Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Rebecca K. Hahn

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783823383895
• eBook ISBN: 9783823302179
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Side-Stepping Normativity: Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner's highly innovative narrative style, which does not conform to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards, and explores how Warner's short stories shift to off-centre positions.Side-Stepping Normativity further outlines the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how Warner succeeds in creating queer, that is, non-heteronormative as well strange and peculiar stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time.In this, Side-Stepping Normativity joins a vibrant conversation in queer studies which revolves around the question how critics can approach literary texts from a non-antagonistic position. Rather than focussing on the role of the critic, however, this thesis shows that Warner's texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.

1. Undoing Categories: The British Author Sylvia Townsend Warner

DT:	This is The New Yorker fiction podcast, from The New Yorker magazine. I’m Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine’s archives to read and discuss. This month we’re going to hear “The Children’s Grandmother” by Sylvia Townsend Warner. […] The story was chosen by the Colm Tóibín […]. Hi, Colm.
CT:	Hi, Deborah.
DT:	So, The New Yorker published about 150 of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s stories over forty years, from the 1930s to the ‘70s. Where did you first start reading her? Can you tell us a little bit about her?
CT:	I don’t really know anything about her at all. […] I know exactly where I bought the book [that contains “The Children’s Grandmother”]. It was a second-hand book in South King Street in Dublin. […] It was a hardback, big book, called Best Stories of the New Yorker. […] it had a story by John Updike, and I think towards the end it had this story that I didn’t think you could write [“The Children’s Grandmother”]. In other words, it really jumped at me. The fact that you could have, you know, this completely gothic story, this story that was so almost – strange, so strange that you would think, ‘Well, it’s not part of any universal experience. Not part of any common experience.’ And yet every detail, every tone in it, seemed to me fresh, and new, and incredibly interesting. (Treisman, my emphasis)

In the interview transcribed above, Colm Tóibín talks about his reasons for choosing the short story “The Children’s Grandmother” (1950) by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1977) for The New Yorker fiction podcast. Tóibín felt reading “The Children’s Grandmother” opened up a whole new reading experience for him. His immediate thought was that Warner had succeeded in writing about an almost impossible topic. His reply to Treisman’s question – whether he could tell his listeners more about the writer whose story he had chosen to discuss – contains some telling remarks. He points out that he is neither familiar with Warner’s writing nor her biography, and that he was drawn in by the ‘strangeness’ of the story.

“The Children’s Grandmother” is an intriguing, atmospheric short story that, amongst others, artfully negotiates preconceived notions of motherhood and grandmotherhood. It portrays the narrator’s elderly mother-in-law whose life is overshadowed, as the reader comes to believe, by the tragic loss of her seven children, one of whom was the narrator’s husband.

Early on in the story, the reader notices that the grandmother has a very matter-of-fact attitude towards bereavement, and, seemingly, talks about her dead children without a hint of emotion:

My husband, the last of my mother-in-law’s children, and born a long interval after the others, was the only one who lived to grow up, his childhood intimidated by the presence, which was also the absence, of Madeleine, Guy, Everard, Lucas, Alice, and Noel. He grew up an only child, in the middle of this shadowy band of brothers and sisters whom his father and the servants assured him were angels in Heaven, whom his mother told him were dead. (Warner, “The Children’s Grandmother” 35)

Here the reader learns that, instead of offering her last remaining son solace in view of the death of his siblings, his mother curtly informs him that his siblings are dead and gone. This passage artfully echoes Wordsworth’s poem “We are Seven” (1798), which revolves around the speaker of the poem’s conversation with the “little cottage girl” (5). Asking her, “‘Sisters and brothers, little Maid, / How many may you be?’” (13–14), she answers “‘Seven in all’” (15). Despite the fact that two of her siblings, “Jane” and “John”, have passed away, the child insists that “we are seven” and that Jane and John are just as present as her living siblings (18). Moreover, by constantly adding Jane and John to her sibling group, the girl effectively renders the speaker’s words, “But they are dead; those two are dead! / Their spirits are in heaven!”, powerless (65–66). While the girl’s utterances demonstrate that she has reconciled herself with the fact that Jane and John “in the church-yard lie” (21), the protagonist’s mother-in-law’s terse reply invites the thought that she has not yet come to terms with the death of her children and is seeking to suppress her grief.

Years later, after the death of the protagonist’s husband in a car accident, his widow and children move in with his mother. From the start, the dynamics between the widow, her children, and her mother-in-law are strained. The grandmother is cold, self-centred, and incredibly domineering, “[…] she had no trace of grandmotherly fuss or grandmotherly fondness” (35). Any form of interaction with her grandchildren takes place under her terms and conditions:

It was an extraordinary sight to see them [the children and their grandmother] playing hide-and-seek in the orchard – the tall old woman running, with her gray head stooped, under the lichened boughs, or folded away in some narrow hiding place, her eyes blazing with excitement. With a fickleness that matched the fickleness of a child, she would say courtly, ‘That’s all’ and walk out of the game without a trace of fatigue, for she played to please herself, not them. (36)

To the narrator, the grandmother’s un-grandmotherly attitude is incomprehensible and she tries to find reasons for her behaviour. She tells the reader, “[…] I used to wonder if her detachment sprang from a contained and despairing diffidence – if, having failed so pitiably to rear her own children she had made some violent vow not to meddle with mine” and “[…] at other times I had the simple and sentimental thought: She has lost all her children; she dare not love again” (36). She further contemplates the idea that “[…] she accepted them as the remission of her own tragedy, an indulgence of a maternal feeling that in her own maternity had been deformed by constant blasts of fate […]” (36). The different explanations that spring to the narrator’s mind are all linked to the death of her mother-in-law’s children and contain a subtle, and yet predictable, form of judgement – the narrator judges her mother-in-law for failing her children, and, implicitly, questions her mother-in-law’s ability to be a ‘good’ mother. Through subtle manipulation on behalf of the autodiegetic narrator, the reader of the short story is led to believe the explanations offered by the narrator.

It is not until her own four children have left the house that the narrator arrives at a new and very simple explanation for her mother-in-law’s behaviour: “At first, she had disliked us, and gradually her dislike had been overcome – that, and no more was the explanation” (38). A more conventional writer than Warner would have perhaps ended the story at this point and would have conjured up the stereotypical image of a woman who was not fortunate enough to be able to see her own children growing up, who has gradually accepted her situation and decided to dedicate herself to her grandchildren. Perhaps this explanation was the one Tóibín had initially been expecting. This type of ending, however, would not have rendered the story “strange”, “fresh”, or “incredibly interesting” and caused Tóibín to use the following words to describe the story, “It is a gnarled story, and it’s full of the most gnarled feelings and then there’s … as it comes to the very end, one final gnarl” (Treisman).

“The Children’s Grandmother” ends with a completely unexpected twist. On her deathbed, the grandmother finally reveals her true thoughts about her family:

Becoming aware that I was being looked at, I turned and saw her glance dwelling on me. Her eyes gleamed in their sockets; her lips were forming painfully into a smile of contempt. She struggled to raise herself, and writhed across the bed toward me.

‘Heh! You poor creature!’ she said, taking hold of my chin in a violent, shaking grasp. ‘Heh! You poor, luckless creature! You have not lost one of your children, not one!’

I thought she was raving, but her tone steadied, and there was the force of years of rational consideration in her voice as the continued, ‘So when you are old, you will not have a single child left you. Nothing but strangers!’ (38, my emphasis)

Here the reader learns that the grandmother and the child in “We are Seven” are less different than one would expect: to both characters, the deceased children are present. While the child, however, accepts this in a matter-of-fact way, the grandmother rejoices at the fact that nearly all of her children died young since their death spared her the pain of watching them grow up and leave home only to return as strangers. Contrary to what her daughter-in-law had believed all these years, the grandmother had not suffered from the loss of her children. This utterance finally exposes the dark and possessive side of her character, which was veiled in ambiguity throughout the narrative. Dead children, the grandmother reveals, always remain at their mother’s side, whereas her daughter-in-law will have to watch her children grow up, leave home and become strangers. The grandmother sees this as a triumph over her daughter-in-law.

This unexpected and powerful ending to the short story challenges normative expectations of ‘good’ mothers and ‘good’ motherhood. “As a mother gives life/vitality to her child,” Simone Fullagar et al. write, “it is assumed that she will continue to provide this to her child throughout her life – from childhood into adulthood and sometimes into older age” (108). In Warner’s story, the grandmother, as a mother, does not live up to these expectations; worse even, as her children pass away, she is not struck by grief – but rather feels relief. This, however, is not the “final gnarl” as the story does not end here. We witness how the grandmother’s power extends beyond the grave: “Those were the last words she [the grandmother] spoke. Then it was the disclosure of her hoarded malice that appalled me. Now I am appalled for a different reason. I am beginning to think that her words are coming true” (38, my emphasis). Up to this point, the grandmother is portrayed as the narrator’s antagonist. Years later, however, after her children have grown up, the narrator admits that her mother-in-law’s words contained some elements of truth. What is more, she has to admit to herself that she herself is not entirely different from the dying woman whose last words made her question her former beliefs.

The story artfully steers the reader away from the widely held concept of what constitutes a “good” mother and presents the reader with another form of motherhood. In this case, the grandmother does not seek to harm her children; she simply admits that she prefers them dead for her own selfish reasons. Even though this may be seen to challenge the idea of a “good” mother, it cannot be termed “bad” simply because the grandmother assumes an unconventional maternal role. In the light of this, the story deliberately aims to catch the reader unaware. Hardly any reader would have immediately guessed the grandmother’s true reasons for disliking her family. Moreover, hardly any reader could assume that the narrator, a seemingly gentle and caring woman, would eventually harbour the same feelings as her dead mother-in-law. Set against this background, Tóibín’s reaction to the story, “it really jumped at me”, starts to make sense (Treisman).

I chose to present this story at the beginning of my book for two reasons: to offer a prime example of the extraordinary directions Warner’s stories take and to set the scene for my analysis, which focuses on a body of work that has been ignored by most literary scholars. To this date, no comprehensive study of Warner’s short stories has been undertaken. The short stories of many of her close contemporaries, for example, Kathrine Mansfield (1888–1923), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) or D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, whereas Warner’s stories have gone almost unnoticed. The few publications that exist have concentrated on individual stories, but so far no attempt has been made to connect the stories in terms of either content or form.

This book seeks to close this gap by highlighting the way selected stories of Warner shift to off-centre positions (“Side-Stepping Normativity”) and by analysing Warner’s highly innovative narrative style, which never conforms in any way to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards. Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner further sets out to outline the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how she succeeds in creating queer, that is, non-heteronormative as well as “strange, peculiar, eccentric” stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time (“Queer”, def. 1a).

Reviews and Literary Criticism of Warner’s Work

“She [Warner] has the spiritual digestion of a goat”, writes John Updike, “Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new, unseen developm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• For Zoë and Juno
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Undoing Categories: The British Author Sylvia Townsend Warner
• 2. Homoerotic Desires
• 3. Cross-Species Relationships
• 4. Incestuous Longings
• 5. Avenues of Escape
• 6. Vanishing
• 7. Elfin Indifference: Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin
• 8. Coda
• Works Cited
• Fußnoten