Paradoxes of Pleasure-and-Pain: Henry Green
[In the following essay, Hall explores the role of what he calls "play-and-pain" in Green's novels, focusing especially on Loving and Concluding.]
Henry Green published his first novel, Blindness, two years before Waugh's Decline and Fall. But, while Waugh was succeeding quickly, Green was working slowly toward the most important innovations in the comic novel since Joyce.
Most readers of Green like him for extraordinarily funny scenes like Edie's telling Kate she has found the Captain in Mrs. Jack's bed or old Rock angrily waiting for his breakfast handout in the girls' school kitchen. But many readers finish Loving or Concluding, as I did, unsure of what else happened. There is something to be said for leaving the situation at that. Scenes are obviously Green's natural units and it is easy to suspect that, if the general direction were only a little clearer, we might not like it anyway. Still, the effort to say more accurately what we have read tells us something not only about him and ourselves, but also something of what we really think—or suspect—about his predecessors.
Green is the skilled novelist in an age which does not want to look very far backward or very far forward—a war generation that lumps all the precariousness of human destiny under fear of the bomb and that lives with so great a social and physical mobility as to make ideals of continuity and traditional living like Forster's seem impossible. Green inherits and absorbs Joyce's use of modern psychology, though he transfers Joyce's view of the mind from the world of reflection to the world of behavior. Like Joyce—and Freud—he treats the mind as a symbol-making agent ready to assimilate every object and experience to its main obsessions. But Joyce had to document his view partly because neither he nor his readers could accept his "forging anew the conscience of the race" without proof. Green assumes this conscience and assumes that his readers will assume it—seems, in fact, unable to conceive any other way of thinking. So his most visible talent is for a casual and cheery acceptance of the human nature which Joyce had to prove and Lawrence became prophetic about.
But, though Green skims the sauce and vegetables off the depth psychology casserole, he does not take much meat. He is sensitive, often oversensitive to symbols, but his comic characters have no history. Their pasts, if any—most have none at all—are backdrops rather than moral evolutions. They live in the immediate future. Their internal monologues, if they had them, would probably run: here I am, here is what I am, here is what want or have to do, how can I do it and like it? His characters allow for their own inadequacies and for a sort of microcosmic absurdity, but do not ask who they are or how they came here. So his scenes are always hurrying toward the next few minutes or the next few days, and carry little of the history which Joyce implies and Warren treats as the foundations of identity.
Green's psychological subtleties are of another kind, a twist on the turn which Huxley and Waugh in their early work gave to the comic novel. The comic novel from Meredith to Forster had a basis in truth to nature—a morally earnest effort toward accommodation between human nature and dominant forces in the culture. Huxley and Waugh focus the moral issue on an almost frantic search for enjoyment, heightened by outraging convention, and end their novels on the exhaustion that follows the frenzy. But, for Green, continuing conflict rather than struggle-and-resolution is the pattern of experience. The "war against the grown-ups" can be only an element, for he sees that we are both the children and the grown-ups. To change a little Forster's well-known phrase about "the knowledge of good-and-evil," Green treats not play and pain but play-and-pain. He sees experience as an hour-to-hour, day-to-day shift in the ratio of pleasure and pain, and cares far less than Huxley or Waugh about the major cycles. In a Green novel, action goes along with a mixture of wishes and fears, neither a direct forecast of the future. What does not happen is as important as what does happen—more important to defining the nature of anxiety. Loving sets a problem of wishes and anxieties, with a partial fulfillment of the wishes and strong desires to flee from the anxieties. Concluding presents the problem of living with wishes and actual phobias, but the characters do live with their phobias and do get some of their wishes.
Like many recent novelists, Green is a miniaturist with an angle. He deals with the conflict between the neurotic and the vital in personality and, by extension, between neurotic and lively people. His talent for casual and cheery acceptance of this situation is as much a matter of temperament as of understanding. He is good at loving what people find difficult to accept in themselves and their friends. He has, like Sterne, an extraordinary ability to like eccentrics and individualists, and to live cheerily with human weakness. He shares with many modern novelists a capacity for getting around conscience in the older sense—accepts easily, for example, a pervasive sexuality in the daily round of his characters. He likes the shrewdness by which handicapped, irregular characters get along in an organized, regularizing world, admires their capacity for giving some order to anxieties which threaten to become chaotic. He specializes in people trying to get what they want when appetites are weak and resistance strong.
But he emphasizes capable neurotics. He respects action that deals with problems as they come up, and satirizes passivity and awkwardness. His passive characters regularly get the leftovers. His bête noir is young Albert in Loving—the gawky, ashamed youth who does nothing in situations that require doing something, then takes "heroic" action to compensate. His favorite adjective, and adverb, is "sharp"—one character quickly taking up another's aggression before it gets under way and dealing summarily with it. And he has the contemporary ambivalent attitude toward organization and institutions. He admires efficient people who can handle other people and organize solutions to problems, but the organizations they create are constantly cramping the organizers as well as the cranky, eccentric, vigorous individualists.
His struggles of the sexes have the same friendly feeling for the contradictory. He caricatures the moral and temporal authority of mothers and substitute mothers—Miss Burch, Nanny Swift, Mrs. Welch, and Mrs. Tennant in Loving alone—yet his heroines are potentially maternal young—and sometimes not young—women. He treats the transition from teasing, flirtatious love to planning, semi-maternal, married relations. He is superb at showing dogged devotion to "small" personal concerns in a world of "large" events which seem to be passing the principals by and engaging their interest only as by-products of their personal problems. He uses the reverse stereotype of the uncertain man and the confident, competent woman, but adds bluster as one mark of this doubting masculinity and nagging as its feminine equivalent. He shows a continuing conflict between the wish for the maternal in woman and the wish to maintain individuality and bachelorhood against organizing, marrying women. His men are not sexually aggressive, his women alternately tease and sympathize—a combination that worries and pleases him. His individualism combines with a strong feeling for groups, especially groups with more women than men.
Though he writes another kind of novel almost as well, the general view of Loving as Green's best novel is accurate. The demand for some explanation of its structure is more than academic. There is just enough order, disrupted constantly by farce, to make the reader feel that he missed something which would explain the whole. The plot is not the difficulty. A group of servants keep things going in an Irish castle which gives them a refuge from the war, two of them fall in love and run away to England to be married. And, plainly, there is the fairy tale framework, which begins
Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch….
One name he uttered over and over, "Ellen."
and returns to this unseen Ellen two paragraphs before the end:
"Edie," he [Raunce] appealed soft, probably not daring to move or speak too sharp for fear he might disturb her. Yet he used exactly that tone Mr. Eldon had employed at the last when calling his Ellen. "Edie," he moaned.
And the final sentences say
The next day Raunce and Edith left without a word of warning. Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after.
But what happened between? Does the novel have a structure obscured by the short, shifting scenes or is its apparently reckless picking up of everything its principle of movement?
An honest answer would be yes to both questions. The novel does have a structure and one of its elements is the carrying on that ignores all anxieties and obstacles. But the basis of Green's skill is the free rolling interplay between his symbols and his characters' minds. (He sometimes seems obscure because a multitude of symbols float so loosely in the novel that the key ones are lost. And every important symbol has at least two meanings—a general, often sexual one which reflects human nature and a personal one which each character attaches to the object or experience.) Most of the characters in Loving are more easily worried by symbols than by events—they have established methods for dealing with events. Edith, the beautiful, lively housemaid, is not afraid to "find" Mrs. Tennant's ring because the possible penalty does not seem real to her. She learns about findings from Raunce, the butler, and makes no distinction between large and small ones. But she goes outside around the castle rather than go through the deserted rooms, and considers it proof of Raunce's masculinity that he looks for her by going through the rooms with sheet-covered furniture. Mrs. Jack endures a long scene of symbolic double talk with her mother-in-law in the "dairy" drawing room where almost every sentence of Mrs. Tennant's and even every object she picks up suggest to Mrs. Jack suspicion about her affair with Captain Davenport. In the picnic scene, Edith's manipulation of the scarf with "I love you, I love you" written all over it teases young Albert as much as anything she says or does. There are many episodes like Raunce's showing Edith the mouse caught in the dumb-waiter and the passing of the dead, moulding peacock, which no one wants to get caught with, to Mrs. Welch's larder and on to Albert's boiler. And when apprehensions grow about the lost ring, Miss Burch, the stiff Victorian housekeeper, demands that the drains be dug out again—a point she has already carried before. Most of the mix-ups and anxieties in the novel come because someone, most often everyone, has appropriated an object or act to his own obsession.
If this is the mode of Green's comedy in Loving, its theme is "free" love and responsibility. The structural symbol is the lost ring. Mrs. Tennant considers the loss a nuisance. She loses objects of value regularly, but this time the consequences disturb the security she wants from ownership of the castle. The insurance company investigates and refuses to insure further. Mrs. Tennant's loss of the ring implies loss of direction and loss of capacity for loving, while its passing to Edith, who has both in plenty, is the passing of a symbol of power. The consequence for Mrs. Tennant is anxiety. There is a thief in the castle, the servants are conspiring to keep things from her as well as take things from her, and Mrs. Jack is hiding some secret about Captain Davenport.
But the ring is more important to the servants, in whom Green's two aspects of reality, love and work, come together. Before Mrs. Tennant loses the ring, the main action is Charley's establishing himself as Raunce, the butler, rather than Charley the footman or "Arthur," the generic name Mrs. Tennant uses for all unimportant male servants. To do this he has to bluff his way past Miss Burch, who resists out of devotion to the dead Mr. Eldon, a dislike for change, and a well-grounded distrust of Raunce. Simultaneously, the action develops an especially cheery brand of pansexual loving. Raunce is coming to like Edith, but he chases both of the maids and can kiss Kate with energy. Kate and Edie are still living in the good old days of long talks about boy friends accompanied by gigglings, undressings, and back rubbings. Raunce bullies and defends young Albert. Miss Burch is devoted to her maids and tries hard to protect them from "dangers"—Raunce's attentions and finding Mrs. Jack in bed with the Captain. (They are, of course, a good deal more capable than Miss Burch of dealing with both.) All the potential guardians of the moral law are happily ineffective. Mrs. Tennant is too unconcerned, Miss Burch is too horrified by events, and old Nanny Swift, sick, believes only good and sees no evil, hears no evil. The results are merrily anarchic.
But this anarchy has its efficient side. Raunce performs his duties as butler—mostly by ordering Albert to do them. Miss Burch supervises, Kate and Edie work hard, Edie brings Raunce his tea in bed before breakfast, and Albert does almost everything else. Mrs. Welch drinks but cooks, and is sensitive about the product.
Through all this Edie becomes so attractive and vital that some critics have called her the central character. But her very naturalness and energy make it impossible for her to be the main dramatic figure. She has no inner conflict and very little outer, though other girls might have a good deal over taking Raunce for a husband. Her flirtatious and accepting spirit creates problems for others, Raunce especially, but she herself is a force-of-nature character, one of the many in literature who lead others on to a more mixed experience. She knows instinctively how to live, Raunce must always figure out how to do it. Edie is a child of nature modified by the traditions of "service." Raunce has strong inner and outer conflicts that make for drama.
The loss of the ring appears at first to be only another episode, almost predictable, in this cheerful anarchy. Edith finds it and becomes engaged to Raunce at almost the same time. But the ring is an engagement ring in the existentialist sense, too. Mrs. Tennant leaves, apparently freeing the servants to do as they please. From that point on, for Raunce, the cheeriness, the effort to get established, and the free loving begin to give way to anxiety, the trials of responsible position, and possessiveness over Edith. Just as he has persuaded Miss Burch to recognize him as butler, the situation threatens to get beyond his control. He prides himself upon his craft and suavity. (He has set up a small system of cheating on the books weekly, though he has found no way to tap the profitable blackmail his predecessor had built up from Captain Davenport.) More than anything else, he wants a smooth-running organization. But, though he has he script for this operation in mind, he constantly meets absurd situations which interrupt his plans and force him to readjust. For Raunce, as for more serious characters, the absurd is the unexpected, irrational turn of events and emotions which deviate from his prepared script. The test of Raunce's competence is his ability to withstand these small jars. When he finds that Edith means to keep the ring as a nest egg for their marriage, he has to explain practical morality to her without losing her love. Edith traps him into admitting the amount of his weekly findings, but his habitual caution makes him try to downgrade the estimate within a day or two. When Edith's weakness for children leads to their theft of the ring from her, Raunce has to concoct a new plan which involves, to his taste, trusting too many people. Just as he has readjusted to this perspective, the lisping insurance investigator, ridiculous but threatening—a prime symbol of the difficulties in Loving—appears to cross-question the servants. Young Albert, out of a misplaced feeling that Edith needs protecting, "confesses" to the crime. Raunce blusters his way through this situation, but with a loss of poise and with the investigator's threat not to pay the claim increasing the threat in Mrs. Tennant's return.
The investigator's card, with its initials I.R.A. (Irish Regina Assurance), sets off a new round of the general wartime apprehensions into which the lesser characters translate their personal anxieties. Raunce has been using the threat of war service for women in England, along with the invasion talk, to keep Kate from going back home, but now he has to deal with semihysterical fears which have hitherto been peripheral—the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) is going to attack the castle, the Germans are going to invade Ireland as a steppingstone to England and rape all the women (old Miss Burch toys with this idea), the Irishman Paddy is a secret I.R.A. man who is going to betray them. But all the worries, real and imaginary, are mixed in with the also half-hysterical horseplay about the investigator's lisp.
The ring, the investigation, and the threat of further investigation aggravate Raunce's anxieties about marriage. [In a footnote the critic adds: "Earle Labor's 'Henry Green's Web of Loving,' Critique, IV (Fall-Winter, 1961), gives a thorough account of the threatening elements in the courtship and marriage."] He begins to turn up unexpectedly while Edith is teasing young Albert or doing Captain Jack's room, and to question her about possible advances from Captain Jack. Raunce's script for living calls for smooth progress of his limited plans plus being "properly valued." The events which interfere make no sense, and his anxiety that he cannot deal with them increases along with his anxiety about the engagement to Edie. His symptoms increase, too—his glands become enlarged and he has to wear a neckcloth, his fear of being outside the castle in the open air reasserts itself in spite of Edith's coaxings. When his mother refuses to help him establish a family by moving to Ireland and Mrs. Tennant refuses to value him properly, he slips out of Ireland with Edie and returns to war work and his mother in England—a compromise with the typical Raunce dubiousness about it. He goes into the marriage hesitantly yet insistently, and he gives up trying to manage either Edith or the castle. The desire to do as he is told and let someone else manage seems to triumph, yet to the end of the novel he is busy managing the clandestine trip. He accepts his public responsibility in wartime England, but by running away from the more immediate responsibility which has become too complex—as young Albert runs away from his inadequacies to become a hero as a tail gunner.
Loving is the showpiece of one symbolic action Green has repeated in all his comic works—Living, Party-Going, Nothing, Doting, even Concluding. From his first novel onward he has been trying to prove that people who, by some going standard, ought not to be enjoying life are enjoying it and that other people who ought to be enjoying it are not. Paradoxes on the conventions of pleasure are his specialities. But he cannot give over the problem, as Huxley and Waugh do in their comic novels, by showing that the human animal is not made for enjoyment. He wants too much to find the unexpected pleasure amid anxiety, exasperation, pain, moral stasis.
His most persistent formula for resolving the paradox is "easy does it." His people who conscientiously try to have fun, like his people who try to do good, never do. The playboys and playgirls in Party-Going, Mrs. Jack in Loving, and the Middletons in Doting all fail by trying too hard too directly. But his factory workers in Living, the servants in Loving, the retired playboy and playgirl in Nothing, the retired scientist who slops pigs in Concluding, and the bachelor and plain secretary in Doting have fun by dealing with the immediate without expecting too much. They work on limited but possible goals and refuse to concentrate on some total, permanent good. Green works with dynamic rather than static concepts of enjoyment. The truly unhappy people in his novels want to organize life too thoroughly and, while Green likes the organizers for enjoyment better than the organizers for public good, he sees an obsessiveness common to both groups.
But here, too, Green lives on contradictions. In spite of this distaste for organization and drive, no novelist admires more than Green small schemes and smooth-working organization—but he wants the schemes to be petty and the organizations small and loose. He loves the ins and outs of the urgency that he dislikes. His "easy does it" takes hold because he recognizes the force of the driving spirit. He plays the urge to drive immediately toward the best against the necessity of indirection and limited aims.
Many people undoubtedly think of Green as a purely comic novelist, but long sections of Party-Going, Caught, and Back make unpleasant reading because of his preoccupation with depression. Caught and Back explore depression almost as far as the later novels of Anthony Powell. In the best comic novels Green hits an equilibrium between this depression and his extraordinarily cheery ability to accept human nature. But one of his best novels, Concluding, pegs the equilibrium so far on the side of dread that there is a question whether it is comic at all.
Concluding is certainly about the deeper, more unresolvable anxieties. In spite of all the worries, Loving treats only two real grounds for anxiety—Raunce's inadequacy as butler-manager and the complications in his love for Edith. But the dread which hangs over the characters in Concluding exists more in reality and is only partly resolvable. This partly, though, is the story, for it keeps life going with a degree of cheerfulness. The conflicting and sustaining forces are the same: the organizing spirit of contemporary institutions and a cagey, crusty individualism.
For the two principals of the school set up by the government to produce workers for the bureaucracy, both the deeper anxieties and the smaller ones come from resistance to the regimented society they are trying to sustain. Their sense of disaster centers on the disappearance of two girls. One is found during the day the novel covers, but avoids having to explain by using the "fair," maternalistic rules of the school system. The other, an anonymous orphan named Mary whom nobody seems to know, never appears, but Miss Edge and Miss Baker keep fearing the news that she has been found dead, and keep hoping that her anonymity will minimize the painful investigation by the bureaucracy. Miss Edge, the dominant co-principal, continues to insist that the rest of the girls must have fun at the annual school dance scheduled for the evening. (And, for the girls, the superbly exciting disappearances do add to the fun.) It takes the reader very few pages to see that Miss Edge is a villain, but most of the novel to see that she is a villain heroine.
The chief resister to this caretaking spirit is cagey, eccentric old Mr. Rock, a retired scientist who once made some anonymous but great discovery and is now busy slopping his pigs, cadging food for himself and the pigs from the school kitchen, and chasing a pet goose around the grounds of the chartered estate. Miss Edge covets the cottage he lives in on the edge of the grounds, partly to become mistress of all she surveys and partly to spare the girls the evil influence of the pigs and the old man, whom they of course like. Mr. Rock, though oppressed by a vision of finding Mary's body in the pond on his way back from chasing the goose, worries chiefly that he will be forced out of his cottage by election to membership in a home for retired scientists. (He resists Miss Edge's efforts to get him elected by stuffing the society's letter into a trunk along with the other unopened letters he has kept for years.)
Green's sterner comedy depends again upon cross-purposes and contradictions in personality. Mr. Rock's daughter, Liz, is recuperating from a mental illness caused by "overwork" in a government bureau, but shows stamina in pursuing Sebastian, a teacher in the school. Sebastian, worried about his masculinity in this feminine environment, wants to marry her and get a better job, but also wants not to marry anybody and stay where he is. Liz is even willing to sacrifice Mr. Rock's cottage to her plans. Both Sebastian and Liz, like Miss Edge and Miss Baker, worry about ratings and the whimsical distant bureaucracy in London. Miss Edge threatens continually to do something drastic about Mr. Rock and the pigs, Miss Baker continually reminds her of channels to be gone through, but Miss Baker panics and upsets the system by bringing in Merode's aunt to complicate the problem of the runaways. Miss Edge wants the girls to like her, but Mr. Rock is initiated into their "secret" club of rebels. Mr. Rock is taken to the dance uninvited, by Liz, but has fun and rejects a proposal of marriage from Miss Edge, who has tried to solve her frustrations about marriage and the cottage in a final bold scheme.
Like Loving, Concluding leaves the reader feeling that he missed something. Almost every reader believes he must have skipped the page which tells what happened to the missing girl. But even more primary dramatic considerations are unclear. Why does Green choose a retired old man, scrambling for a living after a distinguished career, as his hero? Why does Miss Edge come through so equivocally—so clearly the villain, yet with an odd heroic proportion? Is the novel a reversion to cynicism about loving?
The three hundred girls, so anonymous that all their names begin with M, carry the theme of love as potential. It is the chief threat to Miss Edge's system of rules—is, in fact, what the rules propose to suppress. These girls at the budding stage are attractive, flirtatious, and hopeful in spite of their circum-stances—anonymous copies, almost, of Edith and Kate. Since there are no Raunces around, they seize on whatever they can for excitement. Moira flirts with Mr. Rock while she watches him slop the pigs. (Miss Edge is not wholly wrong in believing that the pigs give her girls wrong ideas.) The runaway Merode contrives to have Sebastian find her, under a tree, with a recently bared leg. She settles luxuriously into the warm bath that Marchbanks provides on her return. The girls induct Mr. Rock into their secret society in the basement and want to play kissing games. Even the principals apparently tolerate the society as a safety valve for these nonutilitarian emotions.
Against this potential Green sets a devalued image of love between Sebastian Birt and Elizabeth. Sebastian's continual imitations of other people's voices and accents indicate that he does not know who he is. Elizabeth's love is distrustful, troublesome, and capricious. Neither lover believes himself lovable, yet for different reasons they will presumably marry and face together the uncertainties of their futures. Adams, the handyman, furnishes another devalued symbol, the "dirty old man," Mr. Rock's malign counterpart. No one knows whether the girls really slip out to Adams in the woods at night, but their talk shows another side of loving in their confined situation.
Love as potential, then, is poetic and merry, the hope of the world; but the only adult love in the novel seems intractable, neurotic, sometimes silly. Yet the temptation to read Sebastian and Elizabeth as a prediction for the girls is wrong. Like the missing Mary, the couple represent a threat. Unlike the girls, they have accepted the organization world. Sebastian's imitations are his joke against the system, but they are also a joke against him. He twists his personality to fit the system; he is a different person with Edge, with Winstanley, with Mr. Rock, with Elizabeth. Elizabeth, too, wants only to fit into a corner of the organization, even if she has to sacrifice her grandfather to do it. So she and Sebastian do not so much represent adult love as the threat of trying to make peace without exerting any personal force. They hope to slide through the organization world without bringing its power down on them. Neither Mr. Rock nor the girls have yet accepted this defeatism. Merode's shrewdness in using the rules to outwit the managers is one of many episodes promising that no organization can quite confine the spirited.
Mr. Rock, though, seems involved with neither the girls' hope nor the young adults' compromise. Kingsley Weatherhead has shown the importance of growth in Green's earlier heroes—Max in Party-Going, Charley Summers in Back, Raunce in Loving. But Green deliberately puts Mr. Rock past the stage of any obvious growth. Mr. Rock's object is to maintain life against the approaching threat of death, not to advance. Yet in him Green tests the possibility of loving at a stage when the future no longer promises to be better than the present.
Rock is a hero maimed by age, but akin nevertheless to the many other maimed heroes of modern fiction. His wound acts as a defense against the managing women, and there he is willing to make much of it. Otherwise, he ignores it. He has his affections and, even more, his sense of responsibility. His work is taking care of unmated animals—Daisy, the pig in the pen; Ted, the earthbound goose; the ranging cat; and Elizabeth. He approves of the animals thoroughly, of Elizabeth very little, but he feels responsible for her. Significantly, though, he will not and probably cannot exert authority over her, even to forbidding Sebastian's staying overnight. He can only be grumpy. Yet by the end of the novel Elizabeth seems well on her way to marrying, Daisy is happily asleep in her pen, Ted flies, and the cat comes home.
But Mr. Rock gets some reward. He pleases his animals, and he sees himself clearly as lovable to those capable of loving. The girls want him in their secret society. They believe him on their side in spite of his age, and he is. He does love and cherish; he does not impose authority. He does the dirty work and rejects entirely the public image of eminent, outmoded scientist. He has had a good day "living in the present."
The novel as a whole shows authority extending itself into every detail of conduct, all in the name of responsibility for the future. The drama deals with ways of bearing this burden of being responsible—not, as in Loving, with the discovery that responsibility is easier to achieve than to bear. Mr. Rock is the good burden bearer, Miss Edge the bad. She opposes her authority of rules to his authority as a person able to command by example. But the bad has its human side; life is not a melodrama. Miss Baker, the other co-principal, is maternal and cautious, more aware of the prohibitions in the rules than their use for imposing the will. Miss Edge's consciousness will not organize itself around her will. Green makes her human in much the same way that Faulkner makes Mink Snopes human in The Hamlet. Miss Edge has tried to impose her will without much thought about consequences, believing only in her own form of right, but, faced with Mary's disappearance, she suffers hallucinatory fears and "sees" Mary's body among the greenery piled up for decorations. Her efforts at control during the lunch, when she feels all the girls watching her, inevitably produce sympathy. Green gives her the apprehensions as well as the irritability attending the life of the will. And though the dance—without men—is an imposed, misguided form of gaiety, Miss Edge carries it through in spite of her own confusion.
But why do we never find what happened to Mary? The answer has already been implied. Mary represents the permanent threat of outbreak against repressive conditions—in the school and in living itself. Finding Merode, who halfheartedly ran away, half solves the problem, which can never be more than half solved. So Mary, like the lost ring in Loving, provides a continuing spur for each character's apprehensions. When Miss Edge's frustrated aggressiveness approaches the point of outbreak, the doll in the shrubs seems to her Mary's body. In her calmer moments, she prefers to believe that Mary has run off with a man and hopes to turn this suspicion against Mr. Rock. She fears most of all an "investigation" from London. For Mr. Rock himself, the man with no future, the suicide threat remains the most important face of Mary. He fears finding her in the pond, and yet thinks it ought to be dragged. For Sebastian and Elizabeth, Mary's disappearance means an upset that may start arbitrary authority off on some course dangerous to them. Miss Winstanley, the teacher with few pleasures and hopes, finds in Mary one more prohibition: Miss Edge has forbidden swimming in the pond. There is, in Concluding, no way either to find Mary or to get rid of her. She is a protean burden that all the characters must carry.
The depression and threat in the novel are fairly earned. Green's animosity toward organization and aggressive women, as well as his admiration for individuality which manages to maintain itself, is more open here. But, though Miss Edge's determination to keep organized fun going is grimly comic, it also comes through as real. Better grim fun in the face of the disturbing than not carrying on at all—and her decision to go on with the dance in spite of her hallucination is one of Green's memorable scenes.
Mr. Rock does a little better than merely maintain his individuality. In spite of his absurdities, he is an idealized father, debarred from taking his opportunities for love, considered a menace by the managing women, doing the dirty work and expecting only a little admiration and affection. The cook forgets his breakfast, but he eventually gets it—and some slop for Daisy. He resents his granddaughter's conduct, but gets a little affection from Moira. He has a puzzling conflict with Adams and suffers genuine apprehension about Mary, but has a succès d'estime as an uninvited guest and refuses Miss Edge's offer of marriage. At the end of the day he still has his cottage, and Miss Edge is doubtless planning some new threat to it. He fears going home in the dark, which means loneliness and death to him, but Elizabeth, who does not fear the dark just now, helps him home. A day of checks and balances.
So Concluding concludes nothing. The characters are projected forward into some tomorrow. If the analysis so far is true, it is equally impossible to conclude a chapter on Green. The summary is in the -ing.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.