Tag: George Orwell

A Neglected Classic:  George Orwell’s “A Clergyman’s Daughter”

When you think of George Orwell, you do not say, “Oh, yes, he wrote my favorite novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter!”  In fact, you’ve probably never heard of A Clergyman’s Daughter. His dystopian novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, dominate the Orwellian canon.  And yet A Clergyman’s Daughter is truly a neglected classic, a realistic character study as well as a political analysis of women’s secondary role in society. Published in 1935, it is partly an exposé of the exploitation of poor single women, partly a portrait of a hard-working woman who is repulsed by the idea of “romance,” and partly an account of dire poverty and homelessness.

Having recently read Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell’s comic novel about an impoverished anti-establishment bookseller, I was enraptured to discover A Clergyman’s Daughter, which is even more brilliant. His portrait of the heroine, Dorothy Hare, the rector’s daughter, is sympathetic and poignant. And one-third of the way through the book, the narrative takes an astonishing turn that, despite the political subtext, teeters on the edge of fantasy. Orwell, however, gently brings us back to earth.

Kind, dutiful Dorothy is her father’s unpaid curate, as is clear even to Dorothy. In addition to managing her father’s household, she devotes herself to the church and its parishioners. She listens to the village schoolteacher’s endless lectures about “the real Catholic worship,” which, in his view, should feature lots of incense, fancy vestments, and processions; she makes complicated costumes for the children’s pageants, including armor and jackboots made of paper and glue; she reads Girl of the LImberlost aloud to the ladies’ knitting circle (Gene Stratton Porter is their favorite author, and she wonders what on earth to read to them next); she visits the poor and rubs the rheumatic legs of an old woman – an unpleasant task; organizes the Harvest Festival; organizes the Girl Guides; tries to convince her father they must pay the butcher’s bill (he prefers to “invest” his money and let the tradesmen wait); and pedals 20-30 miles every day “on her elderly  bicycle with the basketwork carrier on the handlebars” on her errands. Dorothy never has a moment to herself.

Because Dorothy has no real power or money, she spends her days deflecting other people’s legitimate and illegitimate worries. How can she raise money for church repairs? It is impossible. She listens to Mr. Progett’s complaints about the condition of the bells, which have been lying on the floor of the bell tower for three years, and may soon fall through the floor. She agrees that he is right.

“Well, I don’t know what we can do,” Dorothy repeated.  “Of course there’s the jumble sale coming off the week after next.  I’m counting on Miss Mayfill to give us something really nice for the jumble sale…. We must pray that the jumble sale will be a success, Proggett.  Pray that it will bring us five pounds at least.”

Exhausted from making jackboots for the children’s pageant, she accepts an invitation to visit the charming, if slightly lecherous, Mr. Warburton:  he has asked her especially to meet “Ronald Bewley, the  novelist.  Author of Fishbones and Concubines.  Surely you’ve read Fishbones and Concubines.”  Well, Dorothy hasn’t read it, but she wants some time off from making Jackboots, so she arrives on her bicycle, looking forward to a nice chat. 

Regrettably, Ronald Bewley doesn’t show up.  That’s because Mr. Warburton made him up.  But they have a nice chat, and after she fends off Mr. Warburton’s embraces – which is very easy, because she nimbly puts her bike between them – she goes home with the sick knowledge that she must stay up all night making costumes. 

And then … she disappears.  Vanishes. No one knows where she is. All the newspapers run stories about the missing rector’s daughter. What terrifies Dorothy when she finally regains consciousness is that she does not remember who she is. SShe finds herself in London, almost penniless. Not knowing what to do, she joins a cheerful young ex-con, Nobby, who tells her he became a widower at age 20 (and this is typical of the sad stories Dorothy hears on her travels), and they go to the country to pick hops – which turns out to be blissful work, being outdoors all day. But after Nobby is arrested for stealing fruit that has fallen off trees and that the farmers don’t bother with anyway, he winks at her, swears at the police, and is taken away to jail. At the end of hop-picking season, Dorothy returns alone to London and is homeless, freezing at Trafalgar Square. 

How will she survive? Will she recover her identity? Finally, she sees a tabloid with her picture in it and an article about how she went missing. She realizes she must have blacked out.

This is not the end of her adventures, though both Orwell and Dorothy are aware of the fact that women without money have remarkably few choices.  Orwel is passionately leftist, but he can’t quite make Dorothy into a political sacrifice. She is an ordinary 28-year-old woman who makes a choice that not everyone will empathize with.  The important thing, Orwell seems to say, is that she is able to make a choice, not have it made for her. And certainly we admire her bravery, as she makes a difficult choice with her eyes wide open to the future.

The Reinvented Bildungsroman: Doris Lessing’s “The Summer Before the Dark” & “Children of Violence”; George Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”; and Louisa May Alcott’s “An Old-Fashioned Girl”

 Like many avid readers of the bildungsroman, I have noted that coming-of-age novels never go out of fashion.  Not a week goes by that there is not a review of a new coming-of-age novel.  I often reread my favorites, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Mill on the Floss. My preference is for the nineteenth century novel; perhaps they did it better. Yet as I grow older, I appreciate the modern reinvention of the bildungsroman as a form that focuses on a transitional period, such as the beginning of middle- or old age.  

So what exactly do we mean by this term?  Doris Lessing insisted that her five-volume Children of Violence series was a bildungsroman.  The first four are naturalistic novels minutely documenting the life of the heroine, Martha Quest, up to the age of 30. But the fifth is problematic.

Many 20th-century women readers  identify with Martha’s desperate struggle to escape the limits of the family and geography that defined their parents’ generation.  The last book in the series, The Four-Gated City, is so experimental that it stands apart as a separate entity, and redefines the novel:  I love it, some hate it. it is the story of Martha in London from age 30 to old age, set against the history of radicalism and sexual politics in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  Lessing also explores the wobbly definition and treatment of madness, and ends with the kind of apocalypse that will doubtless happen, where all is confusion, and no one knows the origin. So is this novel part of the bildungsroman?  I’m not sure.

Lessing’s short 1973 bildungsroman, The Summer Before the Dark, is much more conventional. She focuses on one summer, the transition in Kate Brown’s life from busy, youngish wife and mother to middle age and independence.

That summer, her husband and grown-up children will be out of the country. So Kate is coerced into taking a job as a translator.  Soon she is translating not only Portuguese into English, but the conference-goers’ needs and insecurities into information and services.  And so she is upgraded to a manager, and realizes ironically that she is making a living out of her mothering skills.

Lessing, as well as Kate, wonders, Is this how Kate wants to spend the rest of her life?  As a professional mother?  And after the conference, during a month in a rented room in a hippie girl’s apartment, she changes her expectations, reads, and experiments with clothes: how do her looks affect how people see her?

Most important, she learns how to be middle-aged:  you learn to adapt and move on or are trapped in a role that no longer fits.

Needless to say, George Orwell has little in common with Lessing. I recently reread Orwell’s novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, because I remembered that it is set partly in a bookstore. I did not recall, however, that the raging hero, Gordon Comstock, quit his advertising job to avoid the “money stink.” This novel is essentially a comedy, but it is also about working for poverty wages in a used bookstore and the demands of money in our materialistic culture.  

In this mini-bildungsroman, Gordon is confronting (or avoiding?) the crisis of turning 30.  What do you do when you quit your well paid job in your late twenties and take a job at a second-hand bookstore, because you are too idealistic for the “money stink”?  Now he can barely afford to go out for a drink with his editor friend, Ravelston,  or take his girlfriend, Rosemary, to dinner, and he refuses to let them pay his way.   

Gordon is also a poet, the author of a slim volume of poetry, reviewed by prestigious publications.  He glares at the bookshop’s poetry section.  “His own wretched book was there – skied, of course, high up among the unsaleable.  Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob.”

Gordon has lost his inspiration, and his new manuscript is a crossed-out, inky mess. Orwell comically describes Georges desperation for cigarettes, his inconvenient lodgings, and a drinking spree that gets him fired. – so he falls down even lower on the social ladder.  The question is:  can Ravelston, Rosemary, and his sister Juilia, who lives in genteel poverty, persuade him to take a job that pays?  His biological clock, or do I mean time bomb, is ticking:  what does one do at age 30

And now I will end on a lighter note. I am a fan of a little-known bildungsroman by Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, which is a kind of unraveling of a Vanity Fair, which the heroine radically rejects and shoots down. (Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Flying would approve.) Alcott, who had a contract to write girls’ books, is often criticized for her tendency to “moralize.” Yet this criticism  reflects either ignorance or denial of her upbringing and idealism.   Her father,  Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist philosopher who socialized with Thoreau and Emerson,  not only  founded a vegetarian commune but  started a radical school open to students of all races – which, alas, was shut down.  In An Old-Fashioned Girl, Alcott pits the values of friendship and hard work against materialism and slavery to fashion. 

The impoverished  heroine, Polly, a lively country girl, is used to hard work and is close to her family.  On a visit to  the the Shaws, a nouveau riche family in the city, she is appalled by her worldly friend Fanny’s affectations.  Money drives the family’s inappropriate actions and shallow manners, but Polly quietly smooths the relationships among Fan, her “fractious” younger sister, Maud, and their neglected grandmother, who has marvelous stories to tell. 

As you can imagine, the lives of Polly and Fan differ in adulthood.  Polly become a hard-working music teacher, while Fanny is still absorbed in parties, fashion, and love. Polly introduces Fanny to her bohemian circle of artistic friends, a struggling group of  New England women striving to be taken seriously.   And Fanny is impressed.

Becky Jeffrey, a sculptress, lives with an engraver, Lizzie Small, in a small studio; Kate King is an authoress, struggling with her new novel; and Fanny’s landlady, Miss Mills, a philanthropist,  instead of living alone, rents rooms at low rates to impecunious people.

And Polly and Fanny do have to struggle to survive: they undergo radical changes and unforeseen difficulty. There is also romance.

And of course Alcott moralizes, but that doesn’t bother me in the least.

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