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The Transgression of heterosexual marriage in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

‘I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.’
-Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger, p.5.

Marriage is typically based on a mutual love and desire. However, in The Little Stranger, Waters subverts the social understanding of marriage, and instead uses marriage to satisfy a queer ulterior motive. Faraday’s sudden longing for Caroline is unsettling when contrasted to his earlier unfavourable descriptions of her appearance. He describes her as androgynous with ‘boyish shoes’ and her feminine body parts (hips and bosom) are described with negativity as ‘wide’ and ‘large’. Even after becoming engaged to Caroline, therefore supposedly feeling love and desire towards her, Faraday describes her face as masculine by using the words ‘strong’ and ‘angular’. The text says, ‘I couldn’t believe that I had ever found [her face] plain.’1 Faraday’s description of Caroline is hardly praising her beauty or expressing a profound attraction. Instead, he appears repulsed by her fleshly female form. A poetic literary technique, the blazon, dissects the female body and typically praises its

beauty. Faraday subverts the traditional blazon, which is commonly associated with Petrarchan love, and instead he describes Caroline in a basic and simplistic way. Faraday transgresses typical expectations of heterosexual relationships where desire and attraction are fundamental. His reoccurring criticism of Caroline’s appearance is implicit of no attraction, lust or desire towards her, which jars with his sudden desire to marry her. Instead, it is implied that Hundred’s Hall is the object of his desire. Caroline summarises this herself as she says, ‘Do you really [want me]’ ‘Or is it the house you want?’(p.448) The queer projection of desire onto the house transgresses typical expectations of marriage. Heterosexual love becomes spectral as desire is displaced onto a house, rather than Faraday’s own fiancé. The relationship, therefore, becomes merely functional as a way to guarantee possession of the house, and challenges social ideologies of romantic love.

Even as a small child Faraday is infatuated with Hundred’s Hall. On his first ever visit, he took an acorn out of the wall which he felt entitled to own. Faraday describes this event by saying, ‘I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.’(p.3) Faraday defines his feelings towards the house in relation to heterosexual desire, which transgresses the typical social ideologies of desire. Desire is displaced onto an object, rather than a person. The queer attraction to the Hall is intensified when Faraday describes the feeling of the acorn in his trouser pocket. The text says, ‘I felt the hard plaster lump in my pocket, now, with a sort of sick excitement.’(p.3) The hard lump in his pocket appears phallic, especially as he refers to a ‘sick’ excitement, immediately portraying Faraday’s perverse attraction to the house. The queer sense of desire Faraday feels towards Hundred’s becomes intensified as the novel continues, and when he sees an opportunity of gaining ownership (through marrying Caroline) he becomes obsessed with the idea. Heterosexual love and marriage become a socially acceptable way of satisfying his queer obsession of the house. Caroline becomes aware of Faraday’s ulterior motives for marriage. When Caroline calls off the engagement, Faraday asks, ‘[h]ow can you say all of these terrible things? After all I’ve done, for you, for your family?’ Caroline responds by saying, ‘You think I should repay you, by marrying you? Is that what you think marriage is- a kind of payment?’(p.448) Caroline appears to be aware of Faraday transgressing the social and cultural norms of marriage. For Faraday, marriage becomes a disguise and excuse which allows him to satisfy his queer obsession with the house.

References
Featured photo: Book cover of The Little Stranger, Sarah Walters. Reprint edition (May 4, 2010)

1.Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (Virago Press: London, 2009) p.323 All further references are to this edition.

Written by Sarah Culham.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Fragile Masculinity and the Development of Industrial America in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”

‘Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.’
Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”, p.55.

The American short story traces the development of women’s role in industrial America. In ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ it becomes clear that women are integral to the new, industrial America as they work tirelessly in the paper mill. Over the course of the nineteenth century, women were fundamental workers within the factory. Thomas Dublin notes how they encouraged industrial and capitalistic progress. He says, ‘over the second half of the nineteenth century, employment in New England textiles doubled and cloth production quintupled in value.’[1] The women’s industrial importance is particularly noteworthy when contrasted to the lives of the bachelors in Melville’s short story. Kevin J. Hayes suggests:

‘the descriptive trappings of a bachelors’ Elysium in “The Paradise of Bachelors” would have been familiar to most of Melville’s readers […] like many nineteenth-century bachelors, he is a flaneur, one who cloaks himself in an identity presaged on leisurely observation.[2]

Against the backdrop of the growing industrial world, which women were so involved in, Melville’s story is a contemporarily relevant way of depicting idleness of men. The bachelor’s behaviour, recognisable to the contemporarily reader, depicts a world in decline. Their lifestyle is rendered obsolete when noted against the economic growth emerging from the mills and factories women worked in. Thomas Dublin highlights the success as he notes, ‘in 1850, cotton and woollen textile mills in New England employed about eighty-five thousand workers producing goods valued at just over $68 million.’[3] The growing industrial success of the female factory workers further renders the bachelor’s lifestyle and idleness as outmoded. Melville makes reference to the outdated aristocracy of the Templar Knights, an old fashioned European organisation shrouded in mystery and romance. He says, ‘do we understand you to insinuate that those famous Templars still survive in modern London? […] Surely a Monk-Knight were a curious sight picking his way along the Strand’[4] (p.86) Melville’s constant references to the past hint that the world of the bachelors is a product of fantasy, one which is being romanticised so the men can cling onto an outdated lifestyle. The narrator continues to call them ‘degenerate’ and says, ‘the bold Knights Templars are no more.’ (p.87) The narrator himself sets off the idea of the outdated, anachronistic lifestyle of the Templars. Even the current day bachelors, who he claims have ‘wit and wine […]of sparkling brands’ are depicted as idle. In the story, all they do is eat, drink and take ‘snuff very freely’ before returning to the street to either ‘call a hack’ or ‘be driven snugly to their distant lodgings.’ (p.93) The masculine past that the narrator is clinging to no longer has a place in society. The old, Christian world in London contrasts so greatly to the new industrial present. Kevin J Hayes argues that:

‘at a moment of cultural transition, when gender and sexual categories were solidifying and many Americans had become interested in labelling identities […] he [Melville] styled himself “the last lingerer on a generational threshold.’[5]

Melville’s story recognises a societal change which renders the bachelor lifestyle obsolete. He clings onto an outdated aristocratic lifestyle, knowing that is no longer has a noteworthy place in America. Gender categories were being redefined and Melville’s story is one way to track the process of change in America.

Whilst it becomes clear that the aristocratic male world is in decline, Melville still does not depict the industrial female experience in a positive way. The women live trapped to the patriarchal world and are treated as human machines. The story begins with a description of the bleak landscape, correlating with the bleak experience of the women inside the mill. Melville manipulates the language to dramatize the harsh setting of the story. The mountain the mill is placed on is named ‘Woedolor’. This name immediately introduces the fundamental theme of commerce and transaction in connection with sadness. These themes are then placed in the feminine landscape. The journey the narrator takes in order to arrive at the ‘Devil’s Dungeon’ is described as ‘bleak’, with a wheel-road that is ‘dangerously narrow.’(p.94) The story mediates gender politics through the landscape, particularly since the river is named ‘Blood River.’ Melville connects the hellish, unpleasant and dangerous landscape with blood to evoke images of pain, but also menstruation, an innate female experience. The location of the paper mill is a direct contrast to the ‘paradise’ of the Temple Bar, which is described as being ‘dreamy’ and ‘charming.’ (p.86) Melville depicts the old, aristocratic world of men as idle and outdated. However, the new, industrial female world is likened to hell and described in cold, harsh language. It becomes clear that the gender discourse of new America has not yet been figured out. Martin Schofield argues, ‘the luxury depicted [in the first story] can be seen to depend, economically and psychologically, on the suffering in the second story.’[6] It seems that old, masculine America needs to depend on female suffering in order to reaffirm patriarchal superiority. The male world needs to reconfirm its own identity within the ever-growing female industrial space. The aristocratic Templars are depicted as outmoded, the new discourse of industry and women workers has not yet been figured out. Megan M. Wadle argues:

‘Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.‘[7]

Therefore, in this instance, Melville uses female suffering in order to highlight the fragility of masculine identity within the development of industrial America. Melville’s story depicts the male anxiety of trying to reconfirm an identity in the growing industrial society. The American short story traces the decline of the bachelor’s world and the rising female industrial world. In doing so, it notes the patriarchal response to the continuous growth of capitalist America.

References:
Featured Painting: Gustave Courbet, The Ornans Paper Mill (c.1865), Oil on Canvas, Musée Courbet, France.

Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears’ in American Literature: A Journey of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (2018) Vol.90 No.1 p.55.

[1] Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995) p.230

[2] Kevin J Hayes, Herman Melville in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p.g n/a

[3] Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution, p.228

[4] Herman Melville in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp.86-106 (p.87) All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

[5] Kevin J Hayes, Herman Melville in Context p.g n/a

[6] Martin Schofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p.50

[7] Megan M. Wadle, ‘“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears’ in American Literature: A Journey of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography (2018) Vol.90 No.1 p.55

Written by Sarah Culham.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Myth of Innate Social Cohesion During the London Blitz

‘It’s intellectuals like ourselves who are the only free men. Not bound by conventions, patriotic emotions, sentimentality […] we haven’t what they call a stake in the country.’
-Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear, p.29.

The London Blitz caused large scale destruction and unrest in London which, naturally, fuelled anger towards the enemy. During this time of conflict there existed a myth of an innate social cohesion, where London was united against the perpetrator. Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear deconstructs this idea of a united Britain against a common enemy. Suzan R. Grayzel notes the large scale destruction during the Blitz. She argues:

Those whom air raids affected had to confront an essential feature of modern and total warfare: every home could now come under fire. As a result, civilians mattered in wartime as never before.1

The large scale ruin and the effect on the civilians would assume a negative reaction to the Blitz. However, Arthur Rowe focuses on his own personal experience with disregard to the collective struggle. Buildings that once held memories are destroyed, and the destruction is liberating for Rowe who’s past, according to the narrator, both traps and defines him. Memories of his wife are intertwined with the streets of London and Rowe lives with the guilt of killing her. The narrator says, ‘after a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer-it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one.’2 The bars of the prison cell metaphorically represent his past and when London is bombed he is free; the physical destruction purifies him of his guilt. The stranger who attempts to kill Rowe in Mrs Purvis’ house summarises Rowe’s indifference to the destruction caused by the blitz. He says, ‘it’s intellectuals like ourselves who are the only free men. Not bound by conventions, patriotic emotions, sentimentality […] we haven’t what they call a stake in the country.’ (p.29) Rowe becomes immune to patriotic emotion and instead he is occupied with thoughts of his own past. Choosing to disengage with the political discourse of war does not render Rowe a free man. Instead, patriotic emotions are replaced with imprisoning feelings of guilt. He is ‘othered’ from a collective fight against one common ‘enemy’ as he fights his personal war against his past. Greene presents a system of living based on personal salvation and redemption, rather than a desire to be part of a larger ideology. The novel continues to feature a discourse of imprisonment surrounding him. Greene writes, ‘for more than a year now Rowe had been imprisoned- there had been no change of cell, no exercise yard, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement.’ (p.46) The language used by Greene renders Rowe an outsider trapped in the cell of his own mind, confined by his past. Greene depicts a conflict of language and ideas within the novel: Rowe is liberated and cleansed by the bombing, but equally, remains trapped by his past. This state of stasis Rowe experiences renders him an outsider from any social cohesion. By focusing on internal strife and finding relief in the bombing, Rowe is ‘othered’ from a patriotic unity against a common ‘enemy’. The definition of ‘other’, then, is not only a description of a foreign enemy, as would be assumed war time London. Instead, Rowe himself is the enemy, as he is wages a war against himself.

At the beginning of the novel, Rowe attends a fête, a place he would go every year as a child. Imagery of war is reoccurring throughout the fête, reminding the reader of the greater social events happening at the time. Greene writes, ‘of course, this year there would be no coconuts because there was a war on’ (p.11) and, ‘they would have to close early because of the black-out.’ (p.11) The novel depicts a community trying to cling onto life pre-war by hosting a fête. The event, however, cannot be separated from the discourse of war which penetrates each aspect of the day. Greene depicts the loneliness the people felt during the war by clinging onto an idyllic, British tradition and gathering together to create a sense of community. The novel shows that collectively people in Britain were endeavoring to re-create a piece of the past in order to escape their own horrific, brutal reality of life during the London Blitz. Instead of using the fête to escape the horror of the Blitz, Rowe uses it as a way to fantasize about his own past, and attempt to re-live his childhood experience. He immediately becomes ‘othered’ from the collective experience of the other fête goers. Instead, Rowe spends his time attempting to reconnect with his childhood innocence. In doing so, he momentarily rids himself from his present overriding feelings of guilt. The narrator defines Rowe’s perception of childhood as, ‘liv[ing] under the brightness of immortality […] God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock.’ (p.95) In short, childhood is a simpler, blameless time with no moral ambiguity. For Rowe, the fête is symbolic of the past as the narrator says, ‘the fête called him like innocence: it was entangled with childhood.’ (p.11) The novel suggests that Rowe endeavours to reconnect with his lost sense of identity and reunite with who he was before he murdered his wife: an opportunity to cleanse himself from his past. The text says, ‘he came to these fêtes every year with an odd feeling of excitement as if anything might happen, as if the familiar pattern of his afternoon might be altered forever.’(p.13) Greene continues to recall Rowe’s desire to ‘mislay the events of twenty years.’ (p.13) The novel depicts Rowe in a state of stasis: unable to escape his past, with no clear direction for his future. The fête represents a longing for the past, as other people who attend the fête unite in their hatred of the war, and desire for some normality amongst the chaos. Rowe, on the other hand, isolates himself from the shared experience of escaping the Blitz. Instead, he uses the event to escape his own, personal past. His inability to forgive his own past means he fails to connect with his own present, rendering him an ‘other’, but at his own will.

References:
Featured painting: Nettie Moon, The Spirit of London during the Blitz, 1979, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 65.5 cm, Museum of London.

1.Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

2.Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (London: Penguin, 1943) All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

Written by Sarah Culham
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Displaced Desires and Transgressive Sexual Ideologies in George Moore’s John Norton

‘I know not what attraction they [men] can find in such ugliness. It is beastly.’
-George Moore, John Norton, p.332

A queer sense of desire is shown in George Moore’s ‘John Norton’, destabilising dominant models of sexual identity. John Norton projects his sexual impulses onto unconventional ideologies, such as art and religion. Roger Luckhurst writes, ‘[d]ecadence was associated with ostentatious but pointless display […] [the decadent] became absorbed in an obscure, private and perverse world.’2 Norton’s sombre, reclusive lifestyle, rejection of marriage and indulgence in art is (according to Nordau) influenced by Schopenhauer. His philosophy states that a will to live is damaging since death is the inevitable consequence of life, and therefore, in order to escape pain, one must seek comfort in art and contemplation rather than actively participate in life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is summarised by William Van der Will, who writes, ‘In the aesthetic moment man reache[d] a stage of “will-less perception” in which all desire to increase, to multiply, to consume, all craving and wanting [was] suspended in the recognition of beauty.’3 Therefore, the world of will, as believed in by Mrs Norton contrasts with John’s belief, as he refuses to participate in life, and instead directs his attention to ideas. From the beginning of the novella Mrs Norton is trying to reinforce her paternal authority to get John to return home to marry and be an heir to the estate. Her frustration at John’s resistance to social norms is shown through her repetition of the word ‘why’: ‘[w]hy, is it nearly two years since he’s been home. Why does he not come and live at this beautiful place? […] Why does he not marry?’ (p.320-321). Mrs Norton cannot understand that John does not see beauty in the home and estate as the home represents a return to convention, and the adoption of a ‘will’ to live. Mrs Norton sees it as John’s ‘duty’ (p.321) to marry, depicting how John’s reclusive lifestyle and rejection of marriage does not align with the social conventions of heterosexual love. John finds a queer sense of comfort in the refusal to engage in the conventional social structure of marriage alliance, and so transgresses dominant ideologies.

John Norton’s story could be read as one of repressed homosexuality. Throughout the novella he is disgusted by the fleshly form of women. He says, ‘I know not what attraction they [men] can find in such ugliness. It is beastly’ (p.332). Norton also retreats into a homosocial environment at his college to avoid returning home and becoming pressured into heterosexual marriage by his mother. Yet, despite his repulsion for women, the story depicts a queer and twisted version of heterosexuality rather than repressed homosexuality. The fin de siècle bachelor is typically associated with homosexuality, yet John’s main preoccupation is worshipping art, something Nordau singles out as a typical feature of a degenerate. Even when John is engaged to marry Kitty he describes her in a queer way. John says, ‘[h]er face is a pretty oval[…] her eyes are large and soft’ (p.381). He continues to address her ‘boyish figure’, and Kitty is purged of material aspects of womanliness. John sees Kitty as both androgynous and an art object rather than a real-life woman. Therefore she cannot challenge him with real life, sexual demands which John refuses to engage in. When he intends to praise Kitty he describes her as a flower. He says, ‘[a]nd you, in your white dress, with the sunlight on your hair, seem more blossom-like than a flower’ (p.393) Comparing her to a flower is another way of refusing to accept her in her fleshly, bodily form, and therefore, denying her existence as a woman. Instead, praising her beauty as though she is art. Heterosexual love and desire become twisted and challenge dominant structures of heterosexual desire, as John projects his desire onto Kitty in a way which denies her fleshly womanliness and instead places her in a category of androgynous art.

References
Featured Painting: Henri Toulouse- Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1895, Oil on Canvas, 123 x140.5cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

1. George Moore, ‘John Norton’ in Celibates (London: Walter Scott, 1895) p.332. All further references to Moore’s text are to this edition and will be given parenthetically.

2. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’ in Late-Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. ix-xxxi.

3. Wilfried Van der Will, ‘Schopenhauer, Arthur’, in Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, 1800-1914, ed. Justin Wintle, pp. 553-6.

Written by Sarah Culham.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.