SOURCE: Suess, Barbara A. “When the Past Does Not Feed the Future: The ‘Idea of the Past’ in Three Bowen Stories.” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 9 (1997): 16-20.

[In the following essay, Suess explores Bowen's preoccupation with the past in “Her Table Spread,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Hand in Glove.”]

Elizabeth Bowen's Irish short stories, like her novels, commonly depict characters who perceive themselves as out-of-place. Feeling trapped by youth, in the country, as members of the degenerating Anglo-Irish gentry, Bowen's young women characters frequently express the desire, like Teresa in “A Love Story,” to go “away for ever” (53). However, these characters also aspire to be located in another time, as exhibited by their obsession with the “pasts” they encounter in stories, letters, and old trunks. More specifically, the stories “Her Table Spread,” “The Happy Autumn Fields,” and “Hand in Glove” portray characters whose unhappiness with the stagnant present leads them to seek salvation in what they see as an enchanted or, at least, less inert past—an action which necessarily leads to their disenchantment. These stories thus run counter to what Bowen refers to as the “traditionally restorative qualities of the past”; instead, in these stories, fear is counteracted by fear, and stress by stress (Preface to Ivy Gripped the Steps, and Other Stories xi). In their attempt to subsume a part of the more passionate past into the present, these characters only serve to lose their very selves: in self-delusion, spiritual disembodiment, and death.

In “Her Table Spread,” Valeria Cuffe, a 25-year-old Anglo-Irish but nevertheless high-spirited heiress, has literally spread her table for a dinner with friends; however, the real object of her beneficence is a suitor. Mr. Alban, a pompous English visitor and rather a dubious possibility for the role of suitor—the narrator notes twice that his “attitude to[ward] women was negative” (18)—is the embodiment of what Bowen felt were the negative characteristics of her Anglo-Irish contemporaries. A typical Bowen character, Alban has a blasé attitude towards life and especially love. Furthermore, his confession that he is incapable of love makes him a poor match for Valeria. Whereas Alban feels that “some spring had dried up at the root of the world” and that he is “fixed in the dark rain, by an indifferent shore” (21), Valeria—not one to claim indifference on any subject—“exclaims” both “urgently” and “passionately” (20). Similarly, she offends the social delicacy of the other more sedate (sedated?) characters when she thoughtlessly allows her “bust [to rest] almost on the table” (20).

Although regarded by other characters as childlike and even “abnormal” (18), Valeria is, in one way at least, a positive character: She represents the energy, desire, and passion which has, if not dried up completely, at least been choked back by the members of her social circle.¹ The stress of having to survive both Civil and World Wars as a literal and symbolic neutrality pulled them in opposite emotional, social, and political directions; that, along with the strain of enduring the loss of power and prestige they had held for two centuries, made the Anglo-Irish gentry “indifferent”—a word used to describe every character in the story except Valeria. A telling situation in this regard can be seen in the various characters' reactions to the life-giving rain. Cautioning the women not to spot their dresses, Alban and the other men reluctantly—and only when completely protected by mackintoshes—go out to look for Valeria in the rain into which she has rushed not indifferently but ardently and fearlessly: She “disappeared again—wet satin skirts and all—into the bushes” (22). Her guests, “indignant” that she would even suggest “go[ing] for a row,” are afraid of what she will do (22). Specifically, they fear that she will attract the attention of the men in the destroyer which has docked for the night in the harbor below the Castle. Of course, that is exactly what Valeria hopes to do.

The image of Valeria, “‘racing past the window with a lantern’” (23), is that of a woman seeking to fulfill a romantic fantasy. Having spread her table and adorned herself to attract a suitor, she chooses to actively seek him rather than wait idly by, as she sees her cohorts do. On the negative side of this action, however, is the fact that the objects of Valeria's pursuits, her so-called suitors (alternately, Mr. Garrett and Mr. Graves) actually exist for her no more than do characters in a story: She does not know them, has never even seen them. Valeria has learned of these two men from the servants, who painted a romantic story of their chance visit to the Castle from their destroyer while Valeria had been away. Out of the bits and pieces of this story, Valeria creates a fantasy to which we are privy through an interior monologue in which she pictures herself a “princess” with admirers fighting over her, and in which she imagines that the “stocky, but very merry” Mr. Graves will take her to Naples and Paris and teach her to dance (24).

Valeria's fantasy clashes with reality, however, when she mistakes Alban, who has finally found her in the rainy darkness, for Mr. Garrett and emotionally throws herself at him: “As sure but not so noiseless as a cat in the dark, Valeria hurried to him,” and insisted he accompany her into the Castle (26). Decidedly flustered, Alban nevertheless experiences, at this moment, an epiphany: He obtains a brief respite from his habit of apathy, consequently regaining a temporary connection to humanity, feeling “[f]or a moment, not exiled” (26). Valeria, however, remains apparently self-deluded: At the end of the story, after having discovered her error, she “lay with her arms wide” (26-27), her table spread for another, most likely fantastical, suitor.

Mary, the protagonist of “The Happy Autumn Fields,” similarly loses her self in a story of the past—the story of Sarah, whose letters inspire Mary's dreams. In this story, Bowen alternately juxtaposes events in Sarah's life with those of Mary's. Mary, in a London flat during the Blitz, dreams of a Victorian family's walk through the autumn fields of the title on a particularly significant day for Sarah. On this day, Sarah comes to terms with being torn between her love for sister, Henrietta, and for her suitor, Eugene. In her parallel world, Mary is also tortured about dividing her attention between two objects: her own life as Mary and her much happier dream-connection with Sarah's world. For instance, when her lover, Travis, tries to get her to leave the flat for safety reasons, Mary views the action as part of a “conspiracy to keep her from the beloved two,” Sarah and Henrietta (103).

Mary has become so deeply involved in Sarah's story, in fact, that she comes to be virtually disembodied from Mary-the-body. In other words, she literally loses herself in the story and takes on Sarah's identity. As Sarah, Mary feels “weighed down” by the “irrelevant body of Mary” (103). Her body, representative of her life as Mary, is merely a drag on her during the moments she is able to become Sarah. As in “Her Table Spread,” this young woman character desires to escape the world and people which surround her, for they, too, have become mere shadows of the times past. Comparing Sarah's happier because more passionate existence to her own, Mary remarks to Travis, “‘the source, the sap must have dried up, or the pulse must have stopped, before you and I were conceived. So much has flowed through people; so little flows through us. All we can do is imitate love or sorrow’” (112).

At the end of “The Happy Autumn Fields,” Mary has, like Valeria, experienced a few moments of joy, of passion, of true emotions through the creation of a fantastical relationship between herself and individuals from a past time. However, Mary, too, is left ultimately unsatisfied, for her present reality comes quite literally crashing in on her dream of the past. After Mary is awakened by Travis a last time, the narrator notes, “The one way back to the fields was barred by Mary's surviving the fall of ceiling” (112). In other words, only through the death of Mary's body would Sarah have been allowed to live.

And, interestingly, the real Sarah undergoes a similar experience in her own life, an occurrence which implies that Mary has, indeed, somehow merged with Sarah. At the end of the day in which she recognizes Eugene's love for her, Sarah feels disembodied, not remembering anything since their earlier walk in the fields. The narrator tells us:

The obscurity and loneliness of [Sarah's] trouble was not to be borne. How could she put into words the feeling of dislocation, the formless dread that had been with her since she found herself in the drawing-room? The source of both had been what she must call her dream. How could she tell the others with what vehemence she tried to attach her being to each second, not because each was singular in itself, each a drop condensed from the mist of love in the room, but because she apprehended that the seconds were numbered?

(109)

Hearing of such a passionate attachment to each and every love-filled moment of life, one need not wonder what Mary sees in Sarah. The Victorian girl's story provides Mary with an antidote to her own world of imitation love and sorrow. However, the antidote was not to last. Like Sarah, who disappears after a certain date in the letters that describe her life, at the end of the story Mary is left without a sense of self, “no longer reckoning who she was” (112).

In “Hand in Glove,” the protagonist's loss of self as a result of reaching into the past is by far the most haunting, most literal version of this theme. Orphaned Ethel and Elsie Trevor live the lives of young, popular socialites at Jasmine Lodge in the south of Ireland. Lacking funds to cover their enormous wardrobe budget, including keeping up a supply of white gloves, they frequently and secretly raid the trunks of their ailing Aunt Elysia, whom they keep virtually locked up. When Ethel becomes desperate to get her hands on her aunt's allegedly voluminous supply of white gloves in order to impress her beau, she attempts to ingratiate herself—or becomes, in her sister's terms, “hand-in-glove”—with Auntie who, already bitter about her solitary confinement, becomes even more suspicious about her nieces' appropriation of her clothing.

On the night of the big ball, Ethel discovers that her aunt is, at last, dead. However, not wanting to ruin her evening, she pretends not to notice that her aunt is dead and, per nightly custom, locks her aunt in the room—but only after she has stolen the key to that last trunk that the girls have not been able to break open. Ethel proceeds to the attic where, before she even has a chance to unlock the trunk, it bursts open by itself, revealing miles of snow-white gloves. Although frightened by the supernatural occurrence, Ethel cannot withhold her desire for the gloves. Reaching into the trunk, she is first pulled by her hair into the trunk, then sent flying across the room, where Aunt Elysia's “hand in glove” strangles her to death.

Impatient to move beyond what she had come to perceive as the dull position of debutante, and knowing her own present circumstances alone were not capable of propelling her into the future she desired as a “Mrs.,” Ethel endeavors to obtain help from her aunt's past. The “seven large trunks crammed with recent finery” (114) represent, for Aunt Elysia, the only lasting good to come out of her initially triumphant, then later disastrous marriage to the captain of a cavalry regiment in India. Elsie's and especially Ethel's greedy appropriation of the trunk's contents, therefore, essentially robs their aunt of her past. Indeed, one day, fueled by a “lucid accumulation of years of hate” (120-21) and, no doubt, by jealousy of her nieces' youth and gaiety and their bragging about beaus, Elysia calls for her trunks in order to show-up Ethel's attempts to “trap a man” (121). She cries out, “Could you learn [to trap a man], if it was from Venus herself? Wait till I show you beauty” (121). It is obvious from this statement that Aunt Elysia equates the contents of her trunks with her “early triumphs” (114), her much happier past. Knowing that her niece will not stop until the last bit of this past has been appropriated, Aunt Elysia (or rather, her ghost), perhaps, sees no other alternative to murder.

But Ethel, it must be admitted, plays a large part in her own death. The narrator makes it clear that Aunt Elysia, right before she dies, clearheadedly and “unblinkingly studie[s] Ethel” (120), apparently recognizing the selfish motivation for and hypocrisy of her niece's recent tête-a-tête with her. In moments such as this, it seems that we, as readers, are also meant to recognize Ethel's greed and to connect it with her downfall. Because she only feigns interest in her aunt's past and symbolically steals it from her, Ethel's hand-in-glove treatment of her aunt, it seems, is destined to turn on her, metaphorically and literally. Thus, Ethel is yet another character whose attempt to use the past to augment her own present life leads to a loss of self—in this case a loss of self to death.

Because Bowen wrote these stories during times of intense social and political unrest in Ireland and in Europe, her characters' illusions about the enchanted and pure nature of the past as heard in stories, read in letters, and found in old trunks are understandable. In “The Bend Back,” Bowen treats this idea as an historical one, noting that especially after World War II, although people sought to obtain some form of brightness in their lives, they felt it could not be found anywhere in the present, but only in the relatively more innocent past: Only a connection with the past could provide one with the necessary “life illusion,” with the idea that life is worth living (55).

However, none of these characters' forays into or use of the past seem to provide them with this life illusion—or at least not for long. In place of gaining a new perspective on life or a new life, Valeria and Mary remain, respectively, deluded and spiritually disembodied—and Ethel actually loses her life. Drawn in not so much by “the past but the idea of the past” (“Bend Back” 58, emphasis added), these characters find that although they have gained momentary insight from the past, they regretfully cannot retain in their present lives “life at that pitch, eventful—not happy, no, but strung like a harp” (“Happy” 112). Instead, the idea of the past is shown to be merely a false ideal, much like the story of the visit from the destroyer's soldiers, Sarah's letters, and Aunt Elysia's gloves: When uncovered, the past only strangles the small bit of enthusiasm that had existed for these characters who attempt to retrieve from the past a more passionate present.

Note

1. This has been noted previously by Alexander G. Gonzalez in his article, “Elizabeth Bowen's ‘Her Table Spread’: A Joycean Irish Story,” in which he compares Valeria Cuffe to other similarly passionate, fictional Irish women. However, I believe that Gonzalez's focus on the epiphany of Mr. Alban—and not the failed epiphany of Valeria—leads us away from the real focus of the story, Valeria.

Works Cited

Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Bend Back.” The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Hermione Lee. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986. 54-59.

———. “Hand in Glove.” Elizabeth Bowen's Irish Stories. Intro. Victoria Glendinning. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1978. 114-25.

———. “The Happy Autumn Fields.” Bowen, Irish Stories 95-113.

———. “Her Table Spread.” Bowen, Irish Stories 18-27

———. “A Love Story.” Bowen, Irish Stories 36-54.

———. Preface. Ivy Gripped the Steps, and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

Gonzalez, Alexander G. “Elizabeth Bowen's ‘Her Table Spread’: A Joycean Irish Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 30.3 (Summer 1993): 343-48.