Venus Day

The Season of Brideshead
She's a flapper
I've been reading Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier at the same time as Brideshead. Not for any strategic reason. I requested a copy from the local library back in October and it seems to be very popular right now. My name didn't come to the top of the request list until last week and now I have three weeks to read it.

And yet there is an overlap and it's an intriguing one. One of the fascinating things about Julia is that she is a flapper. We see this in her dress and her haircut and her behaviour.

I think we can see in Julia a bit of a mirror for what has been happening with men only going the other way. We have a lot of bisexuality and general prettiness of boys in the novel. Julia is, as she will later admit, a very hard girl.

That's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is historical. For many feminists of the time and much current feminist theory blame the flappers for killing first generation feminism. The first generation feminists had set about creating this ideal of a new woman who pushed for and won individual liberty. Apparently the ideal is based on Ibsen and we can see Rebecca West renaming herself in honour of an Ibsen heroine.

The story of what happened to first generation feminism will sound very familiar to anyone who lived through second generation. The movement starts out very radical. Its early authors question not just the role of women within Western society but the very basis of western society itself. They see feminism as a way to sweep away conventional Christianity, Christian morality and class distinctions. Pretty soon, however, they compromise on some of these in order to achieve more practical goals. And then along comes a generation of young women who use these hard-won freedoms not to transform society but to transform their youth by dressing in sexually provocative ways and living a sort of extended childhood stretching into their late twenties.

The sexual aspect is important. Although they dressed more provocatively than the generations that preceded them, the young women of the 1910s and 1920s were the herald of a more sexually conservative era. No one knows for certain, but there are indications that the women of the 1990s and the aughts are going to do likewise.

Anyway, back to the beginning of the last century. You can really see this in The Return of the Soldier because, contrary to what is claimed in just about every description I've ever read of the book, this is a book about women in a time when women's roles were changing. Most write ups praise it as the first book about the war by a woman but the war is only a plot device here and the case of shell shock supposedly suffered by the sole male character is ridiculously implausible. Not that it need be realistic because he  is nothing more than a  cardboard cut out of a man whose only real role is to cause drama in the lives of three women. He comes home from the war with all memory of his beautiful, tasteful, elegant wife erased and he can only remember the working class woman he once had a love affair with (consummated in, this is no accident, a folly made in the shape of a Greek temple). The story is told by Jenny a childhood companion who also loves him but has maintained a relationship that is Platonic.

The three women, On the other hand, are wonderful and intriguing characters. West contrasts them here in what I think is the most important paragraph in the book. The narrator describes how the only male character has treated the three of the women in the book:

I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body the conqueror of the soul and in me from the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body.

Now that is a brilliant echo of Plato's Phaedrus.

Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.
...
As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three—two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will now proceed. The right–hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat–faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood–red complexion ; the mate of insolence and pride, shag–eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. 

Our narrator Jenny is unconsciously presenting herself as the Platonic ideal who can balance both horses. Otherwise, however, West has reversed the thing. Kitty's elevated tastes turn out to be slightly suspect. This comes out in a telling scene where the narrator goes to see Kitty who has failed to win her husband back. She lies in bed and has her maid bring her all her sexy lingerie one piece after another so she can review them. As she sees it, this is the investment she has made in getting this man.  The rougher horse, working class Margaret, appears to have the more noble spirit (so far anyway, I'm only three quarters through). In any case, I'm guessing we're headed for a sort of reverse Jane Eyre where we will find that Margaret is the truly noble soul. It is shaping up to be a sort of Wide Sargasso Sea where the issues that have dragged poor Margaret down are not race but class, albeit written long before Wide Sargasso Sea (I'll keep you updated just in case I have to do a humiliating admission of wrongness here).

But I trust that readers can also spot the obvious parallel with Brideshead (there is, by the way, a Phaedrus reference coming up in it too). Here Charles is the balanced man with both his horses proceeding in an even and unhasty manner. Sebastian is the one who champions the soul and Anthony is our spokesperson for the baser pleasures.

But there are also three women in the novel. One of whom represents the baser, another of whom strives for balance and third who champions the soul against the body. They are actually more important than the three men and yet rarely get their due.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.