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Persuasions #11, 1989 Page 61-65 Violet Hunt Rewrites Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Their Lives (1916) JOSEPH
WIESENFARTH
There is a literary genre that we can call
the novel of gothic manners.1 It is a genre in which the manners become the horror.
A genre in which respectability, defined as conformity to
acceptable
social norms, is so burdensome to the individual as to be horrible. Pride and Prejudice is a novel in which this is not the case. It is a novel that strikes a perfect balance between society’s
concern
to maintain a reasonable working order and the individual’s freedom to
be his
or her self within social limits. Thus
Darcy’s claim to importance or consequence because of his social
position is
set right by Elizabeth’s claim to personal respect in spite of her
lacking a
social position equal to his; thus Lady Catherine’s claim to even
greater
importance than Darcy is set right by Elizabeth’s demonstration that
logic is
not one of Lady Catherine’s strong points; thus Elizabeth’s own claim
to
importance is tempered by her realization that she has been “blind,
partial,
prejudiced, absurd.” Frank
attention to these three principal claims allows Darcy and Elizabeth to
find
equity as well as passion in their relationship and finally to marry. So although society and the individual are frequently in tension
in Pride
and Prejudice, intelligent and affectionate individuals are able to
resolve
tensions and live happily within the social order. We find, then, that Jane Austen gives us a perfectly balanced
novel of manners in Pride and Prejudice. We do not find this in Violet
Hunt’s Their
Lives, even though it is a novel that reminds us in many ways of Pride
and Prejudice.2 The novel focuses on Christina
Radmall, just as Pride and
Prejudice
focuses on Elizabeth. Christina has two sisters, Virgilia and Orinthia,
who can
be equated with Kitty and Lydia (Virgilia is beautiful, determined,
calculating,
and unstoppable) and with Mary (Orinthia is pathetic). Christina, the eldest and brightest and most beautiful of the
three,
might be thought to combine traits of Jane and Elizabeth, save that she
is so
willfully imprudent. Christina at age seventeen carries on an affair of
the
heart with Emerson Vlaye, a man three times her age, and she refuses
the one
eligible bachelor, George Day (a Bingley-like young man), who proposes
to her,
much to her mother’s dismay. For
it is the business of Victoria Radmall, as it was the business of Mrs. Bennet,
to get her daughters married. She
succeeds with Virgilia, and the novel ends with that wedding. Indeed, this is not putting it nearly strongly enough.
Virgilia announces her engagement to Marmaduke Hall on page 289
of a
novel that ends with their wedding celebration completed on page 366. Fully one-fifth of Their Lives is given over to
Virgilia’s rite
of transition from maidenhood to womanhood, from being a girl to being
a wife.3 And at Virgilia’s wedding, Christina meets a foreign-looking
stranger,
Euphan Balfame, who, in the novel’s sequel, Their Hearts
(1921), proves
to be even more detrimental to Christina than Emerson Vlaye. So Their Lives ends with Virgilia,
the worldly-wise younger sister of Christina, superseding her imprudent
older
sister in all matters of social etiquette and precedence in society. It is interesting to note the nature of Virgilia’s conquest and
the
occasion of her wedding. Dukie
Hall, her husband, is said to be “as good as gold and as dull as
ditchwater”
(170). His highest aspiration is to
imitate William Morris, and he opens an academy to that end, which he
closes as
soon as his engagement takes place. The
academy’s function, presumably, having fulfilled its aesthetic mission. There is no question but that
Dukie and
Virgilia are very much in love. Their
kisses resound through the last seventy-five pages of the novel. And Christina, as their chaperon, keeps her sanity by playing
the piano
as loudly as she can so as not to hear the fortissimo of their
osculating lips. But the triumph of their wedding is cut across by the death of
Virgilia’s great-aunt Eliza. Protocol
requires that the wedding be postponed on the death of a family member. But
Virgilia, not to be done in by a dead aunt in the north of
England,
forbids her mother from telling her father of the event; the wedding
thereby
goes forward, much to Christina’s dismay. For like Emma Woodhouse with Mrs. Elton, Christina deplores the
idea of
giving way to Virgilia, whose marriage will make her first in company. But Virgilia’s cunning in keeping her great-aunt’s death from
her
father shows that she is as remorselessly prudent as Christina is
remorselessly
romantic. But prudence has a new
definition in Violet
Hunt’s world. In Jane Austen’s
fiction it was thought of as one of the cardinal or moral virtues
(along with
justice, temperance, and fortitude) was connected with a moral
tradition that
went back to Plato and a theological tradition that went back to the
medieval
times, at least.4 But for Virgilia prudence has nothing to do with the human
spirit and
everything to do with getting what she wants. Her refusal to make known the death of her great-aunt Eliza is
just one
instance of this. Her conversation
with Christina the night before her wedding is another. Ostensibly, Virgilia wants
Christina to tell
her the facts of life. She comes to
her sister’s bedroom, and Christina immediately feels herself in the
presence
of a Medusa’s head (344). But
Virgilia’s seeming vulnerability softens Christina, who tells her what
she can
about the physical facts of married life. Which
leads Virgilia to tell Christina that if Christina had only been a
little more
circumspect in her ways, Dukie would have proposed long before he did. He was afraid to introduce Virgilia into the Hall family because
she had
a sister who had a reputation in society. Christina
comes finally to realize that Virgilia’s visit had nothing to do with
timidity
about sex but everything to do with temerity about violence. Virgilia’s last sisterly act before leaving home is to take
revenge on
her older sister for everything unsettled between them in the
past.
Christina lay awake
and still, as one maimed, for a long time.
She felt cold, as if a window had been opened on to her soul.
She was a rifled treasure house. She
had given of her best, her uttermost, she had been simple, serious, and
sincere.
Virgilia also had been true to herself.
As usual, she had not been genuine even in this crucial
interview.
After
a while the importunate thought in Christina’s mind was distinctly
formulated.
She had been “done.” She
had been exploited by Virgilia. (TL
347) This scene turns Victorian woman’s sexual
innocence into a pitiless rendering of Victorian women’s ferocity: The sentence – “Dukie was so afraid – afraid of scandal
connected
with Christina” (346) – reminds one of Elizabeth Bennet’s certainty,
first, that Lydia’s elopement with Wickham would end her chance to
marry
Darcy; and, second, that the last thing Darcy would allow himself to be
would be
Wickham’s brother-in-law. The
affectionate and sisterly confidences of Elizabeth and Jane have
likewise been
reworked by Violet Hunt as the virulent dislike of one sister for
another. Writing a preface for Their
Lives
(3-4) from “Somewhere in Belgium” on 7 September 1916, Ford Madox Ford,
signing himself “Miles Ignotus” (Unknown Soldier), compares Violet
Hunt’s
method of rendering her novel to Jane Austen’s craftsmanship: “the
method of
Jane Austen told of the Eighties gives to ‘Their Lives,’ the character
of a
work of history.” Then Ford
continues: “It is history – and it makes it plain. For that horrible family of this author’s recording explains to
me why
to-day, millions of us, as it were, on a raft of far reaching land, are
enduring
torture it is not fit that human beings should endure, in order that –
outside
that raft – other eloquent human beings should proclaim that they will
go on
fighting to the last drop of our blood.” Ford’s specific reflection on “the last interview between
Christina
and her sister” is that “these remorselessly rendered people who were
without remorse or pity – these people were Prussians.” For Ford, then, an officer at the front in the First World War, “the selfishness of the Eighties – of the Victorian and Albert era – is the great ancestor of … Armageddon,” that is, of the war itself. Or, to put the matter in slightly different terms, Jane Austen’s art, as practised during the Napoleonic Wars, has been resituated by Violet Hunt and made to reveal something about the First World War. The remorseless realism of Jane Austen’s fiction is translated a centruy later by Violet Hunt’s rendering of domestic battles that seem little different from war itself. How so? At least in three ways: (1) Violet Hunt leads a relentless
attack on
Pre-Raphaelitism; (2) she demonstrates the hopelessness of idealistic,
romantic
attitudes in a harsh, materialistic world; (3) she turns the novel of
manners
into a novel of gothic manners. Jane Austen’s novels often
enough target
an object for ridicule, whether it be the gothicism of Northanger
Abbey,
the sentimentality of Sense and Sensibility, the aristocratic
arrogance
of Pride and Prejudice or the blindness to history of Persuasion.
The specific target of Their Lives is
Pre-Raphaelitism. Ford once
described D. G. Rossetti as standing in the underwear he’d slept in and
gurgling about passion to a Mrs. W. Three Stars while the bacon fat
hardened in
the breakfast dishes.5 This rendering of the impracticality of Pre-Raphaelitism is what
we find
in Their Lives. Henry Radmall, husband of Victoria and father of Christina,
Virgilia, and Orinthia, is
a Pre-Raphaelite artist who is sweetly inept. He does manage to keep his family decently by his painting, and
he does
manage to attract the passionate fidelity of Victoria, his wife. But he’s completely unable to control his wife’s sarcastic
tongue,
which keeps him out of the Royal Academy, loses him patrons, scares
away suitors
for his daughters, and prevents him from saying a word to Emerson Vlaye, his
brother-artist, when Vlaye flirts outrageously with Christina and
thereby ruins
her reputation. Henry is an updated
version of Mr. Bennet who, instead of retiring to his library, retires
to his
studio. Yet his very ineptness for
social success makes him beloved by all, even those who fear his wife. His devotion to the Pre-Raphaelite mode makes him ineptly
charming and
the one character who seems less aggressively selfish than all the
others. This fecklessness of
Pre-Raphaelitism blends
into the second object of attack in Hunt’s novel: a romantic attitude
toward
life. Christina makes her mark upon
the world as a teenage poet whose masters are Swinburne and Rossetti
(160). When her romance with Emerson Vlaye comes to naught and George
Day
doesn’t propose a second time to her and Virgilia precedes her to the
altar,
Christina casts herself as a tragic heroine, insists on seeing her life
as a
tragedy: “She persisted in regarding herself as a tragic figure placed
fatally
between the man who wanted her and could not have her, and the man she
wanted
who was unobtainable” (220-21). She
thinks of herself as “a professional Ariadne” (232) and pictures
herself,
when she thinks of suicide, as “Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ ” (221). Christina, thinking the world well lost to love, plays Marianne
Dashwood
to Emerson Vlaye’s Willoughby. The
brilliant and beautiful Christina, who is determined to be a tragic
heroine in a
world suited only to ironic comedy is well described as being “as
obstinate as
an ass and a pig rolled into one” (303). Thus it works out that “Miss Radmall was charming, all right as
a
partner at a dance or a dinner but not for the niche in Belgravia or
the big
country house with its duties and responsibilities” (303). And this leads back to where we began: Violet Hunt’s turning the novel of manners into a novel of gothic manners. The sisterly visit of Virgilia to Christina on the eve of her wedding turns out to be a visit from Medusa. The wedding itself takes place in the shadow of great-aunt Eliza’s death. Violet Hunt attaches a certain horror to the supposedly innocent rituals and manners of her society. It is because society stands for obsolescent values that Christina takes to her Bohemian ways. Christina may not have found any formula for success because success is what Virgilia achieves: Christina “saw that Virgilia, in one way or another, cunning, cruel, and inconsiderate, was straining to put the family’s best foot forward” (320). Virgilia “composed a ‘manner’ for the benefit of the Halls” (321). And the Halls are thereby made “to feel that the Hall-Radmall alliance, queerish and unusual as it had seemed in the beginning, was after all, vastly to Dukie’s advantage, although his Virgilia was an artist’s daughter and brought no money” (321). In short, good manners are a sleight-of-hand that produces an illusion of respectability. The result is that Virgilia gets a man as good as gold – or, in slightly altered terms, a “cunning, cruel, and inconsiderate” girl gets a man “as dull as ditchwater.” The only man in Their Lives
who
understands Christina Radmall is Boris lvanoff, a “highly bred and
intelligent” Russian émigré, who is “young, rich [and] eccentric” (177).
He loves her more than he’s willing to admit, and he allows his
parents
to make a proposal to Christina’s parents on his behalf. But Christina never hears about it because, as the Radmalls tell
the Ivanoffs, marriage is something for young folks to settle for
themselves. Boris, who is imbued with “Slav cynicism and melancholy” (267),
consented to this proposal “not for a moment” because he thought that
Christina “would make him happy” but because he “admired her”
(267):
“She is doomed,”
he told his sister. “Imagine, I
once composed her epitaph for her. It
was: She was made for irregular situations.
I told her. She liked it.
That is the girl all over. She
invites disaster. She will do
something someday, but first she will have to go through some
experience, that,
if I mistake not, will upset the people she lives among.
She’ll insist on working out her own particular perdition …”
(268) “Gentle, courteous and rich,” Boris knows that Christina is at heart an innocent seeking a romantic ideal and that is why she is so “reckless” – so “made for irregular situations.” But the world of Their Lives
has no
place for ideals, only for rank and money. That’s why manners are horrible and why girls like Christina,
whose
very name suggests a religious ideal of love long bled of any meaning,
cannot
succeed and why girls like Virgilia, whose name suggests something
somewhat more
pagan – she is presented as a Medusa – succeed in getting it all: “it
was
a fact [that] Virgilia had ten silver tea pots, eight butter coolers,
eleven
sets of silver salt-spoons, nineteen cream jugs and enough cases of
knives and
forks to supply a regiment” (327). One
can only wonder whether – like Mrs. Bennet with Elizabeth’s pin-money,
jewels, and carriages – Mrs. Radmall will “go distracted.” Elizabeth Bennet is a young woman who gets the bottom of her
dress
muddied and still manages to marry the man she loves. Christina Radmall, metaphorically, does the same thing and
cannot marry
anyone. What Violet Hunt shows when
she writes about the domestic scene in the remorselessly realistic
style of Jane
Austen is that times have changed and manners have changed with them. They’ve become gothic.
Socially
acceptable manners – as the eve and day of Virgilia’s wedding vividly
demonstrate – are now the horror. NOTES 1
See Joseph Wiesenfarth, Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 2
Violet Hunt (1866-1942) was born in Durham, the daughter of Alfred
Hunt, a water-colourist of Pre-Raphaelite leanings, and Margaret Hunt, a
novelist.
Mrs. Hunt’s and later Violet’s house, South Lodge, became a
gathering
place for London Bohemian society. Violet
herself was a determined Bohemian, as well as an ardent suffragist and
proto-feminist, and lived a life that served as a model for Christina
Radmall’s in Their Lives ( 1916) and Their Hearts (
1921).
There
is not a great deal that has been written about Violet Hunt.
There is a brief entry in The Oxford Companion to English
Literature,
5th ed., ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985): 485.
There is something like a biography of her in Douglas Goldring, South
Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English
Review
Circle (London: Constable, 1943). Robert
and Marie Secor have edited one of Violet’s diaries in The Return
of the
Good Soldier: Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt’s 1917 Diary,
Monograph
Series No. 30 (Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria Press, 1983).
And there are two articles on Hunt of general interest: May
Sinclair,
“The Novels of Violet Hunt,” English Review 34 (1922):
106-18:
Marie Secor, “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction,” English
Literature in Transition 19 (1976): 25-34.
3 Their Hearts (1921), the sequel to Their
Lives, devotes its
first thirty or so opening pages to the day of Virgilia’s wedding,
too.
4
5
Parade’s End, ed. Robie Macauley (New York: Knopf, 1950): 17. |
