide range of authoritative roles, including governess, mother, landlady/hostess and mentor. Before she married, she was a governess or

“Mademoiselle” in England and “rapped very many knuckles” before marrying a

“captain in the English artillery”—both circumstances to which she may have been forced because “Frenchmen will not marry you with no dot” (HP 51, 56,

57). Nevertheless, she seems to have had Captain Fisher under her control; he resigned from the regiment before marrying her and going to Paris to live with her

(HP 57).

He had “begotten Miss Fisher” before his death, and his widow wields a great deal of power as a natural authority by exploiting the role of mother (HP

56). Her ability to control her daughter, Naomi, is even more thoroughgoing than

Mrs. Michaelis’s ability to control Karen. Indeed, one of the components of the

“bond” between Naomi and Karen—which Karen refers to as a “band round them, forged in that year in Paris (yes, forged—it was metal, inelastic, more than 240 chafing sometimes)”—may be the similar inflexibility of their mothers (HP 125).

Though Naomi “had a will that, like a powerful engine started up suddenly, made everything swerve,” she does not assert this will against her mother’s (HP 128).

The fullest evidence that Naomi is “subject to Mme Fisher” comes at the time of Max Ebhart’s suicide, and Max and Karen are each so subject to her and so entangled in the same web of her weaving that it is impossible to separate the three strands (HP 128). Karen had first felt Mme. Fisher’s influence as a hostess when Karen, at age eighteen, was one of the “well-bred, well-fed, well-read

English-speaking girls” who passed, “two at a time,” through the Frenchwoman’s house in Paris. Though Mme. Fisher

undertook to exercise no direct authority [, . . .] she knew where

you went, why, with whom, and whether it happened twice [. . .]

her marked unobservingness and withheld comment gave her

terrific power over the girls’ ideas. They might do as they wished,

but did not, for she made it too clear that nothing they did could be

what they really wished to do. Karen herself had more than once

been the victim of that unspeaking smile. Mme Fisher always

withdrew opposition in such a way as to make your motive snap.

(HP 129-31)

Girls had come under Mme. Fisher’s “nominal chaperonage” for a decade, but

“only Karen had left a mark, known Naomi, had more than a word with Max or crossed Mme Fisher without being packed home” (HP 130, 131). Even then

Mme. Fisher had seen Karen’s love for Max, and his for her, and had waited. 241

Five years later, when Karen was twenty-three and had been back in

England four years, Max impulsively proposed to Naomi. He suddenly saw in her

“an unattackable safe place” that could give his restless, high-strung disposition peace (HP 213). Mme. Fisher “opposed the match” because he had been her protégé, and she had entertained more socially-elevated plans for him (HP 183).

Furthermore, she “can never have wanted Max to be quiet” because “when he’s quiet he’s not hers” (HP 203). And the real root of her opposition may have been that she was in love with him herself (HP 181).

However, Mme. Fisher did not foresee his proposal to Naomi and, when, after having visited briefly with Karen in England, he returned to France still engaged to Naomi, she told him that Karen loved him. Because this was something that he had never even let himself think—and Mme. Fisher had realized his willed ignorance—the announcement, as she had intended, stuns Max and stimulates him to action. Max feels Mme. Fisher’s influence at work, and he attributes to her the less-than-admirable motives of telling him in order “to hear me say what I would hate” and “to show I should set my cap higher than Naomi”

(HP 183). Nevertheless, Mme. Fisher indirectly causes his telephone call to

Karen, the act that led to their affair.

When Karen and Max meet again privately, fate propels them forward; the

“day governed itself” until Karen has done “as she knew she must” and Max lies asleep as though “whatever it was had finished with him, too” (HP 196, 198). But

Karen remembers Mme. Fisher’s fatal touch—she “killed all wishes by saying

‘Do as you wish’ ”—and suspects Mme. Fisher as the instrument of fate. Karen, 242 even when alone with Max in the Hythe hotel at 3:00 A.M., feels her presence and approval: “If [Mme. Fisher] had been standing on those stairs to-day, smiling, when I came up behind the maid, I should have turned back and gone, away from where Max is. But if her smiling would stop me, she would not smile. She is a woman who sells girls; she is a witch. She is here; she is that barred light” (HP

203, italics added). Bowen matches the overt evidence of Mme. Fisher’s power to constrain with description implying confinement.

Naomi’s report of Mme. Fisher’s role as the author and finisher of Max demonstrates also her mother’s authority over her. Naomi tells her mother that she and Max “would not, after all, marry,” and Max refuses Mme. Fisher’s summons to see her because “he dreaded to be with her.” She gives Naomi a

“sleeping draught” and “made me keep to my room” (HP 238). Declaring her daughter ill and unfit to receive the post, Mme. Fisher intercepts and opens a letter from Max asking Naomi to see him. To lure Max back to her, Mme. Fisher directs Naomi to accede to his request and adds the ironic verbal admonition, “Do you want to poison his love for her?” She “stayed by” Naomi to enforce her penning of the reply, then “gave me another draught that I did not want” and

“took my letter away” (HP 240).

During the meeting Mme. Fisher listens outside the door until discovered by Max. She directs Naomi, who understands then that “Max did not belong to himself” because “my mother was at the root of him,” to “Go, now.” Though

Max implores Naomi with his eyes “like someone through bars in a death cell,”

Mme. Fisher quickly shames him into wanting no further support (HP 239, 240). 243

She “turns [his love for Karen] to dust” by commending it and pushes him to suicide, the only way in which Max could wrest his life back from her (HP 244).

Then she “made [Naomi] look at the mantelpiece” where Max’s blood was splashed and, “made of iron[, . . .] made me go to bed but walked in my room all night” (HP 242). The next day “she was ill” and “made me stay close to her, saying that till I could weep I ought not to be alone.” Though Naomi now sees that “evil dominated our house” because “all her life [Mme. Fisher’s] power had never properly used itself,” she continues to be the dutiful daughter. “Directed beforehand by [her] mother,” she shares information with the police that makes only Max appear to be at fault (HP 243). In an attempt at analyzing Mme. Fisher,

Karen first says that, loving Max, Mme. Fisher had to look on while he loved both

Naomi and Karen, but then she corrects herself: “No I am wrong, though: it was her power she loved. That time it overreached itself” (HP 245). Here she deliberately imposes power because her personality is stronger than all those around it, and she can. In doing so, of course, her power also overreaches the limits of the various authoritative titles Bowen assigns to her. In exceeding these limits, she crosses Mrs. Michaelis’s line of motherly good intentions into evil misuse of authority.

Karen’s estimation of Mme. Fisher as Faustian proves accurate. Nine years later, Mme. Fisher’s illness persists, and she is the one confined to a room

“guarded from natural light, with fumey air” (HP 278). Though her visitors must come upstairs to see her, she still manipulates them, and her daughter. She

“insists” upon seeing Leopold (HP 263). Though she tells him, ironically, that all 244 he wants “is the exercise of a vulgar power, simply,” within minutes she has focused her waning power on him and made his “thoughts boil” in a way that enables him to “see everything.” But she is “prey to one creeping growth, the

Past,” and, as such, realizes, “This is too late!” (HP 277, 278). Though it would have been ideal to get her talons into someone as young and promising as

Leopold, mortality now limits her power as mentor. Her authority throughout life had been comprehensive, however, because she had mastered the skills of operating indirectly and politely when necessary without feeling any concurrent need to operate morally. She tests her power over pupils, husband, paying guests, daughter and Max, and never, even with her daughter, does she exercise “natural” authority. She is unnatural in the most Shakespearean sense because, from her nihilistic perspective, her power never fails—only its victims do.

While Mme. Fisher represents Bowen’s most extreme condemnation of power gone awry, Mrs. Kelway of The Heat of the Day almost rivals her in unnatural authority. However, as mother or grandmother only, she has not the

Frenchwoman’s many-tentacled scope. Like Mrs. Quayne, she is a relatively minor character in all but influence, and she, too, concerns herself with appearances rather than realities beneath them. Unlike Mrs. Quayne, she draws her power not from her social status—which is middle class—or moral uprightness but from her adherence to some internalized vision of ideal English life almost moral in its application. Her children address her using the singularly inappropriate appellation “Muttikins,” and her grandson is named “Christopher

Robin”—both in an apparent attempt to project happy English normality. Her son 245

Robert, though a veteran of Dunkirk in World War II, conforms reluctantly if at all to her vision, so Ernestine—“Ernie”—attempts to be the ideal son that Robert is not. Radiating the almost rabid nationalism recommended by Mrs. Kelway,

Ernie “vibrated with energy” and always looks as if she has “been torn [. . .] from some vital war-time activity.” Yet in becoming more like her mother in patriotism, she, too, re-channels her passions away from love. “In the look

Ernestine turned from Stella to Robert the absence of human awareness was quite startling,” and she shows emotion only when discussing a former dog who “had wonderful faith in human nature” (HD 102, 119).

Certainly any compassionate feeling is conspicuously absent in Mrs.

Kelway, who exudes proper English responses to the war effort instead. She presides over the lounge of Holme Dene, the literal living room for the family who, “[s]ince we were told of the fuel shortage [. . . make] a point of keeping to this room, as the most central” (HD 108). Ironically, the room Mrs. Kelway chooses for fuel conservation has a great number of “exits, archways, and outdoor views,” and its resulting draughts, since apparently no one in residence feels the cold except her, serve to emphasize the privation that she undergoes for the greater good of England. The language with which Bowen describes the location of Mrs. Kelway’s armchair further supports the theme of patriotic militarism: “it was posted midway across the floor. Was this position strategic?—from it she commanded all three windows, also the leaded squints in the inglenook” (HD 103, italics added). 246

Furthermore, Mrs. Kelway’s appearance could qualify her to symbolize home and hearth on some poster in support of the war effort. She is “small,” with a face of “miniature daunting beauty,” but Bowen emphasizes the hardness underneath the façade:

Mrs. Kelway’s dark hair [. . .] was of a softness throwing into

relief the diamond-cut of her features. The brows, the nose, the

lips could not have been more relentlessly delicate [. . . .] If

Ernie’s regard had held unawareness, her mother’s showed the

mute presence of an obsession. For, why should she speak?—she

had all she needed: the self-contained mystery of herself. Her lack

of wish for communication showed in her contemptuous use of

words. The lounge became what it was from being the repository

of her nature; it was the indoors she selected, she consecrated [. . .

S]he projected Holme Dene: this was a bewitched wood. If her

power came to an end at the white gate, so did the world. (HD 103,

104)

By implication, then, Mrs. Kelway is, like Mme. Fisher, a witch, omnipotent within her chosen domain. When Robert brings Stella Rodney to

Holme Dene to meet his mother, she uses rudeness and humorlessness to dominate the scene. She does not invite Stella to sit down and suggests that in coming to the country Stella has violated a national mandate “not to travel for no reason.” She completely ignores Stella’s attempt to form common ground by responding to Mrs. Kelway’s “my grandson is in the Army” with “Oh, and so is 247 my son!” (HD 104). She speaks in a series of non sequiturs which, Robert later explains, connect only in her own mind (HD 114). When Robert willfully misunderstands her statement, “I sometimes ask myself how long it will last”— for which the only antecedent was “the Army”—she explains “without change of expression” that she meant “the war.” “Comedy,” Stella perceives without difficulty, “was to have no place in any kind of relation with Robert’s mother”

(HD 104). When Robert attempts to excuse her as “ ‘not really rude, more unconscious[,]’ Stella wondered.” She tells him, “Well, principally, darling she struck me as being wicked. But you might not see that.” His reply is revealing,

“Oh, I see it constantly” (HD 105).

Mrs. Kelway does serve tea, but this act, too, is one of exerting control.

Evidently she or Ernie had warned Robert to bring butter for him and Stella, and

Robert had forgotten. To forestall any awkwardness, Stella “said hurriedly that she did not eat tea,” and Mrs. Kelway deliberately misquotes the statement, making of it an issue: “Mrs. Rodney [. . .] does not care about afternoon tea” and

“Happily for Mrs. Rodney, she does not eat cake” (HD 106, 107, 108). She is petulant when not the center of attention even briefly and responds to her granddaughter’s prophetic suggestion that Robert could “end up in prison”— apparently if England lost the war—with “If it’s not too much trouble, Grannie would like some bread” (HD 106, 107). She pointedly displays the deprivations of the home front—particularly her own—while downplaying anyone else’s wartime efforts except those of her own family: “My son tells me that in London you would not notice the war; I am afraid it is far from the same here” (HD 108). 248

Her unspoken rules and enthusiasms are observed conscientiously: war is serious and even children may not treat it entirely like a game (HD 107); one must not speak of Robert’s wound at Dunkirk (but she notes, while directing her “distant ice-clear gaze” steadfastly upon her son, “retreats are now a thing of the past”;

HD 108); one must eat whatever one has regardless of its quality (HD 113); because of the war one must shut up the better rooms; one must always sell for more than one originally gave (HD 115); and one must not be in another’s debt if only for a few pennies (HD 118). She even uses the fact that “Mrs. Rodney is free not to eat cake if she doesn’t want to” to demonstrate “the difference between

England and Germany” (HD 108). Ultimately Mrs. Kelway takes pleasure in suggesting that Robert, who has not gone for the walk for which he allegedly brought Stella to Holme Dene, has brought Stella there “on quite false pretences”

(HD 118). Mrs. Kelway, is, of course, a not-quite-comic exaggeration of wartime adherence to economies advocated by government propaganda. The privations, presented so humorously by Bowen, are a perfect match for the naturally uncharitable Mrs. Kelway, whose flaws of meanness, both of spirit and purse,

Bowen exposes quite seriously.

Stella, stunned by Mrs. Kelway’s ironclad certainties, begins to wonder about the propriety of having come to Holme Dene with Robert. She also sees and fears the power that Robert’s past—with his mother as its most potent living representative—has over him. She has some time ago noted that Robert could on occasion “control [his limp] out of existence” while at other times he “fairly pitched along with an impatient exaggeration of lameness”; the difference, she 249 discovered, had a “psychic cause—it was a matter of whether he did or did not, that day, feel like a wounded man” (HD 85). When Stella and Robert leave Mrs.

Kelway, Robert is obviously limping.

Robert returns once more to this source of the broken spring within him when Muttikins summons him to Holme Dene. They have received an offer for the house, and Robert is to help decide whether they will sell. Ernie, the messenger for her manipulative mother, acts as if Robert’s help is indispensable:

“Muttikins and she [. . .] quite saw that of course the war and Robert’s conduct of it came first; at the same time, could he not find some teeny-weeny space in which to attend to the affairs of his own family? Muttikins was being wonderful, but it seemed unfair” (HD 242). But once Robert has arrived, Mrs. Kelway undermines his every attempt to provide assistance. For example, each time that

Robert tries to summarize their position in an organized way, she utters her inflexible refrain, “I am afraid [. . .] it is not so simple as all that” (HD 244).

One of the unspoken rules of the conversation is that any personal feeling for the place cannot be admitted but must certainly be understood. Ernestine provides the ironic translation of Mrs. Kelway’s usual negative reaction to anything that Robert does: “Muttikins [. . .] is astonished [. . .] You talk, Robert, as though everything could be valued in money” (HD 245). Yet his mother, characteristically, talks of the house with no reference to sentimental attachment.

Her single suggestion of feeling is a ploy to get the preferred reply from her children in response to statements like “I have had my life and I hope I have done my best [. . .] But you must not expect me to be with you long” (HD 246). She 250 offers no love but, as with her “endearing” but substance-less nickname, requires her offspring to go through the motions of feeling what they do not.

Indeed, because all their lives they have been attempting to escape her continual heaping of guilt onto anyone within range, the family would undoubtedly be relieved by her death. Robert, for instance, remembers a past in which there was never any privacy. Family members paused “to make sure that the coast was clear” before opening doors or exiting rooms, and spent private time

“working on to their faces the required expression of having nothing to hide.” In spite of all this effort, however, “everyone knew where everyone else was and, in time, what everyone else was up to” (HD 247). Robert himself took up photography to have an excuse to frequent “a dark room whose door he could respectably lock” (HD 248).

Robert’s middle sister Amabelle “had been martyred” for reaching puberty early; “no one could have been [. . .] more repudiatingly icy than the sisters’ mother” (HD 248). Amabelle had escaped by marrying a soldier and going to

India, an act that Mrs. Kelway considers a desertion of the family, for now “[s]he has no claims of any kind. Your father dealt with her suitably when she married.

If she and her husband expect more they are quite mistaken” (HD 250).

Mr. Kelway, however, had been unable to escape and had consequently been devoured by his wife in what Robert ultimately labels a “man-eating house”:

Lock-shorn, without the bodily prestige of either a soldier or a

manual worker, as incapable of knocking anybody about as he was

of bellowing, Mr. Kelway [saw out . . .] the last two years of an 251

existence which had become derisory [. . . H]is sex had so lost

caste that the very least it could do was to buy tolerance [. . .]

Unstated indignities suffered by the father burned deeply into the

son’s mind [, yet . . .] his fiction of dominance was, as he would

have wished, preserved by his widow and his daughters.

As Robert recalls: “Mrs. Kelway’s way of saying ‘your father’ still, years after that guilty creature’s death, vibrated with injury; the implication was that he had become a father at her expense” (HD 248-49). Bowen reveals Mrs. Kelway, who so corrupts the traditional content of ideals like home and country, as the obvious source of Robert’s bitterness, and ultimately the person to blame for his wholesale defection from both.

Even Ernestine had temporarily escaped by marrying, but her husband had died. Mrs. Kelway manages to imply, “disparagingly,” that Ernestine arranged her widowhood for the express purpose of reinfiltrating Holme Dene and inheriting half of it upon Mrs. Kelway’s death: “It would not be your home if your husband had not died” (HD 251).

Thus for Robert, who has escaped to London and the “prestige” of a soldier unavailable to his father, Holme Dene holds only bitter memories, and he advises his mother to sell. Robert’s niece, Anne, when he playfully asks her opinion about selling the property, says also, “I don’t mind.” Bowen’s response—or possibly Robert’s, as it replicates his own experience—is, in turn:

Why should she? Here for her it had been [. . .] an existence

amongst tables and chairs, without rapture or mystery, grace or 252

danger. Never [. . .] the light disregarding act, the random word or

spontaneous kiss; never laughter other than those registrations of

Ernestine; anger always in a smoulder, never in a flame. Though

she did not know it, she had never seen anyone being happy [. . .]

This was demeaning poverty. Pity the children of the poor. (HD

254)

Robert, of course, grew up in the same calculating, loveless, cheerless poverty. Like his father, Robert becomes a man whose inner spring was broken by Mrs. Kelway, but, by actively supporting Germany’s cause as a spy, he escapes farther from his family than they will ever know (HD 114). He also escapes when he chooses to love and to be loved by someone like Stella—though any reverse effect that her love might achieve is apparently too late.

Nevertheless, to shield Robert’s reputation, she lets his last evening with her appear to be more sordid than it is, and in doing so, ironically shields the remaining Kelways as well. Bowen’s final mention of the Kelway matriarch is that she “and Ernestine refused the offer for Holme Dene and stayed where they were” (HD 291). Mrs. Kelway would have undoubtedly expected no better than an ignominious jump from a roof from her son, but she is spared—one cannot but feel, wrongly—the greater disgrace of Robert’s abandonment of her obsessive and orthodox championship of England. Like Mme. Fisher, Mrs. Kelway not only impoverishes and confines all within her sphere, but the women she either assimilates or estranges, and the men she eventually destroys. 253

In Bowen’s later novels there are fewer natural authorities, and their power wanes dramatically. In The Death of the Heart, Thomas and Anna Quayne are the natural authorities, but Thomas largely delegates the management of Portia to his wife, and Anna in turn often abdicates or delegates her own authority.

Anna disapproves of and feels confined by Portia’s presence in a house the essence of which is the appearance of good taste. As the offspring of an adulterous affair made good by marriage, Portia’s very existence is in bad taste, and her adolescent awkwardness adds to her poor effect. Anna neither likes nor loves Portia but resents her because “I cannot stand being watched. She watches us” (DH 49).

Anna, who has failed at both love and business, feels most confined by the way in which Portia mirrors her own youthful uncertainties and failures. Her every word, every action serves only to remind Anna of her limitations, her inability to control herself or others: to get her acquaintances to hire Brutt, to be kind to Portia, to have broken Pidgeon’s heart as he broke hers (DH 363-68).

Therefore she attempts to use her experience and detachment, her only defenses, to distance herself from Portia, and Portia from her.

Matchett thus assumes limited appointed authority over Portia in the

Quaynes’ stead. She disapproves of Anna’s decision to “put [Portia] in colours” and to let her “dine downstairs” in a “dead white evening dress, and a black velvet one [and] seemed to detect some lack of life in the house, some organic failure in its propriety. Lack in the Quaynes’ life of family custom seemed [. . .] to rouse her contempt” (DH 57). Her sense of correctness, made evident to Thomas, leads 254 him to tell Anna that “no one but us would let a girl of that age run round London alone” (DH 420). The novel reflects, then, not the triumph of authority over youth but the collapse of the values that support authority. Thus, of all the persons with whom the orphaned Portia has come into contact, Matchett has the best claim on her affections because “however much Matchett’s love had been

Matchett’s unburdening, it had been love” (DH 145-46), and for Bowen love is the only real authority. Nevertheless, though Portia has an “extraordinary wish to love” and, presumably, to be loved, being a servant rather than a relation limits

Matchett’s influence and control.

In A World of Love, Antonia “forced [Fred and Lilia] to their bridal doom” and then had left them, standing framed by the Montefort doorway, to decades of a less-than-blissful marriage in a less-than-ideal setting. On the bases of money, superior social class and indirect kinship, she also assumes a role as the guardian of their daughter Jane, pushing aside the natural claims of father and mother. She pays for Jane’s education and appropriates her as a companion and surrogate daughter. Nevertheless, near the end of the novel, when Fred and Lilia move toward reconciliation and stand again “framed in the doorway” of Montefort,

Antonia now stands “outside the fence.” The position suggests a new isolation from and possible relinquishment of authority over the married couple—and even over Jane (WL 209).

In Eva Trout implicit guardianship progresses to legal guardianship and sometimes, as in The Last September or The House in Paris, to the authority of excessive power. The overlapping guardianships of Iseult and Constantine prove 255 to be temporary and ineffective at replacing both the “mother [Eva] never had” and the father that she did (ET 142). And in Iseult’s case, at least, authority over

Eva is not at first the real issue. When Eva at age sixteen meets Iseult, Eva is ready for a mother figure. Iseult, in contrast, is ready for a new challenge of her teaching skills, and her resulting singular and specialized attention at first seems to Eva to be love. Certainly what Eva feels for her teacher is love: “she was kept amazed and awake by joy [. . .] Love like a great moth circled her bed, then settled” (ET 62). Iseult, however, tells Eva when asked that she cares for Eva

“[a]s much as I can,” but it later appears that Iseult had felt only a “vivisectional interest which had drawn her to her uncouth pupil[, . . .] this organism [who] had so much loved her” (ET 66, 27).

This initial attraction wanes—and is ultimately extinguished when Eva comes to live with Iseult, now Iseult Arble, and her husband Eric. Ironically, as

Iseult achieves literal guardianship, the relationship becomes confining to both

Iseult and Eva. One difficulty is that Eva reminds Iseult of her failure to transform Eva. Though, with Anna, Portia was merely the latest in a long succession of imperfect moves, for Iseult, Eva was apparently the first of many errors. The most salient of Iseult’s mistakes, she believes but does not want to admit, is Eric himself. Yet it is his affection for Eva that Iseult finds intolerable and a source of jealously sarcastic remarks. However, Iseult “seemed destined to have Eva [. . .] She and her husband needed the Eva money, to make ends meet— could they, otherwise, have gone on very much longer?” (ET 9-10). Being indebted to Eva, however, is hardly palatable to Iseult, especially when Eva now 256 seems lamentably ubiquitous and, as Iseult complains to her husband, “We never make love” (ET 20).

Eva, for her part, realizes that any affection for or interest in her that Iseult may have had is gone. Even at the cost of going to see the dreaded, perhaps hated

Constantine, Eva is anxious to leave the Arble household—a circumstance not lost on Iseult, who announces to her neighbors, the Danceys, that Eva is leaving almost before Eva has come to such a decision herself (ET 74). Eva braves the visit to Constantine, the legal guardian who maintains that “A Trout [. . .] of any kind, is a liability” (ET 33). He in turn meets with Iseult to “collaborate” and

“concoct something” to prevent Eva and her millions from getting out of his control when she inherits them in April, only three months away.

Eva escapes, renting a white-elephantine house near the sea, but, unfortunately, she also leaves behind some papers regarding the rental which directly reveal to the Arbles her whereabouts. Thus Eric Arble and Constantine, who has been informed of Eva’s location by Iseult, arrive in tandem on the same night. Constantine appears while Eric, who had driven through the previous night to get there, is upstairs taking a nap before his return trip. Taking in the improper look of the situation, Constantine immediately incorporates it into his plan—the collaboration in which he has attempted to involve Iseult by “us[ing her] as a confederate” (ET 96)—to have Eva declared insane.

The attempt to manipulate and confine Eva is, apparently, not the first of

Constantine’s abuses of the authority of power—here reintroduced for the first time since The Last September—in regard to the Trout family. Eva blames him 257 for “defraud[ing]” her mother of her relationship with her husband and ultimately precipitating her flight, for taking Willy from Eva because there was “Always

Constantine,” and finally for “murder[ing]” her father (ET 11, 88, 107). Iseult’s analysis of Constantine’s attempts to confine and control only to be confined himself are instructive:

Evidently he was attached to that wretched Willy [. . .] Attachment

to prey I imagine must have about it some sort of equivalent of

tenderness [. . .] Willy had that spectacular business acumen; is it

possible that Constantine admired him? That could account also

for C.’s [. . .] fidelity in cruelty [. . .] No doubt [Eva] connects

[Constantine] with her father’s suicide, and no doubt rightly. Yet I

doubt that C. either meant to bring that about or envisaged such

catastrophe as possible [. . . .] One infinitesimal cruelty too many?

Willy revolted [, and w]hat Willy did left nothing more to be said.

In a way, a master-stroke. C. left shackled to Eva, that walking

monument. (ET 95, 96)

Constantine attempts to control Eva with this experience in “infinitesimal cruelty.” First he taunts her with her inability to elude him, telling her that she

“always will be [found]. To vanish takes what you have not got; so better put that illusion out of your head” (ET 104-05). He proceeds to try to make her question her own sanity—particularly where any memories of his actions might remain— and to believe that he will have her put away if she remains uncooperative. He pretends great concern about her “state of mind,” quoting to her a series of her 258 own actions as heard by Iseult from Eva’s house agent and passed on to

Constantine:

“Largely from what was not said in so many words, she gathers

that this agent has cause to doubt that you are fit to be tenant of

any house [. . . .] And we must take care of you. ‘Instability’ is a

kind word [. . .] one prays one may not be driven to any others

[. . .] You cannot forever stay as you are, locked up with your

demented fantasies and invented memories [. . .] you should see a

doctor [. . .] Or more precisely, be seen by one: a psychiatrist.”

(ET 105, 107, 110)

Constantine continues the abuse by questioning whether Eva thinks—“if indeed, you have thought?”—and whether she can comprehend what he’s saying—“You may not be able to grasp this, but [. . .]” (ET 109). He has in the past suggested that Eva may inherit mental instability from her mother, and Iseult has also doubted her brain power: “I should like you to think, though. You have thoughts,

I know [, . . .] but they don’t connect yet” (ET 61). Consciously, Constantine seeks to unbalance Eva further with his intimidation.

Indeed, Constantine seems quite pleased to consider himself and Iseult wicked people who “cut ice” and “effect something,” and Iseult believes herself

“soiled by living more than a thousand lives [. . .] through books” and consequently “capable de tout” (ET 40, 96). Yet, while Constantine and Iseult smile about the failure of Eva’s early attempts at escape, they underestimate her. 259

She may be hampered by multiple disabilities, but, after she comes into her inheritance, Eva eludes them successfully for eight years.

By the time of her return to England, the balance of power has shifted.

Constantine, almost unbelievably, changes from master manipulator to “retired sinner” and surrogate father because his “values have been reorganized” by the influence of an Anglican priest. Iseult draws him into further conspiracy attempts, but he is now so reluctant that Iseult accuses him of affection for Eva:

“Eva obsesses you. You love her, in some preposterous way you don’t know yourself” (ET 245, 190, 254). Although his legal authority over Eva has lapsed, his potential for paternal authority increases, and Eva seems to need his approval of her apparent choice to marry Henry.

The relationship that becomes more caustic, and ultimately more lethal, is that between Iseult and Eva. Because Eva implied before her departure that she had had an affair with Eric, Iseult later sees this as having ruined her already- floundering marriage and as yet another step in her own gradual deterioration.

Iseult no longer has any authority over Eva, but she regains authority indirectly.

Though she denies wanting revenge or retribution, she exercises the authority of power and kidnaps Jeremy, Eva’s eight-year-old black market son. Thus, as Eva contemplates the failure of all her plans for Jeremy, Iseult achieves complete but temporary authority over Eva’s present and her perceived future. By forcing Eva to escape her once again, Iseult also commandeers her immediate future, and, by effecting upon Jeremy the transformation that she failed to achieve with Eva,

Iseult resurrects her teaching power and indirectly alters even more of Eva’s 260 future. A rift forms between Eva and Jeremy: “Like as they were, they were not of each other’s flesh-and-blood, and they both knew it. The dear game was over, the game was up” (ET 285). Indirectly, too, Iseult supplies the gun with which

Jeremy kills Eva. Thus she aids in the novel’s final manifestation of authority— the authority of power over life and death assumed by the person behind the gun.

Eight-year-old Jeremy probably appropriates this authority more instinctively than intentionally, but by killing his “mother,” he also escapes her perhaps-unnatural influence forever. At the same time, he either confines Eva utterly, or, possibly, frees her from a life in which money will never be able to produce the elusive home and happiness that Eva continually seeks.

Certainly the denouement demonstrates the increasing failure of authority to fulfill the role it plays in Bowen’s early novels. The protection and scope of natural authority, upheld by the rules of society, morality and nationality, decreases markedly in the later novels, finally, in Eva Trout, deteriorating into the dubious authorities of power and coincidence or chance. By tracing this process,

Bowen emphasizes the underlying deterioration of the upper classes, and the democratization of morality and patriotism. Increasingly, she seems to indicate that might—the authority of power as exercised both by individuals and by the middle class masses—equals right, a circumstance that robs life of variety and fullness.

The only type of authority that seems to increase with each successive novel is the authority of and voluntary subjugation to love. In the face of love, natural authority has little effect. Love overpowers and often proceeds on instinct 261 alone, elevating the lover to a plane where only its own rules apply. However, more often than not, the failure of love to be reciprocated occasions the failure of its supremacy over the individual—and the consequent need for that individual to escape the failure.

Romantic ideas about love cause Sydney Warren of The Hotel to pursue

Mrs. Kerr incessantly, invading her privacy and confining her until she finally realizes the futility of trying to win Mrs. Kerr’s attention and respect as an equal.

She tries but fails to escape with a relationship in which she is loved but does not love in return. Lois of The Last September submits to natural authority because she does not yet love. In To the North, Emmeline submits completely to the authority of Markie Linkwater until two epiphanies show her the lack of love within him. In the wake of those realizations, she becomes suicidal. Karen and

Max of The House in Paris pursue love past the conventional claims of mother, mentor and betrothed to Karen’s possible social ruination and to Max’s ultimate death. Here the failure of natural authority to love mars love for the next generation. In The Death of the Heart, the failure of natural authority to love is compounded by the failure of Eddie to love Portia. Commanded by a love

“imperative” and “straight from the heart,” Portia sees “with pity, but without reproaching herself, all the sacrificed people—Major Brutt, Lilian, Matchett, even

Anna—that she had stepped over to meet Eddie” and to win his love (DH 235,

145). But, himself weak and in need of some conventional support, he has no power to save her from her loveless existence, and she must escape his perfidy.

Throughout The Heat of the Day, Stella and Robert tend the precarious budding of 262 love in war, a love which blooms through treason and loss of reputation and death. Unfortunately, a failure of love in natural authority Mrs. Kelway indirectly dooms the full flowering of the relationship. In A World of Love, the acknowledgement of the failure of love in the past finally releases its continuing authority and prepares the way for new love in a new world. Love seems to have the authority to reinvigorate a dead past in The Little Girls, but unreciprocated love again fails. Love for her father, Iseult, Jeremy and Henry motivates Eva

Trout throughout her novel. In spite of the failures of love in the first three cases, the prospect of real love from Henry tempts Eva to its brink, when Bowen introduces the intervening hand of fate. Only in Friends and Relations do internalized rules—of society and propriety—preempt the love itself, and then only after love has briefly exerted its own authority. If only for a few moments, under the overpowering influence of love, they too “Don’t think” and “for once

[. . .] don’t care” (FR 234).

Finally, however, love exercises authority indiscriminately, and it liberates and unifies only when reciprocal. While it is true that a majority of Bowen’s characters seem to live without it quite adequately, Bowen suggests, as in her

Thomas Traherne epigraph for A World of Love, that love is the “Great Thing” the

“expectation and desire” of which draws individuals forward. The possibility of love motivates much of human effort, and the fulfillment of that expectation enriches and frees, if only temporarily. Conversely, love’s absence confines— always.

263

CHAPTER 6

COMMUNICATION

“Well, what I think [. . .] of course it is awfully difficult to express, but I think the right kind of girl and the right kind of fellow can be almost anything to each other, if you know what I mean?”

“I think [. . .] you put it rather wonderfully.”

—The Last September (53)

There is so much I should like to say that I seem to have nothing to say. Perhaps some day words will be different or there will be others.

—To the North (129) The most pervasive and crippling form of confinement found in Bowen’s novels should come as no surprise since it is characteristic of most twentieth- century psychological novels. Communication problems abound, and they may, like forms of authority, be categorized according to the degree of voluntary participation. At the most conscious—but frequently still only half-conscious— level are the willful miscommunications: the choice not to listen to or even to notice another, the confinement of another to a particular definition or stereotype, and, at the risk of stereotyping, the national British pastime of communicating much unstated meaning through deliberate indirection or insincere politenesses.

Young people, particularly young women, are the most frequently ignored or overlooked as Lois Farquar of The Last September demonstrates, and, as in

Bowen’s depiction of the upper classes excluding anyone except their own, being shut out is as confining as being shut in. Early in the novel Lois twice suggests that family and guests “sit out on the steps to-night,” and “because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her, she felt profoundly 264 lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion” (LS 26).

When they do sit out after dinner, Lois suggests to Hugo Montmorency that he shouldn’t tuck a carriage rug around his wife because “she won’t be able to walk about,” but “No one took any notice” and “Mr. Montmorency went on tucking”

(LS 36). She has already seen that Hugo “would not take the trouble to understand her” (LS 4). Thus when she sees a “man in a trench-coat” on the

Danielstown demesne, Lois elects not to tell anyone because “what seemed most probable was that they would not listen” (LS 45).

Lois’s peers also overlook or choose not to comprehend her conversation.

Her cousin Laurence makes a point of this by acting as if she—a young, female relation of no consequence either socially or intellectually—and anything she might say are naturally beneath him. Since she can say nothing to alter his opinion, Lois finds the atmosphere of cynical pre-judgment oddly freeing, and she often tells Laurence thoughts that she guards from others. However, Gerald

Lesworth’s habit of not listening to her because he, too, has already formed his opinion of her has quite the opposite effect. He has stereotyped her as the flower of Anglo-Irish womanhood—assuming that he even makes the social class distinction—and she cannot dispel this vision before his eyes with any of her own reality. Thus, though Lois and Gerald talk, they communicate little. She tells him, “you never take in a word I say. You’re not interested when I tell you about myself,” and his reply, “You know I could listen all day to you talking,” further proves her point (LS 67). If only, Lois thinks, he “would not love her so, could give her air to grow in, not stifle imagination” (LS 73). Lois resents being limited 265 as a woman, even in apparently positive ways: “I never can see why women shouldn’t be hit, or should be saved from wrecks when everybody complains they’re superfluous [. . .]—and I am a woman.” Gerald concludes, condescendingly, “Which was, of course, exactly why it wasn’t to be expected or desired she should understand.” Ironically limiting her with every thought, he mentally surveys her “one limitation”: that she “had no idea what she was.”

Speaking as directly as his culture will allow, he tells her, “You will never know what you mean to me,” by which supposedly he “made plain his belief in her perfection as a woman. She wasn’t made to know [. . .] She was his integrity, of which he might speak to strangers but of which to her he would never speak” (LS

68). Gerald seems to limit Lois within a generalization partially because he cannot communicate well with her, but, in his self-absorption, he also finds the pat assumptions of his upbringing easier than reaching beyond himself to connect.

Ironically, though Lois finds Gerald’s presuppositions annoying, Lois out of her own self-interest unwittingly limits Gerald by stereotyping him in turn.

She thinks that she knows every move that he will make and bemoans her certainty that there will “be a letter from Gerald to-morrow! If only he’d let me wonder! [. . .] If only his coming or writing could have some touch of the miracle, heal a doubt” (LS 100). Lois wants Lancelot and thinks Gerald boringly predictable. But he does not write, and she tells him, “Gerald, I didn’t realize you were resentful; I didn’t think you could be.” When he attempts to explain, rather inarticulately, his feelings of abandonment, so inconceivable to her, she is amazed: “This new version of the [. . .] afternoon was a shock to her. It had gone 266 on for him, too; doors that she had not thought of shutting and windows opening, the drone in the drawing-room, rain with a different importance” (LS 228). The fact that his mind sees and interprets differently seems, from her self-absorbed perspective, quite new.

Lois also balks at being too clearly defined by those older than she is.

Discontented with being “the pleasant young person” at Danielstown, she wants an identity of her own choosing (LS 146). In the past, ironically, she had “cried for a whole afternoon [. . .] because she was not some one in a historical novel”

(LS 110). She less-than-wholeheartedly toys with being Gerald’s “lovely woman,” perhaps someday a “captain’s lady,” but only as a role (LS 130, 257).

Then, with their usual habit of ignoring or forgetting her presence, Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency discuss her where they know that she can overhear them.

Francie even begins to define her with the words “Lois is very—,” but Lois panics and makes enough noise to stop them in mid-sentence: “She didn’t want to know what she was [. . .] knowledge of this would stop, seal, finish one. Was she now to be clapped down under an adjective, to crawl round lifelong inside some quality like a fly in a tumbler?” (LS 86). Like her aunt, she suddenly “make[s] a point of not knowing” (LS 81). Lois chooses not to confine herself inside someone else’s stereotyped confinement of her.

Some of this hesitation to be confined by an adjective stems from the

Anglo-Irish sensitivity to the power of language to solidify or make real. They casually define others using social, national or religious terms: “she was a Vere

Scott” (LS 48); “the English [. . .] weren’t human” (LS 32); “She’s a Catholic, 267 isn’t she?” (LS 276); “Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist” (LS 290). Yet, in their determination not to notice their political precariousness, certain words are forbidden or discouraged. Laurence must not term a lorry on the road at night

“furtive” or “sinister” (LS 39). Gerald must not refer to his presence in Ireland as that of “we jolly old army of occupation,” and, certainly, “one wouldn’t call [the conflict in which he is participating] a war” (LS 50). To utter “war,” to notice a house burning or to know where guns are buried is to give the word, the event or the information an intolerable reality, so “why would we want to know?” when, instead, “we [could] all be so careful not to notice” (LS 30, 60). The remnants of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy live a wary existence among a wary people; even the postman cautions that “it was not for him to say what was true and what was what you would hear” (LS 116).

Indirection, a socially-approved way of saying one thing while meaning another, is another method of avoiding reality and hampering communication, and

Bowen’s novels teem with experts in indirection and insincere politeness. They learn to “say something clever and quite irrelevant to cover [. . .] awkwardness”

(LS 13). Tired of having spent the afternoon of a tennis party “asking questions, and ignoring the answers as far as possible,” Francie and Laurence develop a soothing method of non-communicating sociability; they “exclaimed their thoughts casually, not answering one another’s, on the retreat toward silence” (LS

75). They replace their earlier insincere politeness with comments not even aimed at each other, and, not listening for a reply, they do not make a connection because they choose not to. Mrs. Studdart of Friends and Relations, on the other 268 hand, does not tire of her less-than-spontaneous communications. She “had learned to reply” to correspondence “by formula” and “for hours set aside daily she verbally smiled and puckered” (18). Indeed, Lois characterizes being grown up as “dressing and writing notes instead of letters and trying to make impressions.” She observes, “When you have to think so much of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what you feel about them.

Everybody is genial at one in a monotonous kind of way” (LS 144).

Nevertheless, all social conversation is fraught with a wide variety of hidden meanings or potentially misunderstood implications. Julian’s sister in To the North uses, as the “ostensible reason” for her early departure from their luncheon, “that she had arranged to buy Pauline a new party frock” (TN 145).

Actually, she wanted to shop for herself and to have a massage—a truth she easily conceals from her brother, who does not realize she is speaking in a kind of code.

When, in The Last September, Francie asks Lois whether she’s “having a wonderful time” now that she is eighteen and out of school, Lois, who does understand the concealed code, carefully considers her answer: “Having a wonderful time, she knew, meant being attractive to a number of young men. If she said, ‘Yes, I do,’ it implied ‘Yes, I am, very—’ and she was not certain” (LS

23).

Lady Naylor is a master of controlling potential misunderstandings while saying nothing direct herself. Her comment, in response to Francie’s assumption that the attraction between Lois and Gerald is quite evident—“I suppose, however, you must have gathered that as I don’t understand what you do mean, 269 what you mean cannot really be so”—is a classic example (LS 80). Her later observation, “The less talk, the less indirect discussion round and about things, the better, I always think,” thus becomes, while undoubtedly true, quite ironic, considering its source (LS 273).

In To the North, defining identity by stereotyping indirectly contributes to fatal results. First, everyone’s preconceived notions about Emmeline preclude her, in their minds, from doing any wrong. They rely on physiognomy, which tells them that, since Emmeline looks angelic, she must be so. Markie’s pet name for her is “Angel” though, in fact, she “was not quite angelic” (TN 90, 17). Thus, when her behavior first begins to depart from its usual course, well-meaning individuals like Sir Robert Waters, “who knew his Emmeline,” disbelieve the signs of change (TN 65).

Further assignments of identity slow the process of reacting to what becomes a social and personal crisis. Cecilia has categorized and dismissed

Markie as an object of interest to herself, and, by extension, to anyone: “He’s a barrister. You wouldn’t like him” (TN 23). Lady Waters does not even consider him in connection with Emmeline because both rumor and Emmeline have characterized him—the latter with an uncharacteristic secretiveness—as “a friend of Cecilia’s” (TN 55). But Julian Tower, who knows that Markie is really

Emmeline’s friend, is stymied instead by his inability to stereotype Markie.

Although he would like to, he “could not pack Markie—engaging, rational, witty, intensely social—into the box of one idea and run a sword through” because he envies Markie’s attractiveness to Emmeline (TN 246). Though he wants “to 270 sponge Markie clean off her slate,” his conscience prevents him from communicating with either Emmeline or Markie (TN 245).

However, it is the social restrictions associated with identity, combined with Emmeline’s own predilection for silence, that primarily hamper communication with her. Each relationship with another has embedded within it the code of behavior toward that person and thus limits the ways in which communication may proceed. Therefore, Cecilia believes that she would be presuming upon her position as sister-in-law if she confronted Emmeline directly, and, likewise, Lady Waters believes her relationship as Emmeline’s “first cousin once removed” too distant for direct communication about a sensitive subject (TN

14). Julian, in turn, only becomes a candidate for confronting Emmeline after he has become Cecilia’s fiancé, when Emmeline’s “good name becomes his affair”

(TN 285).

Thus a network of presuppositions about Emmeline and Markie’s identities prevents anyone, first, from realizing that there is any need to talk to

Emmeline. Then additional presuppositions prevent those supposedly closest to

Emmeline from actually talking to her about her relationship with Markie until after the point beyond which any communication has become meaningless.

The confinement inflicted by lack of communication through not listening to another, misleading another by indirection, or imposing an identity on another is largely voluntary and social in nature. At a somewhat less voluntary level,

Bowen includes a number of characters who positively require some social interaction in order to feel as though they have identity. Others, by 271 communicating with these characters, somehow validate their existence, releasing them from their perceived nonentity into the freedom of social interaction.

Generally, the younger the character, the more she is in need of confirmation. Lois of The Last September, for example, would like to be almost anything in relationship to someone else rather than simply her solitary self. “I like to be related; to have to be what I am,” she explains. “Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely” (LS 146). Though she resists definition, her own opinions of who she is and what she thinks are not fully formulated, leaving her vulnerable to, sometimes even eager for, external influence. When trying to decide what she feels for Gerald, for instance, she considers that her friend “Viola would be certain to tell her she loved him, and by that declaration, to be expressed with vigour, Lois was too certain to be affected” (LS 72). Later, when becoming certain that she does not love him, she wants Francie or Gerald himself to reinforce her faltering resolve to love him in spite of herself.

Older women, too, seem to need the reassurance of communication to confirm identity. The matrons in The Hotel, for example, shut themselves in a drawing room-like setting to commiserate about how being home alone with one’s drawing room door shut feels like “shutting oneself in with nobody [. . .] I really begin to feel [. . .] as if I didn’t exist” (H 89).

Cecilia of To the North demonstrates this fear of disappearing when alone even more fully. Though she declares her relative “a scourge and a menace,” she finds herself, when “tempted to feel she did not exist [. . . ,] magnetised to

Rutland Gate,” where the inquisitive presence of Lady Georgina Waters “was no 272 doubt [. . .] reassuring” (TN 37). She pretends otherwise even to herself, but

Cecilia cannot abide solitude. She feels confined by her own society and hardly encouraged by any “idea of company” in Emmeline’s self-sufficient companionship—at best only a fictional “picture of intimacy” rather than a real closeness (TN 171). Alone, her identity dissipates: “She ran down like a clock whose hands falter and point for too long at one hour and minute [. . .] She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when nobody speaks again” (TN 172). As her confinement of person from person becomes increasingly private, it becomes also increasingly involuntary. She mourns the brevity of her time with her husband Henry and his absence from all of her current surroundings, yet she also feels an alienation from him extending even to their time together. She wonders whether she ever knew him at all well: “The face of her husband, remote in anger or invisibly close in passion, was gone: had she known or touched him? All she had touched was dust” (TN 38).

As Cecilia’s fears demonstrate, at the center of Bowen’s novels is the psychological isolation of individual from individual that is at the heart of so much twentieth-century literature. In Bowen’s works, this involuntary, unbridgeable distance ultimately requires each person to rely on his own identity, prevents profound communication and destroys even mutual love.

In The Last September, the love of Lois Farquar and Gerald Lesworth, though doomed for a number of disparate reasons, suffers from this inability to communicate except in a superficial way through the imperfections of language.

Language, for them both, is “like a net; little twists of conversation knotted 273 together. One can’t really move, one doesn’t know where one is” (LS 288). Each wants the other but cannot make a meaningful connection. Gerald seems to Lois

“at once close and remote, known and un-personal; she understood why, up to now, she had searched for him vainly in what he said. He had nothing to do with expression” (LS 230). Gerald tries to bypass expression by kissing Lois instead, and then he expects her to be angry with him. When she is not, Gerald thinks her

“wonderful” but cannot read any deeper meaning into her reaction. The attempt at communication is almost as painful as its eventual failure:

“Don’t you understand?” she said sharply—Gerald?

“Understand? . . . Lois!” [. . .]

“I never thought you looked at me.”

“Gerald, I’ve been so . . . vacant.”

“I never thought you wanted me.”

“I—” she began. The soft sound of her dress in the wind

became [. . .] painfully inexplicable to her—the pain was its own,

from not being understood. (LS 231)

The ellipses are filled with kissing, an attempt on Gerald’s part to say with lips what tongues cannot, on Lois’s part to feel something that she can identify as love. Later, when they are discussing the effect of love on individuality, Gerald again cannot understand Lois; therefore, he “looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars.” He begs, “Don’t let’s talk . . . I mean . . . don’t let’s talk”

(LS 259). Like Lois, he seems to feel instinctively that touch, not talk, is “the 274 only way across” the chasm between them (LS 287). He feels that their communication actually suffers from attempting to explain—and failing.

Writing, yet another way of trying to communicate, also fails. Gerald tells

Lois, “when I am with you you make me awfully dumb [. . .], and when we are apart you seem so close I feel you must understand, so why try to explain when I am so stupid? So I won’t try to say what I feel; [. . .] I cannot write how I love you” (LS 243, 244). Their impasse is complete: Lois longs to know Gerald but cannot; he longs for her to love him but cannot help her to know him better. She thinks, “Though she watched whenever he went, she could not see him [. . .] And one kiss in the wind, in the dark was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him” (LS 237). Try as he may, Gerald leaves no impression of identity behind. Though “He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree—all hers—and knew the boundary wall right round,” Lois will never be able to “measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living silence” of ultimate distance and alienation (LS 265). He, in turn, cannot fathom her. He stands “confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her vocabulary all communication was interrupted.” He cries passionately, “I’d rather be dead than not understand,” and fate grants half his wish; he dies psychologically isolated from Lois, unable to connect.

At first, Janet and Edward of Friends and Relations intentionally do not communicate. There had been a moment of mutual awareness of each other from which “they both lived on involuntarily.” Later, they had quarreled about Janet’s engagement to Considine Meggatt’s nephew and, at least indirectly, agreed not to 275 communicate. As Janet explained, “it’s possible not to say such a lot” (FR 78).

They do not even say goodbye to each other when the quarrel is over. Yet, though “There had been no question: unasked, the question was at her elbow.”

And “With that unasked question, unanwerable, Edward need have no concern— but concern racked him” (LS 132). For almost a decade, lack of communication heightens their preoccupation with and interest in each other.

Then, when Janet decides to have both Considine and Elfrida as house guests, the suppressed feelings rise to the surface. At first Edward rather pointedly says nothing, but, finally, he forces a confrontation: “we had better talk” (FR 151). At first their conversation is conventional though neither will look at the other. But, unlike Lois and Gerald, Janet and Edward love each other reciprocally, and such a rare occurrence seems to liberate communication. Janet says a single sentence that Edward understands completely, and all the years of silence and indirection fall away. Nevertheless, polite habits at first limit their conversation. As Edward protests, “All delicacy is on your side; you can see I can’t speak at all without outraging something” (FR 162).

Not surprisingly, however, the opening of communication with Edward hinders Janet’s communication with Rodney—whose “eyes sought Janet’s, but she refused to confer”—though she does indicate to Rodney “by the slightest possible movement: “Don’t make things difficult” (FR 167). With Edward, too,

Laurel’s communication falters. Before, the two “had never needed to speak of happiness,” but now that Laurel knows of Edward and Janet’s love for each other,

Laurel “made [her own] silence her enemy” (FR 269, 229). Edward’s silence, in 276 contrast, she sometimes encourages “with her fingers or lips” (FR 269). Laurel’s

“terrifying awakening” to reality also produces Janet’s first miscommunication with her sister; she believes her to be weeping when she is staring, “unseeing,

[. . .] with incredulity” (FR 225). Though Laurel uses language now to fill in the gaps between herself and Edward, her knowledge does impose some limitations.

Whereas, jokingly, “[l]ast year, she would have told [Edward] to look for another wife” upon discovering that she had sent the cook out with the children and consequently has no dinner prepared, now she will not joke about a suddenly humorless possibility (FR 223).

Between Janet and Edward, the “new question of his and her relations” that they had postponed for years “now posed itself with an unbearable simplicity” (FR 168). Though they “had not communicated” in the interval since their mutual admission of love, by accident or unconscious design they meet in

London where they “mutely exchanged some countersign recognizing more than each other.” There they agree that “There’s nothing to say,” or at least “Too much to begin” (FR 210, 216).

When, that night, Edward decides to “go for a turn” instead of returning home with Laurel, “[n]aturally, she did not ask” his destination (FR 231). His visit to Janet marks their only meeting alone as lovers, and they continue to limit communication. He holds her and she touches his hand, and they experience a brief unity beyond touch: “His will was not hers, nor hers his; their will like a frozen waterfall seemed to be timelessly standing still” (FR 235; italics added).

They also experience a brief “identity of their thoughts” before they elect to part 277 from each other “so utterly [. . .] that they were lost to each other” (FR 236). Due to morality and propriety, they forsake the oneness of lovers for the wider but less profound communication that they experience with friends and relations. In this case, Janet and Edward never completely escape the confinement of the vows they have sworn. In fact, they see how choosing freedom to love each other could destroy most of the other relationships around them. As with authority over the young, here society advocates that some confinements are necessary, even valuable, and Janet and Edward apparently agree, though at the cost of their own love.

The situation of Emmeline and Markie in To the North returns to the psychological isolation of Lois and Gerald in The Last September. The relationship is again one-sided, but more immediate since in To the North the lover is also the protagonist. Indeed, Emmeline embodies some of Bowen’s most striking attempts to overcome the ultimate confinement of one human being from another that is alienation—and possibly her most signal demonstration of the failure to do so.

From the beginning of their relationship, verbal communication between

Emmeline and Markie is a problem. Although Markie talks “like all young men

[. . .] long to talk” and can easily dominate a social occasion, Emmeline, who is by nature a listener, “could but be appalled when Markie spoke of himself” (TN

62, 90). For Emmeline is an idealist; she “believed in a fearless exactitude between friends and lovers; overstatement troubled her with its mystification and false accents.” Thus, “[t]hough she might love him, she must dread at all times to 278 hear him speak of their love: it was not in words he was writing himself across her [. . .] ‘We should be dumb,’ she thought, ‘there should be other means of communication’ ” (TN 90-91).

They must, however, rely primarily on language, and Emmeline is mystified by the unforeseen difficulty of attempting communication with someone with whom clarity and understanding have become important. In the past, Emmeline remained passive, letting others communicate what they would.

Now she sees “spinning sentences, little cogs interlocked, each clicking each other round” and sits “blinking at this machinery of agitation that a word spoken two days ago had only now set going” (TN 124).

While she resorts to written words when she must, she feels them to be similarly inadequate. She writes to Markie, “There is so much I should like to say that I seem to have nothing to say. Perhaps some day words will be different or there will be others.” She feels “a little door shut between them as she stuck down the envelope” (TN 129). Nevertheless, on paper she had been able to say things that, confronted by Markie’s “black-and-white bulk about the breakfast tray,” she cannot. His “presence [. . .] made what she had written meaningless,” her letter unanswerable. As a result, “that Markie should read her letter became impossible,” and she burns it, unread (TN 135). Yet Emmeline feels saddened by the fact that the shared pleasure of breakfasting together is in some ways less intimate than the solitary pleasure of writing.

On their flight to Paris, Emmeline and Markie do seem to create a new form of communication combining the best of words and presence. The 279 transcendent moments rely in part on setting. Though “the earth was good enough” for Markie, Emmeline with delight “gave up the earth” as she soars upward into an atmosphere more nearly the element of someone whose most frequent Bowen appellation is “angel” (TN 173, 175). There, the “roaring silence” of the airplane leads them to discount hearing as an aid to communication, and to “be aware of noise as sensible, visible, inimical only when one attempted speech.” In the new element, first Emmeline’s eyes implore

Markie to communicate in a new way, and her “expression [says] so much that there seemed little to add” (TN 174, 176). Then, sitting side by side, they begin to write notes to one another, inventing a new method of communication that Markie finds curiously freeing:

The manner of this correspondence began to appeal to him:

deliberation unknown in speaking, boldness quite unrebuked by its

own vibrations and, free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion

that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he

said. The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech

were at once his. (TN 176)

Spurred on by his feeling of release, Markie both demands more unconditional surrender from Emmeline and communicates more intimate emotion than at any other time during the novel. But, as always, thought outweighs feeling for

Markie, and, to make sure that he has been perfectly clear, he adds, “We could not marry” (TN 177). Thus the fledgling method of communication plummets even 280 before their literal descent to Paris. Emmeline writes, “Let us talk in Paris,” and he replies, “No more to say” (TN 178).

In Paris, Emmeline sees that the two days that Markie said “must be intolerable or perfect,” are perfect—at least until they have their anticipated talk, something Markie “had been dreading” (TN 177, 192). Replacing intimate tactile communication with language, he explains that he will not marry her so

“ungently” that Emmeline finally takes “his arm gently, glad to renew some contact,” and says, “Why are we talking? We’re so happy” (TN 192, 194). As all their methods of communication falter and fail, Emmeline clings to her belief that

“disagreements are on the surface.” She rationalizes, hopelessly, that “Perhaps between friends the surface was meant to be rough. One has to try to speak: words twist everything; what one agrees about can’t be spoken. To talk is always to quarrel a little, or misunderstand. But real peace, no points of view could ever disturb” (TN 249). She convinces no one, not even herself.

When communication with Markie from Emmeline’s perspective fails,

Emmeline must turn in on herself because she has already adulterated her communication with Cecilia through lies and deception. She finds it “daily harder to speak without qualifications and a growing reserve” as “a veil”—symbolic both of their increasing isolation from each other and of Cecilia’s upcoming marriage—“thickened between them” (TN 274).

Then Cecilia, forced by Lady Waters, pushes Emmeline and Markie once more into proximity, and, when he tells her, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” Emmeline gives Markie one final chance to communicate. She invites him 281 to say what he had intended, but for once thought deserts Markie and renders him

“tongue-tied beside her” (TN 302, 305). She repels his inadvertent touch, and

“[c]ut apart by cold singing air he and she had no communication.” At first their alienation attracts Markie more to Emmeline as he contemplates “that unknown presence within her outline [. . .] that slipped behind veils every time they kissed”

(TN 307). But Emmeline says nothing, only turning upon him “that same dilated and musing look of enquiry that, breaking again and again across their intimacy, had made him feel her no more than delayed on a journey elsewhere, and marked their unchanging distance from one another” (TN 313). Still attempting to bridge a gap that he will not acknowledge as impassable, he anticipates that touch may reconnect them—though he does not “dar[e] to formulate what he could not express till she was in his arms” (TN 314). When Markie finally realizes that

Emmeline is lost to the “confining husk [of] her own identity,” he ironically makes a sincere but over-late attempt to communicate. He “pleaded,” he

“coax[ed],” he “reasoned,” but “What he had said meant nothing” (TN 315-16).

Without love, as Bowen clearly demonstrates, all attempts at communication are futile.

Karen and Max of The House in Paris have, like Janet and Edward, a reciprocal love threatened by outside forces. Morality and propriety keep Janet and Edward, with their prior vows of marriage, apart. With Karen and Max, it is

Mme. Fisher’s house rules and their own incompatible social classes which limit their communication so much that they almost do not discover their mutual love or plan to abandon their engagements to others in order to marry each other. 282

Their love began five years before, when Max was forbidden to do much except bow to her and Karen waited, trembling, outside the drawing room just to get a glimpse of him. There was tension and a heightened atmosphere between them, but little direct communication. When Naomi, who saw their love for each other even when Karen and Max did not, arranges for the two to meet again before she will marry Max, Karen finds that her thoughts about him spring forth spontaneously, “as though they had been waiting” (HP 124). In her anxiety to avoid meeting him again, she tells Naomi, and probably herself, lies about what he had meant to her in the past. When she does lunch with him and Naomi at his hotel, she judges the meeting “pointless and pleasant” (HP 134). She finds that

“her memory had exaggerated him,” and believing that their reunion “amounted to almost nothing [. . .], looked back at [the past] boldly,” remembering that sometimes, if she saw his shadow in the door of the salon, she would creep downstairs, heart pounding, “casting around for something to say” (HP 135, 136,

137). She seems unaware that more has been waiting to be expressed than a few involuntary thoughts.

When they all meet again the next day for a more informal luncheon on the lawn, Naomi leaves Max and Karen alone while she is preparing the meal.

The conversation, full of direct, often ironic exchanges, quickly goes beyond the boundaries of polite English observations. Karen blames Max for making her exaggerate when she was eighteen: “I had to say something when I didn’t know where I was [. . .] To say what one means one has to be [Mme. Fisher’s] age” (HP

142). Upon Naomi’s return, the dialogue becomes even more pointed because 283

“With three or more people [. . . ,] direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another” (HP

148). Karen accuses Max of attacking her verbally, but “he said nothing, which had been what she had dreaded” (HP 150). He in turn laments the fact that he does not fully possess English, his “father’s language, but never mine [. . .] What I say is correct, but never spontaneous [. . .]; it never fits what I mean” (HP 154).

Therefore, Max bypasses words and “put his hand on Karen’s” for a long moment of “consenting touch” (HP 155).

As with Janet and Edward, life thereafter seems to go on unaffected for some time. Then, a month later, just as Edward’s flight to Janet was precipitated by Theodora’s letter, Max makes a move toward Karen after Mme. Fisher has acted as a catalyst. Karen and Max’s love, too, seems to have an almost mystical potential for unity and seems to need little to sustain itself. With prescience,

Karen sees that the telephone is “going to speak”; within three minutes, she and

Max have made arrangements to meet next Sunday in Boulogne (HP 170).

When they are finally alone in Boulogne, they talk little. In fact, they agree that “we didn’t meet to talk,” that “[i]f there had been something to say, anything that we could say, we would have written each other letters [. . .] or talked more when we telephoned [. . .] There is nothing to say about wanting to be together” (HP 184). Part of the difficulty is their disparate cultures and the fact that “of what people they had in common they dreaded to speak.” Yet in history they find a subject that allows them to cast off all external influence, and “now they were free of themselves, they were one mind” (HP 186). For Bowen, 284 reciprocated love—in part the product as well as the producer of moments of heightened communication—unifies and, given the opportunity, liberates.

Yet, though Max maintains that he will marry Naomi because, with her,

“there is nothing to be explained,” he and Karen make arrangements to meet again in a week, and then to take their communication to a more physical level (HP

190). After a night together at Hythe, they once again attempt verbal connection—though hindered somewhat by their social and racial differences:

“Talk between people of different races is serious; that tender silliness lovers employ falls flat. Words are used for their meaning, not for their ring.”

Furthermore, “[w]hat they had said had always been under pressure, the quick talk of people who act without asking why” (HP 205).

Because they have acted but not questioned, the real surprise of their communication with one another at Hythe is that they had made incorrect assumptions about each other, and about themselves. Max had assumed that he would still marry Naomi—and possibly that Karen would not marry him, but he had reckoned without the effect of love. Karen had assumed that Max knew what he wanted, and that she was peripheral, not central, to that desire. In fact, not until after their night together does she see “in a moment what was in his eyes” and realize that he loves her. Primarily through non-verbal communication, they now see that they “didn’t understand anything,” but love enables them to surmount obstacles and to agree to marry. Now, their recognition of love in one another makes the experience new, and they are “unable to speak” (HP 217).

Touch is their universal language, one that transcends the fact that, literally, Max 285 and Naomi “have another language” that excludes Karen (HP 215). This

“beginning of love, wanting new hands, lips and eyes,” causes them to “stare at each other.” Karen feels “[l]ighter even in body with happiness” and experiences a “shock of tenderness and life opening” (HP 217-18). Reciprocal love, such a rarity in Bowen’s works, uplifts and frees. It is the surroundings that provide the confinement, as Bowen suggests when Karen and Max are about to part: “But as they approached the bridge their figures entered the frame” (HP 218). They are already caught in a framework of forces external to their love, and capable of destroying it. Language, part of this external structure, confines even as it seeks to connect; touch and sight, by circumventing some of the difficulties of communication, offer new connections, more freedom to love.

In The Death of the Heart, because of Portia’s innocence and ignorance of the world, the seven years separating Portia and Eddie become more significant than the nine years between Karen and Max. Differences in age and experience hinder their communication more than the external forces of Anna’s irony,

Eddie’s encounter with Daphne, or even Anna and Eddie’s deception of Portia.

When she first arrives at Regent’s Park, London, Portia believes herself to be “the only person in the world.” Consequently, she communicates only with herself, in the form of a diary “written just for itself.” When she meets Eddie, he

“make[s] her not alone” and, as a new audience for her writing, alters the content of her diary. Because, as a novelist, he is aware of the ability of words to shape and objectify reality—“I hate art—there’s always something else there”—he 286 urges her “never to write about me at all” (DH 147-48). He realizes, as well, that

Anna has chosen to read the diary precisely because of the “something else there.”

Eddie’s communication with Portia, until late in the novel, is largely on his terms. Though she initiates contact by bringing him his hat at the end of a visit to Anna, he perpetuates it by writing her a letter that plays on her sympathies and invites her to identify with him. In her loneliness and need for sympathetic connection, Portia reserves the letter for private moments of delectation so that she might relive the illusion of contact. In her failed attempts to protect the letter from others, this early communication becomes symbolic of her entire relationship with Eddie.

Soon Eddie and Portia are meeting secretly. When alone with Portia,

Eddie generally chooses to revert to an innocence and straightforwardness that he advertises as being the reality beneath his façade. More reliably, Bowen presents the pair to the reader as a couple of innocents alone in the dark forest of the real world with which they cannot communicate: “Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly.

They exist alone” and “seldom meet” (DH 144, 145). When they do encounter one another, however, the recognition is instant and suggestive of complicity.

Portia and Eddie

turned on each other eyes in which two relentless looks held apart

for a moment, then became one. To generate that one look [of]

superb mutual greeting [. . .], their eyes seemed for the first time to

be using their full power [. . .] You would have said that two 287

accomplices had for the first time spoken aloud to each other of

their part in the same crime, or that two children had just

discovered their common royal birth. (DH 145)

This recognition is not identity in love, however, but complicity in opposing the structures of society that seek to confine them.

Indeed, the initial success of their relationship relies on the fact that their communication is primarily instinctive. Portia does not understand all of what

Eddie says, but she sincerely likes and sympathetically listens to him. For Eddie, it is enough to bask in her atmosphere of approval. He tells her, “In fact, I don’t know why I talk to you at all. In many ways I should so much rather not” (DH

136). Like Naomi’s effect on Max in The House in Paris, Portia’s presence soothes Eddie and allows him “to be freely alone again.” Only she has this

“forbidding intimacy with him—she was the only person to whom he need not pretend that she had not ceased existing when, for him, she had ceased to exist.”

He can escape the tiring need to perform and virtually disappear. Then, Eddie treats Portia like air or darkness, substances of “equality and lightness” more easily endured than any human touch. He “could look right through her, without a flicker of seeing” (DH 265).

Surely this is a one-sided intimacy at best, but it suffices until Portia begins, after visiting Waikiki, to assert her own identity. Like Gerald in The Last

September, Eddie fastens on an “absurd, quite impossible image” and does not notice, or choose to notice, when Portia’s own reality contradicts that image (DH

278). She accuses Eddie, for example, of not reading her letters, but his 288 egocentric lack of love for Portia—at best a self-serving affection—dawns on her slowly because it is the worst of Eddie’s qualities that “she did not want to look straight at” (DH 211, 235).

Catching Eddie holding hands with Daphne at the cinema, however, rather rivets Portia’s attention to his shortcomings, particularly his habit of deliberately misrepresenting himself. Now he acts as if he has always been completely direct in his communications with her, or that, if he has not, he relied upon her understanding to interpret him correctly: “I thought you always knew I was like that. I like touching, you know” (DH 274). Now Portia tries to make Eddie responsible for the reality behind the words he utters: “Was that what you meant

[. . .] when you said you never knew how you might behave?” (DH 274). Instead, he becomes defensive and evasive: “what you mean is not what I’d call behaving—it’s not even as important as that [. . .] Why spoil [our lovely time] for a thing that means simply nothing?” (DH 275, 276). “But it does mean something—it means something else,” she insists (DH 276). Eddie tries to distract her with red herrings and unworthy accusations and nitpicking distinctions between words such as “crook” and “fake,” but his frantic efforts only embroil him in further contradictions. She wants him to be consistent and clear—“I don’t see how you can say you are serious if there’s no one thing you keep feeling the whole time”—but he only wants to shift blame and to avoid being pinned down. Soon he has her apologizing and abasing herself by telling him, “I’m only stupid when I don’t understand” (DH 278). 289

When Eddie finally calms down enough to apologize as well, their conversation clearly demonstrates the unreliability of language when Eddie uses it:

“Whatever I said, I swear I didn’t mean. What did I say?”

“You said you hadn’t meant some other things you had

said.”

“Well, nor did I, I expect—Or were they things you set

store by?”

“And you said there were things you didn’t like about us,”

said Portia, keeping her face away.

“That’s not true, across my heart. I think we are perfect,

darling. But I’d much rather you knew when I didn’t mean what I

said, then we shouldn’t have to go back and put that right.” (DH

293-94)

With Eddie’s continual modification of meaning to fit the moment, their progression toward a complete breakdown in communication is proceeding apace.

Soon Portia, confining herself in order to retain the connection with Eddie that would keep her from having only her diary—herself—with which to communicate, writes in that diary, “I cannot say anything about going away [. . .]

Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever. I must try not to say anything more to Eddie, when I have said things it has always been a mistake” (DH 317).

Language cannot always embody meaning even when speakers make a conscious 290 effort to communicate; when miscommunication is deliberate, misunderstandings naturally proliferate.

Inevitably, the impracticality of trying to secrete information from one set of people but not from another will finally foil any complex network of deception.

When she discovers that Eddie and Anna have been involved in “a plot,” talking about her and the contents of her diary behind her back, Portia once again confronts Eddie with the awful specter of “the truth” (DH 376, 385). She approaches Eddie like “someone who, having lost their way in a book or mistaken its whole import, has to go back and start from the beginning again” (DH 387).

Having firmly believed in Eddie’s essential innocence, Portia tries to reassess their entire relationship and realizes that she “cannot bear the things I think now that you say” (DH 391). Her own innocence, instead of protecting her, has made her his victim, unable to gauge whether he has “ever not spoken the truth” to her

(DH 393). She relentlessly pursues the meanings behind statements that he has made to her while he attempts to evade those meanings and tells her, “you pin me down to everything” and “I feel you trying to put me into some sort of trap” (DH

394). Ironically, however, it is not Eddie, who has on some level known it all along, but Portia who is finally trapped with the truth: that he does not love her nor want to marry her in some idealized eventuality nor even have her best interests at heart. If Portia-as-innocent is the last illusion to die in his progression toward adulthood and the death of the heart, Eddie-as-innocent is one of the first of hers to go, to be replaced with the long-denied truth of Eddie-as-cad. They have communicated, but to what end? Two individuals are irreparably severed 291 from each other, and the world is a little colder—now that they completely understand each other. Having failed to make a real connection, they return to their condition of alienation, confined within themselves to the “row of cages” by which James Milton of The Hotel characterizes the human predicament (191).

The number and diversity of forces limiting communication and eliminating love steadily increases throughout Bowen’s novels. Though Stella and Robert of The Heat of the Day number among the few requited lovers in

Bowen’s works, the external influence of war limits communication about their past lives and finally destroys their love. In A World of Love, the elimination of

Jane’s first love, the specter of someone already dead, becomes one of the chief ends of the novel. Eva Trout and Henry’s age difference of thirteen years—with its added onus of being reversed according to prevailing social standards—seems to many outsiders insurmountable.

Bowen’s most involuntary and private confinements of communication, however, go beyond obstructive outside forces to involve mental and physical limitations within her characters. In Bowen’s early novels the sense of limitation is slight. Usually the characters with such characteristics are few or minor, or the limitation itself is relatively minor. Laurence of The Last September, for example, is short-sighted but, amusingly, “prefer[s] uncertainty” (29).

Emmeline Summers in To the North, however, suffers from more profound and symbolic vision problems. Though she is quite short-sighted, from

“an independence that would rather blunder than be directed,” she rarely wears her spectacles (TN 17-18). Bowen explains that she is “short-sighted in every 292 sense” and not only sees “men as trees walking” but “could not have seen into

[them] very far” either (TN 32, 33).

The fact that Markie Linkwater “had the effect of suspending her faculties” extends Emmeline’s limitations beyond those related to sight (TN 63).

Indeed, the extent of her hindrances marks her as a precursor of later Bowen characters with even more profound physical and mental limitations: “she may have lacked some faculty, key to the maze, or been on some plane or another a kind of idiot,” for “She laid hold on nothing” (TN 70, 71). Certainly this missing faculty—by implication mental—seems to foreshadow the moment near the conclusion of the novel when, for Emmeline, “[s]omething gave way.” At this point the “total loss of her faculties” indicates a psychological breakdown which completely shuts her from her immediate surroundings but opens her to some new realm. When “the strands of the known snap like paper ribbons,” Bowen compares the experience to “the pain of parting” that “sets free the heart.”

Emmeline is suddenly “Blind with a new light” and heard nothing except possibly

“some singing silence inside her brain.” She “asked herself who she was,” and her eyes reveal only a “fixed vacancy” indicating a “silent brain” (TN 314-15).

All communication, or even ability to communicate, shuts down completely.

While she seems to regain some awareness of her surroundings long enough to apologize before she kills both herself and Markie, it is too late to act upon any recovered thought. Unfortunately, others had seen her as “clear-sighted,” an opinion which leaves her, without direction, to the devices of her own inadequate independence (TN 20). 293

Among the many joking references to madness in Bowen’s novels, subaltern Daventry of The Last September is another example of deeper mental disturbance. He is too minor a character to demonstrate much change during the novel, but Bowen represents him as shell-shocked by World War I, when “he had a company in France in 1916” and “later on [. . .] was acting major” (LS 230).

Now either “all this peace-time bother” or his mental state has made him only a subaltern, and he thinks that “[I]f it were not for dancing a good deal, whisky, bridge, ragging about in the huts, whisky again, he did not know what would become of him, he would go over the edge, quite mad, he supposed.” As it is, he consists largely of body language: eyes shut from headaches or “dark with fatigue and nervousness,” neck muscles strained, arms open to dance with Lois, the “palm of his hand [on] his left temple with a curious, listening air, as though to see if a watch had stopped” (LS 217, 224). His nerves, and the whisky, drive him, if not mad, at least over the edge of conventional politeness. He swears, kisses the D.I.’s niece rather forcefully and generally makes Lois wonder, “Was this a bounder?” (LS 213, 233, 235). With his tragic air and good looks, he would have been quite appealing to Lois except for the fact that when she looked hard at him, she “saw there was not a man here, hardly even a person.” He is “not quite at [his] best,” and possibly never will be again (LS 235).

Bowen’s most thorough treatment of mental breakdown, however, occurs in The Little Girls. While, as in To the North, the breakdown has been one of the major moments toward which the novel is leading, in The Little Girls the crisis loses impact because it is reported rather than dramatized. Nevertheless, it 294 becomes obvious that Dinah Delacroix’s breakdown results in the same complete but temporary suspension of all faculties that marks Emmeline’s. The cause of the breakdown, as with Emmeline, is essentially the failure of a one-sided communication attempt. Dinah, like Emmeline, makes the attempt to connect, but

Dinah’s attempt is not only about love. She seems to want to recreate the dynamics that existed almost fifty years ago between three best friends; then, some of their interactions included love, but some of them were more about power. Since Dinah or Dicey was something of the threesome’s ring leader, the other two suspect her of wanting to reassert power, and they will not succumb to her rule any more. Clare in particular, who seems in the past to have loved Dicey, brings on the breakdown by turning on her and refusing to believe in any emotion behind her manipulations.

Apparently, however, the feelings were there, but communicated only imperfectly. After Clare left Dinah alone, her employee Francis finds her: the crisis has already occurred. When he discovers her, “She did not see me” and

“She did not hear me.” Moreover, “She was not like herself.” The never- completely-explained “great bruise” that later appears on her forehead, symptom of some aspect of the crisis, comes to symbolize, as well, the source of the experience, the fact that she “hit against something, or something hit against” her

(LG 240, 243). Knocking sharply against the irretrievability of the past, she at first undergoes an outright collapse of all ability to communicate.

Afterward the collapse, furthermore, Bowen does not suggest progress toward renewed communication. Dinah displays “a growing remoteness from all 295 things else” and “an indifference so great as to be a sickness in itself” (LG 232).

Having successfully resisted time and its effects for so long, she no longer seems to care whether she is “taken away in a sealed van” (LG 246). Now she generates an atmosphere of “unexpectancy [. . .], like someone uncaringly being carried out to sea; or, still more, as though she were herself the outgoing tide” (LG 262).

When Frank visits her, an allegedly recovering invalid, she makes some attempt to communicate but seems unable to bridge the gap of alienation. She

“unavailingly reach[es] a hand toward him,” but “Between them existed the great distances. She again reached a hand out, this time sideways. But the bed was as wide as it was long” (LG 264). Clare also visits, and Dinah’s ambiguous final words to her—“Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?”—could suggest that Dinah has missed the years during which her friend was an adult and is now ready to renew the relationship on a more adult footing, or that Dinah is suffering from further disorientation. Certainly Clare’s own penultimate words, with Bowen’s addition to them—“ ‘Goodbye, Dicey,’ she said—for now and for then”—do not imply further contact (LG 277). The link is severed, leaving Dinah to the confinement, as she perceives it, of her own mind and the memories that are all that remain of the past.

Abnormal inability to articulate meaning is another quality that limits communication, and another characteristic that grows in severity throughout

Bowen’s novels. In Friends and Relations, for example, Janet Studdart has a slight problem with articulation. She talks little because “I never shall be able to think of anything to say that is what I mean” (37). The Heat of the Day offers 296

Louie Lewis, one of a handful of names, including Roderick Rodney, Robert

Robertson/Harrison and Robert Kelway, as well as Frank and Francis of The Little

Girls, whose repetition seems to represent a constriction of language resulting in its increasingly unimaginative use. Louie, who presents a much more advanced example of difficulty in speaking, describes herself rather accurately when she says, “I don’t mean.” Her vocabulary is limited, as is her ability to use it: “To talk, which she had to do, was to tender what words she had; to be forced to search for anything further, better, was [. . .] persecuting” (HD 138). She realizes her handicap and feels somewhat ashamed of it because “She felt she did not make sense, and still worse felt that the others knew it” (HD 143). She generally says little, or she produces almost unintelligible sentences like “How I wish I knew where this was where we are” (HD 228).

Louie venerates words and invests them with almost biblical authority—

“in the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run. This went for anything written down” (HD 144). She regards manipulators of words with an outsider’s awe; thus, she reads newspapers voraciously and believes them implicitly, including all the jargon of war-time propaganda. All the while, she resents the disadvantages of her own inarticulateness but is helpless to alter her predicament. Angered when her friend Connie teases her about her awkward account of meeting Stella Rodney, Louie attempts to compare her very confining inability to speak with Stella’s verbal ease:

“It isn’t you only. It’s the taking and taking up of me on

the part of everyone when I have no words. Often you say the 297

advantage I should be at if I could speak grammar; but it’s not only

that. Look at the trouble there is when I have to only say what I

can say, and so cannot say what it is really. Inside me it’s like

being crowded to death—more and more of it all getting into me. I

could more bear it if I could only say. Now she tonight, she spoke

beautifully: [. . .] there it was, off her chest. (HD 237).

Louie represents the poverty of ideas and their expression that Bowen fears from the democratization of language. While she believes that “At its best, democracy breeds the sentient person” who out of wider reading and better education

“grow[s] more articulate,” at the same time she observes the more threatening side of the post-World War II world in which “differentiation between person and person becomes less” and “each change spells so much obliteration” (MT 59, 56).

Increasingly, communication, though broader and deeper in that it reaches more of society, obliterates something. The use of language seems less a struggle to find Coleridge’s “best words in the best order” than to misrepresent meaning, as in the newspapers that Louie reads or, in Louie’s case, to carry meaning at all, much less to carry it in an aesthetically-pleasing manner.

Nevertheless, Bowen admits, on some ignoble level Louie’s verbal handicap does not limit her. Because she “never had any notion how to reply,” she does not answer her husband’s letters, but she “look[s] for her husband in other faces” and “felt nearer Tom with any man than she did with no man” (HD

13, 139). Thus she frequently attaches herself to other young men—usually servicemen, in Tom’s honor—and is “not always [. . .] disobliging” when they 298 want to go home with her (HD 17). As with many Bowen characters, Louie seems to find touch more reliably connective and long-lasting than speech. She not surprisingly conceives and, after Tom’s death, gives birth to a son. Life, even communication of a sort, goes on in the absence of clear ideas or beautiful language—a life impoverished, perhaps, but vital.

While there is ample evidence of the failure and devaluation of communication in The Heat of the Day, even more exists in Bowen’s final novel,

Eva Trout. Iseult and Eric Arble—despite being, at least at intervals, one of the rare Bowen couples who love each other reciprocally—can, characteristically, communicate better through touch than through speech. Their verbal exchanges brim with misunderstandings resulting from their differences in education; indeed,

Eric, again demonstrating Bowen’s concerns about an increasingly-limited language, seems only to be able to articulate clichés and adages such as “here’s a kettle of fish” or “Life is too short” (ET 28, 176).

Eva herself embodies an inability to articulate similar to Louie Lewis’s.

By the time she was sixteen—before the novel opens—“her outlandish, cement- like conversational style had set.” And, as with Louie, “the discouraging fact emerged” that “it was more than sufficient for Eva’s needs. She had nothing to say that could not be said, adequately, the way she said it” (ET 10). Nevertheless, like Louie, she deplores the disadvantages that she perceives to be associated with being “unable to speak—talk, be understood, converse,” and she gravitates toward skilled users of language such as Henry and Iseult (ET 62). Her tongue may be faulty, but her “eye” demonstrates unfailingly good taste (ET 235). When Iseult 299 tries to free her from the confinement of intellectually “being submerged [. . .] in deep water,” Eva resists somewhat, afraid “[t]hat at end of it all you’ll find out that I have nothing to declare” (ET 64).

Eva later seeks to escape Iseult, who, chagrined over her failure to transfigure Eva and jealous of her husband Eric’s sympathetic relationship with her former pupil, no longer tolerates Eva’s proximity well. When, however,

Eric’s appearance on her doorstep reveals that she has not eluded the Arbles at all,

Eva in her extremity revealingly develops Bowen’s own physical limitation—a stammer. This speech impediment, moreover, occurs each time just before Eva attempts to pronounce “Iseult” (ET 85, 87, 88). The psychological disturbance of having failed and been failed by Iseult renders Eva unable to speak her name without concentration and difficulty.

The stammer disappears after Eva arranges sufficient retaliation against

Iseult and a successful escape from her. Yet some characters continue to imply mental instability in Eva—labeling, for instance, her decision to buy Jeremy

“pathological” (ET 151)—and certainly she never achieves verbal facility. She can convey meaning with “measuring, blank looks” or nods (ET 147, 197), and occasionally she can achieve a certain clarity, as when she describes her history with Iseult to Father Clavering-Haight: “She desisted from teaching me. She abandoned my mind. She betrayed my hopes, having led them on. She pretended love, to make me show myself to her—then, thinking she saw all, she turned away” just when “I was beginning to be” (ET 203). After eight years of silence 300 with Jeremy, she does finally begin to overcome “her mistrust of or objection to verbal intercourse”; “She was ready to talk” (ET 207).

However, with Henry she hardly needs to talk to communicate, and, based on other Bowen loving couples, this speaks well for the depth of their feeling.

Their sometimes cryptic exchanges seem quite adequate for understanding:

“You’re not coming in?” asked Henry, meaning, into the

vicarage.

“No, not this time; I have to be back,” she said, meaning, in

London [. . .] They’ll be disappointed?” she asked, meaning his

parents.

“More, puzzled [. . .] The car stopped, but there was

nothing to say—or, only their faces spoke. (ET 268)

Even with this instinctual communication, however, Eva’s stammer reappears briefly before she tries to verbalize the emotion—love—that she has never been sure of from anyone (ET 262). Finally Henry, who has heretofore avoided touching Eva, extends his overtures toward her to include “brushing his lips against her ear” and telling her that he will marry her in fact, not merely in appearance (ET 299). All seems poised for a rare, real connection until Bowen destroys their future with an unanswerable twist of fate.

The hand of destruction belongs to Jeremy, unquestionably Bowen’s most confined character in terms of communication. Jeremy has “seeing eyes” and misses nothing that the sense of sight can disclose. He also gives the impression of an “unearthly perspicacity” and imposes “on others a sense [. . .] that it was 301 they who were lacking in some faculty.” Even so, he is deaf and dumb, circumstances that signal his involuntarily confinement from several means of communication at a very personal level. He can only read Eva’s lips, though he does not need to due to the “[e]xtra-sensory” perception that his closeness to Eva affords. Generally, Jeremy’s silence “had manifold eloquent variations, outgoings, clamourings and insistencies, queries, ripostes,” for “It took much to tie the tongue of his mind” (ET 180). Nevertheless, because of his multiple confinements, he is almost alienation personified: “What Eva’s little boy knew, what he always had known, and, still, more, what he was now in the course of learning, there was no knowing” (ET 172). Then Iseult kidnaps him and tries her magic of transfiguration on him. Their experience together Iseult represents as a breakthrough. “Don’t think I minimised the agony, the barrier [. . .] he had been protected from it, he had never felt it,” Iseult says, but “the time had come.”

Vision, according to Iseult, was no longer “pleasure to him [. . .] I cannot tell you what satiated eyes he had, or how his weariness of seeing, seeing, seeing without knowing, without knowing, without knowing was borne in on me.” Iseult and

Jeremy were in their “two cages,” but their interchange brings them freedom.

Though Iseult will not reveal “how we communicated, or what about, or to what effect,” her language characterizes the experience as spiritual, transcendent:

“between us there was eternal life. He was my salvation” (ET 273-74).

After this experience, the alienation between Jeremy and Eva develops rapidly. Eva snatches him away from England to supposed safety in Paris, but he acts “withdrawn as never before” (ET 239). Though back together again, “they 302 were not alone together: an unbridgeable ignorance of each other, or each other’s motives, was cleft between them, and out of the gulf rose a breath of ice.”

Between them is the presence of some secret that “irradiate[s]” him (ET 227).

After Jeremy becomes a student of the Bonnards at Fontainebleau, the accustomed ways in which Jeremy and Eva communicate change even more rapidly: “his lips began to formulate, or attempt to formulate, French words, and he started to accord to the lips of speakers, other than Eva, a level, exacting, scientific attention denied formerly” (ET 238). Their special subliminal communication breaks down, for “He no longer obeyed her, not out of rebelliousness but from genuine lack of knowledge of what was wanted [. . .] To get his attention she had to touch him,” a circumstance that has existed ever since the flight to Paris. His look on Eva now reflects “amicability,” not love (ET 239).

As the gap between Jeremy and Eva widens, Eva turns to Henry, but

Mme. Bonnard warns her that “It is still in [Eva’s] power to offend” Jeremy (ET

289). And perhaps she does, or perhaps she had already offended him in the past.

When he kills her, his age and his still semi-caged state make it impossible to determine premeditation or motive. Perhaps he has learned revenge from Eva and feels the need to retaliate for too many years of too much protection. Perhaps he has to sever their communication forever to be completely free of his cage. If so, his freedom at the cost of another’s confinement comes at much too great a price.

The only brief glimpses of increased, mutually freeing communication that

Bowen offers her readers come with reciprocated love. As Dr. Bonnard states,

“Choice—choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to 303 see one rightly—is the only escape” from isolation with oneself (ET 249). But that escape route is mined with obstacles. Instead, Bowen’s novels present a world in which, more and more frequently, communication attempts fail.

Language, of which Bowen can make such a beautiful means of communication, falters as deteriorating diction and syntax take away its nuances and leave only the pre-formulated constructions of cliches and proverbs. Or, with the increasingly involuntary and physical limitations that Bowen imposes upon it, language fails entirely. Then communication either ends or relies on touch, a sometimes more reassuring but less exact conveyor of shades of meaning. In either case, the final effect is to cut off some, if not all, avenues of connection between one human being and another. Alienation—the inescapable confinement of each individual within himself—is all that remains.

304

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

You do, you really do, write about love. Who else does, today?

—Rosamond Lehmann in Elizabeth Bowen (190)

With few exceptions, Elizabeth Bowen’s novels progress away from a time of freedom and grace and toward a time controlled by an increasingly negative set of confinements. In this respect, her novels tell the story of the twentieth century with which Bowen, born in 1899, so liked to identify herself.

Indeed, she chronicles her own golden age in a work entitled Seven Winters.

Significantly, this work covers only the first seven years of her life and reflects the calm, idyllic nature of the reputedly golden Victorian and Edwardian eras in which it took place. These years were the most stationary of Bowen’s life and took place prior to the three wars—World War I, the Irish Troubles and World

War II—through which she lived at close quarters. In her cultural history entitled

Bowen’s Court, Bowen also chronicles the golden age and decline of her family, and, by extension, of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class of which her family was a part. These works exemplify Bowen’s perception of the past as a time of greater grandeur, beauty and security.

In contrast, Bowen’s novels, except for The Last September each set in the time in which it was written, follow the progression of the twentieth century from the 1920’s through the late 1960’s. The major themes of confinement and escape in her novels also reflect the concerns and problems of the Irish and English upper 305 classes as they declined throughout the twentieth century. Bowen’s exposure to the more advanced deterioration of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Ireland enabled her to see and to include in her novels early signs of the progression in England.

An increased dislocation or rootlessness is one such sign. Though Bowen experienced her own “anxiety to be elsewhere,” considering mobility and the new ideas it engenders absolutely necessary for her own artistic survival, she also inherited an attachment to a rooted, traditional place (TN 82). Her family home,

Bowen’s Court, where the Bowens had lived since 1776, existed, apparently immutable, in the background of her life. Bowen traveled often and widely, but, until she felt driven by her dwindling finances to sell Bowen’s Court in 1960, she always returned to its seclusion and safety. In response to the bombings of

London during World War II, she imagined “that everyone, fighting or just enduring, carried within him one private image, one peaceful scene. Mine was

Bowen’s Court.” For her it held the “illusion” of “peace at its most ecstatic” that

“I held to, to sustain me throughout the war” (BC 457).

While the attachment to her ancestral home was definitely a confinement in terms of money—Bowen once suggested that losing it to fire might be “a relief”—it, nevertheless, was “home” (Glendinning 89). In writing the history of

Bowen’s Court, Bowen says, “I was taking the attachment of people to places as being generic to human life” (BC 454). It thus becomes, symbolically, the home for which Bowen characters look throughout her novels, and, increasingly, the only form of confinement that those characters perceive as synonymous with security. Only her younger characters find such a place, as Bowen herself did in 306 her youth, primarily representative of the confinements of “impatience, frivolity, lassitude or boredom” (Glendinning 48). On the other hand, the two novels that she wrote after Bowen’s Court was demolished, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, deal most comprehensively and negatively with her themes of the inability to recover the past or to find a real home.

Her novels, however, also reflect the fact that Bowen was capable of finding a home in a person. Just as Stella feels at home with Robert in The Heat of the Day or Eva looks for a home in Henry in Eva Trout, Bowen needed a

“loyal, loving practical companion” as her home and found one in her husband of twenty-nine years, Alan Cameron (Glendinning 256). Cameron’s reliability and decisiveness made him excellent as the father-figure that Bowen lost in her own father when he, during her seventh year, suffered a nervous breakdown. Cameron always handled their finances and was in later years virtually Bowen’s manager.

Her biographer emphasizes that “Alan’s affection was always a place—the place—for Elizabeth” (Glendinning 67). As Bowen’s novels become more peripatetic, the idea of home as a place is more often replaced by that of home in a person.

Other confinements in Bowen’s novels have few positive associations.

Characters from each stage of life endure their own sets of confinements, often falsely hoping to escape the current constriction by advancing to the next stage.

Thus Henrietta of The House in Paris adopts adult mannerisms at age eleven as childhood rushes toward coming of age, and Portia of The Death of the Heart takes Eddie’s allusions to connubial bliss seriously as coming of age rushes 307 toward marriage. Sometimes, finding marriage impossible, youth bypasses that stage and rushes toward death; no stage, except possibly the last, achieves more than the replacement of one type of confinement by another. This headlong progression reflects Bowen’s own life. Upon her father’s breakdown, Bowen lived with her mother at various locations in England for seven years while Henry

Bowen improved; then, just as he seemed recovered, Bowen’s mother died of cancer. Such extreme psychological dislocations wrenched Bowen from one stage to another with as little choice as some of her younger characters, generally leaving her “dominated by various well-meaning older women” (Glendinning 75).

These circumstances account for the relative lack of mothers or fathers and the excessive number of authoritative aunts and cousins in Bowen’s novels, as well as for the extremes of confinement that several of Bowen’s children and adolescents endure. Like Lois of The Last September, Bowen also attempted an early engagement to an officer but was discouraged by an aunt. Instead, at twenty-four she chose the security of marriage to a war veteran six years her elder and embarked on the life, referred to by Edward in Friends and Relations, which is

“an affair of charm, not an affair of passion” (170).

The very word charm evokes the upper class life of tradition and ceremony of Bowen’s ancestry. Certainly Bowen epitomized that world in many ways. She was a good hostess with the ability “to stimulate, charm, stir up, excite the company and the conversation, while keeping things—on the surface—within bounds [. . .] Elizabeth’s presence always imposed a sense of fitness and propriety” (Glendinning 78, 77). She believed that “humane manners [are] the 308 crown of being human” and argued that “Politeness is not a constriction; it is a grace: it is really no worse than an exercise of the imagination on other people’s behalf. And are we to cut grace quite out of life?” (CI 200). She was able to give the “old order, in its positive aspect of grace and hospitality and congenial intimacies, a late and lavish flowering” before World War I (Glendinning 116).

Yet even then Bowen’s world was the “old order,” and, as such, vanishing. The upper classes, known for “learning easily worn, stylishness, finesse, savoir-vivre” are becoming equally known for “an aura of decline, of straitened circumstances”

(Glendinning 171). Their luster is fading, their influence and means decreasing.

In her discussion of Jane Austen in English Novelists, Bowen admits that

Austen’s characters, like Bowen’s own, operate within the “constraints of polite behaviour,” but she insists that these “serve only to store up her characters’ energies; [Austen] dispels [. . .] the fallacy that life with the lid off—in thieves’ kitchens, prisons, taverns and brothels—is necessarily more interesting than life with the lid on” (25). “Life with the lid on” is the substance of Bowen’s novels, but her charming and constrained version of it is disappearing, as her novels increasingly demonstrate. Even before World War II, Max Ebhart of The House in Paris notes, “Nowadays the world is in bad taste; it is no longer ‘history in the making,’ or keeps rules or falls in with nice ideas. Things will soon be much more than embarrassing; I doubt if one will be able to save one’s face” (146).

While he says this with irony, in retrospect it seems prophetic—and after the war the lid pops off Bowen’s world even more permanently. Bowen herself remembers, just after the war, standing out on someone’s terrace while his 309 fountain, which “had been turned off all through the war,” was restarted. She enthuses, symbolically, “I think a fountain is much nicer than a bonfire; if less democratic” (Glendinning 194). Yet homogenization and democratization are the new order, and, while Bowen was not a snob, she was an aesthete, and she regretted the passing of the richness of the old. She and others of the upper classes find, as Bowen wrote in her short story, “The Disinherited,” that “The old order left [them] stranded, the new offered [them]no place” (388).

Yet not everything in Bowen yearns for the past or traditionalism. Her life of charm she balanced, a bit precariously at times, with moments of passion.

Because he was the “safe harbour, the ‘location’ for her dislocated life,” Bowen did not want to escape her marriage to Alan Cameron (Glendinning 59).

Nevertheless, she escaped the man himself quite often—apparently without his comment if not with his blessing. She traveled extensively without him, on errands of business or visits to friends both male and female.

Her most unconventional escapes, the extramarital affairs, reveal the passionate side of Bowen that yields to the authority of love in spite of tradition.

Sometimes Bowen’s infatuations were unrequited or brief and best forgotten.

One, however, achieved the transcendently liberating and unifying qualities that elevate the rare, reciprocated romances in Bowen’s novels. Her association with

Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie began in early 1941 and enriched the remainder of her life though she was married through the first of it, until Alan

Cameron died in 1952, and Ritchie through the last of it, after he married a cousin in 1948. She always managed to see Charles Ritchie because, though he was 310 posted in Canada, Germany, and the United States in addition to England, he “for her became a ‘habitat,’ as Robert was for Stella in The Heat of the Day”

(Glendinning 175). The relationship lasted approximately the same amount of time as hers with Alan Cameron, and, unlike the life of charm with Cameron, enabled her to experience what she called “living at full height.” Her novels reveal that she did, indeed, “wish for everyone to live at full height” at least once, that experiencing the passions freed an otherwise over-confined and incomplete existence (Glendinning 109). Once, when she was appointed a member of the

Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, she argued against giving the man whose wife has been unfaithful to him more clemency than the man whose mistress has: “I argued that in an irregular relationship passion and sexual feeling is nearer the surface, and if you were to allow for uncontrollable passion it is more likely [. . .] to arise in what is described as a love relationship” (Glendinning 222).

So it had been for Bowen.

And, again, Bowen’s novels reflect both the fleeting and freeing nature of passion—and, generally, its presence outside marriage. She allows none of the rare mutual loves in her novels—Janet and Edward, Max and Karen, Stella and

Robert, Jane and Richard Priam, possibly Eva and Henry—to experience this love within marriage. Only Lilia and Fred in A World of Love and Iseult and Eric in

Eva Trout occasionally transcend the world of charm to heights of physical passion. Yet the best moments of mutual love include psychological as well as physical oneness and are always climactic ones, attesting to Bowen’s belief in their primacy within life. Indeed, for Bowen, “the pleasure of creative writing” to 311 which she had devoted her life and which made her sometimes claim that she was a writer before being a woman, was [. . .] ‘equalled elsewhere only in love’ ”

(Glendinning 110, 266).

While her novels as a whole celebrate the authority of love, however, The

Last September, The House in Paris, and Eva Trout also mark the progression of the negative authority of power. This authority was one that, Bowen believed, became increasingly violent and immoral without property or other symbolic material goods to ground it and to keep the “dangerous power-idea [. . .], like a sword in its scabbard, fairly safely at rest.” She observed this increasing need to demonstrate domination in her own family and thus argues that

The power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either

prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We

have everything to dread from the dispossessed [. . .] The outsize

will is not necessarily an evil: it is a phenomenon. It must have its

outsize outlet, its big task. If the right scope is not offered it, it

must seize the wrong. (BC 455-56)

Thus, from his “material void” the Irish republican draws a gun on Lois and

Marda, and Mme. Fisher, Constantine and Iseult grasp at any raw materials that come within their range. While Bowen’s insights help to explain the increasing numbers of acts of violent extremity, they do not excuse those actions.

The last act of violent extremity in Bowen’s novels arises not out of material void, however, but from a void more psychological in origin. Jeremy

Trout’s murder of Eva after years of inability to communicate imposed by 312 physical handicaps graphically demonstrates the increasing psychological isolation that haunts Bowen’s novels. While this alienation remains one of

Bowen’s most pervasive and modernist attributes, it is not one that her life reveals. Bowen, who, “though passionately gregarious, had and always retained an instinctive reticence” about her personal life, was too private to leave records of such intimate depth except in her fiction (Glendinning 47). Her letters and the memories of those who talked with her reveal attempts at communication, not failures of those attempts. However, she acknowledges that even her earliest published writing was filled with “beating myself against human unknowableness; in fact, I made that my subject—how many times?”

(Glendinning 65). The subject and its conclusions are still the same in Eva Trout:

“there is no hope of keeping a check on people; you cannot know what they do, or why they do it” (216). Such human unknowableness is, of course, a variation on the theme of alienation, the inability of one human ever to know another completely. To achieve love one must overcome that formidable confinement, if only briefly. Few do either in Bowen’s life or novels, but the achievement, she implies, is worth the effort. In a world that consists primarily not of love but of obstacles to love—the world that Bowen unfolds throughout ten novels and forty years—mutual love is one of the few phenomena that is not about confinement.

As she suggests by including these lines from Stendhal’s On Love in To the

North, “en amour posséder n’est rien, c’est jouir qui fait tout” (261). In love, possession, which connotes control, is nothing. It is the enjoyment of love, as the liberality of its definition implies, that is everything. 313

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