20131029 TC Ansay Myriam

A CRITICAL A NALYSIS OF THE FICTIONAL
R EPRESENTATION OF AN OLD W OMAN
REVIEWING HER
L IFE
The candidate Myriam Ansay hereby confirms having realised the present work by
her own means. All sources have been acknowledged.
Myriam Ansay
Professeur-candidate au Lyçée Nic- Biever
A CRITICAL A NALYSIS OF THE FICTIONAL
R EPRESENTATION OF AN OLD W OMAN REVIEWING HER
L IFE
under the supervision of Flora Alexander
Dudelange 2013
ABSTRACT
The scope of this dissertation is to investigate the representation of elderly
women within our western context and the effects of late-life review on their
psychological well-being. Elderly women are recurrently portrayed as doubly OTHER
in our society, ‘other’ to youth and ‘other’ to men, and are thus subjected to both
ageist and sexist stereotypes. The aim of this piece of work is to demystify such
denigrating cultural preconceptions by analysing the old female narrators in ‘The
Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry, ‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively, and ‘There
Were No Windows’ by Norah Hoult, and by assessing the narratives they weave
about their lives to reconstruct their identities.
The introduction deals with the theoretical concepts of this dissertation. It is
followed by the analysis of the three novels which are not treated in chronological
order but according to the type of narrative they offer. In the conclusion,
comparisons are drawn between the different protagonists with reference to the
theory provided in the first chapter.
The analysis of three novels reveals that the oppositional perspective of these
three exceptionally beautiful and intellectual women highlights the social injustices
of their background. In the present-day context, they struggle with the progressing
disintegration of their body but a feeling of wholeness can be achieved through
remembering their past embodied identities. The narrators are inevitably unreliable
since their reviews are subjective and manipulated (sub)consciously by them to
achieve a healthier narrative self. In the case of dementia, the failure of the
interlocutor to help reconstruct the narrative of the patient has life-threatening
consequences for the affected person. Not all traumatic events can be re-integrated
into a life story, but this does not mean that the person cannot find mental peace.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................... 7
2
SEBASTIAN BARRY THE SECRET SCRIPTURE .......................................................... 13
1)
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 13
2)
ROSEANNE ‘the old, old woman’ ...................................................................... 16
3)
ROSEANNE’S TESTIMONY OF HERSELF ............................................................. 21
4)
NARRATIVE AND REALITY– omission, change and invention ........................... 38
5)
CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 42
3
PENELOPE LIVELY MOON TIGER .......................................................................... 45
1)
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 45
2)
CLAUDIA the ‘old ill woman’ ............................................................................. 50
3)
THE LIVES OF OTHERS SLOT INTO MY OWN LIFE: I, ME, CLAUDIA H. ............... 54
4)
CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 80
4
5
THERE WERE NO WINDOWS ................................................................................ 85
1)
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 85
2)
CLAIRE the ‘drooling, not too clean, semi-deranged old woman’ ................... 88
3)
‘[RE-LIVE] THE PAST[…]’ ................................................................................... 93
4)
DYSNARRATIVIA .............................................................................................. 101
5)
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 104
CONCLUSIONS..................................................................................................... 107
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 111
1 INTRODUCTION
When both my grandmothers died in the summer of 2010, the idea came to
me to write on the position of elderly women in our society and the precious value
of their life stories and anecdotes, which, after their death, keep them alive in us.
The fact that aging does not currently get the same careful approach as other forms
of grouping people (such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality) 1 has been another
motivating aspect to embark on this literary study of old women.
Although age directly and indirectly affects everyone, few people want to
believe they belong to that category that others and even they deride (p. x).
Contemporary mass media celebrate youth and beauty, and love to prey on this fear
of aging (p. x) by rendering old age synonymous with deformation. Making the body
the dominant signifier of old age2 has not only created a huge new market for antiageing products. It has damaged old people’s perception of themselves. Their body
which ‘is known of old and long familiar’ has become ‘frightening’ or ‘uncanny’
(Freud) (p. xiv), even ‘abject’ (Chivers, p. xxiv). They find it difficult to reconcile this
outward appearance with their inner ‘true’ self. In Aging and its Discontents: Freud
and Other Fictions, Kathleen Woodward calls this phenomenon the “mirror stage of
old age”. It is
‘the inverse of the mirror stage in infancy. What is whole is felt to reside
within, not without, the subject. The image in the mirror is understood
as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration and nursling dependence of
advanced age’ (original emphasis)3
1
Sally Chivers, From old woman to older women: contemporary culture and women’s narratives
(Columbus: The Ohio State Univerity Press, 2003), p. xii
2
Amelia DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State
University Press., 2010), p. x
3
Kathleen Woodward, Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), p.67
7
Bodily signs of advanced age are not only seen as deforming that which was
once familiar, but are also repeatedly interpreted as indicators of reduced agency
(DeFalco, p. xi). Furthermore, physical deterioration is often associated with mental
deterioration, the looming spectre the not-yet-old are afraid of. Mental decline can
take the form of dementia, which describes various different brain disorders (e.g.
Alzheimer’s disease) that have in common a loss of brain function that is usually
progressive and eventually severe.4 There is a tendency to lament the social and
financial burden such an ever growing frail segment of society imposes on the
working population. People with dementia are especially targeted, since caring for
them not only means a financial strain for the immediate family but also puts them
psychologically at risk. Such antagonism against the elderly can take frightening
dimensions, as some go so far as to suggest that it is selfish for old people to occupy
houses big enough for families.5
While such denigrating culturally constructed representations of the elderly
affect both sexes, women are more exposed to ‘gerontophobia’ (Woodward, p. 193)
than men since they have a higher life expectancy. Further, they suffer a two-fold
cultural loss because it is not just their utility but also their femininity that is
considered to fade. For women, the term ‘ageing’ suggests not only decline and
deterioration but also the loss of sexual identity (King, xii). Using the concept of ‘The
Other’ popularised by Simone de Beauvoir, old women find themselves to be ‘doubly
Other’ both Other to man and Other to youth,6 hence twice the inessential as
opposed to the essential, in fact ‘invisible’ (King, Discourses of Ageing, p. xi).
In this dissertation, I aim to investigate how literature can help debunk such
pervasive life-threatening assumptions about elderly women. Since fiction ‘can
contribute to our understanding of the stages of late life and to “reading” the world
through language’ (Chivers, p. xiv), elderly female narrators in particular can ‘revise
norms of depicting old women as used up, decrepit, asexual and frail’ (p. ix). I
4
Alzheimer’s Society, ‘About Dementia’ in Leading the Fight against Dementia
<http://www.alzheimers.org.uk> [accessed 23 October 2013]
5
Jeannette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. xii
6
Jeannette King, ‘Fiction as a gerontological resource: Norah Hoult’s There Were No Windows’
Ageing & Society 29 (2009) (295- 308), p. 298
8
especially want to look into the effects of reminiscence and late-life review on the
psychological well-being of these narrators. For my research, I have chosen the main
characters of the novels ‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry, ‘Moon Tiger’ by
Penelope Lively, and ‘There Were No Windows’ by Norah Hoult. In the three books,
the protagonists are women at the end of their lives who reminisce about their past.
Before moving on to the actual analysis of the novels, some theoretical
concepts figuring in the title of this dissertation require definition. Firstly, the term
‘representation’ must be defined. Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that there is no
natural or necessary relation between the signs –words- we use and the objects
-referents- in the real world they represent. Reality does not invest language with
meaning, it is we who, through our system of language make sense of our world.7
Since it is through language that we are able to represent ourselves, our experience
and our environment, we inescapably come to perceive our world through the
system of values inherent in the words we use (p. 7). Referring back to the three
literary works of Lively, Hoult and Barry, there is thus inevitably a relationship
between text and context, in the sense that these authors have used language
imbued with a contemporary system of values to construct their female elderly
protagonists.
When analysing the representation of these characters against their social
and cultural background, another important aspect must be taken into
consideration. Since none of the authors were at the end of their life at the time of
writing their novel, none of them could rely on personal experience in the
reconstruction of their characters. Hoult and Barry have had to take a step further
than Lively since Hoult has written on a woman with dementia and Barry has had to
imagine female gender issues as a man. In Literature and Feminism, Pam Morris
raises the question if a male author can accurately describe the experience of
women within a given social background. Feminists disagree on this issue but I align
myself with Morris in arguing that, while man cannot experience gender issues as a
woman, he can recognize and deplore them (p. 2). Similarly, I applaud Hoult’s
7
Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), p. 101
9
attempt to construct a subjective experience of dementia, stipulating that since
patients with dementia become progressively unable to testify to their experience,
the witnesses, here manipulated by the author, are left to describe it.
Human subjects are constituted by narrative8 and it is through the narrative
use of language that one comes to understand the self (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects,
p. 13). As we move towards the end of our life cycle, the impulse to narrate our
experiences becomes more and more intense, and results in a process of life review.
Robert N. Butler defines life review as ‘a naturally occurring universal mental process
characterised by the progressive return to consciousness of past experiences and,
particularly, the resurrection of unresolved conflicts: simultaneously and normally,
these experiences and conflicts can be surveyed and reintegrated’ (King, Discourses
of Ageing, p. 9). According to Erik Erikson, this interpretive recollection can bring
coherence and wholeness to a person at the last stage of life, a stage which is
characterised by a conflict between integrity and despair (DeFalco, Uncanny
Subjects, pp. 23-24). Life review then has a therapeutic effect; it makes it possible
‘for the subject to make amends, to seek - and offer - forgiveness and to end regret’
(King, Discourses of Ageing, p. 101). Subjects become active agents who may
optimize their life story through recognition, revision and even disposal (DeFalco,
Uncanny Subjects, p. 25) to re-create a healthier narrative identity. The
psychoanalyst Henry Krystal even suggests that ‘one’s past must be manipulated to
be worthwhile’ (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects, p. 24) (my emphasis). In reference to
literature, this line of thinking invests the discussion of the reliability of the narrator
of a life story with new meaning. When ‘dysnarrativia’ i.e. a state of narrative
impairment9 is involved, reliability is further challenged as narrative authority is
inevitably transferred from the affected person to the listener, in this case, the
reader.
I align myself with J. King in Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism by
refusing to consider life review as a bleak narrative of decline. I follow her lead in
8
Amelia DeFalco, ‘“And then-”: Narrative Indentity and Ucanny Aging in “The Stone Angel”’,
Canadian Literature , 198 (2008), 75-89 (p. 75)
9
Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Becomes Stories: Making Selves (New York: Cornwell University
Press, 1999), p. 124
10
using Barbara Frey Waxman’s more positive term Reifungsroman to refer to the
novels discussed here. In the Reifungsroman, ‘the ageing woman narrator arrives at
a place of authenticity and can therefore find a route into old age that avoids
negative stereotypes and fits her as an individual (King, Discourses of Ageing, p. 102).
Similarly, although I am aware of the unstable nature of memory and agree with A.
DeFalco that interpreting the subject as reader and writer of his or her life means
that alternate interpretations and tellings are always available, I reject her argument
that the prospect of multiple versions, multiple selves introduced by aging can
provoke a general disorienting unsteadiness (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects, p. 27).
Instead I prefer the more optimistic argument that the self is, in Eakin’s terms, ‘less
an entity and more an awareness in process’ (p. x) which the active subject can
positively influence through the reading and re-adjusting of their life story.
In my critical analysis of the novels, I have used family systems theory
developed by the American psychiatrist Dr Murray Bowen (at National Institute of
Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland in the 1950s) to interpret my female narrators’
life stories. Bowen saw the family as an emotional unit of varying interdependence
which inevitably affects a person’s thoughts, actions and feelings throughout their
life. His concepts of ‘differentiation of self’, ‘triangle’ (three-person relationship
system), ‘multigenerational transmission process’ and ‘emotional cutoff’10 have been
used in this dissertation to understand the three protagonists.
I will not analyse the three novels in chronological order, but treat them
according to the type of narrative they offer: First, I will analyse Roseanne Clear’s
first-person loosely linear narrative in ‘The Secret Scripture’, next I will deal with
Claudia Hampton’s multi-vocal kaleidoscopic flashbacks in ‘Moon Tiger’, and finally, I
will attempt to reconstruct the third-person fragmented narrative provided by the
demented Claire Temple in ‘There Were No Windows’. The last chapter summarises
what has been investigated in this study. With reference to the theoretical
background, comparisons are drawn between the different protagonists and their
10
Bowen Center for the Study of the Family: Georgetown Family Center, ‘Bowen Theory’
<http://www.thebowencenter.org/pages/theory.html> [accessed 23 October 2013)
See also Family Therapy Sourcebook, ed. by Fred P. Piercy, Douglas H. Sprenkle and Joseph L.
Wetchler (New York: Guilford Press, 1986) pp. 25-28
11
reflections on their past life, and the author’s techniques in the reconstruction of
fictional narrative identity.
12
2 SEBASTIAN BARRY THE SECRET SCRIPTURE
1) INTRODUCTION
The Secret Scripture tells the story of Roseanne Clear, also named Roseanne
McNulty, who has spent the past sixty-odd years of her life in a mental asylum in
western Ireland. The present-day setting is the turn of the 21st century. Roseanne is
nearing a hundred, and, sensing that the end is imminent, she decides to put her life
on paper, ‘to leave an account, some brittle and honest-minded history’11 of herself.
It is important to her that her narrative reflects her version of past events and not
the guesses and surmises of those who have made her suffer enormously. Her aim is
to write down her story, even if she feels that some of her memories cannot be true.
I have chosen to deal with The Secret Scripture before the other two novels for the
reason that Roseanne’s life review, as well as her reflections about herself and
interactions with others, are more coherent than those of the main characters of
Moon Tiger and There Were No Windows not only because of her lucid state of mind
but also because she is a first-person narrator who writes her life story down in
instalments without the interference of an external interlocutor.
The book begins in medias res, as the reader is confronted with Roseanne’s
thoughts without any further introduction to the character. She gathers her musings
and memories in her diary entitled ‘Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself’ by Barry.
Underneath, Barry adds just three pieces of information (Patient, Roscommon
Regional Mental Hospital , 1957- ), which invite the reader to make a series of
11
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture (London: Faber &Faber, 2009), p. 5
13
received associations about the protagonist, namely that she is a mentally unstable
person that has been in an institution for a very long time (the present date is not
given). These preconceptions are however immediately put into question by
Roseanne’s surprisingly lucid train of thought and her clear, transcendent narrative
voice.
Roseanne needs to leave a record of her life otherwise she feels that her
narrative has never existed. Barry calls her diary a ‘testimony of herself’, thus
conveying that his protagonist wants to leave an official, truthful account of who she
is. She does not necessarily want someone to read her scripture; she keeps it secret,
hiding it under a floorboard in her room. Roseanne creates her secret scripture for
her own sake; it is her treasure (p. 5). She addresses an imaginary reader who is
mostly anonymous but sometimes takes the form of Dr Grene or God because she
feels the need to clasp this reader’s hand and also asks for his/her protection later in
the book. Once Roseanne has finished the story, she senses that she can ‘imprison it
under the floor-board, and then with joy enough [she] will go to [her] own rest under
the Roscommon sod’ (p. 5).
Her first- person narrative is however not the only one in the book. In his
concerns with the unstable nature of memory, history and truth, Barry has created a
second first-person narrator, the psychiatrist Dr Grene. This doctor has not regularly
looked after Roseanne for many years but now takes a new interest in her because
he needs to assess her to decide whether she can be reintegrated into society or
should be moved to a new institution, as Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital is to
be demolished. In order to do this, he searches for information on Roseanne’s life in
various official sources, among others a deposition left by Father Gaunt, and in his
conversations with his patient. He puts the gathered information, intermingled with
extensive reflections on his own life, down in his Commonplace Book. In this way, his
writing provides a second perspective on Roseanne’s life in every other chapter of
the novel. He has a suspicion that Roseanne, like numerous other cases in the
hospital, was sectioned there for ‘social rather than medical reasons’(p. 27). It is
important to highlight that neither Roseanne nor Dr Grene knows that the other one
is writing; both versions of Roseanne’s life, and of their conversations with each
14
other, can develop independently. Thus, the reader gets two different points of view
on the female protagonist, and the question inevitably poses itself how reliable both
narrators are, or, which of both is more trustworthy.
Roseanne’s narrative is undeniably marked by the historical events of her
context, the Irish society of the first half of the twentieth century, which was ravaged
by intense political turmoil. The civil war which ended with the proclamation of the
Irish Free State in 1922 turned former comrades into enemies and neighbours into
assassins as the country became split between the free-staters, and the Irregulars
who were fighting for a fully independent all-Ireland republic.12 In Producing ‘decent
girls’: governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (19221937), Una Crowley and Rob Kitchin describe how in this time of instability, the
Catholic church and politics introduced a series of reforms and legislations to
strengthen the ‘new’ national moral character. These regulations which made the
Catholic family the cornerstone of the new society created a hostile environment for
women who were confined to their homes and became the scapegoats for any
sexual transgressions in this new sanitized moral landscape.13 As a Protestant and an
individualistic non-conforming woman, the fictional character Roseanne was a
doubly Other for this regime, and therefore a threat to its stability.
Barry attempts to rescue the characters of his novels from this cold hand of
Irish history, imagining a life for those who have been wiped out from official
records. He has also done so with Roseanne, who was created on the basis of the
little he knows about a great-aunt of his. As is the case with his protagonist, his
great-aunt fell victim to the misogynist theocratic moral code of the time, her
marriage was annulled, she then lived ostracised in an iron hut in Sligo and was
committed to an institution. All Barry has really heard about her is a comment of his
grandfather’s that ‘she was no good’, that statement and ‘the rumours of her
12
Joseph
O’Connor,
‘Not
all
knives
and
axes’,
Guardian,
24
May
2008
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/24/fiction1> [accessed 23 October 2013]
13
Una Crowly and Rob Kitchin, ‘Producing ‘decent girls’: governmentality and the moral geographies
of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922-1937)’, Gender, Place and Culture, 15.4 (August 2008), 355- 372,
pp. 355-357
15
beauty’14. In The Secret Scripture, Barry uses Roseanne to ‘reclaim’ his great-aunt’s
life story (Ibid), and the protagonist’s narrative tellingly ends with ‘All that remains of
me now is a rumour of beauty’ (Barry, p. 278). However, since Barry knows so little
about his great-aunt, the book is utterly fictional, even if the setting is historical.
2) ROSEANNE ‘the old, old woman’
Right at the beginning of the novel, Roseanne describes herself as an ‘old, old
woman’, ‘a thing left over, a remnant woman’, who does ‘not even look like a
human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and
blouse, and a canvas jacket’ (p. 4). To her, her face seems so creased and old, so lost
in age (p. 27), and her hands look as if they had been buried a while and then dug up.
She thinks that they frighten people (p. 146). The doctor however says that although
Roseanne is old and shrunken, her face bears the look of her youth yet; one can still
guess that she must have been extremely beautiful at some point, a ‘manifestation
of something unusual and maybe alien in this provincial world’ (p. 18) Roseanne’s
image of herself is in discrepancy with reality, she perceives herself as hardly human
any longer. She cannot accept the continuing deterioration of her body. When she
describes her old frame, she often contrasts it with her youthful version of selfhood,
longing for her long, straight, gold hair - ‘yellow as the gleams in old books’ (p.278),
or the vigour she had to climb up to Maeve’s cairn (p. 183). Her awareness of past
wholeness and present disintegration (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects, p. 82) is further
visualized in her refusal to look into a mirror for the past fifteen years, and in the fact
that she has given up playing the piano ever since a mild rheumatism impeded her
from playing as well as she used to.
14
Sean O’Hagan, ‘Ireland’s past is another country’, Guardian, 27 April 2008
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/apr/27/fiction.culture> [accessed 23 October 2013]
16
Roseanne finds her old self disturbing, although the only people who see her
like this are the hospital staff. That she longs for her past beauty despite later
describing how it contributed to her downfall, raises the question of how much
Roseanne enjoyed and now misses the allure of her beauty for other people. Further
light will be shed on this aspect of Roseanne’s personality in the analysis of her
narrative. Now, at this final stage of her life, she can no longer count on her physical
appearance to attract interest. She nonetheless uses it to her advantage, playing at
times the role of the senile woman who suffers from memory loss in order to
circumvent the Doctor Grene’s questionings. At some point, she smiles at him her
‘oldest, old woman smile’ as ‘if [she] did not quite understand’ (Barry, 28) what he
means when he says that he likes to think her happy at the hospital.
Roseanne is in fact happy but not in the way the doctor thinks she is. Her
personality is too complex to simply resign herself to be content with the little she
has. She does not consider her room at the institution as her home and does not
long for the kind of happiness that means walking freely about the place, paddling in
the sea in summer, and smelling the roses in the here and now (p. 28). A feeling of
panic and her conviction that she does not deserve such freedom impede her from
aspiring to this kind of happiness. At her advanced age, and after her long
confinement, Roseanne considers herself a ‘dead mouse lying in the pyramids’ (p. 5),
and true bliss means for her the prospect of the beyond where she will be rewarded
for her sufferings:
There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable
joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world. As if, in reaching this room,
I have found the anteroom to paradise, and soon will find it opening,
and walk forward like a woman rewarded for my pains, into those green
fields and folded farms. So green the grass is burning! (p. 25)
The alliteration of consonants in ‘fields and folded farms’ and in ‘green grass’,
together with the sensation of the overly intense colour of the grass point towards
an idealisation of this after-life which stands in sharp contrast to the greyness of her
present, confined existence. However, although Roseanne looks to the beyond for
17
spiritual and physical freedom, she is still a great celebrator of life on earth (p. 132).
In her narrative, she itemizes happiness with such enthusiasm when referring to her
experiences as a young single woman, using such an abundance of positive
descriptors that the reader is swept along by her celebration of this episode of her
life. Apart from these memories, she has yet another way to light up her existence.
She explains to Dr Grene how she does not take things at face value, but emphasizes
their extraordinariness: ‘I find the mice remarkable, I find the funny green sunlight
that climbs in that window remarkable. I find you visiting me today remarkable.’ (p.
26) Another example of how she values ordinary events as small miracles is her
description of how the blossoms of the old apple tree in the garden of the asylum
used to make her cry in spring because she found them so ‘heartening’ and
‘overwhelming’(p. 278).
The explanation as to how it is possible for Roseanne to embrace the gift of
life in such a manner despite her disastrous situation is that hat she draws on her
father’s philosophy of life. The latter seemed to consider the retelling of
extraordinary events, such as his encounter with the ’Indian Angel’ a ‘reward to him
for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much, it conferred on him,
in dream and waking, a sense of privilege’ (p. 11). Roseanne calls her father’s
happiness ‘curious’ in the darkness of his dreary existence, a ‘precious gift in itself’
(p. 11). She has inherited this character trait from him. Both Roseanne and her
father’s happiness may be astonishingly unfounded but the protagonist decides that
it is legitimate to let oneself be as happy as one can in the long reaches of a life (p.
12), and she reflects ‘at the close of day the gift of life is something immense’
(p. 278).
Further, she has erected a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar to
protect her wounded self, in this manner retaking control over it, and becoming the
author of herself (p. 4). Roseanne’s perception of her own merits and value as a
person are tinged by the judgements of her tormentors; she has therefore closed up
against any discussion of her person, and is even prepared to use ‘foul’, ‘utter’ lies to
protect herself. She prefers to revalue her life and the decisions she took as a person
in society on her own, without the interference of a second opinion. She has learnt
18
the virtue of silence in a place in which ‘those who feed them do not love them,
those who clothe them do not fear them’ (p. 32). She uses this disturbing quotation
as a pars pro toto for the cruel treatment she has received at the hands of the
asylum staff. For her, speaking means danger:
Peril to the body, and sometimes, a more intimate, miniature, invisible
peril to the soul. When to speak at all, is a betrayal of something, perhaps
a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body
like a scared refugee in a site of war. (p. 80)
Since Roseanne has hidden herself in silence for very long periods of time, her
ability for ‘playful, even fanciful talk’ (p. 132) with Dr Grene and her imagined reader
is very surprising. She uses a lot of humour, which she considers as a quality to be
treasured in a place like the institution. For example, when the Doctor tells her that
Pythagoras warned people to be careful when eating beans, in case they were eating
the soul of their grandmother, she asks him jokingly whether this is also true for
Batchelors Beans (p. 26). At times, she uses implication bordering on irony in her
answers to the doctor. For instance, when Doctor Grene asks her if she has
everything she needs, she replies ‘in the main’. I think that Roseanne uses ironic
understatement here to confer that she certainly doesn’t have everything she needs;
how could she be entirely content in her circumstances? Roseanne’s use of language
further distinguishes itself by her use of colloquialisms (e.g. saying ‘the world and his
aunt’ (p. 151) for everybody), her reference to ancient folklore (for example to be as
quick and agile as Jesse James and his brother Frank (p. 26)) and half-forgotten
quotations (for instance When milk comes frozen home in pail and Dick the shepherd
blows his nail (p. 133)). Finally, her use of imagery from the animal world to describe
people (e.g. calling her doctor a ferret (p. 29)) is to the point and almost poetic.
That Roseanne’s language is thus extremely rich and lively after her long
confinement and ill-treatment, may make some readers question whether charactercredibility is maintained throughout the novel. Sebastian Barry holds that the
sounding and rightness of syntax and language is part of our music of being alive,
19
and radiates mental health.15 Personally, I find it at least very astonishing that
Roseanne is still capable of such intellectual exercise and is thus mentally healthy.
She never searches for words nor names, not even in the way an ordinary person is
wont to do in conversation. On the other hand, one may decide that she is a fictional
character and art is not simply a transcript of reality. In this sense, the rich texture of
her language renders her voice more urgent and her chronicle more personal and
authentic:
To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, as I believe I
am, is a great possession indeed. As I sit here at this table marked and
scored by a dozen generations maybe of inmates, patients, angels,
whatever we are, I must report to you this sensation of some gold
essence striking into me, blood deep. Not contentment, but a prayer as
wild and dangerous as a lion’s roar. (Barry, p. 95)
Old Roseanne is completely alone, but like an alchemist she is able to extract
a kingly joy from her dreary existence. In her impressive mastery of language, she
uses the imagery of the lion which symbolises courage, strength and fearlessness, to
describes how a gold essence, a feeling of pure elation strikes her. She has finally
found the strength to voice her prayer and, invoking God and the reader, she asserts
her voice, wild and dangerous. No longer silent and invisible, she moves against the
cultural preconceptions of her time to tell her story.
15
Penguin Group USA LLC , ‘The Secret scripture’, Reading Guides (2013)
<http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/secret_scripture.html>
[accessed 24 October 2013]
20
3) ROSEANNE’S TESTIMONY OF HERSELF
a) ROSEANNE’S CHILDHOOD
Since Roseanne writes her chronicle in a loosely linear fashion, it makes sense
to analyse her childhood relationship towards her father Joe Clear and her mother
Cissy in a first step. According to Roseanne, her father worked in a graveyard for
most of his life, wearing a blue uniform with a ‘peak as black as a blackbird’s coat’ for
this purpose (p. 9). With her ‘darkhaired, darkskinned Spanish sort of beauty’ and
her ‘green eyes like American emeralds’, Roseanne‘s mother looked ‘neat, agreeable
and shining’. She had ‘skin as soft as feathers, and a warm, generous breast all newbaked bread and delight’ (p. 8). Roseanne’s use of alliteration of consonantal sounds
in the physical description of her parents makes her picture of them more vivid and
memorable, even poetic. It is the idealised description of a child in admiration for
her parents. Old Roseanne sees them still ‘in [her] mind’s eyes, or somewhere
behind [her] eyes, in the darkened bowl of [her] head, still there, alive and talking,
truly, as if their time was real time and [hers] an illusion’ (p. 21).
Although the protagonist hardly says anything about what her father looked
like, he seems larger-than-life in the novel through Roseanne’s depiction of his
character. Despite his hard every-day life, Joe Clear was a very positive person who
let himself be happy through his love for his family, his singing and his passion for
story-telling. That he should have found his place in a society in which he was clearly
an outsider as a Protestant is remarkable. Such an enumeration of positive qualities
on the part of her father suggests that Roseanne greatly admired him. She has
inherited his character traits: she is musical too, and is a great celebrator of life and
of stories. Her mother Cissy, on the other hand, was a very introverted person who
never made ‘miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories’ (p. 11).
At some point, she even fell completely silent like ‘swimming creature under water’
(p. 67). Roseanne believes that people who ‘do not nurse stories while they live are
more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them (p.
21
11).’ What Roseanne remembers about her mother are the pleasant physical
sensations she triggered with her beauty, she was like a ‘lost shilling on a floor of
mud, glistening in some despair’ (p. 8), and her accent was of a soft comforting
sound, ‘rushing and shushing’ like the pebbles on the Southampton beach disturbed
by the waves (p. 21).
According to Roseanne, her father was clearly infatuated with her mother.
When Joe was dead, Roseanne once found her mother curled up like a sheepdog
under her father’s motorbike, which shows that she must nonetheless have felt
affectionate towards him as well. However, Cissy hardly ever spoke to her husband
and daughter, and when she did, it was in the most neutral of tones. However, she
sometimes made provocative sexual remarks to him such as: ‘All may fall at the same
rate…. [b]ut it’s the rare thing rises.’ (p. 21) Roseanne does ‘not think this was a cut
to him’ (p. 21) but it must be remembered that this remark in particular, and their
marriage in general, is viewed by a narrator who, at the time, was a child and not
mature enough to understand the complexities of adult relationships. There was
really a distortion of the roles of wife and child in this family, since Joe treated his
daughter like a confidante and his wife like a child. Using the family systems theory
developed by Murray Bowen, I posit that the relationship in this family was triangled.
Triangles are the basic building blocks of an emotional system and connect
individuals with each other. ‘As anxiety builds between two members of a family, a
third individual is involved (i.e., triangled) to stabilize the relationship or bind the
anxiety.’(Piercy, Sprenkle and Wetchler, p. 26) Joe Clear was unable to make his wife
happy in the dark setting he had brought her to live, and Roseanne was involved to
bind the anxiety between Cissy and Joe. Thereby, Cissy inevitably became ‘the odd
one out’, a situation very difficult to tolerate for individuals (Bowen centre, op.cit.)
which may explain her increasingly withdrawal from her family and into herself.
Every night of Roseanne’s childhood, the last thing her father did before he
went to sleep was to come into her narrow bed, so that she lay half on him, to recite
to her ‘intimations, suspicions and histories of his heart’, not really caring whether
she could understand but offering it to her as a kind of music both of them enjoyed
(Barry, 64). He only joined his wife when he heard her snore. There is an indication of
22
incest here, and the fact that Roseanne provides hardly any physical description of
his father in the novel suggests that she suppresses this forbidden, shameful aspect
of their relationship. Once, Roseanne witnessed her father sitting on his bed, holding
her mother and patting her back ‘almost childishly’ (p. 107). Joe had inverted the
roles, and that his wife must have suffered from this becomes clear not only in her
provocative sexual remark to him in front of her daughter. At his wake, she pierces
his eyes with the two tiny arrows from the Ansonia clock she had bought on
instalments with money dearly needed for the family’s survival. In Freudian terms,
by piercing his eyes, she castrates him and, tellingly, it is Roseanne who removes the
arrows, thus symbolically re-establishing the male power in their household. The
reader can also draw a comparison between the uncanny story in which Joe spends a
horrible night in a Southampton house where a woman had starved her husband to
death, and Cissy’s starving of her husband when she was saving money for the clock.
Roseanne never openly accuses her mother of badly treating her father; she also
excuses her mother’s at times cruel treatment of her, saying that children were
routinely whipped back then. When she sees Mrs Prunty desperately looking for her
daughter at the beach she merely reflects
How I wished suddenly for my mother to seek for me so fiercely, so
sweatingly, to find me again on the strand of the world, to rescue me, to
recruit others for my rescue, to bring me again to her breast, as that
distant mother so obviously ached to do with the happy creature in my
arms. (p. 138)
A parallel can be drawn here between Mrs Prunty’s experience and
Roseanne’s later loss of her son on that same beach, and a contrast established with
Cissy’s mother abandonment. Cissy could have acted but she didn’t, and at some
point she became indeed totally absent. That Roseanne’s resentment is only implied
in the text and that she does not admit holding a grudge against her mother, not
even to herself, imply some sort of guilt on her part for her role in the withdrawal
and silencing of her mother. At her old age, she calls her mother a little wren, a
fragile little bird, a victim of circumstance who, like her, was to some extent
23
abandoned by a husband unable to respond to her cry for help, and was committed
to an asylum when she was no longer considered fit to remain in society.
Even at a hundred, Roseanne uses the present simple when remembering
some key moments with her father, thus showing that these remembrances are very
vivid to her. One of these memories is a scene in the graveyard when her father
attempts an experiment to show her that all things fall at the same rate. The
experiment consists in throwing hammers and feathers from the top of the cemetery
tower. Before she discusses the experiment, she says that she thought she would
never be able to live without her father, but that she would be proven wrong in time.
This suggests that there is a subtext to what Roseanne is describing here as a happy
childhood memory. According to the priest, what really happened in the tower was
an attempt by the Irregulars to murder her father, who was a member of the Royal
Irish Constabulary, and whom they held responsible for the death of some of their
comrades. Allegedly, Roseanne witnessed as they beat him with hammers and tried
to push him through the little window of the tower. The window was too narrow, so
in the end they hanged him in a derelict house. There are several hints in the text
which point to it having been a traumatic event:
My father was calling, calling in enormous excitement in the tower, ‘What
do you see, what do you see?’
What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of
ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculous maybe born of desperation, such
as Eneas McNulty... It is all love, that not knowing, not seeing. I am
standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck,
peering and straining, for no other reason than for love of him. The
feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling,
calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.
(p. 23)
‘Not knowing, not seeing’ implies that Roseanne does not/ cannot know or
see what was really happening. She is still standing there ‘eternally’ witnessing the
horrible event. She uses the present continuous and repetition of important words
to express that she can still hear her father calling for help and see the hammers
falling. She says that ‘[i]t is no crime to love your father, it is no crime to feel no
criticism of him […] (p. 22)’ The traumatic experience of losing her father is
24
something she constantly deals with and the part in her account dedicated to this is
very telling in this respect. She repeatedly uses the exclamation word ‘oh’ to voice
her sadness and desperation. She personifies grief in the body of her father eternally
swinging a little bit in a derelict house and she uses the metaphor of the rat on fire to
describe the destructive force of this sort of feeling, which still makes her cry out for
her father. The image of the burning rat refers back to her father’s implication in the
death of the poor girls at the Protestant orphanage, an implication which might have
contributed to his untimely departure.
It shocks the reader almost to realize that while Roseanne misses her father
terribly, she hardly ever mentions her mother in her memories. After Joe Clear’s
death, Cissy all but disappears from Roseanne’s life story, only to be remembered
when the protagonist, like her mother, is committed to the asylum. Making further
use of Bowen’s family systems theory, I stipulate that the protagonist emotionally
cut herself off (Bowen centre, op.cit.) her mother to free herself from the anxiety
associated with Cissy’s problems. Roseanne wishes the situation would have been
different and her desire for her mother to take responsibility for her the way Mrs
Prunty does for her children highlights her striving for a more balanced motherdaughter relationship. Instead, the roles are inversed, she assumes responsibility for
her mother, for both her parents in fact. This becomes clear in a memory of hers of
the family going to Christmas service when her father was still alive. During the
service, she suddenly felt that her father and mother were in her care and that she
would be able to rescue them. This pierced her with sudden joy and made her cry
tears of treacherous relief. In retrospect, she reflects that these tears were quite
useless since the next day a whole tragedy was set in motion when her mother was
unable to react to father’s Christmas gift in the way he had hoped. In her old age,
Roseanne wishes she could go back to this turning point in her life before many
things went wrong. She wishes to put them all back in that church, back in that
Christmas time, when her father looked at both her and her mother and smiled in
easy, ordinary kindness (Barry, p. 70). Hence, the scene at the church symbolises two
things, namely that in Roseanne’s life moments of happiness are pristine because
25
they are real but always short-lived, and her growing will to fight for her family, for
that which is dear to her.
b) ROSEANNE : the independent single woman
Since Father Gaunt comes to advise Roseanne on her threshold to
womanhood, Roseanne’s attitude towards him, and her assessment of the role he
played in the Clear family’s life are discussed at this stage of the analysis. Towards
the beginning of her account, Roseanne addresses herself directly to him, writing
‘Dear Father Gaunt. I suppose I may say so. Never did so sincere and honest a man
cause maiden so much distress. For I don’t suppose for a moment he acted out of ill
intent’. (p. 35) This comment of Roseanne’s drips with understated sarcasm and
verbalises her resentment against the man who not only moidered her but also
bothered her father. She makes a stock character out of him in further descriptions,
stating that he was ‘bustling, spare and neat, in his black clothes and his hair cropped
tight like a condemned man’ (p. 35). When he comes to visit her after her father’s
death, he wears
his accustomed sleek soutane - I do not mean this critically- and as it was
raining […] he was also covered in a sleek dark-grey coat of similar shiny
material. Perhaps the skin of his face was also made of it, anciently, in his
mother’s womb. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like
something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand.
(p. 96)
Although Roseanne does not openly criticise Father Gaunt, her disdain for his
man becomes apparent in this caricature of him and his umbrella. The priest’s name
suggests a looming presence, but she questions whether a man the same height as
her can be said to loom large. Sean O’Hagan in The Observer finds Roseanne
singularly without bitterness, but I am reading an underlying bitterness into this
sarcastic mock description. The protagonist even compares him at some point to the
26
grim reaper, saying that such a man when crossed is ‘like a scything blade, the grass,
the brambles and the stalks of human nature [go] down before him’ (Barry, p. 38).
After Joe Clear’s burial, the priest considers Roseanne simultaneously as a
‘child […] in gravest need for advice’ (p. 97) and as ‘a mournful temptation, not only
to the boys in Sligo, but also, the men’ (p. 98). By suggesting that she, a sixteen-yearold girl, should change her religion and marry fifty-year-old Joe Brady, Father Gaunt
aims to undermine the possible independence of this young, beautiful woman whom
he considers threatening to the stability of his parish and his authority. With that
surprising strength of character Roseanne refuses what she sarcastically calls a
‘magnanimous’ offer, thus confirming the priest’s fears. Her reflection that he was
trying ‘to do his duty, to be kind, to be helpful’ (p. 97) cannot be taken at face value
since she had by now recognised the true nature of this man, who had not hesitated
to flick the ashes of his cigarette into her father’s offered hand and had had no
scruples about telling her that her mother must be committed. Due to what Murray
Bowen identifies as the multigenerational transmission process (Bowen centre,
op.cit), through which younger generations tend to reproduce the life patterns of
their parents, Roseanne reproduces at this moment the same situation which her
father had once faced: She proudly chooses to stick her religion and moral
convictions over subjecting to the role of the respectable citizen cut out for her by
the priest. Like her father, she prefers to live freely even if it means at the mercy of
Father Gaunt, who is from now on a force unknown, like a calamity of weather
waiting unknown and un-forecast to bedevil a landscape’ (p. 100). That Roseanne is
strong and assertive, even without the possible support of her own family, and this
further becomes clear in her resistance to the bullying of rapist Joe Brady, the very
man Father Gaunt had suggest as a suitable husband, and her subsequent heated
discussion with John Lavelle who comes to her help.
In the following years, Roseanne further resists the role of the married
woman by deliberately not going steady with anyone and through her job at the
Quaker-run Café Cairo, a place which largely her reflects set of moral standards as
opposed to the priest’s since it serves everyone without criticism and brings simple
happiness to people’s lives. She calls this period her university and she reconsiders
27
how it might have been the start of a good life. She describes herself as a ‘stranger’
at this point, using the word stranger because so carefree and happy as opposed to
the sorrowful, despairing other selves in her life. At this time, she enjoyed life to an
extent she had never been able to before or after, and the ceaseless repetitions of
the word happy these pages emphasize this sentiment.
Roseanne is not sure what age she was at the time, she wasn’t exactly a girl
anymore, she metaphorically reflects how on the sunny beach, it is hard to tell a
person’s age in a bathing suit. She is one of a community of 'girls' and 'lads', together
with the other ‘straightforward ordinary’ girls, she likes to bring as much despair as
they can to the lads (p. 146). Roseanne reflects how it is girls of seventeen and
eighteen know how to live and love the living of it if they are let. She is aware of her
and friends’ ‘attributes’, describing their group simultaneously as ‘young goddesses’
and ‘straightforward, ordinary girls’ (p. 146) and celebrates how these used to bring
despair to the boys. She is a confident young woman at the time who decides that
although what lads have to say isn’t much worth hearing that dancing with them is
fun. She is not a weak woman waiting for a husband to make sense of her existence,
she grabs life by the horns, decides that ‘it would be queer cold dancing without
touching’ (147) since it ’was lovely to snuggle up to a lad at the end of a dance, you
sweaty and him all sweaty too, the smell of soap and turf of him’ (147).
When Roseanne looks back on her life as an independent young woman, all
she sees is fabulous glitter, which indicates how precious and magical this period is
still now to her in her old age. At the time, she knew that this blissful episode would
inevitably have to come to an end in a society which considered marriage the
cornerstone of stability, and to escape her fate she at some point literally attempts
to drown herself in this sea of happiness (p. 149). Her future husband Tom McNulty
rescued her from death. Mentioning Tom opens the discussion on Roseanne and the
men in her life, the McNulty brothers and John Lavelle.
28
c) ADULT LIFE
When Roseanne started going out with Tom, she enjoyed his aura and sense
of infinite wellbeing. She felt that she was lucky to have him and knew her luck ‘as a
sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself’ (p. 152). And yet, a few lines
below she mocks him saying they could not have played the Hollywood couple she
imagined because he was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks. Tom did not hold the
candle to her father because he improved his stories (for example the one on the
two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone), while her father was no magician of lies
and stories (p. 10). And when Tom started to talk about jazz, Roseanne stopped
listening to him because she was not interested in what he had to say on this topic
(p. 153). She also reveals that he sweated a lot and that it was therefore hard to
keep his shirts clean, a telling, somewhat unnecessary comment. Finally, she says
that there were certain things she did not discuss with him, such as her dreams
about John Lavelle, because she knew that he loved the image she projected for him,
what he saw of her and knew of her. Through such remarks at different stages of her
account, Roseanne intimates that she found fault with Tom, even belittling him at
times. This becomes most clear when she compares him to his brother Jack. While
she describes Tom as a short, thickset, almost fat man in a sturdy and neat suit that
had a brutal cut (p. 139), his brother is so much more elegant, and has the looks and
halo of a Hollywood star about him: ‘Red hair, auburn really, combed back. Quite
severe features, very serious about the eyes. Oh yes, Clark Gable or better still Gary
Cooper. Gorgeous.’ (p. 155) Hence, although Roseanne tells her imaginary reader
that she loved Tom, that he made her dizzy on a constant basis, and that she had a
shocking desire for him (p. 183), her comments about Jack reveal that she felt more
attracted to him than to Tom. When she wants to set things straight with Tom after
her encounter with John Lavelle and Jack blocks her way at the dancehall, he draws
her to him, so that ‘[her] bottom [is] fastened into his lap, docked there, held tight,
fast, impossible to get away, like a weird love embrace’ (p. 127) Roseanne is
screaming to get to her husband and Jack uses physical strength to keep her away
29
from his brother, and yet this scene is described in sexual terms, as if there were
something enjoyable about it, calling it not ‘rape’ but weird ‘love embrace’. Finally,
she also compares Eneas to Tom saying that Eneas was a neat-boned, wellconstructed man, not in the slightest plump like Tom (p. 248). Although she makes
fun of his name, saying it sounds like a person’s backside in some parts of the
country, it does not sound critically as it does for Tom. She only knew Eneas for a
night but there was gentle, fierce, proper love there, much more intense than her
feelings for her husband. She compares Eneas to a deer standing with absolute
stillness on the mountain when it hears a twig snap (p. 249), and she uses a
contrasting animal image to characterise Tom, saying that he looked at her with
hawk’s eyes (p. 152) when playing with the band. Tom acts like a ruthless predator
bringing her into wretched danger, while Eneas treats Roseanne with friendliness
and respect. The narrator’s almost poetic description of how Eneas drank the water
she offered with miniature ferocity and wolfed his sandwich down gently (p. 249)
conveys her admiration for the combined gentleness and strength of this man who is
loyal to his principles. After their love-making, she says that they were lying together
quite as happy as any moment in childhood (p. 250), another image of innocence
that contrasts with the metaphor of the predator. Her further comment that Eneas
spoke like her father when he wished to say something important shows how he
measures up to her expectations of a man, unlike Tom.
Roseanne’s attitude towards her husband Tom is clearly ambiguous. Her
denigration of his physical appearance is very probably tinged by a retrospective
assessment of his weak character, his lack of moral backbone. Roseanne had loved
him but his failure to stand up to his mother on any matter deeply disappoints her
and renders him unattractive in her eyes. At the McNulty house, Tom does not
defend his future wife against his mother’s prejudices. Due to her disapproval, they
hide away in Dublin to get married and Roseanne is later made to live in quarantine
in Strandhill. The protagonist has a dark foreboding when Tom is making his
marriage proposal; she senses that her future husband, nor any husband for that
matter, would ever be able to defend her interests and protect her against social
pressures. She suddenly has a ‘strong, a fervent, almost violent wish’ (p. 169) to join
30
the many Irish women who emigrate to America to make their lives as hard-working
but independent, free-thinking women. She does not take this step, hoping to find
life fulfilment in the home country of her father. During the marriage annulment
matter, it becomes even more evident that Tom is a wimp unable not only to
overthrow his mother’s authority, but also to face up to a discussion with his wife
Roseanne. The statement ‘He just never came home’ (p. 209) reflects Roseanne’s
shock at Tom’s explicit weakness of character and his abandonment of her. This
selfish and thoughtless Tom who has brought her into such danger deserve neither
praise nor respect, and at some point that she even wanted to kill him for doing this
to her (p. 268).
Finally, Roseanne’s relationship to John Lavelle remains to be discussed. Her
explanations as to why she talked to him whenever she saw him are contradictory.
Her argument as to why she wanted to be near him is that he had been close to her
father ever since that fateful night at the cemetery when Joe Clear helped John bury
his brother Willie. He represented a piece of childhood for her; he was a heroic
‘prince in beggar’s clothing’ (p. 197) After meeting him in the mountains, she fancies
seeing him from a distance, ‘a figure atop the cairn, in black clothes, with a great fold
of bright wings behind him’ (p. 202), a description which refers back to a story told
by her father called ‘The Indian Angel’. And yet, in one passage, this argument does
not hold its ground, since she uses the word ‘maybe’(p. 195); maybe she wanted to
meet him out of a sort of infinite curiosity rising out of her love for her father.
Additionally, she reflects that she found him handsome with his narrow grey face (p.
164). Finally, she describes how he loomed in her dreams, in which he was dying and
she was holding his hand; something she kept secret from her husband. When she
ran into him at the cinema, and he told her that she looked lovely and that she could
find him at the cairn most Sundays, she flushed with embarrassment because she
knew that he had crossed a line. Later in the mountains, he asked her to feel the
warmth of his shirt from the sun and she touched it. At that same time, he told her
that he loved her. Roseanne must thus have clearly been aware that John felt
attracted to her and that this was reciprocal, at least to some extent. She insists
31
however that she only felt protective ‘sisterly’ love for him, but there are enough
indications in the text to make the reader doubt her intentions towards John.
A person’s motives are not always clear, not even to themselves. That
Roseanne was involved with all three brothers becomes clear in her comment: ‘The
three brother, Jack, Tom, and Eneas. Oh yes.’ (p. 34) Feeling attracted to someone
for various reasons is however natural and does not necessary mean that one aims
to transgress certain boundaries. Roseanne may have found Jack more attractive
than Tom; that does not mean that she was unfaithful to her husband. At least 6
years lay between her separation from Tom and her night with Eneas. As far as John
Lavelle is concerned, Roseanne may have transgressed the contemporary
conceptions of a faithful wife with him, but there was never any sexual contact or
display of feeling. Eneas occupies more emotional space than the other three men,
he is the father of Roseanne’s son and her rescuer from the asylum in her wishful
daydream.
At some point, Roseanne jokingly observes that ’[men] are not really humans
at all, no, I mean they have different priorities’ (p. 183). She says this in the context
that Tom once told her that when he felt blue, he thought of her backside. Roseanne
is aware of the sexual drives of men. She immediately adds that ‘I don’t know what
women’s priorities are either, at least, I know what they are, and never did feel
them’(p. 183), intimating that she is self-confident enough to acknowledge her own
sexual drives at a time when women were not supposed to enjoy sexual experiences.
She is a strong woman who was not ‘proper’ because she felt the equal of her
husband. Roseanne was never the subservient, chaste woman society expected her
to be. She describes with pride how it was her who offered to sleep with Eneas and
that he did not impose himself on her. ‘And then I went over to him like a mouse,
quietly, quietly in case I would scare him, and let him into the room behind […]’ (p.
250).
The self-confident, assertive Roseanne took her decisions herself, scaring
many contemporaries. In retrospect, she reconsiders the choices she has made, and
thus, she reflects when describing her walk up the cairn:
32
Why did I know so little? Why do I know so little now? Roseanne,
Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self,
would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me? (p.
194)
She is not sure whether she would take a different decision now. Back at the
hut, after the encounter, she had the sensation that she was looking out on someone
else’s life. ‘Like a ghost to myself and certainly not for the first time’ (p. 201). She
tried to locate that person Roseanne but felt her slipping away from her, perhaps
had done so long ago. This persona Roseanne, Tom’s wife, is a role the protagonist
had lived for some time but now felt that she had cast it off, since she ‘had fouled
[her] own nest’ (p. 202). This image of dirtying her home discloses an intense feeling
of shame in Roseanne’s psyche which undermines her sense of self-worth and
confidence: ‘Somewhere in my heart, in the passport of my heart, if you opened it,
you would see my real face – unwashed, seared by fire, terrified, ungrateful,
diseased, and dumb.’ (p. 202) It is the image of a bombed-out Belfast slum
inhabitant, unwanted and sullied.
This shame Roseanne feels after meeting John Lavelle is intensified by all that
follows their encounter: The desertion by her husband, the annulment of her
marriage, her banishment, and the eventual confinement in a mental hospital. The
chief instigators of these developments are old Mrs McNulty and Father Gaunt.
When Roseanne meets John in the mountains, she suddenly realizes the ‘awful,
dangerous, inexplicable stupidity’ (p. 197) of meeting with him alone. She suddenly
thinks that ‘Tom has married a mad woman’ and this thought has kept haunting her
all her life. It is not according to her own standards that she is mad, it is in the eyes
of society, and especially those of Father Gaunt, that the married woman Roseanne
has acted unnaturally.
When Father Gaunt comes see her together with Jack McNulty after Tom’s
desertion, Roseanne feels a fierce, dark fury, a ‘sort of hungry, wild anger, like a wolf
in a fold of sheep’ (p. 222), against these men who dispose of her as if life were a
game of chess. Had she been a weak, pliable woman, she might have subjected
33
herself to them, however, as a determined, self-confident individual she rages at
their innate right to seal her fate. At this moment, Roseanne does not beat around
the bush, she openly voices her criticism of Father Gaunt, describing him as ‘[small],
self-believing to every border, north, south, east, and west, and lethal’(p. 222).
When the priest returns a second time, she retracts this judgement, reflecting: ‘Can I
say I disliked him? I don’t think so’. (p. 230) However, after he has informed her of
the annulment of her marriage from Rome on the basis of his own, old Mrs McNulty
and Tom’s depositions, and declared her a nymphomaniac, she re-affirms that first
condemning judgement in her actions: She blocks his path, considering to if not
happily, at least gladly, openheartedly, fiercely, finely, murder him (p. 234). She does
not know why she did not follow suit. Finely, when she is at the hospital after having
given birth to her son, she does not attack the priest either, she does what a prisoner
does with his jailer, she asks him for his help. He holds her while she weeps, and tells
her he would put her somewhere where she would be taken care of, and that she
would like the place (p. 275). Roseanne feels contempt for this man who has so
obviously ruined her life, but she keeps retracting her condemning judgement of
him. Old Roseanne does not understand why she did not fight more ardently against
him, did not kill him, overthrow him.
Roseanne adopts a similar attitude towards Mrs McNulty cursing her at times
but then retracting her statement. She is only close to the McNulty house twice in
her life, once to present herself as a future daughter-in-law and once, much later in
her life, when she is about to give birth to Eneas’ son. She is twice rejected by Mrs
McNulty. The first time she meets her, Roseanne feels like a dirty farm animal (p.
166) in Mrs McNulty’s front living room; she senses that she is not meant to be
there, that she is not suitable for a McNulty. Several details described by Roseanne
make this encounter gothic and uncanny: The house smells of boiling lamb,
‘sacrificial lamb’, which makes Roseanne’s stomach turn. The old and lumpy chairs
and sofa are covered in dark red velvet and look as if something had died in them.
Mrs McNulty is a tiny woman in a miniature black dress in a material with that
suspicious shine on in, like the elbows of a priest’s jacket (p. 167). She is wearing a
cross about her neck, has a widow’s peak in her hair and some badly applied white
34
powder on her face. Both the golden cross and the suspicious shine of the dress refer
back to Father Gaunt whose garment was described in a similar way. In this context,
the reader can identify Roseanne with the sacrificial lamb whose ‘stench’ (p. 166)
she finds unbearable. Roseanne is used to wash away Mrs McNulty’s past
vicissitudes (her own dubious origins and the bearing of her son Tom out of
wedlock). This metaphor is further strengthened when Roseanne and Tom see the
slaughtered lambs in the fields on the way back from their wedding in Dublin.
Whether Roseanne consciously implies this parallel in the text or whether it is merely
suggested by an implied author is left open.
Not only Roseanne is sacrificed, Mrs McNulty’s own children have to bear
their mother’s past ‘sins’ and do penitence: Tom is made to abandon Roseanne, Jack
turns on Roseanne too and talks like a mad person when hinting at his mother’s
vicissitudes, Eneas is not allowed to return home because of his political convictions,
and finally, their sister is encouraged to join a nunnery as Sr Declan. Mrs McNulty
brings Roseanne’s sacrifice about by insisting on the annulment of her son’s
marriage, and by refusing assistance to her in two instances, the first time when
Roseanne is about to give birth to Eneas’ child and the second time when she meets
her at the mental hospital. The first time, Mrs McNulty calls her a ‘child’, a beautiful
word that Roseanne associated with love and caring after. Sebastian Barry has
however probably placed that word into Mrs McNulty’s mouth in reference to the
sexual repression and misogyny that found horrific expression in the practices of the
Irish church and state at this time. Women who resisted the strict code of conduct
expected by the church were sent to long-term punitive institutions, for example the
Magdalene Asylums (Crowley and Kitchin, p. 364), forced to surrender their
illegitimate children, denied civil and constitutional rights, and many stayed for life
(p. 366). In the light of what happens afterwards to Roseanne, old Mrs McNulty’s use
of the word ‘child’ not only stigmatises her but also foreshadows her commitment to
Sligo Mental Asylum and the removal of her son. When Mrs McNulty sees Roseanne
at the mental hospital, she takes the measurements for Roseanne’s asylum smock,
not talking to her but merely saying the measurements. Why Roseanne still insists
that she must write of this woman fairly remains a mystery. That, as an old woman,
35
she does not know if Tom is still alive or not, indicates that she has not read Jack’s
letter, and hence does not know what Mrs McNulty’s old vicissitudes were. Forcing
herself to present Mrs McNulty in a positive light renders Roseanne to some extent
complicit in her suffering, in my eyes, as it further reinforces her own sense of guilt.
In conclusion, when Roseanne reviews the role of the McNulty family and
Father Gaunt in her life, her attitude towards them is never clear-cut. This becomes
clear in the following extract
To this day I am in two minds about any of them, Jack –no, no maybe I
can with justice curse Father Gaunt, and that old woman the mother of
Tom and Jack, the real Mrs McNulty as you might say. On the other hand,
I don’t really know. At least Mrs McNulty was always openly hostile
whereas Jack and Father Gaunt always presented themselves as friends.
Oh, it is a vexing mystery. (p.134)
At some point, she wanted to both kill Tom and Father Gaunt for what they
had done to her. At another, she urges herself that she must not speak against either
of them. She admonishes herself to write fairly of Mrs McNulty. Her attitude is
difficult to decipher as she implicitly voices her contempt of them but openly
professes having doubts as to whether she does not feel friendly towards them
despite everything. In her own words, she is in two minds about any of them. Making
use of Murray Bowen’s multigenerational transmission process (Bowen centre,
op.cit.), I posit that Roseanne has in fact copied her father’s pattern of behaviour
with the Catholic people of Sligo. Like Roseanne, her father had always tried to be on
good terms with everybody. Like her, he had disappointed the priest through an
action he had considered ethical, and had later accepted Father Gaunt’s debasing
punishment without resistance. Still, the reader is left to question Roseanne’s
character credibility at this stage. Does Roseanne feel so guilty about herself that she
cannot at least retrospectively judge the lot of them for the traitors they were? I do
however not believe that she is without bitterness as Sean O’Hagan puts it. Close
reading of her text reveals bitterness and anger even if it is often merely suggested
between the lines. Further to this, the fact that Roseanne does not know if Tom is
still alive makes clear that she has not read Jack’s letter, a sort of miniature revenge
36
on the McNulty’s. She writes that she is not concerned with recrimination (p. 132),
but she voices her bitterness implicitly in her narrative, hinting that maybe her
conscious mind, conditioned by her shame, rejects it, but before God, she wants
justice, as a woman rewarded for her sufferings.
A word or two should be said about the rest of the people living in Sligo.
When Father Gaunt sentences Roseanne to a life outside society, she feels the whole
of the hinterland of Strandhill speaking against her, the whole town of Sligo
murmuring against her. She senses that perhaps they would even now come and
burn her in her hut for a witch. She reflects that ‘truest of all things, there was no
one to help me, no one to stand at my side’ (p. 235). When she attempts to reach
her home after having sought help from Mrs McNulty in vain, she asks why the
inhabitants of the houses she passed did not rush out to help her. She felt like a
walking animal, forsaken and it was at this moment that she felt something leap
away from her, something fled from her brain, maybe her last scrap of dignity.
Roseanne uses pathetic fallacy to show how the storm raged as the pain in her belly
raged, nature was in turmoil but humankind did not care. Even the ambulance men
reflected whether they might just not stop her bleeding (p. 275). The picture
Roseanne draws of humankind from the moment she is sentenced by Father Gaunt is
so bleak that it is an open accusation crying for justice. What she describes is so
inhuman that the reader can only hope that Roseanne’s memories are tinged by her
own sense of guilt and lack of self-worth, that the people of Sligo were actually not
as inhuman as this, that this is just an impression formed in Roseanne’s mind
because she has been treated so appallingly by the McNulty family.
37
4) NARRATIVE AND REALITY– omission, change and invention
Throughout the novel, Roseanne gives us ‘the run of the thread’ (p. 90) of her
life story. She reconstructs her narrative identity by loosely linking events of her life
in one causal chain from early childhood in rural 1920 Ireland until her commitment
to Sligo Mental Asylum, and the reader thus easily grasps the sequence of cause and
effect in her past life. One sees how outrageously she has been treated and there is
in fact no need for her to add explicit condemnation of the people who have ruined
her life. We can detect the workings of her mind through a psychologically plausible
association of ideas as intruding thoughts sometimes find their way onto the page.
These thoughts are however not intrusive. In a stream-of-consciousness manner,
they are interwoven into another episode of her life by means of association. For
example, she mentions Eneas and her son at the beginning of the novel when
describing her love for her father. As already mentioned in the previous section,
thoughts about the present also find their way onto her pages, about the joys
witnessing the seasonal cycle of nature and its wonders, but also about her daily
routine, her conversations with Dr Grene, and later, the imminent closure of the
institution (O’Connor).
Since her narrative is written in the form of a diary, she can only provide what
the American writer James Phelan calls ‘a single story of self’ in an editorial for the
journal Narrative (DeFalco, ‘And then-’, p. 75). Phelan believes that whatever
narrative one constructs, it is only one out of many possible narratives, which may
be mutually compatible or incompatible. Roseanne feels uneasy about the veracity
of her one story and in her concerns for integrity, she thinks an account before God
‘must, must only contain the truth’ (Barry, p. 227) and that she would rather
remember ‘aright than just to remember things so that they will stand in [her]
favour’ (p. 229). As Amelia DeFalco concludes in her book Uncanny Subjects, the
unstable nature of memory however makes this quest for a coherent, truthful
38
summing up of her life story difficult, if not impossible (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects,
p. 26):
I must admit there are ‘memories’ in my head that are curious even to
me… Memory, I suppose, if it is neglected, becomes like a box room, or a
lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not
only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them,
and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there. I certainly suspect –
well, I don’t know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to
contemplate that everything I remember may not be – may not be real, I
suppose. (original emphasis) (Barry, p. 208)
Roseanne takes painstaking efforts to search for the truth in her memories
because she knows that memories are difficult to distinguish from imaginings
because they are lying ‘deeply in the same place... [o]ne on top of the other, like
layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the
same element’ (p. 227). Further, her account is inevitably tinged by trauma, and by
her feelings of shame, responsibility and judgement, and this may very well have an
impact on her reliability as her narrator.
At this stage, it is useful to refer back to the fact that Dr Grene is also
reconstructing Roseanne’s life. He uses the sources available to him, which are
official documents about his patient’s father, the deposition left by Father Gaunt, a
conversation with Percy Quinn, who is in charge of Sligo Mental Hospital, a letter
addressed to Roseanne by Jack McNulty and, finally, the discussions he has with her.
In what follows, a few examples in the book have been selected to determine how
truthful Roseanne’s version of past events is.
Roseanne denies her father ever having been in the Royal Irish Constabulary,
a question put to her not only by Dr Grene but also by Eneas during the night she
spent with him. She reflects that it is no shame to love her father and feel no
criticism of him. As already discussed in the chapter on her childhood, Roseanne
suppresses the traumatic images of her father being beaten with hammers and then
killed by Irregulars for having betrayed their comrades. She sanitizes the event by
turning it into a harmless childhood experiment. As a result, the image she provides
39
of her father differs greatly from that of Father Gaunt’s, who portrays him as a
traitor.
At first glance, Father Gaunt’s account of the events is closer to reality than
Roseanne’s. Although the priest is a vindictive and punitive moralist, he would have
no real motivation in lying about Roseanne’s father. However, as Dr Grene observes,
the priest writes with an omniscience that is suspect and this ‘all-knowing, sternminded and entirely unforgiving’ (p. 236) attitude towards Roseanne is not the only
aspect which makes his account doubtful. According to the doctor, the priest has
also confused names in his account, saying that the name on a specific gravestone
where the Irregulars were hiding weapons was Joseph Brady but later suggesting
that he advised Roseanne to marry a man by the same name. Father Gaunt has
certainly also been subject to error of memory in his deposition. Additionally, he
deliberately lied when he said that Roseanne murdered her baby because he told
Roseanne that her child went to Nazareth and knew that nuns of the mendicant
order, more particularly Tom’s sister Sr Declan, took care of it.
Another layer in the narration is provided by Dr Grene himself in the sense
that the reader learns what is written in the priest’s account through the notes the
doctor makes in his Commonplace Book. The doctor strikes the reader as a
somewhat limited man who has neglected Roseanne for long periods of time but
seems to be wise and well-meaning. He admits that when reconstructing the
Father’s account of the events, he also makes errors of memory. He claimed that the
Irregulars had stuffed Joe Clear’s mouth with feathers before beating him with
hammers. When referring back to the original deposition, he realises that he must
have added this element himself, as the priest never mentions any feathers. Further
to this, the doctor’s reflections are tinged by his own failed marriage, his guilt as an
adulterer and the recent death of his wife. In how far they have an influence on his
research is debatable but what is certain is that the doctor, who blurts out to
Roseanne about his own grief, is no longer objective. He empathises with his patient,
who as he later finds out, is in fact his mother.
40
Finally, Roseanne adds a last memory to her account which she herself
claims is ‘a memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the realms of possibility’ (p.
277). It is a scene in which Eneas rescues her from the asylum. He has the baby with
him and she describes walking through a river which cleanses her of all the horrible
things which happened to her in the asylum. When she gets out, she feels beautiful
again, milk comes to her breast to feed her baby, and she and Eneas stand naked in
the moonlight like the first and last people on earth. It is mere wishful thinking and is
the only scene she provides from the moment she is committed to the asylum,
because from that instant on, ‘memory falters, like a motor trying to start at the turn
of a crank but failing’. Then, ‘memory stops. It is entirely absent. I don’t even
remember suffering, misery. It is not there’. (p. 276) Roseanne does not include the
last sixty-five years which she has spent in the asylum in her narrative because she
does not consider them as part of who she is.
Apart from a few hinted comments and quotations, the only time she
explicitly attempts to describe her life in the asylum is in a conversation with Dr
Grene: ‘I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like some of
those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you
cannot see a thing in them.’ (p. 109) Roseanne merely provides this metaphor; she
does not want to reveal any details about her life as a patient. The account of her
life, the sum of memories it contains is what Roseanne wants to remember and what
constitutes her identity. It doesn’t matter that some of these may be unreliable,
even untrue, such as the last memory of Eneas. The information we get about her
life at the institution, that she was molested for quite a long time, comes from Dr
Grene, more specifically from Percy Quinn.
In the end, Dr Grene comes to the conclusion that Roseanne as well as Father
Gaunt commit errors of memory in their writing, omit or add episodes and
(un)consciously change certain events. Additionally, the doctor realizes that he
himself also unwittingly changes some of the information when he takes notes about
it. Sebastian Barry shows here 'the true unreliability of everything written down’
(O’Hagan). Even people who ‘set down the so-called facts the most dispassionately,
the most accurately, the most believably, will still get it essentially wrong.' Therefore
41
those such as Father Gaunt who see themselves as arbiters of the truth are the most
dangerous and terrifying. In fact, as Dr Grene puts it in the novel, history is nothing
but memory in decent sentences and can therefore not be very reliable (Barry, p.
305), no matter who the chronicler is. Hence, there is nothing wrong with
Roseanne’s story if she sincerely believes it. The point in this analysis is therefore not
to see which narrator is more reliable. What is important in the analysis of the two
sometimes coinciding and at times contradicting first-person narratives is that
narrative can be a form of restitution of the past and therefore, of oneself. Roseanne
has used her memories to rescue herself from the past by allowing herself to
reimagine it (O’Hagan).
5) CONCLUSION
‘The greatest imperfection is our inward sight, that is, to be ghosts unto our
own eyes’ (Barry, epigraph). I think that Sebastian Barry uses this quotation from Sir
Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals to say that it is difficult for us to know ourselves,
we are ‘ghosts unto our own eyes’. By being the ‘midwife of her own old story’ (p.
102) Roseanne has sharpened her inward sight. It does not matter that some of her
memories may be imaginings or that she has omitted episodes from her life. Dr
Grene aptly points out:
[It] wasn’t so much a question of whether she had written the truth about
herself, or told the truth, or believed what she wrote and said was true,
or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important
thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable,
living, and complete… She has helped herself, she has spoken to, listened
to, herself. It is a victory. (p. 309)
42
Roseanne has listened to herself and can see herself clearly now. Dr Grene
has understood this and decides to merely ‘let her be’ (p. 292). Throughout the
novel, he thus remains a detector and hider of truths, still hesitating in the end to tell
her what he has found out about their kinship not to shatter her mental peace. It
must be said that not only Roseanne but also Dr Grene finds mental peace in the
course of the novel; Roseanne has reached out to him, not only by putting a
comforting hand on his shoulder but by showing him how to be happy, how to help
himself, and how to forgive.
With her inward sight, Roseanne sees the different versions of herself she is
composed of. She is the little girl reliving her surprisingly close relationship with her
father who treated her like an equal. She is the happy, determined, young girl she
was once when she worked in the Café Cairo. She is Tom’s wife. She is the woman
who defies moral standards by meeting John Lavelle in the mountains and by
sleeping with Eneas McNulty. She is the forsaken woman that gives birth to her son
on the beach. She is the desperate mother screaming for her baby. That Roseanne
urges herself not to speak against contemporaries, particularly the McNulty family
and Father Gaunt, who treated her so harshly and unjustly, makes me question her
character credibility at times. However, I have come to the conclusion that Roseanne
may be copying her father’s behaviour, and that she voices her resentment against
these people implicitly in the text. Closer reading thus reveals that she has made her
assessment of those who have meddled with her life and stigmatised her as a child
incapable of taking responsibility for herself, as a temptress, and later, as a fallen
woman, a witch. All these versions of Roseanne, her own and those invented by
others, are hiding in her ‘wrinkled suit of skin’ (p. 131). Through her narrative, she is
able to gather these versions of herself together. Her identity has inevitably changed
over time but in her eyes seems fixed since her commitment, which she does not
count as part of the story of who she is, of her life.
Nature plays a very positive part in her life story as she is able to seek refuge
in it from humankind, often drawing comparisons between both worlds. Through
nature, Roseanne can perceive and enjoy life. What has made her suffer in life is her
contemporaries, and thus she reflects: ‘After all, the world is indeed beautiful and if
43
we were any other creature than man, we might be continuously happy in it’. (p. 12)
Water in particular is an important element in her story since as a young woman, she
intuitively attempts to drown herself in the sea of happiness; walks up the cairn to
meet John Lavelle as a salmon that seeks its way home up the river; and, finally, in
her daydream, the water of the river cleanses her of all the horrors she has suffered
from. Water thus symbolises a way to self-preservation, back to an initial state in
which she felt physically and psychologically beautiful, unsullied by the condemning
judgements of her contemporaries. I have come to realise that the beauty she
describes in herself and others often parallels the beauty found in nature, a benign
state of mind. That does however not mean that Roseanne rejects the physical
attraction she had for other people; she assumes and celebrates it in her writing, and
longs for it in her old age. She however makes clear that, while for her there was
nothing vile in it, many of her contemporaries, especially Father Gaunt saw her
beauty as something sinful to begin with.
I conclude that the many representations of Roseanne given in the narrative
she weaves about her life contribute to her sense of self. The juxtaposition of Dr
Grene’s findings is important not to Roseanne but only to the reader who realises
that what matters is not whether her narrative is true (she as well as Father Gaunt
and Dr Grene are subject to errors of memory) but that her honest-minded chronicle
has a curative power, it has helped Roseanne to re-assess her life, to come to terms
with the different versions of self she is composed of and to reconcile herself with
her past. She has put her faith in certain memories, using them as stepping stones
without being plunged entirely into the torrents of ‘times past’ (p. 209). She has
trembled when reliving the traumatic events in her life, cherished the few happy
moments in her life like treasures, and has slowly accepted the fact that some of her
memories may not be real. In a final hopeful gesture, she hands her book Religio
Medici, which had belonged to her father, to Dr Grene, so that he may give it to her
son. No longer the ‘songless robin’ (p. 4), Roseanne has spoken to herself, reassessed who she is and found closure to events she lived more than sixty years ago.
44
3 PENELOPE LIVELY MOON TIGER
1) INTRODUCTION
In Penelope Lively’s book Moon Tiger, the seventy-six-year-old Claudia is
suffering from terminal stomach cancer. The present-day setting is a hospital room
in late twentieth-century London. The reader becomes sensitive to the difficulties of
this end-of-life situation as Claudia is drifting in and out of consciousness and as the
hospital staff treat her with silent condescension. She receives awkward, at times
painful visits from various family members: Sylvia, who is her late brother Gordon’s
wife, her estranged daughter Lisa, her long-term lover Jasper and her ‘surrogate son’
Laszlo. Although Claudia is extremely weak, she creates a last review of her life to
‘round things off’, she ‘may as well’, she thinks.16 She is squinting backwards,
recording, assessing (p. 30). She does not put her life story down on paper (except
for one scene in the book) like Roseanne does in The Secret Scripture, nor does she
tell it to an interlocutor like the mentally ill Claire Temple attempts to do in There
Were No Windows. The reminiscing only happens in her mind, and random
flashbacks of given moments in her life are triggered through means of association.
Since Claudia resists the linearity Roseanne adopts for her narrative but her review is
not as fragmented as Claire Temple’s, it makes sense to place the analysis of her life
story on the continuum between the other two novels.
In Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively presents Claudia Hampton as an assertive,
ambitious intellectual woman who has never felt the absence of feminism and who
stands by her unorthodox life choices: On a private level, she has had many affairs
with men, a very strong, slightly incestuous relationship with her brother Gordon,
16
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (Bungay: Richard Clay Ltd, 1988), p. 1.
45
and on-and-off affair with Jasper, the father of her illegitimate child. Her daughter
Lisa was raised by her grandmothers because Claudia put her career first. Only in her
short relationship with Tom Southern in Egypt does she portray herself as a more
conventional woman looking for love and interdependence. On a professional scale,
she studied history at Oxford in the 1930s, which was also exceptional for a woman
in those days, and her provocative popular articles on historical events have
infuriated her colleagues throughout her career.
Lively is a historian like Claudia, and discusses through her fictional character
her own concerns about history, memory and perspective. Her protagonist uses a
postmodern, eclectic approach to write her life review. She resists the term
narrative, opting for a more challenging alternative. As she tells one of the nurses,
she is writing a ‘history of the world’ (p. 1). In it, she is telling ‘[t]he whole
triumphant murderous unstoppable chute – from the mud to the stars, universal and
particular, your story and mine’, and she is aligning her own life with it:
A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and
Times of Claudia H. […] Let me contemplate myself within my context:
everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia:
fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents. (p. 1)
At the age of thirteen, Claudia realised that history was not a matter of
received opinion (p. 14), and she became a fascinated questioner and a doubter. To
her, argument became the whole point of history: ‘Disagreement; my word against
yours; this evidence against that.’ This is also Penelope Lively’s point of view who
asserts that ‘history is fact only to a point- more crucially it is a matter of debate and
conflicting evidence.’17 History is then subjective because, in Claudia’s words, ‘[we]
all look at [the collective past] differently. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My
seventeenth century is not yours.’ (Lively, Moon Tiger, p. 2) The protagonist explains
further that for scholars, history is dividing the past into books by focusing on dates,
names and people. It is unravelled, tidied up into words and collected in print. The
17
Penelope Lively, ‘The presence of the past‘, Oxfordtoday, 16 (2003)
<www.oxfordtoday.ac.uk> [accessed in February 2011]
46
war Claudia reports on during her time in Egypt is a prime example of what has been
traditionally thought of as ‘history’, and it is later that Claudia painfully comes to
realize that this is not history, that ‘[history] is disorder – death and muddle and
waste’ (p. 152). Moments from our lives and circumstances, which following their
natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled, constitute the truth. The past is
ravelled, it is not linear, and many voices (the ‘babble of voices’ (p. 15)) can be
heard. Since multiple voices create multiple stories or versions of the truth, the past,
although it ‘rests upon central indisputable facts’ (p. 70), will always remain a matter
of conflicting evidence, and raise debates, debates which Claudia is having with her
brother Gordon, with her long-term lover Jasper, but also with the audience(s) of her
life review. Her constant concern with history, the truth and memory turns the novel
into a piece of ‘historiographical metafiction.’18
This babble of voices can be heard in Claudia’s life review. Since her story is
‘tangled with the stories of others – Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other
person above all, their voices must be heard also […]’ (Lively, Moon Tiger, pp. 5-6).
Claudia can only make her past ‘true’ (p. 207) if she integrates the narrative voices of
those close to her into her account and presents herself and events from her life
from their perspectives. Using strategies that are appropriate to her postmodern
stance, Penelope Lively has further added an omniscient narrator, and the novel is
rendered still more complex by Claudia using first- as well as third-person
focalisation to refer to herself. Using third person narration through the
protagonist’s consciousness means that the boundaries between protagonist and
implied author are blurred, and Claudia repeatedly becomes an onlooker in her own
review. In her essay ‘The History of the World According to Whom?’, the critic Gayla
Mills discusses the possibility that ‘all the various perspectives are, in fact, imagined
and told by Claudia alone’19. Several inconsistencies arise, however, as various
characters, most notably Lisa and Sylvia, reveal details that Claudia cannot possibly
have known. Further, it is macabre to imagine that Claudia should have described
18
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction (London: Routledge,
1984), p. 2
19
Gayla Mills, ‘The History of the World According to Whom?’
<http://www.gaylamills.com/moon-tiger.html>, [accessed on 28 October 2013]
47
her own death in the final pages of the novel. Claudia’s life review is told by
numerous narrators. The question then arises if this fictional text qualifies as her life
review. Within the postmodern tradition, the reader has to accept that there are no
definite answers, that one cannot always be in control of the text and that one has
to let go of pre-conceived ideas about focalisation and point of view.
Penelope Lively has entitled her book ‘Moon Tiger’, which is a mosquito coil,
like the one Claudia used in Egypt to fend off malaria mosquitoes. This metaphor of
the moon tiger visualises how she relates events from her life. Her memories are
drip fed through the course of the book in much the same way as the coil drops ash
as it slowly burns20, and are triggered by means of association to the past in much
the same way as the incense of the coil is a trigger that conjures through its scents
images, associations, and memories in the mind21. Claudia explains this by saying
that her mind functions like the machines of the new technology, all knowledge is
stored and can be summoned up by a flick of a key. Not all her keys work but the
past provides pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences, i.e. signals, to make
the keys flick (Lively, Moon Tiger, p. 2). In this manner, Claudia remembers personal
events in connection to official histories. One example is when Claudia discusses the
‘primordial soup’ (p. 3) and uses its associated words Triassic and Cornbrash. She
then refers to a moment from her childhood when she and her brother Gordon were
hunting for ammonite fossils on the Charmouth beach. She uses moments from
history as stepping stones back into her own life because the collective past
‘enlarges [her], it frees [her] from the prison of [her] existence and resounds within
[her] experience’(p. 159). The reader will however notice that not only the past
triggers memories, the people who visit Claudia at the hospital also conjure up
flashbacks. For example, a visit from Sylvia triggers a memory of Claudia, Gordon and
Sylvia sitting in a taxi after Gordon has given evidence before a Royal Commission of
Broadcasting. It was the last time Claudia saw her brother before he died.
20
<http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/130028.Moon_Tiger>
[accessed on 26 October2013]
21
Debrah Raschke, ‘Penelope Lively’s “Moon Tiger”: Re-envisioning a “History of the World”’, Ariel,
26.4 (1995), p. 124
48
Claudia reminisces in flashbacks through means of association and therefore
linearity is not possible for her, in fact chronology irritates her. She considers her
past a pack of cards she carries around which is forever shuffled and re-shuffled;
there is no sequence, everything happens at once (p. 2). Because a life-time is not
linear but instant (p. 68), she adopts a kaleidoscopic view: ‘Shake the tube and see
what comes out.’ (p. 2) This does however not mean that there is no form of
organisation to the text. When introducing people from her life at the beginning of
the reminiscences, she says that she is dealing with ‘strata’ (p. 12). Remembering a
walk on the beach with her brother before the war, she says that at the time ‘Jasper
was unknown to us, and Lisa. Sylvia. Laszlo. Egypt. India. Strata as yet unformed.’ (p.
17) Thus, she sees her narrative as multi-layered, introducing each layer as it
resurfaces during one of her flashbacks. There is yet another organisational element
to the text. Claudia believes that each life has its most important part, its centre, its
core. For her, it is the time she spent with Tom in Egypt, and thus it aptly occupies
the large middle section of her story. It is the nucleus of her life around which all her
other memories revolve.
When Claudia remembers how she has written a ‘sober, if controversial piece of
narrative history’ about Cortez, she decides that in her history of the world, the fall
of Tezcuco will be differently seen.
My readers shall hear, at this point- they shall become listeners. They
shall hear the tramping of Cortez’s long march to the interior, the rain,
the wind, the swearing and the grumbling, they shall hear the awful
hiss of Popocatepetl into whose smoking maw the Spaniards descend…
(p. 158)
Claudia does not want to use the cool level tone of dispassionate narration.
She is prepared to introduce fictional elements to render her story more captivating,
like the scribes of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which told in the same breath that an
archbishop died, a church meeting was held, and fiery dragons were seen flying in
the air (p. 8). Claudia is not concerned with the veracity of her story in the way
49
Roseanne is in The Secret Scripture. She questions the notions of truth and history
themselves.
The postmodern approach to structure and narrative that Lively has used in
Moon Tiger makes it at times difficult for the reader to follow Claudia in her
assessment of past events and, hence, in the reconstruction of her narrative identity.
In this cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time, in which natural circumstances prefer to
remain ravelled, Claudia’s voice merges with all the other voices heard in her life
review. Her memories and ideas are always subject to question; and as they are
redistributed by means of association, they modify each other, and no longer
present a consolidated truth. Since the multiple subjective perspectives are also used
in the present-day setting through the consciousness of Claudia’s visitors, not only
the analysis of her past actions but also her present perception of herself becomes
more multi-faceted for the reader.
2) CLAUDIA the ‘old ill woman’
One of the nurses describes Claudia as an ‘old ill woman’ (p. 1) at the
beginning of the book. Claudia is aware of the disintegration of her body (she already
commented on it at her 70th birthday party) and expresses her distaste of it in a
conversation with Lisa. She tells her that she has never been able to accept the
brown spots on her hands and that to her, her hands look like someone else’s (p.
182). To herself, she further admits that her own face now seems ‘an appalling
caricature of what it once was’. She can still see a shadow of the beauty she once
was, ‘that firm jaw-line and those handsome eyes and a hint of the pale smooth
complexion that so nicely set off [her] hair’. However, the whole thing is now
crumpled and sagged and folded, like some expensive garment ruined by the
50
laundry. Her eyes have ‘sunk to a vanishing point, the skin is webbed, reptilian
pouches hang from the jaw; the hair is so thin that the skin shines through it’ (p. 20).
From Lisa’s point of view, Claudia’s face is ‘the colour of yellowed ivory, in which the
eyes lie within deep violet sockets; beneath the skin she can see the bones of
Claudia’ skull’ (p. 55). Further to this, she describes Claudia’s ‘withered arms, her
sunken face, the slack shape of her underneath the bedclothes’ (p. 124). While the
protagonist can still see the other Claudias in the strata of her face, among them the
‘real delicious red-haired green-eyed little myth’ (p. 7) she was as a child, or the by
far best-looking female war correspondent in Cairo (p. 192) that she was in her late
twenties, Lisa merely reflects on how old age has deformed Claudia, and the sight of
her fills her with both revulsion and guilty pity (p. 124). So, there is a reversal of the
situation found with Roseanne in The Secret Scripture. While Roseanne merely
comments on the present disintegration of her body, her doctor still sees in her face
the beautiful young woman she once was.
The hospital staff and family members treat Claudia for the ill, old woman she
outwardly appears to be. Claudia makes a comment about Prometheus and the
human condition to the doctor, provokes him but he dismisses her words with a
patronising, disinterested ‘Ah’, and keeps examining her (p. 7). Claudia’s way of
expressing herself starkly contrasts with the medicals’ bland talk ‘Upsy a bit, dear,
that’s a good girl- then we’ll get you a nice cup of tea’ (p. 1), and exposes the
hospital staff’s denigrating attitude towards the protagonist as an end-of-life patient.
Members from her family feel uncomfortably trapped in their cultural
preconceptions of the frail elderly: Jasper smiles maybe indulgently, maybe
disbelievingly at the idea that she wants to write a book, and refuses to have an
argument with her in her present state. He however dismisses her affirmation that
she is ‘allegedly’ dying, unwilling to openly admit that she is on her deathbed. Lisa
faces similar difficulties with the situation. Claudia has always seemed indestructible
to her, ‘Claudia simply is, ever has been and always will be’ (p. 59). It is strange for
her to look at Claudia from above and it seems to her as if a familiar tree had been
felled. She feels sorry for her, something she has never done before, and lightly
touches her arm to comfort her (p. 61). Laszlo has been caught unawares, learning
51
about Claudia’s state after returning from a holiday with his lover. Like the nurses, he
calls Claudia ‘dear’ (p. 187) and she tells him that this sounds unnatural because he
has never done so before. Sylvia does not act naturally either. Although Claudia
refuses to speak to Sylvia, Sylvia makes an extra effort to be nice to her now that
Claudia is ill.
Claudia knows that she is on her deathbed. Nonetheless, she attempts to
keep up a brave face. Having resisted stereotypes all her life, she refuses to be
pigeonholed as a frail, old burden. She channels the energy she has left to provoke
those around her, and boosts her sense of self-worth through the rehearsal of her
tale. She is still proud of her intellect and heroically bears the defiant attitude which
is inherent to her character until the very end of her life review. Having been
unconscious for 48 hours, she lightly asks what she has been doing for the past two
days, and when Lisa once notices that she is awake, she ironically reflects: ‘Is that
what I am? I sometimes wonder.’ (p. 55) When Laszlo asks her how she is, she
merely replies ‘still there’ (p. 180). She tells Laszlo ‘I am dying, you know,’ but
explains that she is not going particularly quietly, even if it is all happening in the
head (p. 188). She tries to pick a fight with Jasper because she had always enjoyed
their ‘sword crossings’. She even attempts to squash the hospital staff like she used
to do with people in the past, making herself sound more intelligent and interesting
than them. She does this by making provocative statements about God and by
relating her nightmare about Cortez, cutting the nurse short when the latter
attempts to tell her a horrible nightmare she had once had. Nevertheless, Claudia is
not only fighting her present state but also sometimes using it to her own advantage.
When Sylvia comes to see her, she pretends that she isn’t there (p. 21) and
purposely farts to provoke her and make her feel ill at ease. At another time, she
feigns tiredness to turn away from an ‘inappropriate conjunction’ when Laszlo and
Sylvia, who have never inhabited the same world and do not get on, accidentally
meet in her hospital room (p. 181).
Claudia can however not get away with this attitude with impunity. When she
tells Lisa that her preoccupation with God does not mean that she considers herself
about to meet him, and Lisa asks her if she is okay, she falters, her face suddenly
52
contorts, her lips pinch and she merely replies ‘No [… ] but who is?’ (p. 61) Claudia is
not okay, she is scared but her character will not permit her to dwell on this for too
long. As an intellectual, what frightens her most, more than the disintegration of her
body, is the disintegration of her mind, more particularly, the loss of language. When
she at some point cannot remember the simple commonplace word ‘curtain’, she
panics. Claudia believes that language binds us to the world; we can only control it as
long as we can name it. More than this, when we speak,
out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking
lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, AngloSaxon, Norse; we carry a museum of words inside our heads, each day
we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard […] I find this
miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable
than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken,
shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and
survive. (pp. 41- 42)
Without language, ‘we spin like atoms’ (p.41), we are untethered from the world and
history. For a moment, Claudia has stared into nothingness, a void. She only breathes
again after having made an inventory of the room, naming all the objects she can
see. The reader is aware that this is only a false comfort and that Claudia is slowly
losing her grip on reality. These primal fears about disintegration and impending
death, her dissatisfaction with her old frame, and her brave, defiant attitude make
Claudia a credible character. That the reminiscing happens all in her head, in a
’tumultuous netherworld’ as the protagonist is too weak to put it all down on paper,
makes the novel authentic, true to life. Loyal to herself, Claudia sets out to relate her
own story in an unconventional manner, within a ‘history of the world,’ to provoke
one last time, to show off her intellect as an historian and, most importantly, to
assess who she has been. In order to understand why Claudia sets herself such a
challenge, an analysis of the relationships in her life, and in turn, of the development
of her personality within the system of these relations, is necessary.
53
3) THE LIVES OF OTHERS SLOT INTO MY OWN LIFE: I, ME,
CLAUDIA H.
At the beginning of the novel, Claudia immediately reveals a strong
perception of self by referring to herself as ‘I, me, Claudia H.’ (p. 2), repeated as ‘I,
Claudia’ (p. 30) at a later stage. According to Deborah Raschke in her article
‘Penelope Lively’s “Moon Tiger”: Re-envisioning a “history of the world”’, this is
intertextuality and refers to Robert Grave’s ‘I, Claudius’, a set of volumes of historical
fiction on the Roman Emperor Claudius’ life (Raschke, p. 116). That Lively should
have made this reference hints at Claudia’s sense of superiority and her betimes
arrogant attitude towards her contemporaries. She is a strong presence, not only
through her personality but also through awareness and description of her own
body. She became aware of the impact of her physical appearance on others as a
child. When she was about six years old, a friend of her mother’s called her a
‘delicious, red-haired, green-eyed little myth’ (Lively, Moon Tiger, p. 7), and she later
gazed at her own reflection in the mirror with satisfaction, repeating this epithet. As
a young woman, she realised that her attractiveness was an asset, which when
cunningly put to effect, could set her apart from the average woman and open
career doors for her otherwise reserved to men. Towards the end of the novel, she
openly reflects on how her attractiveness has affected her life.
My body has conditioned things to some extent. The life of an attractive
woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape
of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed. The
brain may be independent but personality is not; when I was eight years
old I realised that people considered me pretty. From that moment on a
course was set. Intelligence made me one kind of being; intelligence
allied to good looks made me another. This is self-assessment, not
complacency. (p. 167)
Like it is the case for Roseanne in The Secret Scripture, Claudia’s personality
was forged by the fact that she was pretty. She was aware of her beauty and
consciously used it as an asset. For example, it helped her get a drive into the
54
Egyptian desert for her work as a war correspondent. Beauty has also affected
Claudia’s life on a private level, but unlike it was the case for Roseanne (although it
remains questionable whether Roseanne’s downfall was not entirely instigated by
her misogynist contemporaries), it did not bring her in danger.
Claudia’s perception of self (beauty and intellect) plays an important role in
the complexity of her interactions with those close to her. In what follows, her
assessment of the key relationships in her life will be looked into to understand
Lively’s fictional representation of a character who sees herself as composed of
‘myriad Claudias’ (p. 2). Despite the protagonist resisting chronology in her life
review, the analysis will be done in a linear fashion since childhood experiences
inevitably have an influence on adulthood. Keeping in mind that relationships
inevitably affect each other and cannot be analysed independently, I will focus on
the ties with her brother Gordon, her love Tom, her long-term affair Jasper and her
daughter Lisa, dealing with the other characters within the realm of these four key
relationships.
a) THE PRE-WAR YEARS
The novel deals selectively with Claudia’s childhood, adolescence and early
adult life, showing Claudia’s intellectual development, her growing perception of self
and how her identity is formed in relationships (or absence of relationship) with her
family. From a very early stage on, her childhood is marked by a refusal to comply
with the social conditioning that put pressure on girls to accept a conventionally
feminine code of behaviour. Claudia is considered difficult, even impossible; she
stands out like ‘like a sore thumb’ with her unusual name, her red hair and her
turbulence of mind (p. 8). She firmly distances herself from her nurse and her
mother; she finds them impossible with their ‘injunctions and their warnings, their
obsessions with milk puddings and curled hair’ (p. 3). They are terrorised about all
that is alluring to Claudia –the attractions of the natural world with its ‘high trees
55
and deeper water and the texture of wet grass on bare feet, the allure of mud and
snow and fire’. At a very early age, Claudia sees a gulf between what she wants, ‘to
go higher and faster and further’, and the interests of the average domestic woman.
A course is set for her as she disobeys and aligns herself with her brother Gordon,
deciding that they are ‘birds of a feather’ (p. 3).
The particular configuration of Claudia’s family of origin has a noteworthy
impact on the formation of the protagonist’s identity. Both her parents were largely
absent: Her father died on the Somme and is but a historical figure to her since all
she remembers of him is a misty scene in which ’a poorly defined male shape stoops
to lift [her] and puts her excitedly on his shoulder’ (p. 7) but she is not even sure if
this shape is her father. Claudia portrays her mother as disinterested in her children,
just bothering with her roses when she asks for her permission to learn Latin or
sitting engrossed at her sewing machine when Gordon touches Claudia for the first
time. Mrs Hampton’s lack of emotional response may have pushed her children to
focus on each other for affection, and the absence of a mother-father relationship
may have unconsciously triggered the need in Claudia and Gordon to adopt these
roles themselves and to later give an incestuous angle to their relationship.
The death of her father and the almost emotional absence and inadequacy of
her mother turned her brother very early into the key (male) figure of her childhood,
and they became inseparable. The two of them were ‘nasty, rough children,’ other
families’ nurses pitied the ‘nice’ Mrs Hampton, and ‘tutted and watched [Claudia and
Gordon] with disfavour, playing too noisily, too dangerously, an unkempt, unruly
pair’ (p. 8). They ‘quailed’ when the two were in sight and ‘gathered their charges
around them’. Old Claudia is unapologetic here, it is indeed with pride that she looks
back on how these nurses were afraid of the Hampton children. First glimpses of her
personality emerge from these considerations and foreshadow how in later life
provoking strong reactions in people became one of Claudia’s distinctive character
traits.
The tight bond between brother and sister was animated by a relentless need
for competition and Claudia remembers how, when she was about ten years old, she
56
was prepared to bash a hundred and fifty million years to pieces with her hammer to
be better than Gordon at finding the most perfect ammonite fossil. This scene
visualises the functioning of the Hampton family as it is told three times, first
through the consciousness of Claudia, then of her brother, and finally of Mrs
Hampton. Claudia’s account reflects how for her the only things that are important
are getting hold of the ammonite, and competing with her brother. The shrill cries,
the barks and calls from the beach are clearly audible but they are ‘from another
world, of no account’ (p. 4) to Claudia. Suspicion and rivalry have her in thrall and
she becomes reckless about taking risks, ignoring the ’faint bird-like cries of alarm
[wafting] up’ as she climbs higher. In the end, she is even ‘too affronted to yell’ (pp.
4-5) after skidding down a bit of cliff and coming to a halt in a thorn bush. Gordon’s
version shows his equal determination (he comments on how Claudia’s ‘hot
infuriating limbs’ get in his way) and his satisfaction and horror, when she falls.
Gordon’s reactions mirror Claudia’s in an earlier competition in which she had asked
God to eliminate her brother ‘irreversibly but painlessly’ (p. 16) because he was set
to win against her. Mrs Hampton’s version emphasises this extreme competitiveness
between her children, and she insists on how they blame each other for Claudia’s
fall. She thinks of Gordon and Claudia as a unit – ‘the children’, ‘the offspring’ (p. 5)whose furious tenacity she cannot empathise with. In the Hampton family triangle,
she is the uncomfortable outsider, the odd one out (Bowen centre, op.cit.). She
appears to resent her children whose intransigence makes her head ache and whose
voices are the loudest on the beach. That she ‘tries to quell’ (my emphasis) her
children indicates that she unsuccessfully attempts to quieten them down by force,
that she wants them adopt a behaviour she can identify with.
Claudia and Gordon’s competitiveness modules into sexual attraction when
Claudia is thirteen years old. At this time, their mother hires an undergraduate
named Malcolm as Latin and Greek tutor for Gordon. Claudia is aroused initially by
picking up tsigns of sexual attraction between Gordon and Malcolm. She feels ‘hot
jealously’ and decides to learn Latin as well. She competes against Gordon to have
Malcolm’s ‘suddenly infinitely attractive look trained upon [her]’ (p. 25). To achieve
this, she leans against Malcolm’s warm sturdy thigh, lets her arm brush against his,
57
rubs her newly swollen bosom against him in puppyish play, makes eyes at him, and
primps and poses and curries favour. That Claudia was ready to use her body to
attract a man’s attention at thirteen raises questions about her own perception of
her body at an age when girls often feel embarrassed about their changing shape.
This lack of shame takes on a new intensity when she points out how she had
‘studied’ Gordon’s anatomy over the years (p. 26), wondering about procreation. Her
reflections about sex at thirteen seem an early age in the 1920s, and first signs of
incest emerge from the fact that she uses the word ‘study’ to describe how she
looked at her brother. Around the same time, when her brother asks her if she
knows how babies are made, she does not blush in embarrassment, but in rage and
chagrin at her ignorance. Instead of giving explanations, he tells her that the man
puts his penis ‘there’, stabbing with his finger against her dress, between her legs.
Claudia is not furious at being touched like this, her anger strangely evaporates, she
is ‘baffled’ by this new feeling and stares at her brother ‘in wonder’ (p. 27). Her
reaction is one of surprise and admiration, and the words she uses show how for her
it is a very positive experience. This scene further intensifies the reader’s idea of
Claudia’s lack of shame in relation to the physical but also makes clear how for her
there is nothing untoward or abusive in being touched by her brother.
Claudia relates a specific scene from her teenage years when she and her
brother dance the foxtrot all by themselves in a schoolroom in preparation to the
Molesworths’ ball they want to attend. As is the case with Claudia’s knowledge on
procreation, her reflections on dancing the foxtrot rather than Ragtime all come
from Gordon. ‘Gordon says’ is repeated twice in this paragraph (p. 137), suggesting
how Gordon, being male, has more access to knowledge than she does, a situation
which she finds hard to accept and struggles against throughout her life. It is only in
old age that she is ready to openly acknowledge how as a result of this privileged
situation as a man, Gordon has sounded at times more convincing in their later
heated adult debates: ‘Gordon has always been able to produce arguments and
figures when I have brandished emotions and struck attitudes. I can say this now.’ (p.
183)
58
Referring back to the flashbacks on procreation and on their dance rehearsal,
the actions in these scenes mimic sexual intercourse, showing how Gordon and
Claudia’s relationship takes on an incestuous angle. Gordon describes explicitly how
he ‘stabs with a finger at Claudia’s crotch, pushing the stuff of her dress between her
thighs’ (p. 27) .Their foxtrot dance refers explicitly to the rhythm and intensity of
love-making:
Slow, quick, quick, slow. ‘Oh, very nice..’ says Gordon. ‘Very stylish…
And again…’ Slow, quick, quick, slow. Across and across the room, again
and again, more adept each time, moving as one… A dash to the
gramophone when it begins to run down… then body to body again,
thigh to thigh… oh, heavenly, this is… let’s go on for ever, we’re getting
better and better, let’s never stop… (pp. 137-138)
Claudia relishes the experience. She presses up against him, breasts to his
shirt-front, hair brushing his ear, and savours his full-blown male scent. Dancing that
close to him is ‘delicious,’ a strong adjective which describes the dance as a very
sensual experience, appealing to the reader’s olfactory and gustative senses. Claudia
thinks ‘Oh bliss’ ... ‘Goodness what bliss’. ‘She savours this extraordinary feeling, this
excitement.... She has never felt like this before.’ (p. 138) When they stop, they look
at each other, and then they touch – ‘his mouth against hers, his tongue between
her lips, her mouth opening’. From the description of the kiss, the reader gathers
that Gordon took the initiative to cross the line, his mouth touched hers, his tongue
entered her mouth, but she welcomed him.
One other episode describes sexual relations between Claudia and her
brother. At some point, Claudia is lying quite naked on the grass of a river bank, and
the shadows of willow leaves draw patterns on her body. Gordon then takes a pen
and ‘traces around the edges of the leave shadows, on her stomach, her arms, legs,
breasts: she is marbled all over in pale blue ink’ (p. 138). He touches his sister like a
lover, following the contours of her body. When she protests, he merely says: ‘Don’t
be so prosaic.... This is Art. I’m turning you into an objet trouvé.’ Claudia’s body is
elevated into art, but nonetheless objectified, and it is again the brother who has
taken the initiative, and who tells her no to be such a bore. Her reaction is to laugh
59
into the grass. Lack of shame in regard to her body has been taken to the level of
free sexual enjoyment; Claudia is not in love with her brother (she later reflects that
Tom was the first person she had ever fallen in love with (p. 106).) She has become a
young woman celebrating sexual freedom and flouting cultural and social values, and
she will keep up this attitude throughout her life. Gordon’s comment at his Oxford
fellowship celebration right after the war that she has produced men often enough,
her sexual field-day in Egypt, and finally her on-and-off-affair with Jasper, all bear
testimony to her liberated life.
Claudia never describes her relationship with her brother as abusive or
shameful, and does not hesitate at using the stigmatised word ‘incest’ to refer to it.
On the contrary, she describes it as an intense love of oneself, stating that incest is
closely related to narcissism.
When Gordon and I were at our most self-conscious – afire with the
sexuality and egotism of late adolescence – we looked at one another
and saw ourselves translated. I saw in Gordon’s maleness an erotic
flicker of myself; and when he looked at me I saw in his eyes that he too
saw some beckoning reflection. We confronted each other like mirrors,
flinging back reflections in endless recession. (p. 137)
At a tennis party, Claudia first admires her own sunburnt legs, and then, for a
moment, savours ‘Gordon’s back, the way his hair lies on his shirt collar, the shape of
him’ (p. 139). This scene visualises Claudia’s narcissistic nature, she sees her own
desirability reflected in her brother. At the party, they beat all, and at the
Molesworths’ ball they only dance with each other. They disdain others as they see
themselves as ‘an aristocracy of two and the other people, for some contemptuous
years, but proletariat’ (p. 137). Looking back on who she was back then, Claudia still
feels self-love in her, and reflects that it ‘seemed profoundly unfortunate’ that there
was no one else in the world to match up to her except her brother. Claudia did not
find a man that interests her until she was in her late twenties because the men she
met did not produce the frisson in her that Gordon triggered, seemed less intelligent,
less witty or less attractive. Claudia saw in her brother a reflection of herself, and the
celebration of her own being did not permit her to fall for a man short of her own
60
standards. In a foreword to Francis Broucek’s book Shame and the Self, Andrew P.
Morrison explains Broucek’s theory of shame in relation to narcissism: ‘[Shame] may
instigate the creation of egotistical narcissism as a defense against a sense of
vulnerability, as well as the “the splitting off” from the awareness of grandiosity
itself.’ 22 Narcissism is then a defence mechanism against shame, and Claudia
subconsciously presents a grandiose self for admiration that is diametrically opposed
to a weak internalized self that hides in shame.23 I speculate that she presents
herself as egocentric, arrogant and extremely competitive because she is
unconsciously afraid of falling short of her own and her brother’s expectations, and
that her words ‘seems profoundly unfortunate’ and ‘contemptuous years’ hint at a
shameful internalized self that would have preferred a more socially and culturally
acceptable, and more balanced relationship with her brother. The narcissistic
relationship does not only have an impact on Claudia’s later life, Gordon’s marriage
with Sylvia is also affected by it as Claudia and Gordon re-become a community of
two whenever they meet from which Sylvia is excluded. Fuller discussion of the
consequences of the narcissistic brother-sister relationship in later life will follow in
the post-war part of this chapter.
b) EGYPT
When Claudia left for Egypt, she and her brother ‘were still rivals. Among
other things. Alongside other things. Then and later.’ (p. 17) Even if they did not see
each other during the war, the description ‘Among other things. Alongside other
things.’ reveals that their relationship was in some way upheld, and remained
complex in later life. For the next four years, Claudia sent her brother the articles she
wrote as a war correspondent to show him that she was on top of things and that he
had been wrong in assuming that she would never get the job in the first place. Their
22
Andrew P. Morrison, ‘Foreword’, in Francis Broucek, Shame and the Self (New York: Guilford
Press, 1991), p. viii
23
GO Gabbard, ‘Two subtypes of narcissistic personality disorder’, Bull Menninger Clin, 53 (1989),
pp. 527–532
61
rivalry had always been a principal factor driving her ambition to succeed. His
feedback on her work tended to reach her months later; he corrected what he
considered infelicities of style. In this manner, they continued to quarrel, friendly
enough, across continents.
Penelope Lively stresses the prevalent gender issues at the time of WWII
when she describes how much Claudia had to fight to get her position in Egypt. The
protagonist had to push much harder than her male colleagues to get a job, and had
to finance her stay in Egypt partly herself since the newspapers that took her on did
not pay her enough. Claudia was ‘only as good as her last despatch’ and her stay
could end any minute should she not produce valuable work. The men Claudia
worked with in Egypt at times lacked respect towards her, refusing to take her to the
desert but asking her out on a drink in a same breath (p. 118). Although they
remained polite to her, they treated her with chauvinistic condescension, approving
of her sexual attributes but failing to acknowledge her abilities on a professional
level. Claudia openly refuses to present herself as disadvantaged by her sex,
reflecting that her gender saved her life, since if she had been a man, she might have
died in the war (p. 14). However, between the lines, the reader senses some
ambivalence; a form of criticism on the gender issue emerges from Claudia’s detailed
description of how difficult the job was made for her by men.
During one flashback, Claudia reflects that although public evidence was
important in her job as a war correspondent, it does not matter to her now when
she remembers Egypt. Now, she sometimes quarrels with ‘a fact – a name or a date;
mostly they don’t seem relevant’ (p. 70). This statement from the protagonist, who
pictures herself as a maverick historian in the rest of the novel, is truly surprising.
When it comes to Egypt, only private evidence matters, the ‘rest has melted away
like the language of then or like the baroque balconied buildings of old Cairo’. This
reflects an idea which keeps recurring in Claudia’s mind, that subjective memory
constitutes her truth rather than ‘tidied up’ history, and that strata and core govern
a narrative rather than linearity. Tom is the core of her story and what happened in
Egypt happens now only inside her head; no one else sees the same landscape, hears
the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is one other voice, but it is
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one that only she hears. She reflects: ‘Mine – ours - is the only evidence.’ (p. 70)
Claudia is of course referring to Tom, she has never told anyone about him, not even
her brother. Having kept her secret for such a long time, she is rather hesitant to
speak his name in her narrative. As a first-person narrator, she hardly ever mentions
it; it is the third person unobtrusive narrator that keeps dropping his name.
In the opening pages to her life review, Claudia points to the multiple nature
of her identity in her statement that she is ‘composed of myriad Claudias who spin
and mix and part like sunlight on water’ (p. 2). This multiplicity becomes apparent
when she gets taken to the desert for her job. The place and the dog-tired army men
inspire respect in her and she is less arrogant than usual. For example, she humbly
thanks one of the men for handing her a cup of tea. When Tom and Claudia first
strike up a conversation, Tom asks her how she managed to get herself taken to the
desert. She crisply replies ‘natural talent’ (p. 92) but then immediately regrets it. The
desert is no place for slick society talk she reflects, and she rephrases that actually
she somehow talked her way into it. Later, when she almost steps on a mine because
she is curious about the wreckage of an armoured car, she apologizes to Tom, even
saying, ‘I’m sorry I was a bloody fool.’ (p. 99) The fact that Claudia is surprised to
notice this change of attitude in herself shows that she is capable of reflecting on her
nature and behaviour. To Tom’s words that now that he is in the thick of action, he
realizes that history is true and that he is unfortunately a part of it and is not
immune, she can think of nothing to say, ‘Nothing whatsoever’, a rare situation for
this versatile woman. Claudia is not her usual self in the desert, being so far away
from civilization and from her brother humbles her but also frees her of the self of
the opinionated, independent Englishwoman she usually is.
Claudia continues in this line in the sense that she does not attempt to stay
aloof and overbearing with Tom. On the contrary, she relaxes her defences and lets
her emotions overtake her. Retrospectively, she pictures her later relationship with
him as very romantic and harmonious. For example, she remembers how in a train,
on their way to Luxor, they were holding hands, staring out of the window, and that
the landscape was like a picture, a Breughel painting full of detail, of people doing
particular things. She describes this view as a suspended moment in time. In the
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same flashback, she elaborates this metaphor, using it to describe the sum of days
spent with Tom, saying that there is no sequence for these days, they are
simultaneous, that this time is instant and frozen, like a painting. By elevating this
snapshot of her memories into art, Claudia sublimes and eternalizes it. The
omniscient narrator portrays Claudia in love for the first time:
She is moving from minute to minute: she feels as though she were in a
state of grace. Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never
happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of
thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For
derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she
keep herself from looking at him, touching him. (p. 106)
When she went back to Cairo forty years later, she was not sure whether she
would be able to remember all of this correctly. But that time shimmered like a
mirage over the present. She stood outside some concrete and plate-glass towerblock, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed and smelt them,
and tears came to her eyes. She was ‘crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is
ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant.
That, inside the head, everything happens at once.’(p. 68) Claudia appealed to her
own senses to remember the past and sensation clutched and transformed her
because, although the place did not look the same, it felt the same. Further trusting
the memories her senses evoke, Claudia decides that Tom and the place have ‘fused
in the head to a single presence of his voice and his touch, those sights and those
smells’ (p. 75). Claudia’s memories on Egypt are thus very evocative, they are not the
grey of old newsprint. In her mind’s eye, it is
the blazing technicolour of a hot country, so that I seem to see it still
squinting against the glare, dazzled by that relentless sun, moving in
landscapes that shimmered in the heat haze. Mirages... Well, the
mirror world, the vanishing oasis, is in my head now, not in his, and he
is with it. (p. 104)
Claudia describes her memories as mirages, a vanishing oasis, a mirror world.
When she revisited Egypt in her seventies, she felt that the past lay like ‘the shining
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phantom of that other time’ (p. 87) over the present. These metaphors suggest the
elusive nature of memory, but also its alluring power and its immeasurable value.
Comparing Claudia’s memories of her life in Egypt with Tom’s diary, several things
become apparent. Tom’s writing is much sparer, and yet more true-to-life than
Claudia’s reminiscences because he is writing in the midst of it, not reminiscing
about a past more than 40 years ago. As Claudia puts it, his experience is ‘raw and
untreated’ (p. 207), there is no retrospective assessment involved. He wanted to
make sense of his experiences one day but never got the chance. As it is, he is
describing as an innocent, unaware of the awful wisdom of all that was to follow that
Claudia now bears. Nonetheless, his narrative is louder than the narrative Claudia
knows (which is more factual historical information), it is personal and therefore
larger-than-life, and she cannot make sense of it. Claudia’s memories are removed in
time; they have been interpreted and altered to fit Claudia’s feelings. Her appeal to
the senses is very strong in her account and in key scenes she becomes an onlooker
as the omniscient narrator pictures moments in a rather romanticist fashion:
He takes her hand. They lie, side by side. Like, thinks Claudia, figures on
tombs, or the bundled shapes of sarcophagi. The Moon Tiger gently
fumes and glows; beyond the shuttered window is the hot black velvet
night – the river, the desert.
Tom lights a cigarette. Two red eyes glow now in the dark room – the
Moon Tiger and the Camel. (p. 76)
There is this appeal to the senses, to touch, sight and smell. In comparison,
Tom’s style of writing is bare and unadorned. Yet, his cryptic words ‘C. Always C.’
seem much more powerful and suggestive than Claudia’s account, they are a
metonymy for everything Claudia is describing in more detail. Claudia’s
reminiscences are very personal, something she felt Tom was not being in his
account of his life to her.
Having discussed how Claudia describes her memories of Egypt, it remains to
be considered how little she reveals to Tom about who she is/ was outside Egypt.
Claudia wants to project a more socially acceptable, feminine image for Tom. The
fact that his good opinion matters to her shows how much emotional space he has
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occupied in her life. Even in old age, when Claudia reminisces with pride how she has
shocked many people, the thought of Tom finding her repellent greatly bothers her.
When Claudia revisits Egypt after forty years, she feels that it is not Tom but the self
she was back then that is the poignant presence, ‘a self that seemed to be not “me”
but “she”’ (p. 87). This self, an innocent moving fecklessly through the days, bathing
in transcendent happiness, is quite different from the Claudia the protagonist
portrays herself to have been before the war. Claudia does not reveal the intense
nature of her relationship with Gordon to Tom. She hints at it twice, once when she
describes how the closest she has ever been to the desert is the Charmouth beach
where she and her brother used to collect fossils, then adding ‘fight over fossils’ (p.
93), thus alluding to the competitive nature of the relationship with her brother but
going no further. Tom knows that Claudia enjoys a good dust-up and that she can be
remarkably obstinate but she refuses to be argumentative with him and instead
prefers to listen to his life story. When they visit an Egyptian tomb and find
themselves standing in front of the statues of the pharaoh and his wife/ sister,
Claudia lingers behind the group and asks Tom to shine the torch on the statues
again. She asks Tom if he considered his sister pretty, and he says that he does not
know since he has never thought of his sister in that way. He asks Claudia what she is
thinking but she reveals no more about the incestuous nature of the relationship
with her brother. Thoughts about Gordon however still kindle sexual desire, and she
shows Tom how she feels ‘erotically possessed’ (p. 74).
Oddly enough, Tom’s marriage proposal, which is recounted by the thirdperson narrator, is not described in the romantic manner that the rest of their time
together is. Claudia insists they should climb the minaret of a mosque and when they
have reached it, asks Tom what he is planning to do after the war. Thus, she chooses
a romantic backdrop and gives the opening line for what could have been the
perfect, straightforward marriage proposal. However, closer reference to the text
reveals a more complex situation. Before they climb the minaret, Claudia is focused
first on Tom’s appearance (‘He is lean. His muscles are like rope; his hair has a
conflicting golden burnish from the sun.’ (p. 120)), as she had done formerly with
Gordon. She then concentrates on her feeling of surprise when Tom tells her that
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she makes him happy, in fact at the thought that she might make anyone happy. The
way she further focuses first on her desire to visit the minaret, and then on her
speculation about what a kite is able to see, when an attractive man is trying to
propose marriage to her, demonstrates how remarkably resistant she has been to
the conditioning that women of her generation were subjected to about the
centrality in a woman’s life of marriage and children. This is reinforced by her
surprise at the thought of having a child. She cannot see herself as a mother married
to the farmer Tom wants to become after the war. She pictures her future with Tom
differently, moving back to what he had originally planned to do on his own, to
become a politician or journalist and defend strong views on how society should be
set right. She wants to provide for herself and not be dependent on his earnings. She
looks again at the kites, and one much larger than the others is starting its slow
descent upon some selected target. Claudia is that target, it is almost as if she felt
trapped, the future life Tom pictures for them is not what fits her personality and
what she had in mind.
When Tom is reported missing, resourceful astute Claudia feels completely
desperate for the first time in her life. No longer self-sufficient, she seeks help from
every quarter she can think of. Humbled by her own misery, she prays ‘shamefaced’
(p. 127) in St George’s Pro-Cathedral in Cairo for his rescue. She is still sceptical, calls
God ‘putative’ (p. 57), feels furtive and wretched, and keeps her sunglasses on in
‘defiant’ disguise. She reluctantly asks God to forgive her her trespasses ‘if such they
are’ (p. 58). As she silently reflects that she is even ready to believe in Trinity if God
does his part, her nervous and painful prayer becomes more of a disdainful bargain
with God than an intercession. Later, she ‘indiscriminately’ also prays to the Egyptian
God of the desert, just in case. Claudia feels despondent, yet she keeps resisting the
dominant cultural and religious discourses of her upbringing; she remains defiant
and the adjective ‘furtive’ suggests a secretive and dishonest angle as Claudia acts
against her own convictions. She does not genuinely believe in God and his disciples
but reluctantly appeals to a higher entity in her plea for Tom.
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When Claudia finds out that Tom is dead, she feels stricken with grief, as
though she had been felled. ‘Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into
something else.’ (p. 129) Because of the secret nature of their relationship, Claudia
misses out on sympathy and support in her mourning and this makes her suffering
even more acute than that of the other women whose husbands are killed. Her
subsequent miscarriage further destabilises her. In old age, this traumatic experience
re-surfaces in a nightmare and Claudia is somewhere a long way away the next way
when Lisa visits her. Her subconscious attempt to re-integrate the horrible loss of
Tom’s unborn child completely exhausts her. When Claudia realised that she was
pregnant, she wanted to hold on to this legacy Tom had left to her, first with
amazement, then apprehension, with wonder and awe (p. 130). She was left to deal
with the realisation of her pregnancy on her own and the prospect of a child
frightened her. That she was however determined to have it becomes clear when
she is going through her miscarriage. In a hospital in Gezira she clenches her legs
together as an animal is gnawing her within (p. 132) and shouts and swears at the
nurses, roaring that they must ‘bloody well do something’ and threatening one nurse
that if she doesn’t save the baby, she will kill her.
Claudia’s reaction to her bereavement is an attempt to live from day to day,
to lead a mundane life, consciously suppressing thoughts of death but not getting
away with impunity. Old Claudia remembers ‘laughing immoderately. Drinking.
Dancing. People flowed in and out of my life again.’ (p. 90) In retrospect, Claudia
openly refers to death pointing at how, back then, it was kept at bay by code-words,
but is still unable to explicitly say that Tom was dead and that she was mourning
him. Instead, she moves on to describe the men that she knew intimately
afterwards; and then immediately switches to remembering getting a refusal from
London for an article, thus quickly changing the topic. Months later, criticism from
Gordon reached her for that same article, and here she adds that by then she no
longer cared. Her insistence that she did not care about her brother’s criticism hints
at an attempt to delude herself that positive feedback from him, especially in this
difficult time, was not important to her. Claudia moves on to further discuss her job,
and reveals in that same paragraph how she was having a sexual field-day, like that
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chicken-brained Camilla. Claudia’s two-fold loss projects her into a self that
resembles more what she was like before she met Tom, moving back to making
people ‘angry, restless, jealous, lecherous’ (p. 120). She strikes a pose when she says
that she says: ‘I was one of the very few women in what was a predominantly male
occupation, and I was by far the best looking. As well as the most resourceful, the
most astute, and the least deceivable. And the most immodest.’ Penelope Lively
inserts an extra paragraph into the text to add the attribute of immodesty,
suggesting again that Claudia is capable of assessing her nature and past behaviour.
This becomes further apparent in her concession that in her dealings with men she is
not different from silk-clad scented camp-follower Camilla, whom she had at first
deprecatingly described as frothy and stupid.
The reader can interpret Claudia’s somewhat staccato description of her
reactions at Tom’s death as a manifestation of her raw, untreated grief whose depth
is conveyed years later in a scene where Claudia gets angry at Lisa when Lisa asks to
have the ring Tom gave her, with the box attached containing desert soil (p. 124).
Tom’s death and Claudia’s reactions are conveyed through the kaleidoscopic
multiple perspectives of the text. The treatment of the war in Egypt is a dense and
complex representation, including straightforward recounting of military activity,
depiction of the hectic life in Cairo in which Claudia has a ‘field day’, the ‘plucky’
behaviour of women dealing with the loss of their husbands, and even some
discussion of social relations between British and Egyptian inhabitants. Within this
complicated picture, Tom’s death related in the most economical way possible,
suggesting how little one human life matters in a history that is ‘disorder – death and
muddle and waste’ (p. 152).
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c) THE POST-WAR YEARS
Claudia’s experience in Egypt ranged from transcendent happiness to terrible
misery, and it changed the course of her life inevitably. She herself reflects that
without Egypt, she would not have become who she is (p. 70). The post-war years
are inevitably marked by her bereavement, especially, of course, her emotional/
sexual life. Her relationship with her brother takes a new form as both of them have
been projected into someone else when they meet at Victoria station in 1945.
Retrospectively, she points out that Gordon had a mark on his cheek that only she
would have noticed. This remark immediately makes clear that for Claudia, Gordon is
still more than a brother, even after Tom. The scene is then described by a thirdperson subjective voice, which first conveys Claudia’s thoughts and feelings, and
then switches to Gordon’s. Claudia can see him from half-way along the platform
and it is ‘as though no one else were there’ (p. 135). She stops some distance away
from him, unable to move closer because to do so would mean ‘to step back into
other Claudias, back into other Gordons’. She feels that these other selves are no
longer there, that they have been replaced. Her feelings are mixed, she is
simultaneously fascinated and alarmed. When she finally touches him, the old
familiar signals flash but ‘distantly now, distantly, overlaid by too much else.’ The
word ‘distantly’ is repeated in this sentence, emphasizing how much they have
moved away from each other.
Claudia supposes that Gordon listened to the silences in her account, but she
never told him about Tom. She is glad that her inner wounds are not visible, that she
looks unscarred. When Gordon asks her about that ‘uniformed boyfriend’ of hers
one of his friends had seen her with in Luxor, she merely replies: ’There were two or
three hundred thousand members of the armed forces stationed in and around Cairo
at that point. […] You can take your pick.’ (p. 71) She consciously chooses not to tell
Gordon about Tom because with her brother, she has to remain exclusive, there is
no emotional space left for anybody else. Gordon tells her about the American girl
he had met in Delhi, a year later her meets Sylvia, whom he marries and has children
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with. Unlike Claudia, Gordon manages to break out of their narcissistic relationship,
although his attitude remains as elitist and exclusive as Claudia’s, when the two of
them are together.
Looking back, old Claudia admits to being jealous of the American girl, but
states that it would have been ridiculous to be jealous of Sylvia. However, the thirdperson narrator’s insistence that ‘Sylvia arouses really, no emotions in Claudia at all’
(my emphasis) (p. 141) as well as her efforts throughout the novel to denigrate her
point to the contrary. Claudia describes Sylvia as ‘profoundly stupid’ (p. 22) and
belittles her brother’s remark that he loves her, stating that Sylvia is merely a
manifestation of Gordon’s seminal laziness of the soul (p. 24). Claudia calls Sylvia a
nice old-fashioned girl (p. 23) and wonders what her brother talks to her about.
When Sylvia brings her a poinsettia to the hospital, Claudia merely reflects that the
‘congenitally heavy-handed are capable even of unwitting brutalities’ (p. 100), as if
Sylvia had purposely chosen the desert flower to bring back painful memories of
Tom. Something else makes Claudia’s jealousy obvious, namely her description of
the incestuous nature of her relationship with her brother after emphasizing that she
has never been envious of Sylvia.
Even after the war, whenever Claudia is with her brother, other people cease
to exist. When Sylvia, Gordon, Mrs Hampton and Claudia at some stage have a meal
together, and Sylvia and Mrs Hampton discuss her first pregnancy, their talk to
Claudia is nothing but background noise, like the buzzing of flies or a lawnmower (p.
14). Claudia and her brother are exclusive and arrogant again, purposely shutting
Sylvia out of the conversation by downright ignoring her, making her fill ill at ease
and, finally, offending her. In another flashback, Claudia reflects that Sylvia was the
only person to get a whiff of what was going on between her and Gordon, but could
not interpret it. However, in spite of her open dislike of Sylvia, Claudia makes a
concession at some point, reflecting that Sylvia’s life with Gordon was not easy
because he was away so much, and Sylvia did not know what he was doing. Sylvia
reacted more wisely than Claudia had thought possible, by putting a good face on
things, which was the best she could do (p. 24).
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Claudia savours the moment when she and her brother had danced together
and kissed in their teenage years. However, she decides that all this happened
‘[time] out of mind ago –at least not out of mind but shrunk to a necklace of
moments when we did this or that, when we said this or that, were here or there’ (p.
139). In comparison, when she discusses her childhood memories with Gordon at the
beginning of the novel, she reflects that it all happened ‘A long time ago. And
yesterday.’ (p. 8) She does not put her childhood memories as far away on the
timeline as her memories of their incestuous relationship, which suggests that she
implicitly puts emotional distance between herself and those forbidden moments
with her brother. After Egypt, their relationship never becomes physical again and
when, in midlife, Claudia lies in a hospital in Madrid after a car crash, and Gordon
takes a handkerchief to wipe away her tears, she pushes his hand away. She closes
up, saying that her tears are just part of delayed shock, but Gordon tells her not to
talk like that, takes her hand and looks into her eyes. ‘She feels the warmth of his
hand, sees his eyes and what is in them until she can no longer take it and looks
away’ (p. 164). She reflects that Gordon is more intensely known and more
inaccessible than anyone else. From Gordon’s point of view, things are much more
explicit, ‘neither wishes to return there; both celebrate, in silence what will never be
lost‘. He also reflects that Claudia is closer but further away than anyone else but he
wishes it were otherwise, while for Claudia their relationship remains more
destructive than constructive, her loyalty to Gordon is absolute, but the relationship
seems gridlocked.
Just as Claudia is jealous of Sylvia, Gordon profoundly dislikes Jasper, which
makes Claudia ‘incandescent, aflame with private triumphs’ (p. 17) when she
realizes. At Gordon’s Oxford fellowship celebration, she keeps observing her brother,
thriving on his attempts to keep his barely dissimulated jealousy under control. The
third-person perspective reveals that Gordon gets more and more worked up as he
continues to look at Jasper and Claudia’s hands being entwined. Gordon always
avoids physical contact with Sylvia when Claudia is with them. Claudia relishes the
situation, merely describing Gordon’s statement that she ‘always did have a dubious
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taste in men’ (p. 18) as an interesting remark, thus bringing home again the
incestuous nature of the brother-sister relationship to Gordon and the reader.
Not only Gordon occupies emotional space in the post-war years, her longterm lover Jasper whom Claudia meets relatively soon after her return from Egypt
does too, but Claudia’s position to him is contradictive. In her review, Claudia
discusses Jasper only marginally, saying twice ‘enough of Jasper’, as if she considered
her memories with him not important enough to occupy too much space in her life
story. Claudia does not love Jasper. She reflects that she loved him once but cannot
remember how that felt (p. 51), a statement which confirms that her feelings for him
cannot have been very deep. In 1946, at the beginning of their on-and-off affair, it
would be ‘bad, oh very bad’ (p. 65). if Jasper did not ring her anymore but she
chooses to remain aloof and unavailable. She has decided to never allow him to have
her at a disadvantage because amour-propre is more central to her than anxiety
now. She consciously belittles Jasper in her review, saying that he was excellent to go
to bed with and entertaining out of it, that he was merely a sexual choice. She looks
down on him by describing him as ambitious, well-connected and opportunist. ‘Thus,
in general, Jasper.’ (p. 10) Further on, she lists his arrogance, his obstinacy and his
potent body. In her eyes, he is sublimely egotistical, somebody whose achievements
are entirely his own, who can afford no debts or attributions (p. 65). What Claudia is
unaware of is that this description fits her own personality. Like Jasper, she is
narcissistic, full of herself and only believes in her own achievements. In this way,
Jasper is another reflecting mirror, like her brother. Claudia and Jasper are incapable
of a full-blown relationship but feel inevitably attracted to their counterpart.
Although the protagonist is impatient with Jasper in her review, she acknowledges
that he is central to the structure of her life. To her, he has been ‘lover to begin with,
sparring partner always, father of my child; our lives sometimes fusing, sometimes
straying apart, always connected’ (p. 51). Claudia implicitly reveals that Jasper was
more to her than just entertainment in that he is the only person she says to that she
has more endured than he’ll ever know (p. 64), and he is the one she announces to
early in her life that she is thinking about writing a history of the world. Finally, she
puts Jasper on the same level as herself and her brother, saying that ‘Jasper is
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fragmented: there are many Jaspers, disordered, without chronology. As there are
many Gordons, many Claudias.’ (p. 10) Thus, Claudia deludes herself when she
reflects that Jasper has never dominated her life, he has actually occupied
considerable emotional space. He cannot compete with Tom because their affair was
based on competition, arguments and sexual frissons, lacking the trust, harmony and
romance Claudia describes in her short relationship with Tom. Claudia is
permanently damaged by the loss of Tom, and amour-propre is her key measure to
self-protection. Jasper cannot compete with Gordon either because the ClaudiaGordon bond is too self-sufficient and intense to consciously permit another person
to occupy emotional space within the home context. Claudia can thus not admit that
Jasper is in fact a beckoning reflection, like her brother, and there is situational irony
involved here as the reader knows more than the protagonist.
Claudia’s life after the war is not only marked by her complex relationships to
men. A radical change takes place in her life through the birth of her daughter, a
change which she refuses to accept. Claudia neglects Lisa for her career to the point
where her daughter is raised by her grandmothers. I refer here back to Murray
Bowen’s family systems theory, more precisely to its multigenerational transmission
process (Bowen centre. op.cit.), which posits that to understand this conflicting
mother-daughter relationship, one needs to reflect upon Claudia’s relationship with
her own mother.
As already pointed out earlier, Claudia repeatedly refers to her mother’s
imperviousness to her children’s doings. The comical contrast between the
description of Gordon and Claudia’s incestuous sexual experiences and their
mother’s banal talk which follows startles the reader who finds it hard to believe that
Edith Hampton was completely unaware of her children’s behaviour. Yet, when
Sylvia questions her about the curious nature of her children’s bond, she ‘tranquilly’
says to Sylvia in the early 50s that her children had not always been so cliquey and
that they used to squabble dreadfully when they were young (p. 141). Claudia
reflects that her mother simply withdrew from history, that all she was interested in
was floribunda roses, ecclesiastical tapestry and some changeable weather (p. 6).
During the war, she wrote to Claudia in Egypt. Claudia calls the aerograms her
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mother wrote ‘flimsy’, and describes her as preoccupied with her own problems of
shortages and material sacrifices because of the war. Edith Hampton merely
commented on how difficult to cope with the Egyptian climate must be and that she
hoped Claudia was somewhere safe (p. 119). Claudia calls her fortunate, sensible and
expedient (p. 6), thus hinting that how Edith Hampton behaved may have been
helpful to herself in that situation but not to others, and was therefore not
necessarily morally acceptable. Although Claudia does not openly criticise her
mother, the verbal irony in her life review conveys a picture of her as a self-centred
woman who neglected her children for her own interests. Years later, Claudia acts in
a similar way with her own daughter, concentrating on her own life and career and
leaving Lisa very much to her own devices.
Edith Hampton did not believe in admiring her own children. When other
people commented that Gordon and Claudia were a ‘handsome pair,’ their mother
murmured ‘deprecatingly’ because she had ‘reservations’ (p. 20). Claudia does not
openly discuss how her mother criticised her but merely hints at her attitude by
using the words ‘deprecatingly’ and ‘reservations’. Claudia adopts a similar attitude
towards her own daughter but criticises her openly, even belittling her, not to her
face but to other people. She calls her dull (p. 9), boring (p. 52), and a
disappointment (p. 51). In her eyes, Lisa is not her alter ego because their hours are
as different as she is from Lisa (p. 52). One comment to Jasper strikes as particularly
offensive, namely that Lisa looks ‘washed out as usual’ in her wedding dress.
Whether this is just a usual dose of Claudia criticism or whether Claudia is jealous of
her daughter’s wedding remains an open question. She calls her ‘poor Lisa’, in the
same way as she calls Sylvia ‘poor Sylvia’, in a tone that reflects mockery and pity,
but also unacknowledged envy.
At some point Claudia says that you just need a certain mentality to deal with
children and she does not have it- ‘thank God’ (p. 52). She finds babies faintly
repellent and young children boring and distracting (p. 42). Yet Claudia deludes
herself when she believes that she rejects the mother role with impunity. The
attentive reader notices that once Lisa is born, Claudia is no longer a front-liner. Like
her mother, whom she criticises for her passive attitude at the beginning of her
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review (p. 21), she becomes one of those people who are just sitting it out (p. 182).
Lisa’s existence sharpened the horror of the Cold War, and what might have
happened to the whole of humanity during this time was ‘concentrated on Lisa’s
small limbs, her unknowing eyes, her blithe aspirations’. There were days when
Claudia could not turn on the radio or pick up a newspaper, as though not knowing
could ‘insulate’ her from reality (p. 182). Claudia reflects that she may have been an
inadequate mother, but she was still a mother; through Lisa she ranged and feared.
However, she kept this curdling of the stomach to herself (p. 182); in public she was
still the unquenchable proud independent woman who engaged in protests and
wrote columns on the political and historical events of the time. Damaged by her
rather cold and distant relationship with her own mother, Claudia is not able to show
that she cares about Lisa. She deludes herself when she says that by offering Lisa her
mind and energy, her uses were far more significant than if she had offered her a
haven of maternal love and concern (p. 51). She further says that she saw Lisa as
often as she could, another delusion (p. 171). However, Old Claudia also admits
having made mistakes; had she not been who she is, Lisa would not have decided to
get married at nineteen to have a world of her own (p. 47). At a crucial point in her
life, after her car crash, she sends for Lisa because she wants to compensate for the
kind of mother she is, above all she wants to see her (p. 167). Again, Claudia is not as
self-sufficient as she portrays herself to be.
Present-day Claudia openly reflects to herself: ‘I love Lisa. I always have, after
my fashion; the trouble is that she has never been able to realise this. I don’t blame
her; she wanted a different sort of mother.’ (p. 171) Claudia never realised that as a
child Lisa wanted to be like her: ‘I want pink fingernails like yours I want to be you
not me I want to make you look at me I want you to say Lisa how pretty you are.’ (p.
53) According to Lisa, Claudia has always snuffed her out, does not know her and can
therefore not acknowledge her qualities. The lack of communication between
mother and daughter is responsible for their gridlocked relationship. Lisa believes
that Claudia has never loved anyone because she does not know about Tom. She
does not tell Claudia about her lover Paul because she does not want Claudia to
approve of him. As she ignores that Claudia has lived real love, she may not want the
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situation with her lover to be compared to the Jasper-Claudia relationship. She does
not tell Claudia either that she has read her books and actually found them quite
readable, another indication to suggest that, having striven to get Claudia’s approval
for such a long time, she now openly rejects it. In parallel, Claudia believes her own
mother never loved anyone, was merely fond of a few people, including she
supposes Gordon and herself (p. 21). Like Lisa, she also openly rejected her mother’s
approval, distancing herself firmly from her, and, most crucial, never admitting that
like her, her mother had lost the love of her life in a war. Her thought that she ‘never
knew’ what her mother felt when she dusted her father’s photograph every morning
(p. 6) can be read as another white lie to fit her scheme of things.
However, both Lisa and Claudia take steps to remedy the situation. In midlife, Lisa begins to call Claudia ‘mother’, something Claudia refers to as dowager
status, thus equalling the epithet ‘mother’ with ‘an impressive, usually wealthy, old
woman’24. Claudia has relented and ironically reflects that she accepts the title
because it gives Lisa pleasure. She further calls this a ‘small victory’ (p. 191) on Lisa’s
part. When the reader compares how Lisa and Laszlo greet Claudia on her 70th
birthday, it become however apparent that Claudia and Lisa have not visibly become
closer. While Laszlo and Claudia laugh together and their greeting each other is
described warmly, Lisa puts her cheek, for a moment, against Claudia’s,’ drawing
back even as she does so’ (p. 190). Old Claudia considers that she had felt first
compunction, responsibility and, finally great affection for Laszlo but that Lisa had no
need to be jealous of him (p. 178). Claudia still does not know if Laszlo is her
surrogate son or not. The Claudia-Laszlo relationship works because Claudia can
admire him for being so atypical due to his extraordinary historical background and
his expressive character. Like herself, he has never been clingy, and has kept drifting
in and out of her life, making thus a clearly-defined relationship the likes Lisa has
wished for impossible.
In Lisa’s eyes, their defective mother-daughter relationship is inevitable. She
is certain that her mother does no know her and that she has never loved anyone.
24
A S Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, ed. by Jonathan Crowther (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 348
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Her thought that she wants to bring her lover to the hospital to look at Claudia
through the porthole of the hospital room door reflects how cold she has become
towards her mother. Although Claudia points out to Jasper that regretting is always
pointless because there is no undoing, and that only the sanctimonious engage in
breast-beating (p. 142), i.e. merely hypocrites loudly and demonstratively express
remorse, she regrets how her relationship with her daughter has turned out, and
tries to bridge the gap between her and Lisa. Unquenchable, maverick Claudia
admits to Lisa that she is not well, and Lisa then touches her arm to comfort her. The
sight of Claudia fills Lisa with guilty pity because she is enjoying life to the full with
her lover while her mother is dying. Lisa is not used to seeing her mother thus
diminished, in a weaker position than herself. Claudia further reveals to her that she
does not like her body in old age but Lisa, although she feels revulsion at the sight of
Claudia’s body, quickly changes the conversation. She is carefully dispassionate these
days, and Claudia blames herself for her daughter having turned out thus
circumspective. Like Claudia’s mother, Lisa behaves to Claudia as if she believed that
‘decency consists in leaving things unsaid, ignoring the inescapable, applying oneself
to inessentials’ (p. 171). Claudia knows that the inescapable is approaching, and
does not want to apply herself to mundane details and to leaving things unsaid.
Therefore, she takes an ultimate step towards Lisa, by apologizing for having been
such a bad mother.
‘I’m sorry, you know,’ says Claudia.
‘Sorry about what?’ enquires Lisa, cautiously.
‘Sorry I was such an inadequate mother.’
‘Oh.’ Lisa searches for a response. ‘Well… I wouldn’t exactly say… You
were… Well, you were who you were.’
‘We’re all that,’ says Claudia. ‘It’s something one has to overcome. By
conventional standards I made a bad job of being a mother. So I
apologise. Not that that’s much use now. I just wanted to put it on
record.’
‘Thank you,’ says Lisa at last. She has no idea, she realises, what she
means by this. She wishes Claudia had not said what she has; now it
will always be there, complicating things. (p. 182)
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Claudia takes this huge step towards Lisa but the irony and understatement
she uses weaken her message. Expressions such as ‘Not that that’s much use now’
and ‘I just want to put it on record’ convey her inability to show her feelings to her
daughter. Claudia makes this final effort but senses that it is too late for regret, that
there is no use in it now. Lisa had thought their individual positions were clear, and
this ultimate message from Claudia has upset the balance. She will have to reassess
her feelings for her mother, but at this precise moment, she is merely able to thank
her for these words but is incapable of reaching out to her. Claudia could have made
yet another effort by asking Lisa to get Tom’s diary from her apartment instead of
Laszlo. Apart from Gordon, from whom she is separate since his death five years
earlier, Laszlo is the only person to see through her masquerade of ironic and biting
comments and her arrogant behaviour. He states that Claudia has always made
herself so formidable, but to him she is simply wonderful (p. 188). Claudia thanks
Laszlo for these kind words, which help her towards a final resolution.
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4) CONCLUSION
And oh God, thinks Claudia, may it have a happy ending. Please may it have a
happy ending. The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green
spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped
with light; the world has turned again. (p. 79)
Lively has entitled her novel ‘Moon Tiger’, after the incense coil that bears
witness to the happiest hours in Claudia’s life. The idea of the on-going narrative is a
theme that Claudia comments on at several stages, the first time in the above
quotation, suggesting that she cannot suspend the happy moment, that the story of
her life takes its inevitable trajectory. After finding out that Tom was dead, she
‘raged at the continuing universe,’ finding its indifference at her unspeakable
bereavement on that ‘appalling day’ unbearable (p. 167). Since Claudia herself uses
Breughel paintings to describe the backdrop of Egypt, the ‘Fall of Icarus’ by the same
painter can be used to visualise how Claudia feels about the indifference of the
universe at the news of Tom’s death. After escaping death herself in a car crash in
Madrid, the world astonished her and she forgave the universe its indifference since
it was ‘merely her’ that was still alive (p. 167). She sees herself as someone small in
big history, and when she dies, the narrative rolls on without her: ‘The world moves
on. And beside the bed the radio gives the time signal and a voice starts to read the
six o’clock news.’ (p. 208)
Claudia is severed from the narrative but she can accept this now because,
unlike Tom, she does not believe that death is total absence (p. 199). As an
instinctive agnostic, the idea of heaven is no consolation for her but she has found
another way to survive. Old Claudia tells Tom: ‘You are not absent as long as you are
in my head.’ (p. 206) This is also true for her:
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[We] all survive in the heads of others. I shall survive- appallingly
misrepresented- in Lisa’s head and in Sylvia’s and in Jasper’s and in the
heads of my grandsons […] and the heads of mine enemies. As a
historian, I know only too well that there is nothing I can do about the
depth and extent of misrepresentation, so I don’t care. (p. 125)
As long as she survives in the heads of others, she is not severed from the
narrative. Claudia deludes herself when she says that she does not care about how
she will be represented in their memories. In fact, to be misrepresented in their
heads is a ‘secular form of hell’ to her. Within the multiple kaleidoscopic
perspectives of the text, Claudia is ‘composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix
and part like sparks of sunlight on water’ (p. 2), representations that Claudia can
influence but is not in control of. Neither Tom, nor her close family may realise that
like her narrative, her personality is multi-layered and subject to perspective.
Conditioned by the relationships of her childhood, Claudia had begun very
early to appear unquenchable, narcissistic and arrogant, an independent career
woman who needs no one, has never been lonely but merely alone (p. 81). In in her
article ‘Penelope Lively’s “Moon Tiger”: Re-envisioning a “history of the world”’,
Deborah Raschke (p. 21) holds that Claudia ‘is clearly having a better time than
anyone else in the novel.’ I disagree because the continuous enumeration of
adjectives such as unaverage, maverick, astute, resourceful, peculiar, opinionated,
ungodly, foulmouthed, dogmatic, adulterous, egocentric…. throughout the novel
make apparent that Claudia is striking a pose and that she is attempting to convince
herself that she is stronger than she really is. Neglected by her own mother, she
focused on her brother, and their narcissistic, incestuous relationship impeded her
from a serious relationship with another man until she was in her late twenties.
Bereaved by the loss of Tom, she is unable to open up to new romance, amourpropre becomes more important than the anxiety of being alone. Finally, she relives
her own mother-daughter relationship with her daughter, differentiating herself
from Lisa and neglecting her for her career. Life has not always been easy for
Claudia; and it is in old age that the mask drops; she relents, deciding that she is not
as self-sufficient as she portrays herself to be. ‘I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of
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them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world’s.
Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.’(p. 207)
This final realization closes the circle of Claudia’s narrative and the task she
had set for herself, to consider herself within her context: everything and nothing (p.
1). Tom is a part of her, as immediate and as close as her other own selves, she talks
to him almost as she would talk to herself, and she finds it especially hard to accept
that he might recoil from the present-day ‘stranger, inhabiting a world [he] would
not recognize’(p. 206) she is now. She knew Gordon as ruthlessly as she knew
herself. They were children together; they made narcissistic love; they grew up and
depended upon one another. Even when they hated each other, they were united,
exclusive, a community of two (p. 187). He has been her sense of identity, her
mirror, her critic, judge and ally. Without him, she is diminished. Lisa has not been
her alter ego, but Claudia has come to realise that she has always loves her. She
attempts to reach out to her by apologizing for having been a bad mother; however,
she is incapable of making the final gesture by asking her to get Tom’s diary from the
apartment. Instead, she asks Laszlo, who has called her ‘simply wonderful’,
unmasking her defiant disguise.
To Claudia, history is an illusion and private subjective ravelled memories
mirror our tenuous connection to reality. She repeatedly appeals to her own senses
to revive moments from the past and willingly introduces fictional elements to
further flesh her memories out with colour. Remembering the transcendent
happiness she felt in Egypt, she describes with the magic of the Arabian Nights how
‘the Nile is jewelled’ and the ‘bridges wear necklaces of coloured lights; all along the
house-boats are ablaze, festooned with gold, glowing against the dark swirling
patterned water’ (p. 111). The final scene in the book is imbued with similar poetry
and magic.
Gradually, the room is filled with light; the bare criss-crossing
branches of the tree are hung with drops and as the sun comes out it
catches the drops and they flash with colour – blue, yellow, green, pink.
The branches are black against a golden orange sky, black and brilliant.
(p. 207)
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It feels as if nature had laid this scene out for her pleasure, and it fills Claudia
with elation, a surge of joy, of well-being, of wonder. Old Claudia has proven to
herself that, despite the disintegration of her body which she finds hard to accept,
she is still intellectually alert and has been able to help herself find closure, has
reassessed who she has been and attempted to reach out to her daughter. Although
it remains an open question how much she is aware of a weaker self hiding behind a
strong persona, Claudia has come to the resolution that she is not self-sufficient, she
needs all those close to her to make sense of her experience, and that in itself is a
victory.
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84
4 THERE WERE NO WINDOWS
1) INTRODUCTION
In Norah Hoult’s There Were no Windows, the seventy-eight-year-old Claire
Temple is suffering from dementia and is living alone with her cook Kathleen, and
later, Miss Jones who, as Claire’s paid lady companion, looks after her and is
constantly at her side. The present-day setting is a villa in Kensington, London during
the Second World War. Claire has no proximate family, and friends find her dementia
more and more trying and stay away. The protagonist, who has been a highly
intellectual, attractive and sociable woman, finds the resulting loneliness
unbearable. Her memories are a great comfort to her but the progressing of her
dementia and the advent of Miss Jones render the escape to the past more and
more difficult. I have chosen to deal with ‘There Were No Windows’ in third place in
this dissertation because this enables me to move from Roseanne’s first-person
loosely linear life-story through Claudia’s multi-vocal kaleidoscopic flashbacks to this
final, third-person narrative stage, ‘dysnarrativia’ (Eakin, p. 124).
According to Julia Briggs in her afterword to There Were No Windows, an
exchange of letters between Norah Hoult and Frank Swinnerton reveals that the
fictional character Claire Temple was modelled on the real-life person Violet Hunt,
into whose neighbourhood in Bayswater, London, Norah Hoult moved in 1939.25
Julia Briggs writes that Norah Hoult must have visited Violet Hunt in her later years
and witnessed her deteriorated state, and must have found a lot of the material for
25
Norah Hoult, There Were No Windows (London: Persephone Books Ltd, 2005), p. 338
85
her book in Douglas Goldring’s biography of Hunt’s life entitled South Lodge. Reading
Joan Hardwick’s 1990 biography of Violet Hunt An Immodest Violet, it is clear that
there are striking similarities between Violet and Claire: both were beautiful, highly
intellectual women who moved in literary circles, engaged in love affairs, suffered
from dementia, and died alone with no one to look after them but a few servants.
Both were proposed to by Oscar Wilde and were friends with Henry James. However,
to say that Claire Temple ‘is’ Violet Hunt would be wrong; one clear difference I
noticed is that while Claire does not seem bothered by the war as she does not mind
being killed at any moment (Hoult, p.135), Violet Hunt was terrified of the bombs26.
While the real-life person had syphilis, it is never made clear what has brought on
the fictional character’s dementia. Whether Norah Hoult was unaware of this
unspeakable secret of Violet Hunt’s or whether she purposely wanted to spare her
protagonist the contempt such a revelation would have inspired, is left an open
question. For my critical analysis of the representation of the character Claire
Temple, I have decided to go no further in comparing real life with fiction, and to
base my assessment exclusively on the novel.
Consulting the online British NHS guide on dementia27, it becomes evident
that the symptoms Claire shows in There Were No Windows are part of the later
stages of this disease. Her day-to-day life becomes more and more affected: From
the beginning of the novel, her short-term memory is seriously impaired, she is at
times confused about where she is and she keeps repeating herself in conversation.
Towards the end of the novel, she has extreme difficulties with perception, she
suffers from delusions and paranoia, her bodily functions desert her and she requires
constant care. Norah Hoult gives the reader insight into Claire’s confused mind
straight away in the opening paragraph, thus forestalling any doubts about the
devastating effects the condition is having on her protagonist’s life. At the beginning,
Claire still feels at ease in reliving memories of the distant past, but the present
confuses her, especially when past and present collide:
26
Joan Hardwick, An Immodest Violet: the Life of Violet Hunt, (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1990),
p. 186
27
NHS, ‘Symptoms of dementia’, Your health, your choices (June 2013)
<http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/dementia-guide/Pages/symptoms-of-dementia.aspx>
[accessed 25 October 2013]
86
She had been living quite happily because importantly in the old house,
when a sudden loud explosion arrested her attention, and tugged it to
that No Man’s Land territory in which she found herself marooned
between the old house and the new, the past and the present. Yet
marooned is not altogether the word, for it suggests a state of lacking
the capacity for motion, whereas the odours, the voices and the
thoughts of the past rushed to coalesce with dubious newcomers
intruding from the present causing whirling eddies of confusion in her
head. (Hoult, p. 3)
The past is vivid and sensory to Claire, she remembers odours, voices and
thoughts; it is a time in which she had a social identity, a life. It is in this ‘old house’
that she feels at home. The sudden loud explosion forcefully projects her into the
new house, the present. The sensory input of the here and now is an ‘intruding’
‘dubious newcomer’, the alliteration of the high vowel sound in these words hints at
the threat it represents to Claire’s fragile means of perception. The confusion
created in her mind is like a vortex that threatens to take her along, leaving her
abandoned (‘marooned’) in limbo, in violent and painful agitation. Claire, to whom
life must be expressed through movement, however painful (p. 3), cannot sit still in
the face of this tragic, grotesque situation. She must seek help from outside, there
‘must be someone, some way of relief’ (p. 16).
Claire cannot resign herself to acceptance and sink without a murmur into long,
lonely senility to the click-clack of knitting needles (p. 15). Her mind, which had
always sought stimulus from outside and is now unable to do so, does not let her
relax. She wants to dwell on the past but she is unable to construct her own
narrative because she cannot ‘collect her thoughts’ (p. 12). In an exchange with Mrs
Berkeley, she voices the desire to write a narrative. When the latter asks her to hand
over all her old files for the war effort, Claire refuses: ‘You see, if I should write
another autobiography it is important to be able to verify my dates.’ (p. 128) To Miss
Jones, she also reveals that she is writing a book (p. 206). Her mental condition
impedes her from reviewing her life in a calm and reflected way, but an assessment
nonetheless takes place in flashbacks, dreams and conversations with interlocutors.
A few difficulties arise for the reader in the question of how trustworthy Claire is in
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the telling of her story. As J. King points out in Discourse of Ageing in Fiction and
Feminism, there is no omniscient narrator to provide Claire’s backstory (King,
Discourses in Ageing, p. 44). Hence, the reader must be careful neither to overinterpret the few memories the protagonist provides, nor to take the other
characters’ versions on trust when piecing together her narrative identity.
2) CLAIRE the ‘drooling, not too clean, semi-deranged old
woman’
In the analysis of the representation of the old woman Claire Temple, it is
helpful to remember that the book is divided into three ‘acts’: The first part is named
‘Inside the House,’ it follows Claire’s stream of consciousness and is thus key to
understanding the impact of dementia on her mind. The second is called ‘Outside
the House’ and provides the perspectives on Claire of her visitors Edith Barlow, Sara
Berkeley and Francis Maitland. Finally, the last section entitled ‘The Dark Night of the
Imagination’ focuses on the viewpoints of Kathleen, Miss Jones and Dr Fairfax who
are with Claire when the end is nearing.
Since how the other characters view Claire inevitably has an effect on how
the protagonist perceives herself, I will first look at how they react to and describe
her. Edith Barlow firmly distances herself from ‘her oldest friend’ (p. 91) (old being
used here in a double sense), insisting that while Claire is drooling, semi-deranged
and not too clean (p. 93), she is still intellectually alert and inspires respect in people.
She thinks that there is something eerie or uncanny about Claire who could take her
abode among ghosts and shadows and bogeys with her small wrinkled sunken face
underneath the fine, wild, white hair, her arms and legs thin as broomsticks, and her
continual flitting from room to room (p. 108). During the evening Francis Maitland
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spends with Claire, he reflects that although Claire has retained her beautiful jaw line
and the brilliancy of her large appealing eyes, she looks like a semi-drunken old drab
with her face flushed with the dry flush of old age, a strand of grey hair escaped from
its pin, her clothes in disarray, and her neck not too clean (p. 158). Both Barlow and
Maitland adopt a patronising attitude to her and find Claire’s dementia unbearably
trying. Barlow even compares her tendency to repeat herself in conversation to a
Chinese form of torture (p. 110). Maitland takes refuge in his own masculinity,
defining Claire’s dementia as female frenzy. Both prefer to criticise Claire and blame
her for their impatience with her never-ending tale of woe (p. 94) rather than
questioning their own fears and motives for such gerontophobia.
Not only her visitors treat Claire with condescension, her servants also adopt
a disrespectful attitude towards her. As Dr Fairfax reflects, the Irish cook Kathleen
looks through her own darkened windows at Claire; she is full of superstition and
believes that Claire is somehow demoniacally possessed, and that her female
madness has taken its root in her earlier promiscuity. The doctor wonders if Miss
Jones looks through any windows at all because her lack of imagination renders her
incapable of understanding anybody but herself. She treats Claire with complaisant
pity, calling her ‘dear’ and speaking to her the way one talks to a wayward child.
Except perhaps for the doctor, none of the characters around Claire are able
to feel compassion for her. Even the young American Lance, who considers Claire
some form of ‘institution’, and insists that something must be done to help her,
dissociates himself from her by seeking comfort in his own youth. The ‘windows’ the
minor characters thus provide on Claire often turn out to be mirrors, ‘revealing more
about the observer than about Claire herself’ (King, Discourses of Ageing, p. 45).
Claire’s entourage polarizes differences between the protagonist and themselves to
overcome their own fears of dementia and old age. They all consider Claire a burden
and resort to sexist and ageist stereotypes to shield themselves against the
uncanniness of old age, all too obvious in the main character. As J. King points out in
Discourses of Ageing, they use ‘discriminatory discourses to construct Claire as
Other’ (p. 44).
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In her lucid moments, Claire herself is aware that she is old, and looks old and
fearfully shabby (Hoult, p. 222). She knows that she has become dowdy, that she is
only ‘rags and bones and a hank of hair’ (p. 197). That she is subject to incontinence
terribly upsets her and makes her cry for hours. At other times, she forgets about the
deterioration of her body and when she is reminded, it shocks her. When a woman
asks her in the street if she can doss with her, Claire painfully realizes how neglected
she must look. She plumbs ‘dark seas, almost reaching their bottom, so dark, so
terrible, so perhaps salutary’ (p. 223) at the thought. This negative image really
rankles with Claire, and she almost welcomes the thought of giving up. She is only
borne back to the surface by the thought of her wearing her slippers, which to an
outsider must look like common bedroom slippers. This explanation permits Claire to
reassert herself in her position as an upper-class woman and to re-gain momentary
composure.
The protagonist knows that dementia not only affects her body but also her
mind. Her abilities to communicate diminish daily and the trenchant observations
she sometimes makes as well as the critical comments (for example describing Miss
Jones as ‘the genteel English virgin made entirely out of grey india-rubber’ (p. 212))
are merely sporadic flashes of the wit she once had. She continuously repeats herself
in conversation and keeps apologizing about it to her visitors. She explains to Sarah
Berkeley that she is not afraid of the bombs because her loss of memory already
makes her feel maimed (p. 136). Claire senses that power lies in discourse and her
greatest fear is to be totally disempowered and committed to an asylum. Her
restless mind, and the general hostility she is subjected to by her entourage feed this
paranoia. While at the beginning, she ‘merely’ checks whenever she wakes up that
the windows have not been barred and that the outside scene is familiar (p. 857),
her delusional paranoia takes her over completely towards the end:
She heard the harsh noise of iron gates clanging behind her; she passed
through a door; and turned just in time to see the bolt drawn behind her; she
screamed; someone muffled her mouth with a huge hand and dragged her
on; dragged her into a padded cell; where no one would hear her screams…
(p. 254)
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Claire wishes she would feel less, that she could ‘wear out’ (p. 122) or be
‘tired out’ (p. 213). In her present situation, she is fed up with life, she wants to die
but she is afraid of committing the deed (‘pour être mort if faut mourir’ (p. 74)). This
does however not mean that she is not a celebrator of life. She longs for the magic of
bygone days when one was young, beautiful and entertaining. To be old is terrible
because one is no longer admired, and can no longer dance and flirt:
When had his gaze, whoever it was, spelt nothing but polite attention?
Or else worse, had flickered away in a kind of gauche embarrassment?
That she would like to ask God, if there were such a person. Why did
women spend years learning to be women, becoming adept in flattery
and charm? And then for years one was an old woman with white hair
and hollow neck whom men did not desire to love. (original emphasis)
(p. 26)
Claire has always defined herself in terms of her attractiveness to men. Now
that she is old and undesirable, she is tired of life. However, the image she has of
herself is by far not as negative as that of Francis Maitland and Edith Barlow. For
Claire, the fact that she looks old and unattractive is upsetting because her charm
went along with her memory, causing loneliness (p. 159). She considers this
loneliness unbearable. People have been her furniture and now she keeps ‘running
from the empty attics to the empty basement, and wringing [her] hands over the
desolation’ (p. 207). Loneliness has turned life into the ridiculous pursuit of her cat
and her servants for company. When Edith Barlow tells her not to grovel in front of
the servants to be let into the kitchen, she says:
I know you despise me for not having more dignity. But when one is as
lonely as I am you do disgraceful things… it’s like when you are starving
and grab crusts of bread out from dust-bins. That’s what my life has
come to, grabbing garbage out of dust-bins.(p. 109)
Claire sees herself as a victim, living on an island, because she is shipwrecked.
(p. 156). She feels abandoned, marooned. She compares herself to that woman she
once heard screaming in the night (p. 69) that no one helped. Claire knows that one
of the mistakes that she has made in her life is that she has never cultivated
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loneliness. She explains to the warden, Mr Mills that ‘if you run away, as I have
always run away, then it is so terrifying when at last it catches up with you’ (p. 246).
As Julia Briggs points out, the reader finds in Claire a truthful depiction of how
our minds can fail before our bodies do (my emphasis) (p. 329). She keeps getting
confused about where and with whom she is, becomes past all conversation safe in
snatches, her bodily functions slowly desert her and she falls victim to agonising
delusions which worsen her terrible restlessness. One aspect however does however
not fall in line with the disease pattern of dementia. Language does not seem to be
deserting Claire; she still uses a lot of figurative language (‘The past is being wafted
by the present. Witches and bad witches, sweeping busily with their brooms.’(p.
244)), idioms (‘[our] lances at Mrs Grundy were titled with due discretion at Mrs
Grundy’ (p. 45)) and quotations from literature (‘”He cometh not, she said; “I am
aweary, aweary. I would that I were dead.”’ (p. 74)). This may put her character
credibility in question, but considering she lived in a cultured milieu (Her numerous
references to Shakespeare, to Malvolio from Twelfth Night (p. 74), and to Hamlet
(p.268) and King Lear (p.299) make this evident)), I posit that her wide range of
literary knowledge is part of her long-term memory, and therefore still accessible to
her. Claire’s fate is extremely gloomy. This woman of letters and socialite suffers the
worst possible fate imaginable to her: to die deprived of discourse and of human
warmth, like ‘a neglected pot plant outside the window of a slum tenement’ (p. 263).
The reader feels for her despite her ‘snobbery, her verbal cruelty to her dependants
and her inability at times to see beyond her own happiness (J. King, Discourses of
Ageing, p. 50). Pity is however not what Claire aims for, she longs for people in her
life. Since the present no longer provides these, she relies on ‘the storehouses of her
memory’ for comfort (p. 252). I will now look into these, or the little Claire can still
glimpse of them, to analyse the protagonist’s review of her own life.
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3) ‘[Re-live] the past with herself, and talk of it to any listening
sympathetic ear.’
Claire dreads the twilight of her own thoughts (p. 45) spun by her diseased
mind. Her past memories provide her some respite because they permit her to
escape her delusions and to maintain the story on which her sense of self as a
subject depends (J. King, Discourses of Ageing, p. 44). Although Claire can no longer
create a coherent life review, there is a reasonable amount of reminiscing going on
in the book but there are several obstacles: Firstly, Claudia keeps repeating herself
not only in conversation but also in the memories she harps on. Secondly, her
weakening vitality, the lack of stimulants such as a glass of whisky or the visit of an
acquaintance or stranger, and the advent of Miss Jones further make it difficult for
Claire to dwell on the past. I will attempt to reconstruct her story from the snatches
she provides, while endeavouring neither to over-interpret the information provided
in this fragmented narrative, nor to under-estimate Claire’s abilities to make her own
assessment. Norah Hoult has used the character’s final dreams in the novel to help
the reader understand her protagonist, since ‘[what] scars on the heart, what
wounds of the mind do not the dreams of even those who feel that their lives have
run to a placid and conventional measure, reveal!’ (p. 321)
Claire gives a summary of her life to Miss Jones, which contains the essence
of what she remembers about her life:
I went steadily up at the beginning of my life; you see I was praised a lot,
and artists painted and drew me, and I wrote articles and knew people.
Then I had bumpy bits: my love affairs were like switchbacks; it was
exhilarating going up, but going down one felt sick. And now I am right
in the valley. Sometimes I think it’s so dark that it must be the Valley of
the Shadow of Death. (pp. 207- 208)
Claire divides her life into three stages: Firstly, the celebration of her young
successful self, secondly, the joys and tribulations of love, and thirdly the desolation
of old age. Using these three emotions as a backdrop, I will reconstruct Claire’s life
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on the basis of the fragmented information she provides. Using Murray Bowen’s
family systems theory, more particularly his concepts of differentiation of self,
triangles and emotional cut-off (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family), I will
analyse the relations with her parents and sister(s). This will enable me to identify
the triggers for the emotions of success, desertion and desperation of her later life,
and to juxtapose my conclusions with Claire’s own assessment.
a) Claire’s childhood
Little is said about Claire’s parents and her siblings, it is not even clear if she
has one or several sisters. She tells Mrs White that after her mother’s death, ‘[her]
sisters grabbed everything they could’ (p. 37), yet only refers to one of them in the
rest of the novel. For example, she says that ‘[her] own sister doesn’t speak to her to
this day’ (p. 45). Grammatically speaking, were there more, she would have to
specify which one. Similarly, at the end of her life, when Claire has a dream in which
she is again in the old Devonshire farmhouse where she had spent her summers as a
child, she only refers to one sister (p. 327).
The person from her childhood that she remembers with the greatest
affection is her father. She calls him ‘dear papa’ (p. 11) and lies awake at night
worrying about what will happen to his pictures, i.e. the continuity of his legacy,
after her death (p. 38). Her father seems to have been rather fond of her and treated
her with respect, letting her take her own decisions. This becomes apparent in
Claire’s reminiscence that when Oscar Wilde had asked her father if he could marry
her, her father had replied ‘so sensibly’ that he should ask Claire (p. 168). However,
one flashback of Claire’s calls her father’s honour into question. In one of the
episodes in which Claire confuses present with past, she believes herself to be
making her own bed because her father, being ill in the next bedroom, requires extra
service from the servants. She makes her bed tidily in expectation of visiting him and
of inquiring, after ‘a dutiful kiss’, what sort of night he has spent (p. 9). She finishes
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her bed carefully, smoothens out the creases in the counterpane, and pulls up the
eiderdown with hands that are ‘sensitive to the taffeta softness’ (p. 9). When she
takes a look at the mirror before she goes to see her father, she realizes that her hair
is untidy and that it has turned grey. She reflects that her father will be disappointed
because he has always praised her fine chestnut tresses (p. 10). This appraisal of her
physical appearance may simply make her father responsible for Claire placing such
an emphasis on her physical attributes as a woman. However, together with the
‘dutiful’ kiss, and with her hands being sensitive to soft touch, it may also be a slight
indication for incest. One comment of Claire’s, that ‘all men are cowards’ (p. 26) can
be interpreted in two ways: Since the men in her life have abandoned her, the
comment may refer to her feeling left deserted after her father’s death. A second
possibility is that her father never took responsibility for the dubious relationship he
had with his daughter.
Three direct references to Claire’s mother can be found in the novel. When
Claire attempts to exert her energy to put Kathleen in her place in front of Mrs
White, she reimagines herself a little girl, defying her nurse, defying her governess.
‘Governesses didn’t like you to scream, because that brought your mama into it’. (p.
6) A little later, when referring to her father’s death, she remembers the ominous
sound of the coffin being carried down the stairs. At the time, she pretended that
the wine she was drinking had made her a little drunk, so that she kept talking of one
thing or another to divert her mother’s attention (p. 11). The last allusion to her
mother is when Claire complains how her sisters took hold of everything after her
mother’s death. All three references reveal that Claire held her mother in affection,
but they also disclose that she felt protective towards her, that she may have been a
weak personality needing support from both Claire and household staff.
In the present-day setting, when Miss Jones finds Claire roaming the house at
night, Claire tells her that she has been thinking about how beautiful everything was
when she was a little girl: ‘I opened the window or the door, and looked out and
everything was dressed up, do you know what I mean? So that you wanted to clap
your hands, and run out.’ (p. 213) Claire even suggests to Miss Jones to light candles
and sit down and talk about when they were little girls (p. 213). Thus, to all
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appearances, Claire’s childhood must have been a happy one. The protagonist
mentions no major conflicts, and does not seem to have suffered under her parents’
constant criticism of her behaviour. Her great affection for her father and her
protective attitude towards her mother suggest that the mother–daughter roles had
been inversed here but too little is known about Claire’s family to base my
speculations about incest on firm ground. From the little Claire explicitly says, she
must have been fond of her parents, and the fact that her last thoughts went out to
her family suggests that in her old age, she is still eager to regain their affection.
Using Murray Bowen’s family systems theory, I then posit that the strong
interdependence within this emotional unit permitted Claire to merely develop a
weak sense of self, which stayed with her throughout her later life. (Bowen centre,
op.cit.)
b) Claire- the entertaining socialite
At first glance, Claire strikes the reader as an emancipated and sexually
adventurous young woman. She knows exactly what she wants: she ‘[doesn’t] think
of marriage to anybody as anything but a joke’ (Hoult, p. 168) and refuses to follow
the path cut out for her; she launches her career as a literary woman, and parties
and flirts and starts an exciting, secretive affair with the much older, married Oliver
Manning. Old Claire remembers this time with fondness, and projects herself back
into the past where she ‘could be the girl contriving a network of circumstantial lying
to hide from her parents where she had spent her evenings’ (p. 250). She thinks back
on how policemen used to turn a blind or benevolent eye whenever she got home at
a late hour unescorted, and she cherishes the continuity of these gallant, helpful
men in her life, calling them ‘planks for the shipwrecked’ (p. 223) in the present. Yet,
despite appearances, she was not as self-confident and independent from her family
as she believes herself to have been. According to Murray Bowen, members of a
close-knit family develop a weak sense of self because they heavily rely on each
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other for acceptance and approval. The less developed a person’s self is, the more
influence other people have on his functioning in society. Bowen believes that an
extreme rebel is a poorly differentiated person too but he pretends to be “self” by
persistently opposing the positions of others (Bowen centre). Claire may have
wanted to rebel against her interdependent family circle but she could not free
herself from her need of acceptance and approval from others. As a result, she
merely transferred her reliance from her family of origin to another, wider circle,
that of her social acquaintances. She entertained and was entertained, she garnered
memories, listened attentively to gossip, savoured the spice of scandal, formed apt
judgments and carried along with her as portable luggage revealing incident after
incident of bedroom, boudoir, dining-table and drawing-room (p. 19), all to get
people’s attention and approval. She took the habit of not only revealing other
people’s trespasses but also serving out her own private life as drama to be
entertaining.
A further sign of emotional dependence is the possibility that her first lover
Oliver Manning, who was much older than Claire, might have replaced her father to
her. There is an indication in the text that her affair with Oliver Manning only started
when her father was dead. When her family and friends found out about the affair,
she was emotionally cut off. Since Claire was with her mother when the coffin was
carried out of the house, the social ostracism must have occurred at a later stage.
Her affair with Manning, and later with Wallace, did not last and old Claire asks
herself why she has been so unsuccessful with love. She reflects that for her love had
been ‘the crystallisation of the gregarious instinct’ (p. 84) and that she had been
‘attracted by intellect and personality, but no the strong, silent personality, if such
existed’ (p. 84). She unconsciously chose fickle men in her inability to replace her
father in her life.
Claire had always relied on her femininity and attractiveness to get a man’s
attention, and when her charms failed to have their effect, she took it as a personal
affront. For example, she was deeply hurt when a great modern portrait-painter
showed no interest in her at a studio party. A second incident took place when a
man whom she had believed to be her particular beau had feigned interest in her
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while his eyes had roved the room for any woman available. It would however be
wrong to assume that women’s approbation was not important to her. In a dream,
she relives the social ostracism inflicted on her when her dear friend Violet had
stopped speaking to her. Further, the emotional cut-off from her sister is a matter
she seems to shrug off lightly but which has in fact inflicted a deep wound,
something that becomes apparent in her final Devonshire farmhouse dream.
Doctor Fairfax characterises Claire as an individualistic Victorian with a
pronounced lack of ripeness. I only agree with his assessment to some extent.
Individualistic being defined as ‘the quality of being different or original’28, Claire has
this quality in that she has chosen her own path in life and followed a literary career.
She herself believes to have been individualistic: ‘All her life, from the time she had
been a little girl, she had gone out when she had wanted to, however other people,
her mother and father, had criticised. She was going to fight her individuality to the
end.’ (Hoult, p. 277) Yet, her need to entertain others and to quickly adjust to what
they think, say, and do to please them renders her more of a chameleon (Bowen
centre) than an individualist. She herself makes a trenchant observation about this to
Edith Barlow when she says: ‘”That’s what you dislike in me, that I have no sense of
style as an individual?”’ (Hoult, p. 104)
Claire is a Victorian, not only in her prejudiced attitude towards the lower
classes or in her nostalgic memories of this bygone period. As Edith Barlow points
out, Claire has believed in the Victorian conventions enough to get thrills out of
breaking them (p. 108), and yet, she insists on having gone through the respectable
social stages destined to a woman as well: she vows having been married to Wallace,
and adopts the role of the widow after his desertion. She has no offspring but she
had spent a lot of money on Wallace’s children (p. 67) at the time of the affair,
something that suggests that she had projected herself into the protective mother
role. These motherly feelings had extended to Wallace in the sense that she had
started the affair because she had felt loving-kindness rather than passion, pity
28
Cambridge dictionaries online
<http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/individualism_2?q=individualistic > [accessed 25
October 2013]
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rather than love for him (p. 36). Her maternal instinct had believed in being able to
save him after he had threatened suicide. By ‘inventing’ these versions of her as a
wife, a mother and a widow, Claire shows again that although she portrays herself as
a rebel, her desire to belong to an emotional unit is extremely strong. Her family of
origin emotionally cut her off for breaking social mores, and the suppressed anxieties
resulting from this traumatic experience impede her from differentiating herself
from her family by pushing her towards creating this respectable version of herself.
She even asks herself whether her life would not have taken a different turn if she
had married Oscar, another indication that she is unconsciously seeking to present
herself in the most respectable way possible.
As far as Claire’s supposed immaturity is concerned, I agree with the doctor
to some extent but refuse to consider the word ‘immaturity’ as a pejorative term. On
the one hand, Claire has been an intellectual socialite who has published books and
entertained celebrities. She is able to make shrewd observations and defend herself
in the face of insult. For example, she tells Francis Maitland: ‘You mean that I’m a
tiresome egotist, only concerned with myself. That I haven’t done what the
Christians tell us we should do, die to ourselves. But you haven’t either, have you?’
(p. 157) Claire is perfectly capable of striking out intellectually to defend her own
position against others. On the other hand, she however recurrently uses childlike
behaviour or emotions in adult life to express how she feels/ felt. For example, when
she had sold the Suffragette paper, it had had ‘a glow like the glow of being a
naughty child’ (p. 276). She reflects in the present that there are so few gentlemen
now left in the world that one looks at them ‘as intrigued as a child by the spectacle
of the giraffe in the zoo’ (p. 67). Claire tends to ‘relapse’ into her femininity when
feeling protected and guided by a man’s masculinity, enjoying this temporary
situation of tutelage. She considers how, mostly in her life she had been treated like
a ‘monkey, forgiven everything because I was entertaining’ (p. 308). In the final
dream she has before she dies, she longs to be forgiven her trespasses like a child:
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[She] had been naughty and had been sent to bed as a punishment […] it
seemed to her that soon her punishment would be over and that she
would be allowed out into the sunshine to play with her sister, to run
down lanes […] when one was a child, and hadn’t meant to do wrong all
was surely forgiven as the coming of sleep wiped out all noisy angers
and every hurt. (p. 327)
In old age, Claire longs more and more for the carefree nature of childhood.
She is no longer willing to bear the responsibility of past actions. She wants to be
forgiven and to find the world as imagined by children, a world in which all harm can
be undone.
In conclusion, Claire has made an assessment of her life in her flashbacks and
dreams, and in conversations with her visitors and household staff. It is a past she
relishes, because although often unhappy and hurt, people had looked after her, she
had been admired and entertained, scolded and watched over (p. 250). It starkly
contrasts with the present, and Claire bitterly asks God why she, an intellectual
socialite, should suffer the worst possible state imaginable, to be left to die alone
with dementia. She does not dwell much on her childhood but the few glimpses she
provides make the reader aware of her strong emotional tie to her father and her
protective attitude towards her mother. There are some indications in the text that
the father-daughter relation might have been of an incestuous nature, and that she
may have taken over the role of the wife. I posit that this is why since his death, she
has been constantly seeking male attention but has been unable to construct a
healthy relationship to another man. After the emotional cut-off from her family as a
result of her affair with Manning, she remained in her dependent child role in the
sense that she sought to be continuously entertaining in order to be popular with
others. Claire has realized that she appears to have no style as an individual, i.e. that
she has a poorly differentiated self. Not only have her emotional ties to her family
impeded her from assuming a different, adult sense of self but she has also projected
herself into the roles of wife, mother and widow to be re-accepted into her original
emotional unit, her family. Since her wish about being re-integrated into her family is
voiced in a dream, this repressed desire is buried in her subconscious.
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4) Dysnarrativia
In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, J.P. Eakin quotes K. Young
and J. Saver’s definition of dysnarrativia as ‘states of narrative impairment
experienced by individuals with discrete focal damage in different regions of the
neural network subserving human self-narrative’ (Eakin, p. 124). As Claire’s dementia
progresses, she has more and more difficulties to reconstruct her version of her life
story on which her sense of self as a person depends. She is reduced to reminiscing
in conversations, flashbacks and dreams, in conscious and subconscious mental
states. Norah Hoult could have used an omniscient narrator to fill the gaps in Claire’s
story. Her choice of third-person limited narrator renders her protagonist more
credible because the reader has to follow Claire’s workings of the mind to get access
to her past. The many ellipses in her life story and the repetitive nature of her
memories are symptomatic to a patient with dementia, and it is left to the reader to
reconstruct Claire’s identity from the few insights she is still able to provide.
Her memories have however not withered as a result of her disease, on the
contrary. A stimulant, such as for example music, can cause the leaves to flutter and
the past to rush in upon the present,
everything was alive and everything was joyful and everything was sad,
as it used to be when one was young. Only much more so, for now it
was all illuminated by the poignant light of a sunset that said: “Never
more. (p. 238)
Claire’s memories are bright and lifelike. Thus, she feels that whenever she
tells parts of her story, for example the part related to Wallace’s desertion, that they
fall ‘fresh from her lips’ (p. 251) as she remembers them. Her dreams brought on by
her restless mind and the sedatives she is taking are almost larger-than-life. After
the dream in which she relives her friend Violet’s refusal to speak to her, she
‘[awakens] as one who [has] received a blow, and [tosses] and [turns], battling with
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the old grief, grown as lively as it had been a quarter of a century ago’ (p. 322). And
after a romantic dream about Wallace, she wakes up with the new happiness still
warm against her breast (p. 323). Finally, her flashbacks can be of such intensity that
Claire confuses past with present, and acts out her memories. For example, she
dances to that ‘music that had played in other years’:
… on and on she went, skirting the foot of her bed, swaying her hips
ever so lightly, inclining her head now and again, imagining that she was
holding a fan, imagining that the man’s arm clasped her tiny waist, that
the band was seductive, that the floor was excellent, that her partner
was beginning to be just a little in love with her, and was murmuring
something about the fineness of her eyes. (p. 27)
Claire desperately looks for memory hooks, elements which have remained
the same over the years, because they help her reconnect with the past. Her ‘dear
and valuable possessions’ (p. 38) provide such a hook, for example. In the way that
Claudia Hampton in Moon Tiger worries about being severed from the narrative,
Claire worries about the continuity of her legacy, about what will happen to that one
dessert plate left from a dinner service from her childhood, or to her bureau that
Robert Browning once used. How much she is emotionally attached to her
possessions becomes clear in the scene in which she becomes violent when Kathleen
wants to bully her into giving two of her father’s pictures to Miss Jones. Her
furniture is invaluable to her because it is her friend; it has been with her all these
years (p. 128) and thus bears witness to the landmarks of her fragmented story.
Claire looks for the same durability in the city of London but is bitterly disappointed:
‘”O London, where have you gone?” she [cries] out in her heart’ (p. 221).
There are ambiguities in the text which question Claire’s version of certain
events in the past. Claire states that after her mother’s death, her sisters grabbed
everything (p. 37). Yet, she is still living in her parental home with her father’s
paintings and all the old furniture. Secondly, she claims to have been married to
Wallace and has adopted his surname. She has cast herself into the role of his widow
although he deserted her and their marriage had never officially been accepted
(which becomes clear in her dream about the Queen’s approval). Kathleen says
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Claire was never married and Edith Barlow thinks it is almost touching how Claire still
receives Wallace press cuttings, how she refuses to accept his desertion.
Apart from the doctor, the people in Claire’s entourage refuse to accept
Claire in the role she has fashioned for herself. Instead of going along with her
version of the truth to foster her sense of self, they judge her using sexist and ageist
stereotypes because they are unable to look beyond their own fears and prejudices.
By making it impossible for Claire to revisit the past and by nourishing her delusions
about being committed to an asylum, they completely undermine her sense of
identity. Not only do they fail to listen to her narrative, Miss Jones completely blocks
the entrance to that house of the past (p. 252). They refuse this part of their role as
caregivers and friends, and are therefore more to blame for Claire’s breakdown of
narrative than dementia. Claire’s fall back on violence is an ultimate cry for help, for
approval of her narrative, of the person she portrays herself to be. In a very bleak
ending, her narrative is silenced and she is sedated with hyoscine into ‘an “easy”
death, ‘a powerful image of lonely mortality’ (J. King, Discourses of Ageing, p. 53).
J. King writes that Claire is not allowed to ‘rage against the dying of the light’
(p. 53) and that the end is very bleak. I do however feel that Norah Hoult has used
the device of dreams to give Claire the possibility to give closure to her narrative on
a subconscious level. ‘Aroused to a partial consciousness of the present, Claire
herself wondered why she should dream of people and events which even by her
uncertain measurement were buried under long years’ (p. 321). Another, second life
review is thus taking place in her dreams, in which she moves ‘backwards and
forwards’ to revisit key concerns from her past. There is no conscious assessment
but she relives her desires for approval, love and forgiveness. Finally, she closes the
circle of her narrative in her final Devonshire farmhouse dream, in which her
suppressed emotional cut-off from her family resurges and she comes to the
conclusion that as sleep envelopes her, she will be forgiven and find peace.
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5) CONCLUSION
By diametrically opposing the novel’s title There Were No Windows to its
epigraph ‘Man is not a windowless monad,’ Norah Hoult sets the message of the
novel straight from the beginning: It is an outcry against isolation and loneliness.
Seventy-eight-year-old Claire Temple is left to spend her final days shut out from
everything. She reflects that although she is old, and looks old and fearfully shabby,
yet her heart flows with pain as just when she was young but that there is nothing to
expect from her dreary present (p. 222). Claire is tired of her present life and wishes
she could finally find rest. Her nostalgic memories about her glorious past are
comforting to her but her progressing dementia impedes her from constructing a
coherent life story. She is reduced to reminiscing in sporadic flashbacks,
conversations and dreams. Her rare visitors and servants find her conversations
trying because she keeps repeating her stories over and over again. They use sexist
and ageist stereotypes to construct Claire as ‘Other’, and prefer constructing
counter-narratives to empathising with the protagonist. By rejecting or belittling
Claire’s version of the past, they undermine Claire’s efforts to uphold her sense of
self as the subject of that narrative.
Claire has found alternative ways to help her reminisce. Those elements
which have provided continuity in her life, such as her valuable possessions, the
sound of music or her lapses into femininity provoked the presence of a man, serve
as memory hooks in the story of her life. Norah Hoult has decided not to use an
omniscient narrator to tell Claire’s story. Instead the reader is left to piece together
Claire’s narrative identity from the few glimpses and observations she provides. She
does not reveal much about her childhood but her constant reference to childlike
feelings and behaviour intimate a strong emotional dependence on her parents, a
dependence she transferred to her social acquaintances after the emotional cut-off
from her family. She kept relying on others, never cultivated loneliness, and thus her
sense of self remained weakly developed. In her lack of self-confidence, she
constructed her Victorian status as wife, mother and widow herself to boost her frail
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sense of identity. How much Claire is aware of her initial dependence on her parents
is left an open question. Her final dream shows the reader that, on a subconscious
level, Claire ultimately looks to her parents for help. It is in her dreams, in her
second, subconscious, life review that Claire finally comes to rest, that she finds
closure to her narrative. Despite the animosity of her entourage and her dementia,
she has found a window for herself, and found her rest.
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5 CONCLUSIONS
In a very recent article for The Guardian entitled ‘So this is old age’, Penelope
Lively has written that ‘[old] age is in the eyes of the beholder.’ 29 In our
contemporary society, the body, i.e. that which strikes the eye, is often made the
dominant signifier of old age (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects, p. x) and associated with
physical and mental decline. In Moon Tiger, the sight of old, ill Claudia fills her
daughter Lisa with both revulsion and guilty pity, and in There Were No Windows,
Edith Barlow reflects that Claire could take abode among the ghosts and shadows
and bogeys with her physique. Only Dr Grene in The Secret Scripture resists ageist
stereotypes to some extent and is able to look beyond the outward signs of old age;
he observes that Roseanne bears the look of her youth yet. The reactions of these
different characters in the books show that it is difficult for the not-yet-old to
witness the disintegration of a once familiar face; only the psychiatrist who works
within the field of gerontology does not distance himself from that which is uncanny.
The protagonists themselves also find the progressing deformation of their
body disturbing and long for their past beauty. While Claudia can still see the other
Claudias in the strata of her face, the sight of her own reflection fills Claire with
dismay, and Roseanne downright refuses to look into a mirror at all. All three women
struggle with what Kathleen Woodward has termed the ‘mirror stage of old age’ (p.
67), what is whole is felt to reside within them, in the memory of their past beautiful
bodies, and only Claudia glimpses a shadow of this wholeness in her physical
reflection. However, her comment that her old hands look like someone else’s
reveals that the physical changes her body has undergone are just as frightening to
her as they are to Roseanne and Claire.
29
Penelope Lively, ‘So this is old age’, Guardian, 5 October 2013
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/05/penelope-lively-old-age>
[accessed on 25 October 2013]
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The past wholeness within the protagonists comes to life in their narratives,
which have been constructed differently in the three novels. While Roseanne writes
a loosely linear narrative, Claudia spins a multi-vocal kaleidoscopic life story. Due to
her dementia, Claire has been reduced to a state of ‘dysnarrativia’ and what emerges
from the text is a third-person limited perspectives review of who she has been. Only
Roseanne’s tale is told in the first-person narrative voice, and it fits her aim to tell
her very own version of events as opposed to Father Gaunt’s or the McNulty’s.
Claudia’s tale is multi-vocal because of her belief that those close to her must also
provide their subjective perspective on events. Finally, it strikes me as befitting that
third-person limited point of view is used in There Were No Windows because it
reflects how this dementia patient feels increasingly disconnected from reality.
Henry Kristal has stipulated that one’s past must be manipulated to be
worthwhile (DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects, p. 24) and this is what the three women
have done. Roseanne is the one most concerned about the veracity of her story but
even she acknowledges that some of her memories may not be true. She has
unconsciously sanitized the traumatic murder of her father into an innocent
childhood memory, and, what is most striking, she has completely left out the sixtyodd years she has spent at different asylums, refusing to consider this episode part
of who she is. Claudia believes that our connection to reality is tenuous anyway and
therefore celebrates her narrative as a piece of fiction; she adds screams and
rhetoric to flesh her past life out with colour. Finally, mentally affected Claire is left
with mere scraps of narrative since no one in her entourage is willing to help her
reconstruct her life story. These flashbacks mainly deal with her adult life as a
popular intellectual socialite and have also been manipulated to a certain degree.
For example, she claims to have been married to Wallace while her entourage holds
that she was merely his most famous mistress. Since both Roseanne and Claire have
left out large chunks of their life story, the chapter on Moon Tiger is inevitably the
longest in this dissertation, Claudia being the only one to consider all the stages in
her life as part of her narrative. In an article for the Journal of Aging and Society
entitled ‘Telling Stories: Aging, Reminiscence and the Life Review’, Kathleen
Woodward substitutes the term life review for the more open-ended process of
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“reminiscence”, because the latter does not promise the totality of the life review.
Reminiscence is more fragmentary and partial than review since it is only concerned
with a certain moment, or moments, in the past (quoted in DeFalco, Uncanny
Subjects, p. 25). I want to leave the discussion open of whether the term
reminiscence would have been more suitable here, since for me, a ‘total’ life review
only encompasses what a person feels to be part of his/her life, the term ‘total’
hence being subject to interpretation.
What is important is not whether these women have narrated the totality of
their lifespan or how reliable they are as narrators but to what degree the
therapeutic effect of their life review has been achieved. I have come to the
conclusion that all three have achieved a healthier narrative identity. They have resurveyed traumatic experiences such as abandonment, bereavement, miscarriage
and the loss of a child, and re-integrated them as far as possible. The fact that, for all
of them, some key issues have remained unresolved makes them more credible,
since hardly anyone lives without emotionally suppressed experiences or unresolved
conflicts. Roseanne is unable to voice her bitterness towards Father Gaunt and the
McNulty family openly in the text because she is tongue-tied by her overbearing
feelings of shame. In an ultimate gesture, Claudia attempts to reach out to her
daughter Lisa but fails to resolve their conflicts. Finally, Claire only manages to reintegrate the emotional cut-off from her family on a subconscious level in a final
dream before she dies. Nonetheless, the late-life reviews of Claudia and Roseanne
can be called Reifungsroman since at the end of the two novels, the protagonists
have arrived at a place of authenticity which fits them as individuals. Some may
question whether Claire’s narrative can be defined as such, since the final resolution
only happens at a subconscious level. I remain in two minds about this myself
because her comment on her lack of style as an individual and her insight about the
necessity to cultivate loneliness reflect maturity, but her inability to collect her
thoughts impedes her from a calm, thorough assessment of past events.
In How our lives become stories- making selves, Paul J. Eakin points out how it
is possession of a body image that anchors and sustains our sense of identity (p. 11).
Through the course of this dissertation, I have come to realise that the body plays as
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much a role as the narrative in shaping identity. Claudia, Claire and Roseanne have
been exceptionally beautiful women, and Claire openly reflects how her body has
determined the course of her life to some extent. J. King holds that this embodied
identity is determined by contextual cultural discourses (Discourses of Ageing, p.
172) but that these discourses can be resisted. This is what the three protagonists
have done: They have followed their own set of moral standards, celebrated their
beauty and intellect, and fully enjoyed their sexual experiences. Early in their lives,
all three were treated as equals by a dominant figure in their childhood. These
women found themselves in a triangular relationship in which the mother figure was
largely absent: Claire and Roseanne had a very strong, bordering on incestuous
relationship with their father, while Claudia had a similarly intense, sexual bond with
her brother. Having been treated as an equal by the first male companion in their
lives, they dissociated themselves from the social and cultural obligations for the
women of their time. All three protagonists have had a hard time in their attempt to
resist predisposed female roles, and in their striving for a different sort of power
relationship within their contemporary society. Claudia is the one to have suffered
the least from her unconventional life choices; both Claire and Roseanne die
ostracised from society.
I conclude this dissertation by stating that Lively, Hoult and Barry have
neither reduced age to negative physical decline nor banalized it to simply a positive
time of peace (Chivers, p. xx). Their elderly protagonists are exceptional women and
the stories they weave about their lives enthralling. Narrative technique, voice,
perspective and change of tense have been used to capture the unstable nature of
memory, and the authors’ appeal to the readers’ senses of smell, touch and sight
have made their characters’ flashbacks larger-than-life. All three women have
benefited from their life reviews as each has made an assessment of different selves
they have been in the course of their lives. S. Chivers holds that authors who expose
ageist stereotypes perpetuate them to some degree (p. x). This may be inevitable
but in the case of these three novels, I have come to look beyond the wrinkled suit of
old age to discover fascinating narrative identities.
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