Collana di sintomatologia delle apocalissi culturali

diretta da Leonardo Terzo

Saggi italiani su

Elizabeth Bowen

a cura di

Barbara Berri

Edizione a cura di Arcipelago Edizioni Via Carlo DAdda 21 20143 Milano info@arcipelagoedizioni.com www.arcipelagoedizioni.com Prima edizione febbraio 2010 ISBN 978-88-7695-423-8 Tutti i diritti riservati Ristampe: 7 6 2016 2015 5 2014 4 2013 3 2012 2 2011 1 2010 0

vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzata.

INDICE

Leonardo Terzo Prefazione / Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara Berri Introduzione . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elena Cotta Ramusino Bowens Court . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Silvia Granata Structuring Space and Time in Elizabeth Bowens The Hotel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Silvia Monti Figurative Language and Imagery in The Last September and To the North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonardo Terzo Amore e morte, amore e vita in To the North . . . . . . . . . . Cristina Marelli Universi in solitudine in The Death of the Heart . . . . . . . Barbara Berri Labisso del tempo ritrovato: A World of Love . . . . . . . . . . Lia Guerra Eva Trout: the girl who had been left unfinished . . . . .

7 13 29

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65 91 95 117 133

John Meddemmen It Is a Fine Morning and We Are Still Alive. Scrivere in tempo di guerra: Elizabeth Bowen, 1939-1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biografia e bibliografia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gli autori . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149 175 181

PREFAZIONE
di Leonardo Terzo

Questo libro il prodotto di un gruppo di studiosi, per met giovani agguerriti, che, come risulta dalla nota sugli autori, fanno tutti capo alla sezione di anglistica del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne della Facolt di Lettere e Filosofia dellUniversit di Pavia. Forse proprio la loro giovane et, influenzando anche i meno giovani, ha creato le condizioni per osservare con uno sguardo inedito lopera di Elizabeth Bowen, una scrittrice la cui eminenza non mai stata soggetta agli ondeggiamenti del gusto e delle mode, sia nella prima che nella seconda met del Novecento e oltre. Lo spirito nuovo con cui i suoi romanzi e racconti sono qui riletti e interpretati, da un lato conferma, forse banalmente, la perenne attualit dei classici, anche moderni, dallaltro dimostra che uno sguardo e un interesse aggiornato sono in grado di riproporre ad altri livelli il proverbiale shock of recognition, tipico dei capolavori. Per questo lopera della Bowen si rilegge ora come il sintomo di una trasformazione culturale pi profonda di quella gi a suo tempo colta nella letteratura inglese ed europea nel passaggio pre- e post-bellico dallimpegno degli Anni Trenta allo smarrimento degli Anni Quaranta. Ci che si riflette e si riconosce in queste interpretazioni limmagine culturale disincantata, e poi nuovamente incantata, degli attuali lettori; ci che si scopre la capacit dellautrice di tracciare una diversa e ulteriore via, tra la ricerca sulle tecniche espressive, propria dei modernisti canonici, ed il ritorno
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agli interessi etici e sociali della letteratura del periodo bellico e immediatamente successivo, e a seguire della fase di antimodernismo che caratterizz la letteratura inglese negli Anni Cinquanta. Questa via comprende entrambe le istanze, mantenendo una forte capacit di invenzione tecnica al servizio di una tematica che a suo tempo fu giustamente interpretata per lo pi in termini di critica sociale, educazione sentimentale e di indagine psicologica, ma che, oltre a queste, oggi appare in grado di far scaturire dimensioni e avvaloramenti impensati, per esempio nel trattamento del tempo e dello spazio, o nellapertura, segreta prima, allusiva poi, e infine persino oscena, alla pluralit e alla stratificazione dei livelli di esistenza pi o meno cosciente dellanimale umano, culminanti nella sperimentazione metamorfica di Eva Trout. Questa versione progressivamente apocalittica del modernismo e delliperrealismo ha tra gli altri effetti quello di sconvolgere e ricostituire lordine cronotopico della narrativit. Entro questa nuova apertura delle coordinate narratologiche, il mondo e i personaggi subiscono una trasfigurazione e una caratterizzazione che fornisce loro unintensit oggettiva peculiare, e nello stesso tempo proietta sui luoghi e sulle cose una sorta di animismo e animosit umanistici altrettanto inaspettati. Lopera di Elizabeth Bowen resta pi che mai una lettura impegnativa, una pietra di paragone che marca irrefutabilmente e distintamente la differenza fra i livelli di cultura, in un tempo che vorrebbe credere di aver superato queste questioni. Lamore e la morte, la verit e lambiguit, la guerra e lo spionaggio, ladolescenza e la maturit, le aspirazioni e le frustrazioni sociali, lo spaesamento e il ritrovamento del s costituiscono un repertorio di interessi sempre vivi per ogni generazione di lettori; ci che invece del tutto straniante il trattamento ellittico a cui la narrazione della Bowen li sottopone.

Prefazione

I mondi che lautrice rappresenta sono infatti non tanto ci che resta dei sentimenti e delle aspirazioni, come se fossero impoveriti da un venir meno di autenticit e intensit. Al contrario la ricerca di una nuova autenticit trova nella simbiosi con gli oggetti e coi luoghi, nellaggrovigliarsi e arrovellarsi dello spazio e del tempo, un nuovo paesaggio esistenziale dove lo scarto essenziale fra il non detto e il non fatto e lideale compiutezza delle storie ben raccontate, e soprattutto ben accadute, non desolazione, e nemmeno solitudine, ma un nuovo modo di sussistere. Come stato notato nellintroduzione a proposito dellamore, ma che vale forse per ogni altra materia in questione: tutti si agitano intorno ad un vuoto dove lamore non riesce ad essere detto, intorno ad un abisso dove lamore non c. La verifica individuale e collettiva che quel qualcosa ci sia non ha un termine, n una conclusivit, ed linedito modo di tenere insieme in quel momento e in quel luogo i personaggi, la loro solitudine e la loro sopravvivenza. Una sorta di catarsi dacciaio in un involucro drammatico vellutato.

Silvia Granata

STRUCTURING SPACE AND TIME IN ELIZABETH BOWENS THE HOTEL

The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowens first novel, was published in 1927, at the end of a historical decade characterized by a profound disillusionment, but also in English fiction by groundbreaking productions by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (Jacobs Room and Ulysses in 1922, Mrs Dalloway in 1925, To the Lighthouse in 1927). Bowens novel shares with coeval works not only the concern for a new perception of time and the impatience with Victorian values and beliefs, but also a subtle exploration of consciousness. Although The Hotel does not usually appear among the great novels of the age, it presents interesting features that intrigue the reader, provoking contrasting reactions whose reasons deserve a thorough investigation. As a number of British and American novels of the period, it is set in the Riviera, where wealthy Britons spend their long vacations. The hotel guests come to know each other, interlacing relationships of various kinds and responding in different ways to the natural and social environment. Among them, prominence is given to Sydney Warren, a young girl who becomes friend of the elderly Mrs Kerr, and is then deeply disappointed when Mrs Kerrs son arrives at the hotel, catalyzing his mothers attention. Feeling betrayed and disoriented, Sydney decides to accept a marriage proposal by Rev. Milton. On the way back from a nearby village, the car she rides in almost gets involved in an accident: nobody is injured but the
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episode prompts her to reflect on life, and she suddently realizes that she doesnt love Milton, and that life is too important to spend it with the wrong man. The marriage is thus cancelled, and Rev. Milton leaves. The hotel is also peopled by a number of other characters, like Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym, whose friendship seems to be shaken during their stay, Miss and Mrs Pinkerton, whose main object in life is to preserve their social standing, and Victor Ammering, a young man who cannot find a job because of the war. The hotel guests are portrayed as a miniature model of British high society, but the book is far more than a traditional novel of manners. As noted by Harkness, although the typical Bowen novel may seem to have a slight plot, a closer look reveals that in the background there are underplayed events of no small weight1. The Hotel perfectly exemplifies this feature. As a matter of fact, all the turning points in the story are underplayed and understated, so that the reader struggles to understand their importance, and is able to reconstruct it only later, when consequences of what seemed minor events unfold (this is especially true for the main turning point in Sydneys story, the car accident). In Harknesss words, another recurring feature in Bowens novels is an overwhelming sense of place affecting the characters2. Indeed, as noted by Kreilkamp as well, the author is almost obsessed with the formative role of the material spaces men and women inhabit3. The Hotel peculiarly attracts the readers attention because of the surrogate quality of the hotel environment, which is a kind of second home without being

Harkness, Bruce, The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, The English Journal 44, 9 (1955), pp. 499-506, p. 500. 2 Harkness, p. 500. 3 Kreilkamp, Vera, Bowen: Ascendancy Modernist, in Walshe, Eibhear (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), p. 15. 46

SILVIA GRANATA ~ STRUCTURING SPACE AND TIME IN E. BOWENS THE HOTEL

one. Moreover, although the whole plot takes place in Italy, the hotel guests never mix (or even bother to get in touch) with the locals, typically remaining isolated in a kind of small Britain abroad. It is true, as observed by Bennett and Royle, that the novel is pervaded by a sense of abeyance4; the hotel guests seem to be suspended, both in place and time; the authors use of time and place in fact represents one of the most peculiar features of the novel, influencing as it does not only the characters vicissitudes, but also their very perception of themselves, as I will try to demonstrate below. Whereas the theme of the novel is apparently slight and quite traditional (a young girls entrance into the world, the disappointments of love and the criticism of high society), Bowen chooses to narrate in an elusive way, which makes the plot almost evanescent. This elusiveness is first conveyed through the very setting: the hotel, which deeply affects characters and reader as well, is never described, but its presence pervades every scene. Not only as a building, but also as the symbol of a whole life-style, the hotel is so ubiquitous that it could be considered as the real protagonist of the novel. Notwithstanding this prominence though, its appearance remains shifty and mutable, exactly as the contrast between lights and shades characterizing it. Its interiors are often dark and shadowy, perpetually enveloped in a kind of half-light. They are presented more through allusions than descriptions, compelling the reader to create his own image of it. For the Italian reader, but also for the British one who has travelled, such image often overlaps with real places seen and vividly remembered. It is thus significant that The Hotel does not start as other novels set in the Riviera with an objective sitedescription, but with a foreshortened view of interiors by one of

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995), ch. I. 47

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the characters. Our first glimpse occurs through the eyes of Miss Pym, who spies the lounge to see if someone is there:
There was not a soul down there; not a movement among the shadows, it was eleven oclock and everybody would have gone out to the shops or the library, up to the hills or down to the tennis courts. Not a shadow crossed the veiled glass doors of the drawing-room to interrupt the glitter from the sea. Not a sound came up from the smoking room. (7) 5.

This passage, built on a series of negations (not a soul, not a movement, not a shadow nor sound), suggests an idea of desolation which is counterbalanced by the final mention of the glitter of the sea, implying, as the novel itself repeatedly does, that whatever happens, happens elsewhere. However, the hotel also has sunny spots: they are reserved to the wealthiest guests, emphasizing through location and architecture a social divide: apparently, only those who stand higher in the social scale have the right to enjoy the sunshine in their rooms:
The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright, and looked over the road with its chestnut trees on to the side of the hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of the villas (26).

But this highly-purchased sunshine is not really enjoyed, even in the most elegant apartments. Miss and Mrs Pinkerton for instance find it too bright, and thus barricaded themselves in from the assault of noonday behind impassable jalousies (26). In general, the dusky atmosphere inside the hotel creates a feeling of stall, as if the place were always suspended between night and day.

5 Bowen, Elizabeth, The Hotel (London: Vintage, 2003). All quotations from the Vintage edition, page numbers are given in the text.

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SILVIA GRANATA ~ STRUCTURING SPACE AND TIME IN E. BOWENS THE HOTEL

The hotel itself is experienced by the characters as an inbetween place: it should be a kind of provisional home for them, but they obstinately cling to their real homes in England through letters, through the information they gather about new guests, and the news they read about British social events. They miss home, but at the same time repeatedly tell each other how indispensable this vacation is, and how dull it would have been to remain in England. Each in their own ways, all the guests seem thus to be suspended in a kind of voluntary homelessness. At times, the small world within the hotel is seen as a continuation of home life, as when Miss Pym reflects on new arrivals (which she thinks of as long forecast shadows forever darkening the threshold of the hotel): she learns of Rev. Miltons arrival from three letters for him and something that looked like a bill (or perhaps a receipt) [that] had been forwarded from an address she knew quite well, a country house in Derbyshire. She feels gratified by how ones intimate world contracted itself, how ones friends wove themselves in! Society was fascinating, so like a jigsaw puzzle (8). But this displaced life is by no means a synonym of freedom: even though on vacation, characters still adhere to the formalities they follow at home, creating a web of obligations and social duties that makes their everyday-life fixed in a perennial routine:
Nobody was hurried or constrained; time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfill a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away (24).

Life in the hotel thus follows the same unwritten rules and conventions of life at home, but is not pervaded in general by

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the feelings of security, ease and coziness usually associated to the idea of home. This might be due to the fact that form and etiquette are inherent in the characters daily life. The resulting restlessness is well expressed by one of the ladies that gather in the hotel drawing-room:
As winter comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel hardly human, sitting evening after evening in an empty room. One cant always be going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one. If I shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it feels so unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one hears the servants laughing, or something to worry one. [] Its not, of course, that Im nervous, but I really begin to feel if youll understand my saying anything so extraordinary as if I didnt exist. [] One would go mad if one were not able to get abroad (61).

While the inside of the hotel is often immersed in half-light, the outside is flooded by a blazing glare. Extreme southern light, however, like shadow, prevents from seeing well, and is at times hard to bear; moreover, the stronger the light outdoor, the deeper the outside shadows, which often reveal the characters feelings. This is why the positioning of the characters in light/shadow is so important, as for instance when Miss Pym looks at the tennis players on the court: The quality of their hard, cool stare of indifference yet so penetrating was enhanced for Miss Pym by the glare of the courts, the air charged with sunshine, the treelessness, a kind of positiveness everywhere (12). Sunshine here emphasizes Miss Pyms feeling of being out of place, irremediably separated from the in her view happy and carefree players. Words like glare, sunshine and positiveness, usually associated with agreeable connotations, are here employed to stress the characters inquietude, thus pointing to uncanny, sinister overtones. But the tennis players are not so light-hearted as Miss Pym thinks: in fact, their mood is strangely intertwined with contrasts between light and shade: Sydney, who is usually a very

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good player, starts to feel uneasy when Mrs Kerr shows up as a spectator; the girl is so keen on what her friend thinks of her that her play is affected. While Mrs Kerr looks at the court (unseen, sitting far back in the shadow, 13), Sydneys play becomes awful. Her companion kindly attributes her failure to the terrible glare that prevents from seeing, but the reader just like Sydney understands that the reason lies elsewhere: Mrs Kerr remained sitting: the edge of her skirt, the tip of her parasol, came out into the sunlight. From out of the black shadow that hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a livewire was incessantly tugging at Sydneys consciousness (15). Indeed, much of the novel is centered on the issue of perception: characters seem to exist only as far as they exist for others; in Bennett and Royles words, people, like people in novels, are constituted by thoughts, their own and others: people in Bowen are being thought6. Sydneys attachment to Mrs Kerr is exactly of this nature:
if she did not exist for Mrs Kerr as a tennis player, in the most ordinary, popular of her aspects, has she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question of What did Mrs Kerr think of her? but rather Did Mrs Kerr ever think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment a kind of extinction. (17).

What is true for the hotel tennis courts is also true for the surrounding landscape: although the location is undeniably beautiful, it does not offer a reassuring setting. The hills around the hotel are described as pervaded by light, but it is a light which does not offer any chance of enlightenment: Beyond the village more hills, a disheartening infinity, rose blade-like, without shadow, against the vapourless and metallic brilliance of the sky (39). Even the much waited for sunshine after a storm is described as painful and impersonal: against an
6

Bennett and Royle, p. xx.

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opaque, bright blue sky the expressionless faces of the buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness (65). Thus, the hotel guests live in a place characterized in various ways by otherness: it is another home, but not quite comfortable as ones own; it is another country, which they perceive as strange and vaguely mysterious (they do not understand the locals, nor try to), and, finally, it is always pervaded either by shade or by glaring light. Both forbid a clear vision, and signal the difficulty of the characters in placing themselves; their vision (of the place they live in, of themselves and others) always seems to be disturbingly blurred. But characters are not only suspended between light and shade, they are also suspended in time, often feeling that they occupy an odd space between different eras, or different ages of life. To begin with, they are frequently concerned with the issue of age. This emerges for instance in the friendship between the twenty-two years old Sydney and the middle-aged Mrs Kerr, a connection which many find odd, or even dangerous. Sydney herself seems to see the generational gap between them as an obstacle, fearing that her own youth might induce Mrs Kerr to underestimate her, and feels resented when her friend uses what she calls a girl-of-your-age tone. Youth and age are often discussed, as when Rev. Milton observes that young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we cant help realizing that ourselves I dont know whether that makes us less funny or more so (77). A few lines below though, we find that being sophisticated is not seen as a positive outcome, and that Milton finds the growing refinement of youth alarming. Sydney, on the other hand, is initially discouraged by his middle-aged whimsicality (78). Ultimately, youth and age too seem to blur, as exemplified by the figure of the late Mr Pinkerton, whose very age comes to be perceived as elusive:
The Honourable Edward Pinkerton had died before his father, Lord Parke. Though he had not been young when he died, such a frustration of lifes high purpose for him he was an only son

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had lent him the pathos of youth. Had his widow been less substantial and less palpably recent he might have passed, by the references made to him, as having died before his majority. (8).

In different ways, most of the characters are also trapped between two historical periods, a condition they sharply feel as having a paralyzing effect. Thus, if Sydney can express her disappointment with the exclamation How Victorian! (13), others see the difference between youth and age as a divide between the Victorian era and modern times. Rev. Milton, for instance, who is used to being in touch with his rather oldish parishioners, looked with interest at these modern girls (35). At times modernity is palpably misunderstood: for instance Mrs Lee-Mittison thinks wrongly that young girls are not so interested in men as those of her generation used to: according to her, this was the most delightful aspect of modern girls, they all liked just being jolly together (43). Young people themselves seem to mistake youth for modernity, as when Veronica wonders why Sydney has been invited to Mr Lee-Mittisons picnic: You dont effervesce. Youre not breathlessly modern (on his level!) every minute like we are. You cant think how tired we get. Thats why Joan struck at coming this morning. She said she felt old... (37). Modernity is not, however, universally identified with energy and youth: the modern era is also the one deeply scarred by the catastrophe of the war, whose effects are embodied in the novel by Victor, out of job and with nothing left to do in Colonel Duperriers words but rot[ting] about here for a winter (55). An undefined but impassable divide separates the new generation from the previous one, as noted by the young Joan while talking with the Colonel: the wars come very hard indeed on our generation. I dont think people understand a bit (55). The dialogue between the girl and Duperrier, although apparently banal, can provide a key to better understand the atmosphere of suspension and paralysis that Bowen
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captures in this novel. After the first general observation on the hardness of the period they live in, the discussion shifts from history to age, clarifying the way in which the two terms are linked together. Joan candidly tells the middle-aged Colonel that it must be very nice for him, having no future to think of (56). Seeing that the colonel fails to understand, she explains:
you havent got to do anything that matters. I mean, theres nobody but yourself to please and, of course, your wife. While a young man, like well, oh, anyone say Victor Ammering, has got the whole beastly thing ahead of him. I suppose it wont all be beastly; I mean, hell fall in love and, I suppose, marry, and sooner or later his fatherll die and then hell have some money of his own; but in the long run its all rather an effort. (56-57)

Joans point of view does not only reflect a young persons fear of not reaching his or her goals in life. As we learn from her next words, which clearly keep Victor in mind, it is the age they live in which turns a common anxiety about the future into a kind of paralysis, a mood of renunciation deriving from the feeling that any possible effort would be meaningless. When Duperrier asks whether Ammering is not ambitious, Joan answers in the negative, specifying that being ambitious is no good, since there may be another war. And even if there isnt, disappointed people are dreadful to live with (57). The real issue which Joans generation is experiencing is thus first stated vaguely, then apparently circumvented, and finally explained in a casual, dispassionate way. She is implying that being young in that particular historical moment is dramatically different from being young in any other period, a condition that the old often fail to understand. As a matter of fact, the elderly guests of the hotel continue to live as they used to, vaguely perceiving that something has changed but still clinging to the old values and principles that informed their lives (what Sydney would define Victorian); some of the young guests
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instead, clearly see that things have changed, and that the values and assumptions of the former generation are irremediably outdated, without being substituted for new ones. Bowen depicts a period characterized at least for the English bourgeoisie she deals with by a deep sense of confusion, and by the idea that there is nowhere to go, or worth going. Even the received function of the upper middle classes, conscious of being the keeper of traditional values and feeling it their duty to provide a positive example, is here underplayed by the fact that no one really looks up to them, apart from themselves. Their role as a class is discussed in a dialogue between Milton, Miss Pym and Mrs Hillier; this is one of the few instances in the book where characters bring up political or social issues, but what most strikes the reader is the tone of the conversation, and the revealing quality of its conclusion. While on a trip to a beautiful villa, Milton thinks of its former aristocratic owners, and asks if one comes to think of it, what was the good of them? (121); Miss Pyms polemical answer comes somewhat as a surprise: if you come to think of it, what is the good of us?. Milton fears this might lead to a quarrel about the Empire, but Miss Pym explains she only meant us all, our class.... Mrs Hillier who here represents the old generation, still faithful to certainties that others see only as illusions playfully accuses her of being a socialist. Miss Pym however still pursues her point very seriously: but must one be a Socialist [] to wonder sometimes what is the good of us? Mrs Hillier then tries to stifle the debate through politeness, that is, with the same well bred instinct to cover this that she had when anybody tried too discuss religious experiences. Then she states that their role as a class is to give the others something to go by with. I mean, people do notice. Why, one feels it even out here Italians notice. To this, Miss Pym answers with a statement that sounds both ironic and desperate, highlighting the narrowness and self-centredness of the others position: but dont you wonder if they dont just think were

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lazy?. Mrs Hillier however is not impressed and finds the idea simply preposterous; she replies that Italians are positive parasites, blaming Miss Pym for being acutely self-conscious in worrying about what the hotel waiters might think of them. The dialogue thus ends by leaving Mrs Hillier still firm in her Victorian upper-class prejudices (and quite self satisfied) and Miss Pym thoroughly confused (122), while the reader sees that both the accusations (that of being lazy and that of being obsessed by others opinions) are correct, and might apply to all the guests of the hotel, as well as to the whole class they belong to. Nineteenth-century values embodied by Mrs Hillier do not sound convincing any more, but the real question is, what should substitute them? Even those who demonstrate a vague faith in modernity, always interlace it with anxiety, a kind of disappointment for unfulfilled promises. For instance, Ronald feels sure that times are changed, and this makes it even more puzzling that people still continue to live as before:
As a matter of fact, said Ronald gravely, I dont think we mind being respected. I think, Mother, if you dont mind my saying so, that it is a mistake ever to confuse us with your finde-sicle friends. Of course a remark like that would have a thousand satirical reverberations in say a Wilde play. But really, one is able to take it quite simply. (106).

This modernity that everybody talks of, and nobody is able to define, is often connected with women: there is nothing now to prevent women being different, said Ronald despondently, and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it? (126). Apparently, modern women should be free from the duties and boundaries which marked their mothers lives: the horizon of young girls should stop being circumscribed to the hope of finding a husband and settling down. However, the thoughts of most girls in the hotel are still absorbed by their relationships with men, while Sydney, the intelligent and sensi 56

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tive outsider who defies conventions and chooses to pursue a career, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Instead of being impressed by her academic achievements, other women find them boring and vaguely depressing. Thus not only the very idea of modernity becomes evanescent, being understood by each character in a different way, but the reader starts to suspect that the elder generation even though still anachronistically tied to prejudices and formalities of the previous century is ultimately happier than the younger one, that sees the hypocrisy and vacuity of old ideas but as yet has been unable to substitute it with something new and more satisfactory. Indeed, time can be puzzling, and relative in odd ways; as noted by Bennett and Royle, this further emphasizes the ghostliness of the present7, as does Sydneys reflection in the village graveyard:
the present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next, and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have to turn back to it (99).

Something similar results from Sydneys allusion to the phantasy that Saracens could appear and ravage the hotel. In fact, such a powerful and uncanny image is ultimately drowned by the meaningless and mediocrity of the present: while a cloud of depression crept over her Sydney asks Milton (and herself) how many of us they would really care to take away? (pp. 40-41). Her conclusion is that she pities any Saracen that ever got into them [villages], for theyre perfect honeycombs, and the people I think are cruel in a leisurely sort of way (40); as if this was not enough discouraging, she adds, in a way that invites no discussion, that women must have deteriorated (41).

Bennett and Royle, p. 11. 57

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This pervading sense of elusiveness, this struggle to find an apparently unavailable meaning, is emphasized by Bowens style. She not only underplays key-events so that the reader struggles to identify them as such, but also manages to let some of her characters experience the most trifling circumstances as if they were epic ones. This happens for instance when Tessa, Sydneys cousin, ponders over her choice to see the hotel menu in advance: she was not sure whether she should continue the arrangement [...] She wished so much that she could make up her mind about this, turned her head among the cushions and with a sigh refolded her hands on her bosom. In Life one seemed always to be making decisions (19). As other characters, Tessa feels deeply, but her feelings (especially those of uncertainty and inaptness) are often connected with formal or unimportant things. At times, this widespread tendency to over-react (at least psychologically) to trivial facts becomes a means to convey a powerful social satire, which is, however, always mixed with sincere curiosity, a feeling of compassion, and a half-hidden fascination. This is evident for instance in chapter four, titled Bathroom: Miss and Mrs Pinkerton, whose names are always accompanied with ironic insistence by the adjective honourable, have payed an extra-fee in order to have exclusive use of the bathroom facing their room. The place is described as a sacred space, almost as a temple:
here in white-tiled sanctuary their bowls of soap, their loofahs, their scented bath salts could remain secure from outrage; here, too, their maid could do their smaller washing and hang the garments up to dry before the radiator. There generally were garments drying there; the two distrusted foreign laundresses, perhaps with reason. (26)

The insistence on this aura of sacredness is clearly ironic, but Bowen does not stop there, complicating the picture with a hint at the effect that the arrangement has on the other guests. Instead of being annoyed at having to share the only remaining bathroom, other visitors on this floor respected this arrange 58

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ment which had a certain beauty for them, the accretion of prestige (26). Thus it is not only the Pinkertons who attach value to trifling things; their ideas are in fact widely shared and accepted, and many other guests are indeed impressed (or awed) by their aloofness. Rev. Milton, however, who has just arrived from a long journey, quickly heads towards his room (which is on the shadowy side) and then to the Pinkertons bathroom, without knowing it is private. The Pinkertons reaction is one of profound astonishment and anxiety: the author, though, presents it through the eyes of Sydney, who happens to be there, and immediately informs Tessa of the circumstance. Thus Bowen exhibits three different reactions to the same fact: for the Pinkertons it is a source of excruciating embarrassment, Sydney finds it really funny, while Tessa, more used to empathize with others, pities the outraged ladies (29). Through Sydneys eyes, we can thus see the funny side of the situation, but we are also encouraged to look deeper into the Pinkertons motivations, as Sydney does when she and Tessa are invited in their room:
she realized that this must be something worse for them than not, simply, getting what they paid for. It went deeper than that. They were stupid but not, she felt, vulgar; all this lace and leather, monograms everywhere and massive encrustations of silver meant less to them, probably, than to herself, to whom wealth and position would have been conveniences to be made use of. They were part of the immense assumption on which the Pinkertons based their lives. The Pinkertons imposed themselves on the world by conviction. (30-31)

The adjective vulgar, with its obvious classist overtones, recurs often in the novel. Sydney employs it to blame herself for misunderstanding Mrs Kerr (I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me. It is so much easier to be vulgar and so much less noticed, 69); Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym, during their quarrel, had seen each other crudely illuminated, and they had seen each other as vulgar (10). Such a linguistic choice by
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even the unconventional and modern Sydney signals that she shares, perhaps unconsciously, the widespread snobbery of the other guests. However, she still finds the episode of the bathroom hilarious, counterbalancing with her irony the excessive pathos attached to it by the Pinkertons. While in their room, Sydney is still overcome by a simultaneous desire to yawn and to laugh (31), which contrasts even more with their suffering, expressed through a kind of leave-taking speech by Mrs Pinkerton: there are situations in life said Mrs Pinkerton, face to face with which one is powerless:
Though she only meant that in the struggle for life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility, Tessa and Sydney gathered that Mrs Pinkerton was prostrated. After a blank little silence intended to express the inexpressible they murmured a solicitous good night and slipped through the door. (31)

The Pinkertons are an example of the way in which people can be entrapped by conventions and assumptions about social standing, a feeling of entrapment which is frequently alluded to in the novel: they seemed somehow enclosed as they sat there, moated about by their patent honourableness. Distinction drew a bright line round their woolly white heads, detaching them from the panorama of faces; distinction flowed down with their sleek satin draperies into dark folds (23). Of course, this leads to isolation, even though this enclosedness is ultimately pointless:
Mrs Pinkerton and her sister-in-law never sat for more than a minute or two in the drawing-room where other ladies forgathered. They withdrew early to their rooms where they would embroider, eat little pastries and drink coffee. No one else had ever been invited to join them there; such an invitation was hardly to be expected, thought the Pinkertons had consented to be present once or twice at Mrs Lee-Mittisons coffee parties. They felt, perhaps, a little lonely these evenings; the comfortable feeling of enclosedness would fall away when there

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was nobody to be enclosed against. In the high room among marble-topped furniture they sat listening with their well-bred attentiveness to one anothers breathing (27-28).

The hotel setting amplifies this feeling, making such selfenclosure even more evident. But there is also a way in which the very nature of the hotel a group of people, all more or less sharing values and assumptions, all close to each other and constantly under each others scrutiny functions as a kind of trap. This applies for instance to Rev. Milton, who as the text is at pains to underline is sincerely and at times naively looking for new experience; however, the hotel will not let him escape his social role, as Sydney understands, apparently recognizing the hotels almost intentional influence on its guests: she knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito, foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the hotel (40). The idea of the hotel as a kind of prison recurs again during the picnic, in a reverie by Mrs Lee-Mittison, whose attention is caught by a nice villino on the hill; she starts fantasizing about living there with her husband, and enjoying a place where the dark interior of the house would not be dark from within (42). In comparison with that cozy, intimate though modest abode, the idea of returning to the hotel becomes disgusting:
she felt sick at the thought of their hotel bedrooms that stretched, only interposed with the spare rooms of friends, in unbroken succession before and behind her. She felt sick at the thought of for how many mornings she would have to turn the washstand into an occasional table by putting away the basin and jug in the cupboard and drape with Indian embroideries the trunk in which they concealed their boots. (42)

The very nature of the hotel, as a place that forces a close cohabitation, in which everybody is always under other peoples scrutiny, is at the same time enervating and revealing of another way in which Bowens characters are suspended: their
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thoughts constantly shift from their own perception of themselves and the supposed perceptions of others. It has been observed that characters almost maniacally worry about other peoples opinions; what makes this attitude even more confusing, is that their thoughts are always shifting, never coherent or deeply grounded. We often hear contrasting opinions on the main characters, so that it becomes quite difficult to understand what they really are: is Sydney a very clever, sensitive girl, or is she simply an over-reactive, morbid spoiled child? Is Mrs Kerr nave or manipulative? And what about Rev. Milton? Is he the simple, cheerful man Mrs Kerr thinks, or is he terribly self-conscious as Sydney sees him? (68). Bowen astutely dramatizes the difficulty of really understanding others by providing multiple points of view on the same character. As a further reminder of this, the difficulty of seeing others clearly is often remarked by the characters themselves. As observed by Sydney: its a fatal combination, Im sure, to be clever and kind; you can never see clear: its a sort of squint. The stupidest person out here could describe me immediately (169). But the interplay between conscience and perception is explored also on another level: the text invites reflections on the relation between identity and artistic representation, an issue Bowen often points to, comparing her characters not only to dolls, but also in a kind of meta-narrative play to characters in a novel, to actors on stage, and to movie stars. Thus the metaphor used by Sydney, who describes the hotel as a dolls house, becomes dramatically resonant:
I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge like the front of a dolls house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with their walls lit up and the real-looking staircase and all the people surprised doing appropriate things in the appropriate attitudes as though they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in their lives. (78-79).

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The difference between real person and fictional character is further discussed by Cordelia Barry, who explains:
I only like people in books who only exist when they matter. I think it is being in danger or terribly in love, discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling and for that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly alive...! (93)

Ironically, Sydney answers that you never know what might happen to them, but this sounds quite unconvincing. Thus the people in the hotel are characters since this is how they feel, with their obsession for other peoples opinions (from which only Mrs Kerr seems to be free), but also because they actually are characters in a novel. In the passage above, Bowen draws the readers attention on the interaction between fiction and reality, ironically making Cordelia blame her fellow-characters for being less real than those of the books she is reading. Furthermore, the hotel guests are also compared to actors on stage, tirelessly repeating the same script: Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on interminably; they had watched from rise to fall of the curtain the whole drama of lunch (25). Lastly, they become for each other like figures on a screen, as when Sydney sees Veronica and Victor together: the couple gesticulating soundlessly below her in the sunshine appeared as in some perfect piece of cinema-acting, emotion represented without emotion (48-49). Bowen thus creates a multi-layered novel, which portrays a very complex, transitional historical moment from various perspectives. On the one hand, she investigates the crisis of old values and beliefs, questioning the meaning and implications of modernity. The very setting she chooses emphasizes this, underlining the cultural and at times existential homelessness of her characters. On the other hand, the author also explores the issues of conscience and identity, through reflections on the relationship between life and art, never suggesting a one-way solution but posing perplexing questions, and leaving the ultimate answer to her reader.
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