SOURCE: "The Poetry of Space in Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time of Man," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Fall, 1985, pp. 61-72.

As Elizabeth Madox Roberts' novel, The Time of Man, nears its conclusion, the outer appearance of the heroine, Ellen Chesser Kent, reflects her inner wholeness. Indeed, the jubilant words of young Luke Wimble capture the aura of her full self-awareness when he exclaims, "You're a bright shiny woman, Ellen Kent … You got the very honey of life in your heart." Despite the fact that Ellen, her husband Jasper, and their five children are again journeying into the unknown, her spiritual pilgrimage flows securely toward completion.

The common areas of space and the "o'nary" objects of home—as Ellen would describe them in her backcountry way—have nourished this inner growth. Ellen's steady movement toward spiritual unity rests on her total willingness to allow her psyche to encounter and absorb whatever lies closest at hand; she is always open to a direct experience of things in themselves. By imagining actual events and places in the life of a struggling Kentucky tenant farmer, Miss Roberts is able to depict a psychological drama unfolding under the humblest of circumstances. Thus, Ellen Chesser lives with her parents Henry and Nellie in three homes before her marriage to Jasper Kent, and these simple homes, particularly her own bedroom in each house, firmly establish the wholesome pattern of Ellen's interior development. As protective spaces, these houses also have corresponding implications for the creative activity of the artist.

The works of French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard express most effectively the importance of such an openness to the ordinary elements of life. A pioneer in the field of phenomenological studies, Bachelard regards the immediate receptivity to images as the key both to the nurturing of the creative imagination and to the understanding of how the imagination produces poetic works. In particular, his observations in The Poetics of Space can suggest to us how Ellen's innate ability to respond to the spaces and objects in her life has guided her way and enlivened her imagination. At the same time, they can aid in discovering the poetry with which Miss Roberts narrates Ellen's experiences as a young girl in a one-room house or a bedroom in the loft or beside the kitchen. Illustrating his remarks with examples from such poets as Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire, Bachelard conveys forcefully the significance of that interaction between the sensitive mind and the common areas of space it encounters: "Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space … It has been lived in … with all the particularity of the imagination." His comments and poetic samples also enable us to see how Miss Roberts' novel demonstrates a keen perception of the workings of the human mind. The author, as well as the heroine of The Time of Man, displays a rich imagination through her receptivity to the nuances of space.

As an artist, Miss Roberts' foremost concern in all her fiction is the dramatic portrayal of the inner psychic journey. For her, ultimate reality exists in the realm of the spirit; the outer physical world reflects and symbolizes the real absolutes, which originate in the human mind. The landscape of the soul is then made concrete by events and things that confront the mind in the world. She phrases her philosophical convictions this way:

Somewhere there is a connection between the world of the mind and the outer order. It is the secret of the contract that we are after, the point, the moment of union. We faintly sense the one and we know as faintly the other, but there is a point at which they come together and we can never know the whole of reality until we know these two completely [quoted in Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist, 1956].

Although all human beings attempt to make these connections, the writer is compelled to fashion the process into literary form. In The Time of Man, Ellen's acute consciousness of the variety of spaces in her homes—their inner rooms, corners, stairways, and even their outer appearances—become, for her, moments of union between the two orders, and because as an artist Miss Roberts perceives the secret of these contacts, she is able to shape them into poetic form. She presents the unfolding of Ellen's separate self with all the emotional intensity and structural perfection that accompany great musical compositions. Symbol and image, prose and plot, combine to produce an experience akin to the full orchestration of a work by Beethoven or Mozart, two composers she often listened to while she was writing. As her biographers, Harry Campbell and Ruel Foster, describe it, her artistry "transforms what is called spiritual into the physical, the physicalizing which we have called the artistic word made flesh."

The Chesser family's tenant homes—small, poorly-equipped cabins on the farms of the Bodines, the Wakefields, and the Orkeys, respectively—reflect and nurture young Ellen's spirit. Although more or less formally unknown to her, she comes to intuitive understandings through her contact with them. For example, when by the light of the moon, she observes the glittering frost on her bedroom window, the image somehow symbolizes her own inherent awareness of the frigid barrier that arises between individuals, no matter how close they may appear to be. Despite the intimacy that has evolved between Ellen and Jonas Prather, and despite the spirit of friendship that has developed among the members of their youthful group, she instinctively apprehends the permanent and impenetrable separation dividing one human being from another. As in her mind that winter "the distances in the little room were magnified by the crystal of the cold," so also did the wall between people seem to be enlarged when she viewed the frost. While Ellen slept during the extreme cold of December, this "frost stood between herself and Jonas, … and between herself and Dorine was the frost and ice." In this way, spiritual realities that she gradually and often painfully learns to accept are made physical. Through the narrator of another novel, Jingling in the Wind, Miss Roberts insists that "life is from within, and thus the noise outside is a wind blowing in a mirror." Guided by this philosophy, she also makes full use of the changing of the seasons, the tilling of the soil, and the fixity of the mountains in order to embody particular truths that exist in Ellen's mind. But the emergence of these absolutes, the beginning of the psychic journey, occurs for Ellen, as it does for all of us, in the house.

The house, as a primary image in human life, represents a guardian of mental as well as material needs. The house provides the spirit with a haven for solitude and dreaming just as it offers the body protection from nature's extremes of hot and cold, rain and drought. Bachelard reminds us that the house, like "all great, simple images," reveals "a psychic state"; the house "bespeaks intimacy" because it connotates shelter and safe-keeping. The very essence of the house, Bachelard states, is "protected intimacy" because it shields the fragile emerging self. Also, the straight lines and right angles of even the humblest home somehow fulfill our need for "discipline and balance"; "our consciousness," says Bachelard, "is drawn toward verticality." This comforting structure, then, is an especially important place as well as an essential image for the beginning of an individual's physical and spiritual journey through life, an insight that distinguishes Miss Roberts as an artist who foreshadowed in 1926 the principle ideas set forth by Bachelard in 1958. She understood the prime importance of the house for early spiritual nourishment. When her heroine, fourteen-year-old Ellen, looks at Hep Bodine's farm house, the young girl intuitively reacts to the sight in this deeply human way:

In her mind the house touched something she almost knew … something settled and comforting in her mind, something like a drink of water after an hour of thirst, like a little bridge over a stream that ran out of a thicket, like cool steps going up into a shaded doorway.

A natural contemplative like the writer who created her, Ellen responds instinctively to the world about her, recognizing in the house a sanctuary for both the outer and the inner life.

The importance of the house in the human psyche begins with its confirmation of an individual's basic notion of being. We are born with the capacity to comprehend our own existence, and, as our first cradle, the house activates this inherent concept. However primitive, the house then helps to further the distinction between the I and the Not-I. No longer trailing clouds of glory, the developing child comes to recognize her own existence as a separate entity that is distinct from all other objects in the world. As a very young child, Ellen had recognized her separateness from the other articles and creatures in her first home: the brick floor, the boiling teakettle, the "tall white cat." This fundamental awareness of individual being enables her to proclaim triumphantly throughout the novel that she is "a-liven!" Alone in her room in the house on the Wakefield farm, for instance, she can avow that despite her painful rejection by a lover she is "still herself." "I'm Ellen Chesser," she says, "and I'm here, in myself." In the face of the many assaults against her sensitive nature, she is consistently able to affirm her own existence as meaningful because it has been nurtured within the protective walls of a simple structure.

Ellen's receptiveness to the sight of nooks and corners continues to protect her awareness of existence. Of this instinctive need for privacy, Bachelard observes that "one can undoubtedly become more aware of existence by escaping from space"; the walls of a corner, for instance, form a "chamber of being." He offers one of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems ["Mein Leben ohne mien"—"My Life Without Me"] as an illustration of the role of the corner in strengthening the concept of selfhood:

Suddenly, a room with its lamp appeared to me, was almost palpable in me. I was already a corner in it, but the shutters sensed me and closed.

Ellen is immediately attracted to such a cozy place during the family's first night in the one-room house on Bodine's land. She imagines herself describing the experience to Tessie, her friend-from-the-road, and so, as Ellen and her parents prepare to sleep on the floor, she mentally relates to Tessie that "before night I saw a cubby hole against the chimney and a cubby hole is good to put away in." Without attempting to rationalize her reaction, she somehow comprehends that the warm arms of the corner will satisfy her need for solitude, which in turn, as Bachelard asserts, will nourish and individualize her imagination.

In times of personal crisis, our being is again confirmed as the memories of our own childhood resurface in our minds. When we experience this remembrance of houses past, Bachelard explains, we again "participate in this original warmth." Ellen comforts herself this way on two occasions. Frightened by strange happenings in each instance, she unwittingly seeks reassurance by re-calling the comfort and security of her earliest protective space. First, when she moves on to the Wakefield's property, her family's unfamiliar tenant house provokes a recollection of her childhood home. As she moves about in this new home, she suddenly remembers events and objects from the long-forgotten one:

She had been six years old then and she had lived in a house under some nut trees.… She could remember the strange smell that hung about the nut trees.

Later, Ellen again participates in this same type of warmth during the depths of her despair after Jonas Prather forsakes her to marry Sally Lou Brown. Intuitively, the rejected young woman explores her memories more deeply this time because she has a greater need for them:

She had turned her mind upon some happenings of her infancy. She had lived in a house under a nut tree. The rinds of the nuts broke off in beautiful smooth segments and inside was the pale yellow hickory nut to be laid away to dry for the winter.

The memories of the invisible embrace of her first house and the roundness of the hickory nut (an example of the circularity which Bachelard describes as also confirming our being) help Ellen to recover from the psychic wound she has received.

This primary image, an ordinary house, however, not only confirms and protects a sense of being; it also nurtures and enriches the imagination, mostly through the seemingly non-productive activity of daydreaming. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—her meager surroundings, Ellen Chesser displays a rich, creative imagination, which Miss Roberts illustrates in dramatic ways. The roof that leaks in the cabin at the Wakefield farm allows the water to run down the walls of Ellen's bedroom. The resulting brown stains on the walls change with each rainfall, assuming various shapes, such as "monsters," and "demons impaled on trees" or a "woman in a long shawl … walking through the crosses.…" Each new precipitation brings fresh material with which her imagination can experiment. The stairs in this two-story house also provide ample opportunity for Ellen to rehearse graceful movements as she imagines herself "to be stepping down hard white stairs, walking on wide stairs, a low wind fluttering her sleeve." When she actually mounts these stairs, she yields to her "sense of pageantry" as she attempts "different methods of descent, walking demurely, gliding down stiffly, or tripping down with dancing steps." The knobs, latches, and closets in this house also provide her with opportunities for investigations and discoveries. Her day-dreams, which feast upon all the objects about her, nourish her self-individualization, a necessary element for her spiritual development. With her portrayal of Ellen's imaginative mind, Miss Roberts reminds us of the essential qualities of the house so that we may not forget that even the plainest of homes can provide these basic opportunities.

Ellen's imagination, as it develops from girlhood to young womanhood, is frequently engaged in fantasizing about ideal houses, an activity which in itself signals her approaching maturity. To convey this inner growth, Miss Roberts presents a vivid stream of ever-changing images: Fifteen-year-old Ellen would dwell in a brown house with large stairs, a tower, and a "fountain adrippin out in front"; her own room in the small cabin would be "pink and blue," and she would have "things to put in drawers and drawers to put things in.…" This is the romantic house of the teenager; the house of the young woman who is making plans for marriage takes on a more practical appearance. As she sits with Jasper Kent, the bride-to-be envisions a structure with mended shutters and a porch that does not leak, a fine parlor for sitting in and a full view of hills, some of them rolling "and some plowed." Thus, although her ideals become more realistic, she does not lose her capacity for creative imagination.

An important element of Ellen's imaginative faculty is her appreciation of form, which is evident from the beginning of the novel. She is attracted to the Bodine house, especially to the relationship of the house to the trees that appear at first to be part of the structure itself. She wonders if the farmer realizes "how the yellow gables came out of the tree boughs, all set and still, fixed behind boughs, gables fitting into each other, snug and firm." When Ellen moves closer, however, she realizes that her perception of these relationships is inaccurate; she sees that "the trees that had belonged to the gables when she had seen the house from the field now stood off along a fence to the rear." These trees were not really attached to the house itself, and this new arrangement somehow violates her sense of form, her notion of how the lines of a fine house ought to be configured. To show her displeasure she sticks out her tongue and then labels the house "a poor trash sort of house." In the next cabin, at Wakefield's farm, Ellen places a glass jar containing a branch of thorn blossom on a shelf above the fireplace. Like the speaker of Wallace Stevens' poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," she proposes to tame the wilderness by satisfying her own sense of form and proportion.

The persona of the poem speaks metaphorically of placing a jar on a hill in the wilderness of Tennessee so that this artistic object takes "dominion everywhere" [Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind], whereas Ellen graces the living room of a tenant home with the beauty of a growing plant. Both arrangers, however, are concerned with the aesthetics of relationships. Ellen's intuitive attempt to bring order and design to the chaos of the harsh physical planes is analogous to her instinctive struggle to wrest an orderly pattern from the emotional events of her life.

As an artist, Elizabeth Madox Roberts shares with her heroine this appreciation of form, this desire to bring order and design to chaos both visually and mentally. Her papers at the Library of Congress reveal just how compelling this idea was to her; she describes it as "one evidence of an unseen power at work" and as

the apprehension of form by the mind, the comprehension of pure form, the mind demanding that things, lines, masses of matter be placed in certain relations to give satisfaction or pleasure …

She further states that she believes "that the great value of sacred writing is … in their [sic] aesthetic and comforting design, their approach to pure form." Again, in reference to her own preference for line and design over color, Miss Roberts writes elsewhere that "… if I were an artist, I should like to be a fine draftsman rather than a painter… in the line I see the absolute, the making of design" [cited in Frederick P. W. McDowell, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 1963]. And finally, of her own literary attempts, she observes,

The difficulty is to choose material from the chaos about me and the apparent chaos that is myself … if I cannot trust the fibers of my being to make the pattern, to write in its delicate traceries, there will be no pattern, [cited in Campbell and Foster]

As Ellen's perceiving mind attempts to force her sense impressions into meaningful patterns, so also did her creator struggle to select and place certain images and events in a pleasing artistic arrangement that would convey her sense of the importance of any individual's development through an imaginative ordering of his or her surroundings.

This preoccupation with masses of matter, things, and lines in pleasing relationships is the real problem for artists, states Susanne Langer [in Philosophy in a New Key, 1942]; their ultimate quest is "the perfection of form." A study of Roberts' seven novels, according to Isabel Hawley, reveals that "the concern for the imposition of 'aesthetically satisfying' form is one of the most prominent and characteristic aspects of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' thinking," though in Hawley's opinion, this tendency exerted a "negative" influence on her later works. In The Time of Man, however, Miss Roberts is in total control of this concern. "Structurally," claims Earl Rovit [in Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 1963], "it is an almost perfect book.…" The desire for perfection of form is perhaps what most attracted Miss Roberts to the works of Beethoven and Mozart; their masterpieces represent a balance between the rational and the irrational, the classical and the romantic, which the human mind constantly craves. In Ellen's story, the artist's search for significant form results in a successful balancing of two elements—form and content—in order to convey the unfolding of her heroine's realizations.

To dramatize the wholesome evolution of Ellen's inner life more fully and to depict the restorative powers of ordinary places more authentically, Miss Roberts draws from the insights that depth psychologists confirm. By her judicious use of dream imagery, she is able to portray what C. G. Jung terms the compensatory nature of dreams. Jung stipulates [in Man and His Symbols], that the "general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium." Thus, when deeply hurt by the superior attitude and deliberate snubbing of Joe Trent, fifteen-year-old Ellen climbs up to her small room in the loft of the cabin at Bodine's farm, and eventually, the "well-being of sleep" comforts her body. This same "well-being" speaks to her, reminding her of her beauty and repeating to her, "it's unknowen how lovely I am." The rippling anapestic rhythm of the words themselves reinforce the harmonious flow of a mind that welcomes the information offered to it by the unconscious—an example of how Miss Roberts' poetic prose contributes to the meaning.

In the Chesser's second cabin, on the Wakefield farm, Ellen's dreams continue to restore her psychic balance. Heavy with the gloom of adolescent despondency over the meaning of existence and weary from the physical demands of farm work, she sobs over the threatening images of a futile old age. But, during her sleep, the "comforter" returns to remind her of her loveliness, and she is again able to rejoice because she is "a-liven." Three years later, the voice again reminds a dejected and listless Ellen that despite her rejection by Jonas, she is still worthy and beautiful. In her dreams, "a deep sense of eternal and changeless well-being suffused the dark, a great quiet structure reported of itself.…" In this dream, the voice alone is sufficiently strong and deep, requiring no image at all to convey its metaphysical truth.

Ellen's bedroom in the third house, on the Orkey property, is the epitome of a room that can function as a space for healing her psyche and, at the same time, act as a symbol of the whole process. Withdrawn into herself because of Jonas's desertion, she finds her small room snug and dry while she awaits the wet relief that will come later with her own tears. In this haven, Ellen feels the womb-like protection of "the enclosing walls," while, at the same time, the room and its contents represent her state of mind. Here Miss Roberts captures that distinctive atmosphere we often give to a place when we are experiencing a strong emotion. Our own sorrow may fill a room as it enshrouds every object and invades every space. The white-wash on the walls reflects both Ellen's attempted obliteration of the memory of Jonas and her sterility of mind, and the chest standing alongside of the wall opposite her bed becomes a casket in which she buries her love for Jonas. For her, "it was a pleasure to lock the chest and slip the key onto the high shelf where it lay out of sight." Bechelard again articulates for us the significance of such use of the space within a chest:

Every important recollection … is set in its own casket … The pure recollection, the image that belongs to us alone, we do not want to communicate … [ejvery secret has its own little casket.

This observation also points out just how conscious Miss Roberts was of the poetry that inhabits ordinary areas of space. Now, because Ellen is open to the sight of places and objects that can contribute to her own healing, she is able to survive what to other young women in her society might be the onset of an embittered life. She has allowed the poetry of space to minister to her spirit.

Gradually, therefore, Ellen begins to open the chest more frequently to put in the money that Jasper Kent entrusts to her. And when her father's accident and Jasper's subsequent help with the farmwork promote the gradual process of healing, the trunk begins to lose its hold on her mind. For, as Bachelard further remarks, "chests … are objects that may be opened … from the moment the casket is opened … a new dimension—the dimension of intimacy has just opened up." Her spirit thus restored, Ellen hurls Jasper's name "at the stiff white walls" one night, and later in the season in her moonlit room, she realizes that she will marry Jasper and go with him wherever he chooses. She understands that she must return to life, that she must begin the journey again. Her restored unity is suggested by the "square of white light on the floor," for as Jung tells us, "quadrangular forms symbolize conscious realization of inner wholeness." When Jasper is forced to flee the area, Ellen returns the money he had given to her, and does so, finally, because she was rid of the memory of Jonas:

The chest was no longer locked for it was empty of any treasure. Its key lay on the floor and its lid stood open …

Confident that Jasper will return for her in secret, Ellen is ready to begin life anew, having been strengthened in a room that is also emblematic of her renewal.

The design of the novel then presents Ellen, assisted by the basic qualities of her three homes, developing into a wholly integrated, mature human being, a bright and shining woman. She does not have to cling desperately to any single moment or idea and demand that it remain in a petrified state, because she is aware that other moments and ideas of equal or greater significance will follow. To a certain degree, she no longer needs a permanent house for psychic shelter since she has somehow become her own house—a separate, independent, and sound structure. Ellen can now withstand impermanency and travail because she has learned to depend on her own inner resources. When we remember '"houses' and 'rooms,'" Bachelard points out, "we learn to 'abide' within ourselves."

Although the last section of The Time of Man is more compressed than the earlier parts and includes many serious family problems, the conclusion does not appear abrupt or somber. Ellen and Jasper Kent, with their growing children and few possessions, load a wagon in the darkness to begin anew in another place. But the final sentence—"They asked no questions of the way but took their own turnings"—conveys a sense of their appreciation of the present moment and their confidence in a future place. The wandering tenant farmers gradually grow dimmer in our minds as the characters in a film would slowly disappear from our sight, leaving only the impact of their unending odyssey. Their constant journeying is the final image as it emphasizes that the movement of life must always be forward. The Kent family, as well as we the readers, are forever pilgrims, and all our sojourns are more enriching when we become aware of the poetic power that exists in "o'nary" places.