Ivy Gripped the Steps

by Elizabeth Bowen

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Style and Technique

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An external voice narrates “Ivy Gripped the Steps”; the voice speaks of Gavin Doddington, as well as all the other characters, in the third person. However, the narrative stance emphasizes Doddington as the protagonist because no information given in the story is foreign to him: The description of the ivy-choked house is given to the reader as Doddington looks at it, the long flashback section is presumably a memory of Doddington, and the scene outside the Concannons’ home centers on Doddington. Although he does not narrate the story technically, his experience controls the narration. As an eight-or ten-year-old, he is not sophisticated enough to understand the full reality of his experience with Mrs. Nicholson, but as an adult he is: He knows that he is alone and restive at Southstone with his memory. His feelings of love, devastated at an early age, have never recovered.

Bowen begins early to establish the tone of her story through her diction. Ivy-covered houses, frequently considered stately and prestigious, are shown capable of carrying negative connotations. In the title and in the first three paragraphs of the story, the diction suggests that the ivy is a destructive image: “Gripped,” “sucked,” “deceptive,” “matted,” “amassed,” “consumed,” “brutal,” “strangulation.” The ivy that gripped the house has taken it over and made it grotesque. All other places in the story where the word “gripped” is used also convey negative connotations. The admiral grips his hand behind his back after he confronts Mrs. Nicholson with her flirtatious behavior; Doddington grips a cigarette in his mouth as he is turned down by the young woman and is left alone and desolate. Twice Gavin Doddington’s being gripped by his love for Mrs. Nicholson is emphasized. The first situation occurs when Gavin at age eight has an early intuitive feeling that he can never approach Mrs. Nicholson:Gavin, gripping the handrail [along the cliff], bracing his spine against it, leaned out backwards over the handrail into the void, in the hopes of intercepting her [Mrs. Nicholson’s] line of view. . . . Despair, the idea that his doom must be never, never to reach her, not only now but ever, gripped him and gripped his limbs.

Bowen employs the same images in a later scene describing Gavin’s relationship with Mrs. Nicholson. He has just been called a child by her, and his reaction is one of anguish: “Overcharged and trembling, he gripped his way, flight by flight, up the polished banister rail, on which his palms left patches of mist; pulling himself away from her up the staircase as he had pulled himself towards her up the face of the cliff.” Just as the ivy has taken over the house and turned its image from a positive to a negative one, the feelings that Mrs. Nicholson nurtured in Gavin toward herself not only have caused him pain but also have doomed him to a life without genuine feeling, to a life without love. Both Mrs. Nicholson and the leisurely, irresponsible life she led are shown to be destructive forces.

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