Reclaim Clara Dawes!

I re-read Sons and Lovers recently, in order to enjoy the richness and descriptive sensitivity of DH Lawrence's writing, and telling myself it did not matter if I was annoyed by him. Being annoyed by Lawrence is an inevitable side-effect of reading his novels, for me, at least, and I believe I am not alone in this!

 

I did enjoy the writing - the opening to Sons and Lovers alone is marvellous, with that wonderful image of the development of the collieries, the donkeys circling the gin-pits, followed by the coming of the big industry and the railway. However, I got the annoyance, too. The man is such a chauve! It began with his attitude to Miriam Leivers - I did feel he was being 'rotten' as he would say himself, to her, and therefore to Jessie Chambers, who she was based on. So as soon as I had finished Sons and Lovers, I opened Jessie's own memoir.

 

I then got annoyed by Jessie! The woman was such a doormat. Lawrence would sit there telling her the most horrible things about herself, and she just put up with it.  Brrr!

So then I got a biography of Lawrence to read, to see how much of Sons and Lovers was fact, and how much was fiction, and that was very interesting indeed. I read the magisterial and impressive John Worthen The Early Years, the first volume of the Cambridge biography. I was irritated again to find that Lawrence did, apparently, have all the personal charm that he gives Paul in Sons and Lovers. I always thought his description of Paul was pretty smug. Still do.

Lawrence in 1906: Wikimedia Commons

 Leaving Miriam/Jessie aside (which I did with some relief in the end), I had always wanted to know if Clara Dawes was based on anyone real. In fact, she is not a complete portrait, but there must be something in her of Alice Dax, a married woman Lawrence is supposed to have had an affair with, and also there is surely something of Frieda Lawrence in her physique, if nothing else. Nevertheless, she is much more of a fictional construction than Miriam, so when I want to get indignant on her behalf I can do so without the real woman popping up and saying: 'Well, I enjoyed it really!'

Clara, like Alice Dax, but unlike Frieda, was into Women's Suffrage. Paul Morel is said to be 'interested' in this, but to Clara's face he reacts with patronising rudeness: 'she seems like a dog before a looking glass, gone into a mad fury with its own shadow,' he says of a woman who fights for her own rights. Lawrence, the author, underlines Clara's unhappiness 'the upward lifting of her face was misery, not scorn', and does a good job of suggesting that the only reason she wants the vote is because she is unsatisfied in her marriage. Though through her, Paul is said to get 'into connection with the socialist, suffragette, unitarian people in Nottingham',  Lawrence consistently refuses to show the thinking, intelligent side of Clara. In the end, she is only a sex symbol.

 Alice Dax was a highly intelligent and politically active woman, involved in the early days of the WEA, a writer of poetry and plays and 'almost completely uninhibited in an age when you weren't, kind, caring and a dedicated socialist. She was also plain, and everyone was surprised when she got married.

Maybe it was because Lawrence had his affair with Alice when she was a married woman that Paul Morel shunts Clara Dawes back to her stupid and violent husband. She is almost pathetically glad to have Baxter Dawes once Paul has ditched her, meekly reverting to the traditional female role.

 

 

Clara works with Paul in Jordan's Surgical Appliance factory, where he is the pet of the female staff, though they all respect him. In fact, when Lawrence briefly worked at Haywood's surgical garment making factory, in Castle Gate, Nottingham (the street pictured below, my photograph), he was tormented by the 'girls' who, shortly before the illness that ended his employment there, forcibly debagged him. Lawrence was a sensitive lad and unconfident, and it must have been a horrible experience to him, a form of abuse, even. I can't help feeling, though, that Paul's domination over Clara, her almost annihilation, in the end, is partly informed by Lawrence's desire for revenge over those girls.

 

 

I want to think that after a month or so Clara would get fed up with Baxter Dawes, and would head off to London, where she would get a job and take up with some interesting and sensitive Socialist man - or even with a woman. Though I would love to reach back into the plot and yank her away from the reunion with Dawes altogether.

 She represents what for Lawrence was intolerable; a woman whose sense of self, and enjoyment of life, was not totally dependent on a man and her sexual relations with him, but who had her own autonomous interests and occupations.

The photo of Sylvia Pankhurst is from Wikimedia Commons, derived from Netherlands National Archive.

 

 

Whatever happened to Mary Lennox?

The last time I re-read this book - a favourite of mine - I thought about what lay ahead of children of the generation Burnett was writing for and about, inexorably, threatening to wipe out all Mary and Colin's newly-gained happiness and confidence, and health.

The Secret Garden was published in 1911. Colin and Mary are ten, we are told, and Dickon, the appealing Yorkshire animal-whisperer, is 'about twelve.' Maybe Colin escapes active service in World War One by the skin of his teeth, but I always think the age of characters is fixed at the moment the author starts writing, which is usually about a year earlier. That would make Colin old enough to be called up in 1917. Perhaps he falsifies his age and goes a year earlier. While Dickon would have gone two years earlier, in 1915.

What remained of 'the magic' that got Colin on his feet again when he or Dickon crouched in rat-infested trenches, among mud and blood and lice, with the guns going off?  Were they able to hold onto even a spark of the joy that Burnett preached, or even remember the moor, the garden, the birds and beasts and their friendship? Or did Colin crack up again, and end the war on the pages of Regeneration? Perhaps Dickon tamed a rat or two - but there wouldn't have been time. Did either survive, either physically or psychologically? And Mary, what about her?

The Secret Garden' leaves us at that moment when Colin and his father stride happily back towards the house with Colin walking 'as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire.' As a child, reading it, I noticed the omission of Mary from this scene, and understood, with hurt and indignation, that Colin, being a boy, was supposed to be more significant. And in the latter part of the book, Mary fades behind Colin, while the story focuses more and more on his restoration to health and mastery.

Mary's transformation from an ugly little girl who nobody likes, to a child who is healthy, happy, and pretty - and nurturative, as girls were meant to be in that era - is carried out, it seems, mainly for the sake of Colin - and yet I rather like Mary's spikiness. I think she gets a raw deal from her author right from the start, actually. 'Nobody had ever taken any notice of her' says Hodgson Burnett, 'because she was disagreeable.' Which is an appalling thing to say, when you think about it. Nobody ever loved her, not even the Ayah who took care of her, so how could she be agreeable? It's not her fault. And - thinking about the Ayah - Kipling, brought up by Indian nurses, adored India, and it was when he came back to England and dumped with a harsh, uncaring woman that he was desperately unhappy. Mary remembers the Indian chanting song her Ayah used to sing her to sleep with - and yet she's never allowed to miss her. Of course, I can see why. It's racism. England stands for happiness, beauty, health. India is death, unhappiness, and spoilt, monstrous children. It is only in England that Mary may find her salvation.

But in the same way that I want Mary to have cared for her Ayah, I also want her to retain some spikiness. How did she react to the War, with its flood of death, she who hid in the Indian bungalow while everyone died around her? I thought at first that she might become a nurse, but she was too young to be a VAD; they had to be eighteen. So maybe she joined local women scraping lint and knitting things for the troops, while every day she stood supportively beside Archibald Craven and shared his dreadful anxiety as they looked at the casualty lists together. And maybe she raged at having to do so little.

If Colin could have cracked up, Mary could have hardened up again. I think that she was fundamentally tougher than Colin, and I can imagine her, after the war, cutting her hair, dressing in short skirts, even finding work for herself. I wonder how much money her parents left her? If Colin had been killed, Archibald Craven might have made her his heir, if the property wasn't entailed, in which case the doctor would have got it after all.

I don't think she married Colin, though, even though he survived. For some reason, I feel really resistant to that idea, and not just because they were first cousins.

What do you think happened?