Representations of the household in Graham Greene’sThe Quiet Americanand Jean Rhys’sWide Sargasso Sea

British society in the 1950s and 1960s was fractured and reformed by the great political and economic turbulences ensuing ( instantly ) from the terminal of the Second World War. Artists chronicled these alterations in two main ways: by utilizing the resources of pragmatism to give an thought of what it was like to be in the midst of the here and now ( particularly in the instance of working-class novelists such as Alan Sillitoe and Barry Hines and, subsequently, the movies of Ken Loach ) ; or by puting themselves at some grade of remove, through location and signifier, frequently ( possibly ) so as to supply some grade of historical position.

If we are to utilize the modern British household as a venue for placing the alterations in modern British society, we find that it is straight treated in the instance of the ‘realists’ and ( seemingly ) indirectly treated in the instance of the ‘removists’ . It is with the latter category of authors that I will be concerned in this essay. Despite their distanced narrative, it will be seen that they combine insight into the household unit with a sense of historical position, promoting a sort of ‘dual-perspective’ which lays bare ways in which the household unit is portion of larger systems. The households represented may be far from 1950s/1960s Britain in clip and infinite but they are represented by a modern head, with an oculus on modern issues.

Before traveling on to analyze representations of the household in Graham Greene’sThe Quiet American( 1955 ) and, aboard R.D. Laing’sThe Divided Self( 1960 ) , Jean Rhys’Wide Sargasso Sea( 1966 ) , it will be enlightening to give an illustration of the manner of distancing that I have discussed above. John Fowles’The Gallic Lieutenant’s Woman( 1969 ) is an historical novel treating of the Victorian epoch, yet it clearly aims to state of import things about the sixtiess. Within two pages of the gap we find the mistiming ‘as full of elusive curves and volumes as a Henry Moore’ ( Fowles 10 ) – Henry Moore, of class, working three quarters of a century after the novel is set. The storyteller is invariably reminding the reader that his age is that of McLuhan and Robbe-Grillet. The last name on that list is important: following techniques innovated in the Gallicnouveau Romanthe storyteller makes one extremely cognizant of how his modern-day ( i.e. 1960s ) position informs his representation of the past and of how that yesteryear is used to re-explain the present.

For illustration, in chapter 35 ofThe Gallic Lieutenant’s Woman, the storyteller asks the inquiry ‘What are we faced with in the 19th century? ’ . He so goes on to name a series of paradoxes ( all indexed to the issues of sex and the household ) – e.g. we are faced with ‘An age [ … ] Where the holiness of matrimony ( and celibacy before matrimony ) was proclaimed from every dais, in every newspaper column and public vocalization ; and never–or barely ever–have so many great public figures, from the hereafter king down, led such disgraceful private lives.’ ( Fowles 258 ) . On the one manus, we get an penetration into the unreconcilable contradictions at the bosom of Victorian life and the ways in which they condition the fictional characters’ behavior. Marriage is sacred in theory but non in title. On the other manus, the information given about the Victorians is reflected back on to the modern-day epoch to enable asynkrisis( i.e. comparing of two lives/times ) of the Victorian and the present epoch. The storyteller writes:

Nor can Malthus and the deficiency of birth-control contraptions rather account for the fact that they bred like coneies and worshipped birthrate far more ardently than we do. Nor does our century autumn behind in the affair of advancement and liberalisation ; and yet we can barely keep that it is becausewehold so much sublimated energy to save. ( Fowles 259-60 )

A remark on the Victorian household ( their worship of birthrate ) is in the first sentence made to reflect visible radiation on the modern-day household ( which presumptively does non idolize birthrate – likely because of the widespread usage of preventives, particularly of the preventive pill after its blessing for clinical application in May 1960 ( Wikipedia ) ) . Furthermore, the relationship between the sexes in Victorian England is construed to account for some of the ‘sublimated energy’ that Victorians used for advancement. The household has a portion to play, so, in this advancement ; and as such grounds may be found within the household for the comparative deficiency of ‘sublimated energy’ in the modern epoch.

The modern householddoesdo its visual aspects inThe Gallic Lieutenant’s Woman, but largely as a shadow or a deficiency: a mostly implied and vague infinite that the storyteller compares the Victorian household to. We get some thought of the modern family’s construction and definition and how these might be tied to current events merely by following the deductions of the narrator’s comparings ( e.g. , ‘it seems far from certain that the Victorians did non see a much keener, because less frequent, sexual pleasance than we do’ ( Fowles 263 ) – therefore the sexual grasp of the sixtiess is blunter, because glutted ) .

The technique employed to stand for the household inThe Quiet American( afterlife ‘QA’ ) falls within the same class as that employed inThe Gallic Lieutenant’s Woman– the position strives to stay close and distant at the same clip, though here the distance is geographical instead than temporal. The novel is set in Gallic Indochina in the dusk between the prostration of the Gallic Empire and the American engagement at that place. The newsman Fowler’s household is something left behind in England, glimpsed merely really fleetingly in remembrances and letters but thrown into crisp alleviation by the ‘quiet American’ Pyle’s thoughts on matrimony. Furthermore, the nexus between household and political positions is suggested by the contrast between the men’s constructs of matrimony.

We learn small about Fowler’s matrimony in Britain except that it has fallen apart, and that Fowler wants it to stop but his Catholic married woman won’t grant a divorce. The matrimony has failed, it seems, because of Fowler’s relentless unfaithfulness ( his married woman, in a answer to this missive, refers to other incidents, peculiarly with one ‘Anne’ (QA129 ) ) . These inside informations were of peculiar personal significance to Greene ( his lover at the clip could non obtain a divorce from her Catholic hubby ) but however he is touching upon of import modern-day issues. There was a great motion off from traditional matrimony values and towards divorce in the 1950s and 1960s, with a 133 % addition in divorces in England and Wales between 1959 and 1969 and the eventual alteration of the divorce jurisprudence in 1969 ( Childs 214 ) . It would be excessively wide a gesture to associate Fowler’s selfishness steadfastly to the lifting secularisation and consumerist selfishness of Western society in the 1950s ( Cf Robbins 240ff ) – I believe it to be more accurately expressive of Greene’s ain personality.

Requesting a divorce from his married woman so that he can get married Phuong, his Annamite girlfriend, Fowler writes ‘I had intended our matrimony to last rather every bit much as if I had shared your Christian beliefs’ (QA82 ) . Fowler’s construct of household bespeaks a adulterate signifier of British matrimonial values: household is a venue for him temporarily to seek his ain felicity, for him to exert his ain selfishness. Beyond that, it is emptied out of intending – spiritual, loving or otherwise. As Fowler’s married woman writes: ‘I can see you get marrieding after a drink excessively many’ (QA130 ) – a opinion in which ‘marrying’ could good be substituted for ‘gambling’ , ‘falling unconscious’ , etc.

This indurate, disinterested attack to household is, nevertheless, interestingly counterpointed to that of Pyle. Pyle is a immature American who has been sent to Indochina to organize covertly a ‘third force’ , which would agitate strife between the Gallic Imperial powers and their antagonists in order to derive a political bridgehead. His thoughts on political relations, it becomes clear, repeat his thoughts on matrimony and household: they are abstract activities, to be learned from books and entered into by the book ( therefore blindly, though with good purposes ) . Traveling through Pyle’s properties after his slaying Fowler finds a book on sex and admirations ‘Perhaps he was analyzing sex, as he had studied the East, on paper’ (QA23 ) . Talking to Phuong and her sister, Pyle says

[ … ] ‘I’ve ever thought I’d like a batch of children’ [ … ] ‘A large family’s a fantastic involvement. It makes for the stableness of matrimony. And it’s good for the kids excessively. I was an lone kid. It’s a great disadvantage being an lone child.’ (QA40 )

Pyle uses the linguistic communication of accounting ( ‘interest’ recalls ‘asset’ , much as a pension program would be ) to make an balance-sheet for matrimonial felicity ( many kids = advantageous ; few = disadvantageous ) . Subsequently, at a tense minute when Pyle is seeking to allure Phuong from Fowler, Fowler mocks, ‘’Is that how you make love in America – figures of income and blood-group? ’’ (QA79 ) .

Pyle’s position of the household is grossly simplified and ‘innocent’ – but non innocuous. It proceeds by manner of abstract generalizations, non specifics, in a manner similar to Pyle’s political relations. This was important at a clip of increasing American power in the universe – between 1945 and the mid-1950s America involved itself in external personal businesss as ne’er before. Pyle, for Greene, represented the push of American policy of the mid-1950s, seeking to rule states abroad but nescient of local cultural and political specifics ( Mudford 19 ; 43 ) .

The contrast between Pyle’s position of household and Fowler’s misanthropic, ‘experienced’ one touches upon Greene’s major point inThe Quiet American, I think. Pyle’s positions on household microcosmically show hisWorld viewand US foreign policy: household ( and political relations ) are a series of regulations to be kept with good purposes, and damn the effects. This position is expressed in a well-known transition:

We used to talk of sterling qualities. Have we got to speak now of a dollar love? A dollar love, of class, would include matrimony and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go today for their divorces. (QA, 64 )

Marriage is bathetically compared to the relatively unimportant Mother’s Day, and divorce made unserious by being linked with the seedy Reno. Greene seemed to believe that these attacks showed the ‘eternal adolescence’ of the American head, as emphasised in a parallel transition fromThe Pleasure Dome( 1972 ) . Reflecting on American movies, Greene writes that harmonizing to an American ‘morality means maintaining Mother’s Day and looking after child sister’s purity’ ( p.172 ) . He goes on to inquire, ‘What usage is at that place in feigning that with these Alliess it was of all time possible to contend for civilisation? ’ ( p.173 ) .

It is non a street arab point. A shallow morality finds its look in the sort of ignorance that Pyle shows in puting up his ‘third force’ , which in one machination unwittingly causes the deceases of many Vietnamese ( portion 3, chapter 2 ) . Pyle fails to accept the effects of his actions as if he is insulated from world: his first thought on happening that he has stepped in blood he has caused to cast is ‘I must acquire them cleaned before I see the minister’ (QA182 ) . As Gorra writes, Greene suggests that much evil ‘springs non from maliciousness, but from innocence’ ( Gorra 14-5 ) . Set against Pyle’s ‘innocent’ insisting on ‘getting involved’ , Fowler’s maliciousness and reluctance to go ‘engaged’ ( politically, with dry wordplay on ‘engagement’ ) seems about more humanist and reasonable, since it causes stagnancy but less direct injury.

Clearly, what is at interest both politically and in the household is a sense of ‘civilization’ – and household and political relations can be seen as looks of one another, since the values taught by one are applied in the other. Tellingly, there are no existent households inThe Quiet American, merely thoughts of them or intimations of them beamed in from afar. But the chief characters’ thoughts of household and of political relations can be seen to be coextensive. Fowler, politically and in love, is misanthropic, selfish, doesn’t ( truly ) act and gets what he wants. Pyle is guiltless and Acts of the Apostless and gets killed. ‘Family’ here is in service of a political point but the nexus is enlightening. Greene is promoting us to develop our eyes both on the household microcosm and its symbiotic relationship with the political universe.

Rhys’s imaginativeness is exercised by a different set of jobs than Greene’s. By the publication ofWide Sargasso Seain 1966 foreign personal businesss and America’s portion in them were still centre-stage, of class. But the gradual displacement in civilization had opened up another kingdom of involvement for the populace: the relationship between household and single abnormal psychology, prompted by plants such as R.D. Laing’sThe Divided Self( originally published 1960 ) . Laing encouraged an existential-phenomenological attack towards lunacy: that is, non merely sing the mad as inexplicable, unaccessible and hence outside society but comprehendible every bit long as their looks of themselves are interpreted within the right context. In a sense, this sort of development, allied with rush in involvement in feminist, fagot and post-colonial, i.e. ‘outsider’ art, was instrumental in ‘giving a voice’ to the dispossessed.

Wide Sargasso Seacan be read in visible radiation of this societal tendency without clumsiness. The chief character, Antoinette, is derived from the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’sJane Eyre( 1848 ) . She is, like others of Rhys’ heroines, an foreigner – a white Creole in the black Caribbean, arevenant: ‘the un-person, the returning apparition who refuses to suit into the corporate continuum’ ( Sage 47 ) . An geographic expedition of how she became this ‘un-person’ finds that the household is the venue of her maltreatment and directs her ‘outsider’ voice back to a ‘centre’ , promoting a rereading of a canonical work.

Once once more, there are no modern households inWide Sargasso Seabut the novel, for its Victorianness, could merely hold been written by a modern individual. As such, its modern psychological position on the household is obvious:

‘ [ … ] They are kids – they wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Unhappy kids do ache flies, ’ said Aunt Cora. ( Rhys 35 )

There is at times a dramatic similarity between the transition of events and their effects in R.D. Laing’s instance surveies and Rhys’ descriptions of Antoinette’s life. For illustration, the description of ‘Julie’s’ ‘existential death’ in Laing ( Laing 162ff ) follows a similar form to Antoinette’s. Julie’s insanity was judged finally to stem from an opprobrious relationship with her parents, in which her female parent was perceived to be commanding ( ‘tailor-making’ Julie ) and her male parent untrusty because of an matter he was holding.

The minute of Julie’s insanity came when Julie’s doll was lost ; this made Julie believe her female parent was out to kill her. InWide Sargasso Sea, it is frequently at minutes when a precious thing is lost due to the unfeelingness of a household member that Antoinette is pushed towards madness. When the household house Burnss, Antoinette wants to salvage her parrot Coco. Mr Mason, her stepfather, won’t let her: ‘She wanted to travel back for her blasted parrot. I won’t allow it.’ ( Rhys 41 ) . As a consequence, the parrot dies, which is a bad portents: ‘I heard person say something about bad fortune and remembered that it was really luckless to kill a parrot, or even to see a parrot die.’ ( Rhys 43 ) . Due to the action of person from her household, an event betokening great awful Acts of the Apostless on Antoinette.

Antoinette’s household is inordinately cold towards her, when understood in modern footings. When she was a kid, her female parent pushed her ‘away, non approximately but calmly, in cold blood, without a word, as if she had decided one time and for all that I was useless to her ( Rhys 20 ) . Her stepfather, Mason, holds her ‘at arm’s length’ when he comes to see her ( Rhys 58 ) . These early experiences weaken her and promote her later in life to see world as a series of splittings, as Simpson has pointed out. This is illustrated in the undermentioned transition:

It was so that I saw her–the shade. The adult female with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a aureate frame but I knew her. ( qtd Simpson 113 )

The adult female is a ‘false’ or 2nd ego, a ‘zombie’ : an image of experiential decease ( Simpson 113 ) . It is non excessively far to travel to propose that this experiential decease has been brought approximately by a catalogue of maltreatments perpetrated largely by her ain household.

The household, inWide Sargasso Sea, as inThe Divided Self, can be seen as the possible venue for experiential decease ; an inward-looking that reflects the self-contemplation of the mid-1960s. Likewise, inThe Quiet American,the household is identified as cardinal to one of the concerns of the mid-1950s: political values. These centralities are identified despite the fact thatThe Quiet AmericanandWide Saragasso Seainquiry their ain states and epochs indirectly and from afar. It seems that they are successful in naming some of the jobs that lay so at the bosom of household kineticss. Furthermore, they were able to propose some ways in which the household should be seen as linked to wider political and historical motions.

Bibliography

Primary texts

Fowles, John,The Gallic Lieutenant’s Woman.London: Jonathan Cape, 1969

Greene, Graham,The Quiet American.London: Heinemann/Bodley Head 1955

— – ,The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism 1935-40, erectile dysfunction. John Russel Taylor. London: Secker & A ; Warburg, 1972

Laing, R.D. ,The Divided Self: an experiential survey of saneness and lunacy. London: Penguin, 1969 ( originally published 1960 )

Rhys, Jean,Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Andre Deutsch, 1966

Secondary texts

Childs, David C. ,Britain Since 1945: a political history. London: Routledge, 2001

Gorra, Michael,The English Novel at Mid-Century: from the tilting tower. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990

Mudford, Peter,Graham Greene. Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1996

Robbins, Keith,The Eclipse of a Great Power: modern Britain, 1870-1975. London: Longman, 1983.

Sage, Lorna,Womans in the House of Fiction: post-war adult females novelists. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Simpson, Anne B. ,Districts of the Psyche: the fiction of Jean Rhys. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Wikipedia, hypertext transfer protocol: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_pill, consulted 12:00pm, 29.11.05