Rite at the Center: Narrative Duplication in Susan Hill's In the Springtime of the Year

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SOURCE: "Rite at the Center: Narrative Duplication in Susan Hill's In the Springtime of the Year," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 172-80.

[Below, Ireland identifies the scene at Helm Bottom as the mise en abyme of In the Springtime of the Year, emphasizing its primary relation to the themes and structure of the novel.]

It is almost a decade since Susan Hill's last novel appeared. Similar to E. M. Forster in one respect at least, that of having written a handful of mature novels before giving up the form, she paradoxically invites, by her novelistic silence, a retrospective consideration of her work. Much-read but little analyzed, her work has a fluency and economy soon taken for granted, a simplicity of surface that is deceptive. In the Springtime of the Year (1974), her sixth and arguably most accomplished novel, received critical acclaim when it was published, but in the absence of any academic attention, certain features of the book's narrative structure have gone unnoticed. One feature especially, that of interior duplication or mise en abyme, makes an unobtrusive but carefully judged appearance, testifying to her subtle overall control and effective presentation of material.

Auden's description of Rilke as the "Santa Claus of loneliness" is one that might be adopted, with some modification, for Susan Hill. All her novels, it has been observed, focus on "the same kind of lonely, dislocated experience. The characters are always somehow unaccommodated, outside ordinary intercourse; there is always the pathos of an excited, complex sensibility that has to stay closed-off and inarticulate…." Each novel explores a particular set of relationships, ranging from possessiveness and jealousy (Gentleman and Ladies, 1968, A Change for the Better, 1969), cruelty (I'm the King of the Castle, 1970), fear and intimacy (Strange Meeting, 1971), to madness (The Bird of Night, 1972) and grief (In the Springtime of the Year, 1974). Living "at the edge" in terms of mental stability, the central characters of these novels vary in age and sex from elderly spinsters and retired people to schoolboys, from a soldier and a poet to a young widow. They share a sense of guilt and responsibility exploited by family and kin, and a spiritual or geographical isolation making them vulnerable to events, so that, not surprisingly, death frequently intrudes. Two novels actually culminate in suicide, and the sixth and final novel only narrowly escapes, to close on a note of qualified hope.

In the Springtime of the Year is a study of the effects on a 19-year-old woman of the sudden death of her husband, a forester, killed while felling timber. Although Ben Bryce's family lives nearby, it has long shown resentment and lack of sympathy towards Ruth, and she now suffers in virtual solitude, tended only by her 14-year-old brother-in-law Jo. The novel traces the course of Ruth's emotional responses to Ben's death, from an initial terror and numbness, through despair interrupted by brief moments of vision, to an ultimately precarious sense of consolation based upon altruism. By dividing the narrative into three unequal parts, such that the first and third are temporally sequential and spatially subordinate to the central "embedded" section, Susan Hill skirts the danger of monotony inherent in a straightforward linear presentation of the material. Thus, the first part is set six months after Ben's death, while the second part opens on the day before that event in February and closes with the Easter weekend, leaving the third part to continue from August into December. For Ruth, sunk in depression, the approach of Easter represents "suffering and death and resurrection … despair and hope and certainty," but a scene which occurs before its arrival and is located at the very center of the novel seems in many ways more decisive. It is also a scene best conceived of in terms of the mise en abyme.

The procedure which this phrase connotes dates back as far as the Renaissance at least, but was outlined by André Gide in the 1890s and developed further by critics of the French New Novel in the 1960s and 1970s. Referring to his partiality for thematic duplication within a work of art, Gide contends that such duplication can illuminate a work and confirm its overall proportions. As pictorial models, he cites paintings by Memling, Quentin Metzys and Velasquez in which mirrors afford a second, if distorting view of a depicted scene; as literary models, Gide alludes to the play-within-a-play of Hamlet, to marionette scenes in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister, and to the story read to Roderick in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. For Gide, however, such models do not correspond as closely to the effects intended in his own works as does an analogy from heraldry, whereby one escutcheon encloses a second, positioned at the heart-point (en abyme). It has since been shown that this inner coat-of-arms never exactly reproduces the outer by which it is subsumed, though Gide's formula retains its value nonetheless. His brief discussion concludes with the claim that this effect of "inescutcheon" or mise en abyme is characteristic of the psychological novel.

More recent commentators, especially those involved with the nouveau roman, have chosen to ignore this latter feature in favor of approaches derived from structural semantics. The critic and novelist Jean Ricardou, for instance, sees the functions of the mise en abyme as those of narrative summary and enrichment. Its roles may be antithetical or revelatory: challenging the narrative by acting as counterpoint (Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher) or revealing the narrative's own self-awareness (Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur). These roles may, in turn, be further divided into semantic operations of repetition, condensation and anticipation. Ricardou's concern, and that of many practitioners of the French New Novel, is with the mise en abyme not simply as a fragment foreshadowing the whole of the narrative, but as the matrix of that whole. Thus, it comes to function as a model issuing directives for the production of the larger narrative, which then becomes the mise en périphérie of the micro-narrative. In the extreme case of La prise de Constantinople (1965), Ricardou uses the letters of his own name as the generative basis of his novel.

While, in practice, it might be difficult to demonstrate in a given text that a mise en abyme actually preceded and generated the whole of the narrative, or that, alternatively, it developed later to fulfill a need to provide an internal mirror of events, at least its functions in different contexts can be examined. Of the two anglophone examples cited by Gide, that of Shakespeare's tragedy has become a locus classicus of interior duplication. The play-within-a-play is located at the very center (III, ii.) of Hamlet, and in strict terms offers two mirrors rather than one mirror of the larger events, since a dumb-show precedes and enacts the argument of "The Mouse-trap" itself. It is Hamlet who chooses the play and who inserts lines of his own into the given text, while the avowed intention, to "catch the conscience of the king," proves successful. In its narrative relation to the main play, "The Mouse-trap" is retrospective, an "external analepsis," and in its performance it is only half-completed, King Claudius leaving when the Player King is poisoned. The mise en abyme in Hamlet thus has the status of a stage-work acted out in public, using a model familiar to initiator and performers, and carrying personal meaning for its chief spectator.

In Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, second of Gide's anglophone examples, the book read to Roderick by the narrator most clearly represents the mise en abyme, though an allegorical poem titled "The Haunted Palace" placed at the very center of the larger narrative offers, as in Hamlet, a further internal mirror. It is the unnamed narrator who, within a prose narrative, vainly chooses a prose romance, the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning, in order to divert the doomed recluse. Usher's own recognition of the close correspondence between events offstage during the reading and those in the romance stresses the narrowness of the "internal prolepsis," so that the mise en abyme, here generating suspense but represented by a partial and incompleted performance, barely foreshadows the catastrophe. As Roderick's friend, the first-person narrator is an observer and a participant in a private performance, the literary model for which is familiar to speaker and listener alike, the outcome of which destroys both master and mansion. The functions of the mise en abyme in the context of Susan Hill's novel are different once again.

In the relevant scene, forming the second half of Chapter Six of The Springtime of the Year, Ruth visits Helm Bottom, site of Ben's death a month previously. Earlier chapters have detailed his funeral and other people's reactions to his death, and have focused especially on his widow's distracted grief, epitomized by her nocturnal vigils at the graveyard. Only her excursion to the sea with Jo, which earns his mother's reproof in the first half of Chapter Six, has brought the slightest relief from despair. At Helm Bottom, however, Ruth now becomes soothed and quietened by happy memories of the past, in contrast with the storm of emotions aroused at the graveyard. The choice of name itself also carries the notion of reversal or contrast, since "helm," according to the OED, still signifies in dialect the crown, top or summit of anything, and in Old English referred to the leafy top of a tree. Ben's death beneath an elm tree, whose bark appeared fresh but whose center was rotten, may be pertinently recalled. Another sense of "helm" is that of a handle, tiller or wheel by which a ship's rudder or steering gear is managed, and in a more figurative sense, that by which affairs are managed. Ben's relationship to Ruth is here exactly defined, and his loss causes her quite literally to drift:

She had brought about no real developments in her life by any exercise of her own will; things had happened to her, and she had accepted that, and could not tell if it had been right or wrong, good or bad. She was afraid of taking any initiative with time and circumstance, people and places. She had never done so, because her father had been there, and Ben.

In a third, more circumscribed sense, "helm" is a North-Country name for a cloud which forms over a mountain-top before or during a storm, and a "helm-wind" refers to a violent wind met in the Pennines. Thus, in a novel with indeterminate geography, even this localized meaning conveys the force of Ben's death and its aftereffects.

It is significant that this scene at Helm Bottom, at the symmetrical center of the novel, should be graced by weather which suggests for the first time, "a sense of the approaching spring" (86). By this allusion to the book's title, the thematic as well as structural centrality of the scene is emphasized, and the new season is contrasted with the physical detail of the dead leaves remaining from the old year. Arrived at the bottom of the slope, in what proves a symbolic as well as physical sense, Ruth pauses at the sound of chanting from high, childish voices. She retreats behind an oak to watch a small, slow procession which emerges from the woods. The group comprises five children from the village, all girls and all dressed in white, the first of whom carries a small, white box. As they approach, they sing disjointedly the nursery rhyme of "Cock Robin," and halt near the fallen elm tree. Their leader, Jenny Colt, sets down the box, a hole is dug, the box is buried and the chanting recommences. After sticking a cross made of twigs into the ground, the group's leader bows in respect and rejoins the others who retire through the trees, leaving behind the grave of a bird or small animal.

To designate this scene as a mise en abyme clearly implies thematic duplication within a micro-narrative, but it also introduces here a significant reduction in the scale of performers themselves. Thus, the mourners are children, five in number, echoing the survivors of the Bryce family (Ruth; Jo and Alice; Arthur and Dora), but far fewer than the "column of mourners like black ants" at Ben's funeral. The coffin has become a small, white box, sufficiently light to be carried in the girl's hand, rather than requiring shoulders for support. Their clothes are adapted from adults', and their whiteness, like that of the box, contrasts with the conventional black of the adult ceremony. They sing a nursery rhyme in place of a hymn, use a rusty garden trowel instead of a spade, and endlessly incant the only fragment of the funeral service they know. Lacking any more substantial material, they make a cross from twigs, while the object of mourning in the grave is no human body, but that of a small creature whose scale matches that of the young mourners.

It is made quite apparent that the children act out their ritual with a specific ceremony in mind. Not only do they dig a grave close to the fallen elm where Ben lost his life, but their leader, Jenny Colt, is the sister of the young forester David Colt, who brought the first news of the accident to Ruth. The nursery rhyme embedded in this brief scene offers, like the dumb-show in Hamlet and the allegorical poem in Usher, a second internal mirror, or rather echo, of the larger events, and is especially appropriate in this context. While the story of the mating of Robin with Wren is centuries-old, it is his death and burial rather than their marriage that has endured in rhyme, and it is this same kind of emphasis which dominates Susan Hill's larger narrative too. By using the classic nursery rhyme liturgy of "Cock Robin" with its doleful sequence of question and response, and allowing the phonetic similarity of "Ben"/"Robin" to resonate throughout, the narrative establishes suggestive links which are further reinforced by giving Jenny Colt, the children's pallbearer, the same first name as the Wren who "bears the pall" in the nursery rhyme. Being herself childless and, at nineteen, young enough to be related in spirit to the child-mourners she is watching, Ruth must regard Jenny Colt as her surrogate, the Wren lamenting her Robin.

The choice of Helm Bottom for the mise en abyme of the children's ceremony also involves semantic condensation, in so far as the site of death now merges with the site of burial. It becomes, too, the site of rejuvenation, in terms of Ruth's identification with the youthful actors. By their white robes, the children mark themselves off from the world of adult convention and proclaim their innocence, while Ruth's past abhorrence of the "ashen" faces of mourners "black as crows" at Ben's funeral now merges with other images, of people in the early church "who wore white at a funeral for rejoicing." This association of whiteness, together with the link between the earlier ceremony and the reduced model, conveyed by the typical epithet of "old-young" which Susan Hill applies to the children's faces, prepares the reader for a brief account of Ruth's reactions to the scene. Leaving the solid oak, she goes to sit on the fallen elm, at the same moment as the sun breaks through, and she feels a moment of happiness. This "assurance that she would survive" recalls an earlier epiphany at the church service for Ben, when a reading from the Book of Revelation accompanies Ruth's perception of an inner unifying light: "She felt faint, not with grief but with joy, because love was stronger than death." Now, at Helm Bottom, she senses that she will one day emerge from the dark tunnel, remade and whole; were she to die soon, she tells herself, at least she would no longer feel alone, unloved and unprotected.

This gradual reawakening of concern for other proves later to be the vital support by which she clings to life and ultimately justifies her existence, so that on the last page of the novel, hearing about an old man's fate, she "felt appalled, at the isolated death, that the man had no friends, no care. She must not let anyone in her own life come to that." At the end of the scene at Helm Bottom, therefore, the first stage in that process has begun, as Ruth experiences a sense of relief on behalf of the youthful mourners. Her own thoughts provide the framework for that reaction: "The children were safe, because they had been able to act out the ritual of death and funeral, they would not come to harm." For days afterwards, she is gladdened by memories of the scene and at night the white figures inhabit her dreams. Ruth's attraction to the graveyard is now replaced by that of Helm Bottom, where she comes to the elm tree to remember her past life. For, "only by remembering might she piece the pattern together and understand it. Until now, she had only seen it in flashes, as though a light had been turned on to a picture, but turned off again, at once, before she had had a clear view of it." The scattered epiphanies of the past, now reinforced by her experience at Helm Bottom, prepare the way for her spiritual illumination on Easter Sunday, when she feels for the first time ever that she is part of the life around her, part of some "great, living and growing tapestry, every thread of which joined with and crossed and belonged to every other, though each one was also entirely and distinctly itself."

By contrast with Hamlet and Usher, the chief character of Springtime has little to say in the choice of the mise en abyme, beyond making the voluntary decision to watch the ritual funeral. The intention behind its staging by the children would appear to be their imitation of a traditional event in the adult world. Its success, however, unrealized by and incidental to the performers, must be measured by its effect upon the unseen observer. Ruth's momentous decision, on Good Friday, in the chapter next-but-one, to dispose of Ben's possessions, carries the sanction of the scene at Helm Bottom: "She remembered the children in the wood. Well, she would copy them; somehow, she would drag the sacks down to the meadow, or into the copse, and either bury them or make a pyre and burn them in the garden." Thus, the children's burial of the white box becomes the trigger for Ruth's burial of the past, which must precede a fresh start. In narrative terms, the purpose of the ritual is to objectify Ruth's experience for the first time, to prepare her to view her situation as if she were outside it, to exorcise the barren claims of the graveyard. By adopting elements from the pastoral elegy and using children as actors, a new ambience is created in which complex issues appear simplified, the outlines of emotion are softened, distanced and depersonalized, grief is granted dignity, and the possibility of consolation and reassurance in some permanent principle is finally held out. Later, when she comes to the aid of the curate Ratheman, whose young daughter has just died, she recognized a parallel case, a further objectification of her own earlier self: "Ruth realized at last how she herself had been, and how it had seemed to others, when she had shut herself away, or spent hours in the woods, or beside Ben's grave at night, all sense of time lost." It can hardly be accidental that Ruth encounters the hysterical curate, who prompts her first show of initiative, activity and altruism, in the woods at Helm Bottom.

Set alongside the ritual of Easter, presented at some length in the novel, the children's enactment of the burial service appears transient and private, though, as indicated, it is a necessary prerequisite to the public celebration of Easter by which it is followed. While Springtime shows the spatial reduction common to all examples of mise en abyme, it differs from Hamlet and Usher in adding a reduction in the physical scale of its performers, and introducing a different mode (dramatic) from its overall norm (narrative), whereas the mise en abyme in Hamlet is dramatic within a dramatic framework, and that in Usher is narrative within a [narrative] framework. Unlike Poe's and Shakespeare's, Susan Hill's example is non-literary and non-secular, emphasizing by its dramatic mode the notion of objectification, and by its status as religious ritual the importance of the spiritual in the novel as a whole. The proximity of interests between Ruth and the children is unequalled by that between the factions in the other works, the narrator and Roderick, Hamlet and Claudius.

This relationship of affinity, rather than sympathy or outright antagonism, is supplemented, further, by the fact that the mise en abyme in Susan Hill's novel is the only one of the three examples which offers a completed rather than a partial performance, since "The Mouse-trap" and the Mad Trist are not acted out or read out to their conclusions. In this connection, it would be apposite to refer to Ricardou's conception of the mise en abyme as a model issuing directives for the production of the larger narrative. Thus, the effect of reassurance which the (completed) performance has on Ruth is projected into the note of qualified hope at the end of the larger narrative, while the corresponding (incompleted) mise en abyme in Hamlet and Usher anticipate the physical downfall of their chief characters. In its relation to the larger narrative, finally, the mise en abyme of Springtime, by contrast with the other two works, appears as an "internal analepsis," referring back to an event which has occurred since the novel's starting-point. Its role proves revelatory, in Ricardou's terms, and its psychological aspect, proposed by Gide, is here borne out. All three anglophone examples treat the theme of death: in Hamlet the mise en abyme re-enacts the manner of death, in Usher it narrowly foreshadows its approach, in Springtime it relives the funeral rites. While the first two are concerned with process, the third is concerned with product, and while in Hamlet the micro-narrative contains no hint of the eventual outcome, and in Usher it patently overdetermines it, in Springtime the ritual ceremony achieves a sense of tenuous balance: it serves both an analeptic and proleptic function, by its imitation of a past event and its anticipation of a future direction.

By consideration of one narrative feature, it is not meant to suggest that others may not be relevant in discussion of the novel. It would be possible, for instance, to use the analogy of a pictorial triptych as an approach to Springtime. With a central panel twice the width of its wings, this would roughly correspond to the dimensions of the novel's three parts, the first and third of which are temporally successive and in advance of the central section containing the mise en abyme and the Easter sequence. In novel and triptych alike, the outer sections fold over or embed the vital second section; where the pictorial model composes a church altarpiece often depicting the Madonna, the literary model offers a "meditation on love and death," a verbal Pietà not of Virgin Mother grieving for Son, but of widow for husband; the Easter narrative and shared spiritual experience would anchor both pictorial and literary models.

Whatever the value of using the triptych as an approach, the analogy underscores the value of considering structural as well as thematic features, and of relating each to other. Serious shortcomings in any area obviously can not be redeemed by mere felicities of structure, but the latter, on the other hand, can reinforce already existing strengths. Critics of Springtime have usually pointed to a certain simple-mindedness or indulgence, a lack of vulgarity, a trend towards quietism or melodrama, and an overliterate inner consciousness. Others, more favorably disposed, have commented on a lack of sentimentality, a delicate rendition of the countryside which blends inner and outer weather, a fastening on moments of genuine feeling and vision, an unfashionable concentration on the fundamentals of life. This intensity of concentration, Susan Hill's particular strength, whereby the private concerns of characters viewed in their isolation reach an obsessional level, results too from a classical purity of narrative marked by an absence of subplots, ideologies or panoramic ambitions, which could distract from or counter-balance the prime thrust. In Gentleman and Ladies (1968) and Springtime (1974), Susan Hill employs the identical trigger of a family death, but in the intervening years and novels moves gradually from multiple relationships to a single character spiritually and geographically isolated from any community ("it was a mile to the next house and three to the village"). It is in her last novel that this bracketing out of extraneous elements is most rigorously applied, the focus most narrow and sharp. The relative brevity, or short-windedness, of her novels is perhaps the inevitable outcome of such intensity, which over any longer stretch could prove intolerable for the reader. At the very extreme of self-preoccupation by the main character, then, there emerges in Springtime the possibility of piecing together some pattern, of grasping hold of some reassurance, or belonging to some community. By emphasizing the structural as well as thematic centrality of the rite which constitutes the mise en abyme in Susan Hill's last novel, it is hoped to direct critical attention not only to the value of narrative duplication as a general procedure, but also, and perhaps more pertinently, to a more careful analysis of her other works than it has hitherto received.

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