Devolving Identities

Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging

Lynne Pearce, Lynne Pearce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

There is no doubt that the political and cultural map of Europe is in the process of being radically redrawn. Alongside the major upheavals in continental Europe, the British Isles has undergone far-reaching constitutional reform. In Devolving Identities, feminist scholars explore their personal negotiations of gender, class, ethnicity and national or regional identity through their readings of two literary and cultural 'texts'. The collection centres on the ontological experience of reading and writing 'as a feminist', and combines the discussion of texts which are inscribed - whether consciously or unconsciously - with the academics' own struggle to reconcile their 'roots' with their current 'situations' or 'identities'. This book's focus on the overlapping of gender and national or regional identity is a direct response to the devolution movements currently active in the British Isles. The contributors are drawn from Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Northern Ireland and selected regions of England. In its complex engagement of subject and text and its political insistence that we no longer consider key aspects of 'identity' in isolation, this volume presents a truly state-of-the-art investigation of (a) what it means to be 'regionally defined' and (b) how the complexity of our positioning in terms of class, gender and nation impacts upon our practice as literary and cultural critics.

Chapter 1
‘The Undeveloped Heart’: Forster, Pym and the English South

Hilary Hinds

Beached in Bournemouth

Nor is suburbia absent. Boumemouth's ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City's trail!¹

For me, now, Boumemouth's pine trees mean sleep. At least, my mother tells me that it is something exuded by those ubiquitous pine trees, edging the broad avenues and lining the chines that lead down to the beaches, that makes visitors yawn till their jaws crack, makes their heads thick, makes them long to sleep early in the evening, and makes them rise late and unrefreshed in the morning. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps the fact that I share this response with others who visit the town should wean me away from my sense that the enervation is psychological or emotional rather than physiological. But, having grown up in Boumemouth, a byword for elderly gentility, I cannot help but think that the lassitude that descends as soon as I get off the train is both residual, the remnant of teenage monotony, and protective, guarding against the insinuations of a town left long ago.

For my parents, as for Forster, Boumemouth was the end-point of the City's trail, but for them it marked a contrast with London rather than a continuation of it, and this was its appeal. For them, in the mid-1950s, London meant smog, frozen pipes, cramped and dark basement flats; it was not a place to raise children. Bournemouth promised the opposite. It meant space, light, air, parks, beaches; it was, I was reminded throughout my childhood, a wonderful place for children. It was a chosen place, somewhere to make a home, somewhere they determined to make their own. Moving there was an act of affirmation.

To their new home they brought stories of their old homes. My mother's stories came from two locations. There were those from Scotland, her father's home: tales of her three aunts who ran a farm, who raised her father, who churned their own butter, who were never seen hatless, even first thing in the morning; these were stories of tough, capable, unmarried, fulfilled, working women, but also stories of self-reliance and self-discipline, of resolution and application and strictness, of conventional Presbyterian virtues. Then there were the stories of Exeter, where she grew up with two brothers and three sisters in middle-class comfort, a world of nannies, housemaids and gardeners, front stairs and back stairs, as compelling, unreal and fantastic as those featured in Peter Pan and Mary Poppins. My father's stories ofhome were less sharply defined, but just as impossible as my mother's. Born in Bombay, his father in the Indian Army; aunts and cousins in Belfast, Anglo-Irish Protestants whose forebears had 'gone to Ireland with Cromwell'; boarding schools in England: home for him was elsewhere, nowhere, his nomadic parents alighting finally in North Devon, for no good reason, as far as I could tell. A colonial childhood, the kind I later recognized in the writing of Saki and Kipling, in Forster.

These origin stories ran in parallel with the 'home' that I knew; they both gave me an identity and, at the same time, threw into relief the ways in which Bournemouth seemed to deny me an identity. This was my family, so the stories were, in some senses, about me. 'I'm half Irish, quarter Scottish, and quarter English', I took pride in telling my schoolfriends, but the 'English' part was just a makeweight, something that had nothing to say in itself; lacking the compelling Celtic romance of the other two national elements, it told my friends nothing about who I was. I saw no continuities between my parents' stories of home and the place in which I lived. Bournemouth was not Scotland, nor Ireland, nor was it Devon, 'the West Country'. It was English, southern English, a location that, as far as I could see, was unmarked by any of the things that linked places with distinctive, and desirable, identities – accent, music, food, mythology, extended family, history. Bournemouth was quintessentially suburban, though without the urbs that might have mitigated its uniformity and conservatism. It was a parvenu with social aspirations. Bournemouth's thoroughfares were never designated as 'streets' – presumably the town planners found the word too urban, too contrary to their ambitions for the town; only roads, avenues, closes and crescents can be found in its A to Z. Beached in Bournemouth, biding my time, I looked for, and looked to, other locations – London, France, Glasgow, Birmingham – to provide me with a grittiness, an authenticity that Bournemouth so heartlessly denied me.

This response to my hometown could be characterized in two ways. First, it was marked by a sense of dislocation, a feeling that the places to which my sense of self might have been able to anchor itself were elsewhere, and mine only by proxy. Secondly, and at the same time, I had a sense of unlocation, that the place in which I found myself was not a place in which I could find myself, could not offer any of the routes to, hooks for, or narratives of identity that I saw articulated in my parents' stories of home.² Bournemouth was the space left when everywhere else had taken what it wanted.

Such autobiographical accounts are no longer unusual as springboards for excursions into cultural theory. A familiar and conventional tale of a childhood outsider, at odds with her home, her family, of a middle-class romanticization or appropriation of a number of different 'elsewheres', my own account offers possibilities for an extended consideration of the relationship between identity and class, gender, colonialism, nationality, ethnicity, narrative, history. What I want to do in this chapter is to indicate the ways in which some of these different co-ordinates are inflected through, and by means of, the location in which they were articulated – through the specifics of the kind of southern Englishness outlined above. In so doing, I shall also consider the contingency of these analyses and accounts. For, of course, origin stories such as the one produced above have no authority as unmediated reflections of the truth concerning their author's subjectivity. The rehearsal of my discontent with, and my embarrassment at, my middle-England origins, my feeling of being to one side of the stories of identity that made most sense to me, is a long-running one, a transmuting one, and one that has its own origin stories. It is clear already that my relationship with Bournemouth, or the English south in general, has since childhood been a thoroughly narrativized one, articulated through and against my parents' stories of home, and in the teeth ofBournemouth as a place, as I saw it, without a history or story of its own. I want to examine in this chapter how this sense ofbeing 'to one side' of my hometown came to be articulated and foregrounded in my account of myself through two encounters with more literary narratives: E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (1958). What part does the 'southern Englishness' of these two novels play in my readings (both first and subsequent) of them and of myself? What aspects of those texts did I recuperate to my own self-narrative? What did those readings ignore – or, rather, how does returning to these texts now whilst in the throes of having to reconceptualize myself as middle-aged prompt me to reread them?

Forster’s England: safe as houses

'I'll live anywhere except Bournemouth, Torquay and Cheltenham. ... There on no account.' (p. 119)

So says Margaret Schlegel, as she and her brother Tibby discuss where they might live when, their lease expiring, they are obliged to move out of Wickham Place, their childhood London home. Her naming of these towns (together with Ilfracombe, Swanage, Tunbridge Wells, Surbiton and Bedford) as unfit to live in is not incidental to the scheme of the novel. Howards End is famous on the one hand for its concern with the question of 'who shall inherit England?', and on the other for its attempt to debate and resolve this question by looking at what there is to be inherited, where it is to be found, and what it is worth, through the condensation, identification and characterization of 'value' (or the undermining of it) with specific places and, in particular, houses – Wickham Place, Ducie Street, the Basts' flat, Oniton Grange and, supremely, Howards End itself.³ The towns named by Margaret represent, as the quotation with which I open this chapter makes clear, the suburban outposts of the city of London.

But, despite this, these towns are not coterminous with the city: Bournemouth is 'ignoble' (p. 170), whilst London permits the Schlegels' lives to be 'cultured but not ignoble' (p. 115); the litotes here signals the possibility of ignobility in the same move that it is refuted, kept at bay, apparently, by a culture to be found in the city itself but not its suburban outposts. 'Down at Swanage', we are told, 'no one appreciated culture more than Mrs Munt' (p. 29), and the uninformed, bourgeois and rather philistine way that Mrs Munt appreciates 'culture' is one of the butts of humour, and one element in the novel's critique of the effects of culture on different fractions of the middle class, in Chapter V, in which the Schlegels listen to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Here, Mrs Munt 'tap[s] surreptitiously when the tunes come', and asserts that 'I do not go in for being musical... I only care for music – a very different thing. But still I will say this for myself – I do know when I like a thing and when I don't. ... When it comes to music I am as safe as houses...' (pp. 44, 51). Mrs Munt's responses, like her hometown of Swanage, are indicative of a small-minded, clumsy, at times self-deluding English parochialism that the novel is concerned to criticize.

Such references to the suburban are a crucial element in the anatomization, diagnosis and critique of 'England' undertaken in Howards End. The pleasures of the capital city may be insubstantial, transitory, even illusory ('London only stimulates, it cannot sustain' (p. 155)), the locus of real English value may be in the rural continuities of Howards End and its surrounding farms (p. 264), and the city and the countryside might be the two key elements in the dynamic by which the narrative is played out. However, the suburban is the channel through which the encroachment of the former on the latter is effected. Hilton, the village closest to Howards End, is becoming suburban; suburbia is both symptom and disease, it is the 'red rust' of London, corroding the countryside that constitutes the legacy of the real England (pp. 29-30, 141-2, 329). The rejection of suburbia, its delineation as spiritually impoverished, is a given; it is not a part of the debate between the various manifestations of city and rural values represented by the sparring of Schlegels and Wilcoxes, Basts and Schlegels, Helen and Margaret, Margaret and Henry, and so on. For Henry, suburbia is no good because it is 'neither one thing nor the other', for Helen it is a sign of London creeping, for Margaret it is not to be countenanced as a place to live, for Leonard it is a barrier to the authenticity of the countryside – 'gas lamps for hours' (pp. 142, 126). All except Mrs Munt, and Charles and Dolly – figures who in themselves represent aspects of suburbia's impoverishment – find suburbia undesirable, debilitating, but it is through the voice of the narrator, a voice that gains its authoritativeness through its intimate, confiding, vaguely apologetic yet still self-satisfied tone, that we learn the most about the meanings and dangers of suburbia. In a series of narratorial interventions, short essays or reflections that seek to characterize the meanings of London, the countryside, and thereby England, we are left in no doubt that suburbia has no place in the vision of England that the novel is advocating; indeed, in itself it constitutes the other half of one of the binarisms that help the reader to understand 'England'. As Mrs Munt arrives at the railway station in Hilton for the first time, the narrator asks, 'Into which country will it lead, England or Suburbia?' (pp. 29-30). The two, quite clearly, are not compatible. Suburbia, within the scheme of meaning set up by the narrative, is not 'English'.

This inclusion of suburbia within a scheme of situated values was certainly one reason for the novel's impact on me when, at sixteen years old, I first read it. It offered, quite explicitly, a validation of my own assessment of Bournemouth, and, indeed, of Cheltenham, where my brother had gone to boarding school and where I had endured interminable and much resented weekend visits. Nowhere else in Literature had I ever seen Bournemouth named; here, it was not only named, but done so in such a way that my own sense ofbeing to one side of my town and my family was not just a piece of teenage cussedness, but linked to a wider structure of feeling. The novel gave me a way to insert myself into this structure; it gave me the terms by which to elevate my assessment of my context, that sense of distaste and ennui, into an endorsement of a set of contrary values. The castigation of suburbia is of a piece, the novel suggested, with the ultimate endorsement of the Schlegels' vision, the valuing of the inner life, the unseen, the personal, as set against the profound limitations and fundamental hypocrisies of the outer life of the Wilcoxes, the world of finance, commerce, colonialism, of 'telegrams and anger', 'panic and emptiness'. For me, this legitimated a refusal of the world as seen by The Daily Telegraph, with the hypocrisy of its high-toned espousal of family values and Mary Whitehouse's Festival of Light sitting side by side with its relish for the gossip and scandal it grouped on page 3; it rendered comprehensible my incredulity at a town where it was acceptable for a headmistress to pray for a Tory victory in the forthcoming General Election, and to pray that her charges 'might not look down upon the working classes'; and it sanctified my shrinking from a home where the prospect of weekends of Canasta and a small sherry ought to have been enough. Town, school, home, and family melded into a configuration of skewed values, anxious unspontaneity, and fmely nuanced shades of tedium. Howards End spoke to me so clearly because it offered me a series of linked points of identification. Margaret not only speaks against Boumemouth; she also understands 'the tragedy of preparedness', 'that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy' (pp. 115, 71); and it is she who questions conformity and orthodoxy, embracing instead 'the battle against sameness. Differences – eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray' (p. 328). The connections between these elements – Boumemouth, preparedness, difference – made Margaret's the voice of a critical insider: someone with detailed insider knowledge, but a knowledge that was put to work against the values of the inside. It was with recognition and relief that I encountered this voice.

Twenty-five years on from that first reading, the novel's verdict on suburbia, and what went along with it, looks rather less appealing. Fearful of so-called 'mass culture' and its enfeebling effects on genuine culture (however defined), Forster, in common with so many other writers, artists and intellectuals of his day, as John Carey has argued, used the suburbs as shorthand for the narrow-minded and conservative, the trivial, and the inauthentic. Carey notes how the word 'suburban' is 'distinctive in combining topographical with intellectual disdain. It relates human worth to habitat'.⁴ This link between human worth and habitat is, as I have suggested, fundamental to Howards End's narrative strategy and argument, and the disdain for all things suburban is just one plank in this. Needless to say, for me now, this disdain for the suburban smacks of a rather crude and embarrassing snobbery and elitism; and, indeed, at the time of first reading the point of identification was not the class politics of this position, but the associated personal politics of those through whom the disdain was articulated. Whilst the novel itself explicitly refuses the dissociation of public and private moralities, it does not make a similar case for the connection between public and private politics – nor, indeed, between the notions of'morality' and '...