Patterns of Confinement and Escape in the Novels
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“SOMETHING TO KEEP US SEPARATE”: PATTERNS OF CONFINEMENT AND ESCAPE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH BOWEN by 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 by 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 © 2002 Constance Elizabeth Means Nunley All Rights Reserved “SOMETHING TO KEEP US SEPARATE”: PATTERNS OF CONFINEMENT AND ESCAPE IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH BOWEN by 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 v 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. vi 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