When you think of “unsentimental” writers, the names which come to mind would include European philosophers (Arendt, de Beauvoir, Weil) and US journalists and essayists (Didion, Sontag). But what of these fair isles? Do we have our own tradition of tough-minded women’s writing? And who are our great novelists of toughness?
Let’s explore toughness-as-style in British and Irish women novelists circa midcentury to the present.
When crowdsourcing recommendations, Iris Murdoch’s name was mentioned several times, so I dug out this well-thumbed paperback with a moody Edvard Munch woodcut on the cover. Most of the pages had their corners turned, as a reminder to re-visit them, and the margins were dense with notes. It has been a pleasure and an eye-opener to return to a book so rich in conceptual pattern, having lived, loved and learned in the intervening years. Murdoch entertains, while also having much to teach us about storytelling, and—possibly—what matters most in life.
Reading this gothic fairytale/spiritual quest/Jacobean tragedy/courtly romance about the journey towards self-knowledge of a lovelorn school teacher and a civil servant with a passion for the classics, it is not difficult to see how Murdoch acquired a reputation for stylistic toughness. Not a word is wasted, and such description as made it through the editing process is consciously sparse. We are given the effect of light on landscapes and objects, and frequently smells and textures, but there is nothing ornamental here. Perhaps the author felt about precious language the way one of the main characters feels about the ornaments in the great house. They are “greasy,” “unkempt,” “menacing” and “old-fashioned clutter.”
Amid a harsh, wild, desolate, sublime landscape animated by allegorical significance, the heroine and hero arrive at a sinister country house with a difference. She seeks to escape a failed love affair, he to resume a doomed one presented according to the literary conventions of courtly love. Although he is the knight making a romantic pilgrimage, he is characterised as somewhat self-aware and less than idealistic. Marian the Maiden, although aware she lacks aesthetic charm, is in thrall to various forms of idealism: her ex-boyfriend admonishes her with the jibe “will you never be a realist?” As she is drawn from her mundane world into the melancholy subculture of Gaze Castle, her character increasingly belongs within the gothic.
The stakes are high, or at least seem so. Calamity is foreshadowed in the author’s description of the sea in terms of the romantic sublime. It seems “black, mingling with the foam like ink with cream.” Marian “found the vast dark coastline repellent and frightening.” The Byronic, charismatic, domineering Gerald Scottow warns her off.
“‘No one swims in the sea. It is far too cold. And it is a sea that kills people.’ Marion, who was a strong swimmer, privately decided to swim all the same.”
And so, we know the novel’s major themes are deep and timeless—love and mortality—but there is a third major theme tucked away in the subtext: class, and this is distinctive in that the narrative voice deals with it through humour. Marian, the character, and Murdoch, the novelist, do not belong to the great house-owning class but rather mock it—and long to possess its essence—from a distance.
“Nervously venturing out into the silent stuffy corridor, she found near by a lavatory with a vast mahogany seat, which seemed warm from generations of incumbents.”
The lady, Hannah Crean-Smith, is a “placid golden idol” who inhabits a golden chamber at the heart of a house which is otherwise dark, musty and chilly. In captivity which may or may not be self-imposed, she is the unicorn of the title: a metaphor for the suffering Christ, but also for imagination itself. A whiskey-drinking dreamer depicted as the calm centre of a swirling emotional storm, rumours circulate among the house’s inhabitants that she is a femme fatale. While there are moments where the mystery plot tilts towards “something nasty in the woodshed” territory, the narrative regains its poise and seriousness.
In the history of art, the unicorn surrenders only to a maiden. Our maiden is Marian, who discovers that she has been hired not to teach children but to read to Hannah as a distraction from her agoraphobia, loneliness, boredom and emotional paralysis. Some of the occupants see Hannah as a victim to be rescued, others as a danger to be managed. Her absent, avenging husband is continually threatening to stage a re-appearance, and unleash the hysteria that simmers under the surface of relations in the castle. Into the rip tides of these dysfunctional group dynamics Marian and Effingham are steadily drawn.
Hannah’s choice of bedtime reading with Marian is French symbolist poet Paul Valéry’s most fin-de-siécle poem of all, The Graveyard By The Sea, in which all is haze, mist, smoke, glister and pulsing motion. Hannah reads the original French, and I’ve found some unsatisfying translations which don’t work when read aloud, so here is my adaptation. At best, the poem is pure music:
Just as a mouth dissolves the pear it’s eating,
Transformed, as it breaks down, into delight,
So my soul melts as I inhale my future,
Bounds disintegrating into air.
The sky sings with lost souls.
Rumours circulate: change will come.
No, no! Arise! The coming years unfold.
Shatter, o dear body, meditation’s mould!
And o my lungs, draw rebirth from the wind!
A freshness exhaled by the waves restores my soul!
Ah salty power! Let’s run at the waves
To bring us back to life!
As a side note, Valéry put down his pen after writing The Graveyard by the Sea and turned away from romance & sentiment towards the austere, objectivity-seeking realm of science. He must not have found what he was looking for. After twenty years of searching for truth within that domain, he returned to poetry.
Hannah, then, is the archetypal Romantic with a capital ‘R,’ enchanted by the formless and indeterminate, confined to a world of feeling and aesthetics and fluidity, far from the effort of thinking in straight lines and observing sacred boundaries. While Gerald Scottow laconically notes that the sea kills people, in Hannah’s imagination it brings people—and perhaps ideas, and glorious pasts—back to life. She is, among other things, a beautiful dream from a fading past.
The landscape of The Unicorn is a fairytale depiction of the west of Ireland, so are we looking at an early example of “Bog Gothic” here? “The Scarren” is obviously the Burren, and the deathly cliffs evoke the Cliffs of Moher: we are in an imaginary, allegorical County Clare. Then there is the stereotypical enthusiasm with which whiskey is consumed by the residents of the great house. There is mention of fairies, turf cutting, and a sinister bog occupied by a supernatural force, in which Effingham nearly meets his end. Murdoch was Anglo-Irish with mixed Irish and—if you go back far enough—English heritage. One of her mother’s ancestral lines belonged to the ruling, landed class which arrived in the seventeenth century. By all accounts, they came down in the world after that, and Iris was the first in her family to attend university.
By page 186 in my 1977 edition, I was not entirely sure what was going on, and I liked it. The mystery made me turn pages. Effingham reconnects with his old tutor to talk philosophy, specifically the virtue ethics that were Murdoch’s stock-in-trade when she was teaching at Oxford. Max has spent his life in a spiritual quest but, towards the end of his time, finds that he hasn’t even begun.
“Good is the distant source of light. It is the unimaginable source of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarised by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.’
‘This sounds like a mystery religion.’
‘All religions are mystery religions.’”
Without spoiling, in the end, all’s well that ends well. With characteristic toughness, Murdoch dispenses with characters who are incapable of moral development. Hannah confesses to having been an emotional vampire.
“It was your belief in the significance of my suffering that kept me going. Ah, how much I needed you all!…I needed my audience, I lived in your gaze like a false God. But it is the punishment of a false God to become unreal...You made me into an object of contemplation. Just like this landscape.”
As for what exactly Hannah symbolises within the novel, you can enjoy working out those patterns for yourself when you read it.
“Max had been right perhaps when he said that they had all turned towards her to discover a significance in their own sufferings, to load their own evil on to her to be burnt up. It had been a fantasy of the spiritual life, a story, a tragedy. Only the spiritual life has no story and is not tragic.”
We have shifted from doom-laden Sturm und Drang to lighter realms, but this resolution calls for rather drastic means from the author as she prunes the dramatis personae.
The novel is like a highly worked expanse of ultra-fine fabric. The warp is spun from invisible and strong yarn. Into this, Murdoch weaves striking strands of detective mystery, virtue ethics, traditional fairytale, Medieval Courtly romance, 18th Century Gothic and 20th Century romantic confusion. The author plumbs her fascination with the literary history and the history of ideas before pulling the reader out of that sucking bog, that tumultuous, brooding, dark sea, to return us to the well-lit world of realism, emotional maturity, practicality, and sanity.
Pick up a copy of The Unicorn from wherever you buy your books, and join us for the next readalong of tough, unsentimental British and Irish women novelists from midcentury to the present.
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