SOURCE: "Stories about Courtship: Bachelors/Spinsters, Fathers/Daughters," in William Trevor; A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 57-82.

While codes governing courtship and marriage are changing in some parts of the world, in most places feminine and masculine gender identities are governed by two antagonistic codes of behavior—purity for women, promiscuity for men. Certainly Trevor's stories about courtship—such as "The Ballroom of Romance," "Teresa's Wedding," and "The Property of Colette Nervi"—reflect these codes. In these stories young women driven by a fear of spinsterhood marry undesirable suitors in communities governed by men. Economic concerns override considerations of love or happiness in marriage. "Kathleen's Field" tells the story of a farmer's daughter so submissive to her father she does not even recognize she is being condemned to a lifetime of servitude and spinsterhood. "The Wedding in the Garden" traces the development into manhood of an initiate whose "progress" is partly responsible for the "regress" of at least two women in his community. The deprivation of servants and the deprivation of women go hand in hand. Such deprivation deems certain women as appropriate targets for male lust and certain others as marriageable.

Although the setting for stories in this vein is frequently Ireland, the universality of prizing sons and conditioning deprived daughters to be submissive to fathers is most important. Trevor's sensitivity to the suffering of women is evident in the many stories that culminate either in a wedding motivated by economic concerns or permanent spinsterhood. Destructive gender codes as represented in Trevor's stories discourage fidelity, discourage sensitive men who nurture, and encourage frigidity and submissiveness in women.

Trevor's stories focused on gender should be seen not only in relation to the nineteenth-century British novel of manners and morals, courtship and marriage, but also to the eighteenth-century Augustan tradition. Writers in this latter tradition directed satiric barbs toward men but not with the same relish that they excoriated the folly of women (e. g., Pope and Swift).

When Trevor deals with gender he directs his ire toward the folly of men—not exclusively but emphatically. He portrays women—even the most neurotic (as in "Raymond Bamber and Mrs. Fitch")—with an inordinate amount of compassion and tenderness. [In her Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, 1973] Carolyn Heilbrun explains female neurosis in relation to sexual repression as follows: "A woman must enjoy the full cycle of experience, or she would become riddled with complexes like a rotting fruit." Terrible barriers between men and women in the nineteenth century caused wives to envision sexual freedom as the freedom to say no to their husbands. I am not suggesting in any way that promiscuity on the part of women should be encouraged, but as Dorothy Dinnerstein [in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 1976], among others, has shown, conditioned responses to feminine stereotypes result in "the special muting of woman's erotic impulsivity," which is a tragic development underlying the cause of the "midlife crisis" serving the older man so well when he wishes to abandon his wife for a younger woman.

Men and women indeed suffer when faced with only two viable models of womanhood: whore or Holy Mother. The consequences of this ancient predicament are self-hatred in the case of women, distaste for the body in the case of men as well as women. Gender codes in a patriarchal society privilege men and objectify women. Few can overcome such social conditioning that so profoundly governs relationships between men and women.

In Ireland gender codes are further complicated by colonialism. In her work on Joyce, Suzette Henke points out [in James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, 1990] that "unconsciously emulating their English masters, the Irish assert a specious manhood through blustering claims to patriarchal privilege, making infantile demands that frustrate and feminize those already demeaned by colonial subjugation." Irish women—but also women everywhere—bear the brunt of blustering husbands and fathers. Subjugation because of gender, then, is the most important factor in the stories to be addressed here.

The best example of Trevor's sensitive rendering of women is "The Ballroom of Romance," although given the preponderance of overbearing and narcissistic fathers in the Trevor canon, the father in this story is an anomaly. Even though Bridie's father does care about his daughter, he must be understood in the context of a society endorsing fathers, husbands, brothers, and womanizers who are insensitive to the suffering of girls trying to salvage their floundering self-respect in a world that targets them as sex objects or ignores them; of submissive wives; of middleaged women desperately trying to maintain their physical appearance; and of elderly women marginalized because they are alone—treated like children because physically fragile and suffering from an inferiority complex not unlike that of adolescents. Understanding the subtleties of "The Ballroom of Romance" and the stories depicting elderly women is crucial to understanding Trevor's many stories about courtship, sexuality, and gender.

The mother dies before we enter the lives of Bridie, the ballroom spinster, and her crippled father, who is not obviously narcissistic or domineering. Nonetheless, the gender codes governing Bridie's exaggerated, self-sacrificing nature are indirectly but poignantly revealed in the way she interacts with other members of this Irish community—the conforming spinsters and brides as well as the rebelling mothers; the womanizers of the dancehall in hot pursuit; the "father" representing the voice of the Church; and the businessmen, exemplified in Mr. Dwyer, the dancehall owner.

Bridie's father is apparently admired by his community and loved by his devoted daughter; despite his concern about Bridie's subservience, however, his handicap clearly requires that she spend most of her time meeting his every need. This physically crippled father—through no fault of his own—requires so much "mothering" that he "smothers" his emotionally crippled daughter, a plot line that inverts the more common scenario of a son entangled in his mother's apron strings.

Of course, gender codes in every society dramatically determine whether a daughter or son develops autonomy by separating from both parents. As Jessica Benjamin and other gender critics have argued, the son's individuation from the mother is more readily accomplished than the daughter's individuation from either parent. The son's idealization of and identification with the father is untainted by submission because cultural constructions of maleness incorporate concepts of power, thus encouraging independence from and actual authority over the mother. On the other hand, the daughter "idealizes deprivation" and submission to the father [Jessica Benjamin, Feminist Studies 8 (1982)].

The daughter cannot identify with the father and thereby establish an identity independent of the mother. Indeed, the mother is not a figure encouraging individuation for either child. To teach sons to be like the mother stereotypically conceived—affectionate, nurturing, sensitive, and tender—is to castrate them. Mothers may therefore inculcate in their sons an unfeeling stoicism, competitive independence, and "natural" aversion for nurturing to ensure their access to the power lines of a phallocentric world. Mothers likewise indoctrinate their daughters to be submissive and attractive to men. Furthermore, daughters are conditioned to develop what Benjamin identifies as "an adoration of heroic men, who sacrifice love for freedom"—heroic men like those found in American wild west novels, Bridie's father's preferred entertainment.

Bridie is indeed radically limited, nervously worried whenever she "abandons" her father, which is only twice each week: on Sunday to attend Mass and on Saturday to attend "a wayside dancehall" where she hopes to "[drum] up" a husband, perhaps Dano Ryan, the drummer in the band. Bridie struggles to snag a husband without regard for her own needs or her own suffering.

In the first paragraph an understated, matter-of-fact narrator casually highlights Bridie's father's woes from "having had a leg amputated after gangrene had set in." The farm pony's death is mentioned before the mother's—the latter death related in one sentence and with the same intensity as the former's. The narrator flatly outlines in a shopping-list tone the routine comings and goings of the central characters as well as the usual visitors to the family farm—that is, three "in-comers" to Bridie's world: Canon O'Connell, the milk lorryman, and the grocer Mr. Driscoll. Bridie is a limited "out-goer."

The discourse of routine at the start of this story masks Bridie's suffering—her fear of growing old without a husband, her despair over her mother's death, her isolation. The absence of eulogy, a more appropriate response to the death of a parent, clarifies the neglect of Bridie by everyone in her community except the undesirable bachelors whose motives are suspect.

[In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, 1981] Bakhtin explains the subtlety at issue here when he discusses the reflexive nature of language and its tendency to distort, idealize, or mask the tragedies of life. The prominence of routine in Trevor's stories has already been mentioned; the discourse of routine in this story most emphatically "weatherizes," as Bakhtin imagines it, adjacent texts defining Bridie's struggle.

A pattern of subtexts conveys Bridie's entrapment by societal norms. The discourse of routine functions as an underlying refrain in many of Trevor's stories. Here this discourse marks the malaise of Bridie's life and the inevitability of her fate. On the first page alone we learn what was done "Sundays," "Mondays," "two years later," "not long after," "by the week," "daily," "during the week," "weekly," "once each month," "on a Friday afternoon," "by now," "often," "at night," and "in the evenings." Trevor demonstrates that Bridie functions "in time," with little freedom to develop the self.

Bridie is defined by her routine activities—domestic chores, the hard farm labor, the mothering of her father, and regular cycling to the nearest town (11 miles from the farm) to shop. She buys "for herself, material for a dress, knitting wool, stockings, a newspaper, and paper-backed Wild West novels for her father." The masculine communal voice relegates women to domestic tasks such as knitting and men to pioneering the wild west—adventures demanding that men be courageous "out-goers" and rescuers of helpless females, who foolishly presume they can survive a life beyond domesticity. There is an unhappy gap between the realms of women and men in this Irish community. When reading wild west novels, women less readily than men identify with masculine heroes and less easily feel vicarious enjoyment when aggressive men assert their will in gun battles and their freedom in the exploration of new frontiers, arenas closed to women.

Elaine Showalter quotes Louise Bogan to clarify the limitations of female domesticity in a similar context:

Women have no wilderness in them.
They are provident instead.
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

Bridie's dry domesticity, passivity, and entrapment, then, are subtly conveyed by reference to the wild west and a literary genre sentimentalizing the heroic feats of men. The father's reading of such novels is only one clue that we should be looking, as Annette Kolodny puts it [in The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter, 1985] with "an acute attentiveness to the ways in which power relations, usually those in which males wield various forms of influence over females, are inscribed in the texts (both literary and critical) that we have inherited."

Trevor in fact manipulates many different voices so that the dialogue of others tells the real story of Bridie's plight with a tragic tone. The point is the absence of feminine power in the Irish community, the silencing of women. When Bridie converses with "some of the [town] girls she'd been to school with, girls who had married," she notes enviously that "most of them had families." But a rebelling feminine "they" tells Bridie, "You're lucky to be peaceful in the hills . . . instead of stuck in a hole like this." The narrator then relates Bridie's feelings of "surprise" that the girls "envied her life" because this aging spinster longs to conform to gender codes that place more value on the fact of being married than on the importance of marriage based on love.

It is an ironic, authorial voice that counters Bridie's wish to marry at any cost by defining married Irish women as "tired . . . from pregnancies and their efforts to organize and control their large families." The authoritarian voice of the Church urges women to have "large families" and to be happy despite the difficulties of "controlling" children when child-rearing is accomplished by mothers alone. The women characters in this story either assume mindlessly the proper female role or rebel by complaining about being "stuck" as mother-women exclusively—a role that is tiring. Nonetheless, Bridie and the other spinsters doggedly conform and romanticize the wife/mother role.

Bridie is "usually" thinking about how best to serve her father, "mending clothes or washing eggs." She agonizes over the possibility of becoming "a figure of fun in the Ballroom"—that is, a spinster like Madge Dowling, the hopeless case still chasing middle-aged bachelors. Bridie is radically determined by societal norms, first perpetuated by her father and later by the various men she imagines as rescuing her from spinsterhood. She deludes herself about the romantic potential of these bachelors: Dano Ryan, Eyes Horgan, Bowser Egan. Also, metonymy works to hilarious effect as "the guy with the long arms" appears and reappears, further darkening the romantic horizons of the spinsters.

Bowser most clearly conveys the masculine view of marriage: "he'd want a fire to sit at and a woman to cook food for him"—a woman "great at kissing." On the other hand, Bridie's fantasies about marriage do not include a sexual element. Benjamin argues that "daughters [reject] sexuality as a component of woman's autonomy." Nonetheless, the authorial voice describes Bridie physically and suggests a certain "masculine" vitality—an anomaly given Bridie's conformity to asexual feminine roles but a promising factor.

Bridie's repressed energy has the potential to counter her malaise. The narrator says that Bridie is "tall and strong," qualities more commonly attributed to men; "the skin of her fingers and her palms [are] stained and harsh to touch. The labor they'd experienced had found its way into them, as though juices had come out of vegetation and pigment out of soil: since childhood she'd torn away the rough scotch grass that grew each spring among her father's mangolds." Her "hands daily [root] in the ground. . . . Wind had toughened the flesh on her face." Rooted here in nature, Bridie tragically cannot fulfill the "natural" functions of wife and mother except by assuming the role of both wife and mother to her own father.

The same mindless dialogues grind up Bridie's day: the ballroom owner, Justin Dwyer, has been promising "for twenty years" he would visit Bridie's father. We are told that Bridie "never minded" "cycling" to either the ballroom or Mass. But the fact that "she'd grown quite used to all that" assumes the reality of a potent time past when she minded it "all" very much.

Furthermore, the dialogue of others tells the real story with a tragic tonality that must be reconstructed. Again at the start, after mention of Bridie's mother's death, we see Canon O'Connell's response, not Bridie's. He tells her not to "worry about it all." The narrator tells us that the good Canon here refers to "the difficulty of transporting her father to mass" because her mother is no longer there to help. The public rhetoric of this authority figure provides soothing evasions that ignore Bridie's suffering over the death of her mother. Surely "it all" encompasses more than getting her father to church.

Bridie suffers the loss of her mother. She worries about growing old, about becoming a spinster, about being isolated on a farm with a crippled father, about properly performing the domestic chores inside and the hard labor outside, and about fulfilling the duties of errand girl, daughter, wife, and mother to her father. Bridie's father sympathetically articulates the problem: "It's a terrible thing for you, girl." It is easier for her female friends to see the problem. Cat Bolger asks, "Are you on your own, Bridie?" Dano Ryan orders, "Tell your father I was asking for him" when she wishes he'd be asking for her instead. Patty Byrne asks, "Are you O.K., Bridie?" A nameless youth asks, "Is there sense in it, Bridie?"

This nameless youth is also isolated, supporting his uncle until he can earn enough money to emigrate. The emigration of men owing to a poor rural economy in fact has limited Bridie's choices. Men are free to move "to Dublin or Britain, leaving behind them those who became the middle-aged bachelors of the hills"—leaving behind the women. Emigration is defined as escape from the mother country. Abandoning one's country seems as inevitable as abandoning one's parent, but abandoning one's parent is the first and necessary step toward autonomy. Women are limited in terms of emigration because of economics and in terms of independence because gender codes demand the dependence of wives, mothers, and daughters on husbands, fathers, and brothers—a painful dependence requiring no small measure of self-sacrifice.

Bridie suffers but behaves "as though nothing had happened." Her suffering is more evident when we consider not only how Wayne Booth perceives it but also how perspective is refined and clarified by Bakhtin. Authorial, narrative, character, communal male, and communal female voices vie with one another in Trevor's stories to form an underlying grid of relationships poignantly impinging on women characters. In this case aggressive forces oppress Bridie's personal freedom. She is habituated to behavior more appropriate for mother and wife than for a young maid seeking a husband.

Thus Bridie rides her mother's bicycle, the "old Rudge" digging deeper ruts in the same old track that forces her subservience to her father, who still calls his 36-year-old daughter "girl," even though it is he who depends on her. Bridie's father declares that he would "be dead without the girl [my daughter?] to assist [him]." We should notice that the father's comment implies the reverse of the usual case: parents ordinarily sustain the life of the child, not vice versa.

Unaware of her oppression, Bridie looks forward to being controlled by a husband. She daydreams about "when she was just sixteen" and had anticipated that Patrick Grady "would lead her into sunshine, to the town and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, to marriage and smiling faces" (my italics). Appropriately, given the inspiration of "The Ballroom of Romance," Bridie romanticizes the social and religious codes demanding that men lead, women follow. When contemplating marriage, Bridie does not fantasize a husband who assumes the role of helpmate as expected but a husband who takes part in an oddly formulated threesome. The father-in-law and son form a pair: "two men working together" outside in the fields. Bridie thus attends "to things in the farmhouse." Her ideas of courtship and marriage are based on communal fantasies, not on reality (cripples don't work fields), and the inadequacy of these communal fantasies is implied as the story progresses.

Community codes condition women to be self-sacrificing, but Bridie sees her father, not herself, as a martyr, believing that he "had more right to weep, having lost a leg," a sort of castration. Even though the father's helpless "hobbling" deserves some sympathy, still the authorial voice solicits the largest measure of sympathy for Bridie, whose passivity and de-centered relation to the community is common enough.

All of the women at "The Ballroom of Romance" assume their proper "places on upright wooden chairs" and "[wait] to be asked to dance." These women are furthermore "too embarrassed to do anything about" the men who dance too close. Bridie is so conditioned by societal and religious codes regulating proper female behavior that she does not really belong anywhere and cannot escape her possessive father, who also suffers because he is unable to fulfill masculine norms of independence and freedom of movement.

Neither the father nor the daughter can openly express their suffering. Bridie feels it "improper" to weep "in the presence of her father," which also suggests that gender identity is inappropriately conditioned behavior—and that Bridie's response to such conditioning is confused. Societal codes in the Irish community and elsewhere require that men stoically repress tears, women weep or threaten to weep in order to control men. Bridie sublimates her own needs, and her "tears" are seen as "a luxury." Trevor amazingly presents weeping in a positive light. When men cry in this story, however, their tears are associated with an ailment, with disease. Dano develops "a watering of the eyes that must have been some kind of cold." Bridie, of course, tries to mother Dano by suggesting he take "Optrex," which she uses to bathe her father's eyes when he has similar trouble.

Unfortunately, Bridie is not aware enough to identify what she subconsciously wants—recognition as a subject. [In Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989)] Margot Norris discusses Joyce's "The Dead" in a similar context and posits a reason for a wife's wish to be controlled by her husband: "Being treasured as a valued and cherished object—that is, relations more proper to the parent-child relation—is easier to achieve than recognition and significance as a subject."

Trevor's story about Bridie's plight finally identifies failures of male-female and parent-child relationships owing to the pressures of gender codes in a materialistic society idealizing the conventions of romance and mandating the subservience of women. The point emerges most clearly when readers relate the romantic delusions of Bridie's daydreams to those of aspiring brides everywhere.

At the root of male-female conflicts in the modern world is the failure of "romance" to result in meaningful relationships. "The Ballroom of Romance" has no humanity. The misanthropic capitalist, Dwyer, hates "the middle-aged bachelors who . . . came down from the hills like mountain goats, released from their mammies and from the smell of animals and soil." Indeed, Dwyer reduces love, the "evening rendezvous," to "business." His wife counts the "evenings takings" and raises turkeys rather than children. . . .

"Kathleen's Field" is [a very sinister story]—a vivid and painful portrait of feminine vulnerability and parental narcissism. Hagerty, the father in this story, unknowingly drives his daughter to despair as surely as he drives three bullocks to market in a futile attempt to muster enough money to purchase a lush field adjacent to his farm. Establishing his son's financial security is the father's goal. He worries that his eldest son's inheritance of the farm and land will be inadequate to attract a good wife. He worries about being abandoned by the three younger of his 10 children, the elder seven having already emigrated because of the poor rural economy. Con is his only remaining son, Biddy and Kathleen the last of his daughters.

Thus Hagerty justifies his scheme to ensure that his remaining son and two daughters remain within his grasp; his son especially must be restrained "from being tempted by Kilburn or Chicago." He manipulates "his youngest daughter," the 16-year-old Kathleen, whom he rationalizes as "his favorite," until she agrees to work for the pretentious owners of Shaughnessy's Provisions and Bar. Her wages are applied against the father's debt so that Con "would be left secure" and the mentally defective Biddy "would be provided for." This father unwittingly sells his daughter Kathleen into slavery. Mrs. Shaughnessy clarifies the arrangement when she tells her husband that Hagerty "has a girl for us," as if claiming her "property." The father reassures the lady of the pub that her efforts to train his daughter will not be wasted: she will not "go off to get married."

When her father explains that her "wages . . . would be held back and set against the debt" as a "convenience," Kathleen notices her father's relief: "the fatigue in his face had given way to an excited pleasure." She responds by agreeing with his plan. His suffering is over, hers just started.

This is yet another case of the daughter nurturing her father: the daughter here is focused on the father's pain—on his needs rather than her own. It does not seem to matter to the father that the son's welfare is won as the daughter's welfare is sacrificed. The loan for the land and the "loan" of a daughter are both reduced to a matter of doing business. Whereas purchasing the field expands the borders of her father's farm, the daughter's "field" of existence is radically circumscribed. This conforming daughter suffers unbearable working conditions and an overbearing taskmaster, Mrs. Shaughnessy, who deems Kathleen "raw," resolves "to train every inch of her," and complains about her "country accent." Worse, the child-molesting husband abuses the inexperienced young girl. This devious molester "liked the style" of having a servant because it afforded him the opportunity to sexually harass Kathleen.

Mrs. Shaughness expresses to Kathleen's father her worry that after spending a year training his daughter she'd "go off and get married." A cruel irony obtains when Hagerty assures his investor that "Kathleen wouldn't go running off, no fear of that"—exactly the fear that inspired his scheme in the first place to prevent her from leaving him.

The first view of Kathleen on the job focuses on her alarm and the fact that Mrs. Shaughnessy renames her new servant "Kitty," the name of the servant Kathleen has replaced. Mrs. Shaughnessy thus strips Kathleen of her identity and avoids the bother of herself adjusting to change. That this overbearing woman wants to call her new servant according to the name of a past one testifies to her regressive traits. Mrs. Shaughnessy complains that her last "girl" was "queer" because she ate raw onions, but the reader suspects this was the young woman's ploy to escape the clutches of Mr. Shaughnessy, who "liked to have a maid about the house" to molest.

Mrs. Shaughnessy trains Kathleen to set the table, cut kindling, dust "all the places where grime would gather," and rake the yard. Kitty's uniforms do not fit Kathleen well, making her uncomfortable. She is restricted to using the outhouse. And Mrs. Shaughnessy refers to her abusive husband as Kathleen's "master." Kathleen works six days, going home only on Sundays. During one visit she explains to her parents that she doesn't want to return, but her mother expresses her fears that the farm will consequently fail, the family will end up "no better than tinkers." The good daughter returns to the Shaughnessy establishment despite Mr. Shaughnessy's bold advances: "his hands passing over her clothes." His attentions only deepen an old track—her memories of rejection because boys her own age never tried to kiss her. Mr. Crawley, the butcher, often asks her if she's "going dancing," but "no one displayed any interest in her whatsoever." The shame that Kathleen feels over what becomes in her mind a "surreptitious relationship" with Mr. Shaughnessy is worsened by the shame of not being courted, of a future most certainly that of the spinster maid abused by "a grey-haired man" (Mr. Shaughnessy? her father?) because "a bargain was a bargain," as her mother puts it in the last line of the story.

Those who labor in fields or work as servants of the great house in Trevor's stories would seem at odds with those who celebrate weddings in gardens. As in "Kathleen's Field," however, the son's inheritance is a central issue in "Wedding in the Garden," and it is a vulnerable young woman who suffers because of this concern. Moreover, we also again explore the terrible rift between men and women owing to differing attitudes toward sexuality and marriage.

Gender differences in "The Wedding in the Garden" are complicated by class differences. Gender and class codes determine not only whether one marries but also who one marries. Although Mrs. Congreve "married beneath her" and indeed the Protestant British aristocracy would normally shun Mr. Congreve, the middle-class proprietor of the Royal Hotel, still her son, Christopher, must seek a higher level. The plot, then, centers on an appalling event from the perspective of the Congreves, who focus strictly on economic concerns: Christopher seduces their servant girl, Derval. These parents worry that because of this indiscretion the "stylish" family pretense will not be maintained.

This story most suitably ends this discussion of gender and marriage because it subtly raises issues related to the covert nature of the double sex standard: the code that encourages the promiscuous behavior of men worried about their manhood and the frigidity of "ladies" worried about their virginity—with servant girls somewhat exempted.

The authority of the Church and the aristocracy are represented by the "clerical sombreness" of Mr. Congreve's "clothes" and the "ladylike" nature of Mrs. Congreve mentioned right at the start. Social hierarchies are then undercut when this paragraph ends with a superb double entendre. The voice of the young heir's lust merges for an instant with a voice expressing lower-class values, which have been determined by the pretentious upper class. More precisely, Derval's lower-class father defines aristocratic virtue: "The Congreves have great breeding in them." The "breeding" that takes place between Dervla and Christopher would certainly not meet with her father's approval. The elevated discourse of the upper class sometimes imitated by the working class encourages the reader's disdain for such considerations as not just "good" but "great breeding."

The proprietors of the Royal Hotel are concerned with improprieties of class that would undermine their stature in the community. They "naturally" condemn Christopher's affair with the maid. Such socioeconomic concerns as class—Mrs. Congreve's "stylishness" and that of her children "imbued with this through the accident of their birth"—are, in Trevor's view, superficial differences. Nonetheless, the Congreves demand that Christopher marry an affluent Protestant minister's daughter. Dervla is condemned to the life of a servant/spinster devastated by lost love.

Class codes coincide with gender codes as this story develops. In a typical phallocentric and classisi society, women and servants are often invisible. Christopher does not apparently notice the new servant, Dervla, for "a year or so," perhaps not until he reaches puberty. She appears at first as "a solitary figure in a black coat"; Christopher "didn't [even] know her name or what her face was like." Servants are faceless. She is simply "the girl." His sense of Dervla is so vague that he "couldn't remember the first time he'd been aware of her." Likewise, his sisters "paid her no attention," even though she was "a child as they were." Finally, Christopher, while wandering about town, "had never noticed Thomas MacDonagh Street," Dervla's neighborhood. When he does finally notice the young and physically attractive servant, he "[follows] with his eyes . . . the movement of Dervla's hips beneath her black dress." This sort of attention is of course suspect.

Dervla's invisibility is most subtly conveyed when Trevor represents Christopher's return from boarding school. Greeted by "a great fuss," "excited" sisters, and his father, apparently anxious to hear his son's "tale of the long journey from Dublin," Christopher recalls his experiences at boarding school to an eager audience, which at first seems to include only the family. The presence of the servants is only evident halfway through the paragraph when abruptly one line of direct dialogue intrudes: "Like the game of tennis it would be," the yardman Artie here responding to Dervla's inquiry about "what cricket was." This snatch of dialogue, the second half of the exchange, then transfers the reader's attention from Christopher's story of boarding-school exploits to Dervla's "excited" interest, and the second half of the paragraph relates Dervla's vicarious living of Christopher's experiences.

This "turn" in a single paragraph effectively conveys the invisibility of the servant class, yet at the same time it infers Dervla's interest in the event, although the Congreves ignore her. Her inspired imaginings reprocess Christopher's story of "the big grey house . . . and bells always ringing, and morning assemblies, and the march through cloisters to the chapel." The breathlessness inferred by the sequence of "and . . . and . . . and" approaches a sense of awe, which is also felt by Christopher's sisters, who stand on the sidelines and are also generally ignored.

Women and servants are, on the other hand, noticed if they behave as if they do not know their proper place, if they do not observe "the formalities," as Mr. Congreve puts it. Mary, the elderly and "rheumaticky" maid Dervla replaces, refuses Mr. Congreve's offer for her to rest on her long way to her attic bedroom: "'It was unseemly,' Dervla had heard old Mary saying in the kitchen," that servants should sit on the furniture. Voice becomes complicated in this passage as we are told by a narrator what Dervla heard old Mary and Mr. Congreve say. Sequence provides a clue as to whose voice we hear: Mr. Congreve complains that "it took [Mary] half a day . . . to mount the stairs to her bedroom at the top of the hotel, and the other half to descend it." This criticism darkens the atmosphere of the next sentence, the cheery claim (probably the servants' misconception) that Mr. Congreve "was fond of " Mary.

Similarly, this paragraph ends with another suspect conclusion that "Mr. Congreve was devil-may-care about matters like that." This sentence continues with a series of elitist and chauvinist considerations surely meant to represent Mr. Congreve's ambitious perspective on proprieties governing the servants—"but what would a visitor say if he came out of his bedroom and found a uniformed maid in an armchair? What would Byrne from Horton's say, or Boylan the insurance man?" The "visitors" who would be disturbed by a servant overstepping her bounds are presumed to be men. The next paragraph represents Mr. Congreve's concern over "the formalities." Surely his attention to Mary's infirmities are insincere, not only because she is a servant but also because she is a woman.

Mr. Congreve charms Dervla with the same pretense of interest as he does all the servants when he seems to care about the infirmities of the old maid, Mary. The master of the house tries to converse with the younger maid by "asking how her father was." Dervla is "somehow—in front of him . . . embarrassed" and later suffers "a nightmare . . . that [Mr. Congreve] was in the house on Thomas MacDonagh Street and that her mother was on her knees, scrubbing the stone floor of the scullery" (my italics). Reluctant to claim her home as "my house," she realizes the disparity between her family and Christopher's.

Disparities owing to class are clear when we consider the differences between Dervla's and Christopher's families. Disparities owing to gender are clear as Christopher relates to Dervla and also to his sisters. Sons are given preferential treatment over daughters early in their development and emphatically so when they approach manhood. In this case Christopher avoids his sisters because he wants "to be alone at that time of his growing up"; "his sisters [are] too chattery." Indeed, Christopher's puberty is defined in terms of romanticized notions of a boy's initiation into manhood, his need to be "alone"—that is, not in the company of girls—and to explore the world beyond the home. His "wanderings about the town" end with the shops where as a child he bought sweets but now buys Our Boys, Film Fun, and Wide World.

Whereas Christopher enjoys "lingering by the shops that sold fruit and confectionery" and Christopher's sisters enjoy playing games in the garden, Dervla seems to work at least a 12-hour day, "arriving before breakfast, cycling home again in the late evening." The difference here depends on class differences more than those of gender, but of course aristocratic attitudes toward the working class often involve drawing boundaries according to what is "natural." "Nature" likewise limits women economically and physically. Christopher knows it is not "natural in any way at all" for him to sit with Dervla on a rug in the sun or "to wheel the bicycle of the dining-room maid." Trevor appropriately allows much more space to define Dervla's awareness of class difference than to define Christopher's, whose awareness of such differences eventually causes him to abandon the maid.

Dervla in fact is "fascinated" by the status, "stylishness," and wealth of her employers, whose worth is measured according to their possessions. Christopher's "grand" initialed "green trunk" captures her imagination each time he returns home from boarding school. She imagines the Congreves in "their motor-car, an old Renault," surely in a state of grace when they "[make] the journey to the Protestant church" and "the bell ceased to chime" upon their arrival.

Despite the Congreves' conformity to theological dogma on regular church attendance here, other transgressions seem less weighty. Trevor relates Dervla's seduction by Christopher in a very few lines, affording this event very little space in comparison with other passages—say, those focused on status symbols, which are developed at some length. The seduction, the first tender tryst, encompasses six sentences strategically positioned to follow Dervla's father's litany of her marriage prospects—Buzzy Carroll, who worked in Catigan's hardware; Flynn; Chappie; Butty; Streak; and the nameless "porter . . . [whose] toes joined together in such a peculiar way that he showed them to people." Trevor's concision suggests the ease with which Christopher initiates the affair by declaring, "I'm fond of you, Dervla," and then leading "her upstairs to Room 14, a tiny bedroom." There follows a brief discussion of how the seduction developed into a routine. In the seventh sentence of this sequence we learn that "after that first afternoon they met often to embrace in Room 14." In the eighth sentence Christopher declares, "They would marry [and] live in the hotel, just like his parents."

The promise of this loving relationship is also all-to-briefly developed in the bat of an eye when "the warmth of their bodies [becomes] a single warmth." Christopher's "love" for Dervla changes his attitude toward his community, which he had previously seen as "a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of dwellings, an ugly place." After the affair he sees his community as "Dervla's town, and .. . his own; together they belonged there." That basic human need for a sense of belonging is central to the story. Christopher envisions his future: "in middle age [he walks] through [the town's] narrow streets . . . returning to the hotel and going at once to embrace the wife he loved with a passion that had not changed"—again, a fleeting embrace.

Trevor here does celebrate the potential of love to nurture the lovers' sense of belonging—to each other and to their community. Love does stave off the ravages of time, does overcome the adolescent's sense of alienation. The promise of Dervla and Christopher's love, however, cannot last. Dervla's father first intrudes. Trevor frames the seduction passage by the paternal voice urging his daughter to accept suitors of her own class. The frame is completed by her father's insistence, "Not a bad fella at all. . . . Young Carroll." And Dervla wonders "what on earth [her father would] say if he knew about Room 14."

The need to belong reappears when Mother Congreve develops five reasons to convince Dervla to relinquish Christopher. She admonishes Dervla to consider "propriety" given certain social hierarchies ("there are differences between you and Christopher that cannot be overlooked. . . . Christopher is not of your class, Dervla. He is not of your religion"). She shames Dervla by appealing to her sense of honesty and duty (she blames the poor maid for "betraying" their trust). She clarifies the relationship of the powerful ruling class to the servant class in terms of economics (she threatens that Dervla will lose her job, Christopher his inheritance). She tries to instill a feeling of obligation in Dervla ("We have trained you, you know. We have done a lot")—obligation that should yield to authority. Most cleverly, she targets the adolescent's need to belong when she asks, "Don't you feel you belong in the Royal, Dervla? . . . You will not be asked to leave."

The Church further undermines Dervla's determination to defend her love. Dervla considers that "it was a sin" and relucantly writes to Christopher, conforming to his mother' s wish that the maid be the one to break off the affair.

After he receives Dervla's letter written in "tidy, convent handwriting" and declaring the affair over, Christopher's "bewilderment turned to anger," a conditioned masculine response to loss. Before he can confront Dervla, his father confronts him, chastizing him for "messing about with maids" and then exhibiting the typical masculine perspective on sexual violations of women: "it's a bit of a storm in a tea-cup." Only after having a clear sense of his parents' attitudes does Christopher confront Dervla with, "Is it priests?" and "Did my mother speak to you?" Dervla answers in the affirmative—"Your mother only said a few things"—but Christopher is unresponsive to her reply. The moment of opportunity to seize love and retrieve his ethical sense is lost. He does not question Dervla enough and all too quickly becomes "reconciled to the loss of their relationship [because] between the lines of her letter there had been a finality." The "finality," however, is based on class lines.

When the no-longer-maiden maid finally confesses to "the priests" about "the sinning that had been so pleasurable in Room 14," the priest, like Christopher's father, sees the servant's affair as a "misdemeanour." Dervla herself comes to realize that her lover "would naturally wish to forget it now: For him, Room 14 must have come to seem like an adventure in indiscretion, as naturally his parents had seen it" (my italics).

Dervla remains in the Royal Hotel and is forced to observe the development of Christopher's interest in the archdeacon's beautiful daughter. The maid listens to stories told by the more suitable maiden, who converses during dinner about her past. Dervla feels abandoned while "expertly disposing of chop bones or bits of left-behind fat." She herself was as easily disposed of and has become "leftovers." Her realization "that this was the girl who was going to take her place, in [Christopher's] life" is more poignant on Christopher's wedding day, when "a new maid with spectacles" appears, probably to replace Dervla just as Dervla replaced Mary.

The reality of what was lost fades because the routine of "Dervla [clearing] away the dishes" no longer calls attention to young love. The servant is again invisible. Dervla's previous prayers—ironically, to "the Virgin's liquid eyes"—that Christopher's "little finger might accidentally touch her hand" are soon eclipsed by confessions. By the time of his wedding, in fact, the ritual of confession and the ritual of the wedding toast have lost meaning. Pretense causes the "excess of emotion in the garden, an excess of smiles and tears and happiness and love" expressed by "glasses . . . held up endlessly, toast after toast."

Indeed, the marriage celebration is really "a business arrangement," like the archdeacon's agreement "as convention demanded" to pay for the reception to be held at the hotel. Christopher realizes that Dervla "was not beautiful" even though "once, not knowing much about it, he had imagined she was." When he acknowledges that there "was something less palpable [than physical beauty] that distinguished her," we are left to ponder exactly what the groom has in mind. What is it that finally distinguishes the uniformed maid? It was precisely Dervla's "palpability" or physical attractiveness that first caused Christopher to notice his "servant."

The priests finally "get" Dervla; the archdeacon's daughter "gets" Christopher. And yet a sense of less permeates this outcome. The bride's unnaturally beautiful "skin like the porcelain of a doll's skin" causes us to question her humanity. Routine, ritual, convention, the civility of shared memories, and "speeches . . . made in the sunshine" round out our days. The cliché-ridden voices of various community members resound throughout the garden as guests share fond memories of the past to affirm that they truly "belong" in this elegant present.

Whereas Dervla's father had admired his wife for having "the strength of an ox," thereby surviving childbirth and producing Dervla at the age of 42, Christopher's bride is virginal, her hand "as delicate as the petal of a flower." The point of the story, nevertheless, is that few women possess the strength to emerge from an affair without scars—sometimes wounds that eclipse any possibility for wedded bliss. Dervla's vulnerability is clear when Christopher realizes, "She would indeed not ever marry," and then turns away.

The vulnerability of women emerges most emphatically at the end of the story when we are surprised to discover that Christopher's sexual adventures may not have been limited to his purported love for Dervla. The best man, Tom Gouvernet, declares that "Christopher had been "a right Lothario" with a "shocking reputation at school," then encourages the bride to remember her groom's best man when she gets "tired" of her new husband. The mood here changes; actually it is not much different from the mood of the best man in "Teresa's Wedding" (no harm done by his "great bloody ride"). This jubilant mood is ominous: the groom more likely will tire of the bride.

Finally, the disparity between Dervla's and Christopher's perceptions of their "romance" and the conventions of "Ancient Romance," as Bakhtin explains it, may sharpen the reader's conception of the circumstances in this story. In ancient romance the boy and girl are expected to be "exceptionally chaste." At the end of this story the best man casts doubt on Christopher's chastity when he seduced Dervla—also on his pretense of romantic feeling. Dervla, on the other hand, retains her innocence because she maintains her fidelity to her lover, like the classic case of the romantic heroine.

In ancient romance the lovers are beset with "obstacles that retard and delay their union," as Bakhtin explains it. The deft lover here wins Dervla's immediate submission. The hero and heroine do not know their lineage in ancient romance: "The first meeting of hero and heroine and the sudden flare up of their passion for each other is the starting point for plot movement; the end point for plot movement is their successful union in marriage." Their "love remains absolutely unchanged . . . their chastity is preserved." In this story Dervla and Christopher, conversely, are all too aware of their lineage. Their first meeting is a nonevent. The plot develops around the dramatic change of events when Dervla is confronted by Christopher's mother.

In ancient romance the heroine withstands trials and tests while maintaining her fidelity, which proves her triumph over her humble origins. Dervla is tested but never rises above her class. The "maid" is not transformed into "lady," and in fact she is fallen, no longer a "maiden." The hero of ancient romance does not give in to materialistic temptations as Christopher does when conforming to parental authority in order to preserve "his inheritance," which Trevor ironically defines early in the novel in terms of a "greenish . . . threadbare" carpet.

Christopher realizes that he must endure a lifetime of pretense and suffer the constant gaze of his faithful servant: "while he and his parents could successfully bury a part of the past, Dervla could not. It had never occurred to him that because she was the girl she was she did not appreciate that some experiences were best forgotten. . . . [Such] subtleties had naturally eluded the dining room maid." Christopher wishes he had told his bride about Dervla and realizes he cannot because the Archdeacon's daughter would certainly dismiss her servant. Poignant irony obtains in the groom's scruples here as the reader conflates "a promise made to a dining-room maid [that] must be honoured" with the promise to marry Dervla that was not honored.

Marriages are not likely to succeed if based on secrets and determined by business "arrangements"—the Congreves' conniving a case in point. Although gender codes are central to the stories addressed here, the force of "business as usual" also has been a constant undercurrent.