Dear Marjorie,
Faults? Well, she could have trimmed a bit. We could have done with fewer raves from Sam and fewer rants from Henny. Each one is a little masterpiece of concentrated character exposition, an exciting tornado of madness and invective, but after the fourth or fifth time she calls him a vile rotten pig, pig, pig and he spins out his futuristic flimflam, one does get the picture. On the other hand, energetic excess is a part of the novel’s power; it’s what makes us accept Sam and Henny as the larger-than-life people they seemed to their children to be, archetypal Father and Mother, Man and Woman, forces of nature, instead of a pompous civil servant and a bitter housewife. Stead isn’t a lapidary novelist like Flaubert. (Although, come to think of it, Henny is a bit like Emma Bovary–both are romance-minded girls who are suffocated in marriage, disappointed by lovers, and ruined by moneylenders.) She’s more like Dickens or Dostoevsky, and her modernism is closer (although not very close) to that of Joyce than it is to the laconic minimalism of, say, Hemingway.
While we are on the subject of Stead’s relations to other writers, I think one could make a fascinating comparison between The Man Who Loved Children and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Both novels are drawn from the writer’s own childhood and have that child’s sense of magic and delight in the big old house, the seemingly endless garden, and the special world that children make together out of private games and secrets. Both feature large families; an intellectual, egotistical, emotionally needy father who is basically a failure; and a put-upon domesticized mother. In both novels, sex roles and male dominance and the ways they are created and sustained and resisted in the family are major concerns, and in both novels art is presented as an escape from feminine servitude–14-year-old Louie runs away for a “walk around the world,” and you know she’ll be all right and write great things some day even though she’s left home with only a dollar in her pocket; Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse, chooses to remain single and to paint, even though she knows she’ll never be a great artist.
It’s interesting to me that given the similarities, The Man Who Loved Children is not (correct me if I’m wrong) firmly ensconced on the women’s studies and feminist bookshelf right next to Woolf’s wonderful novel. It would be hard to find a more devastating critique of marriage, or of male chauvinism, whether of individual men or of a whole society. Stead lays out Henny’s ill nature unsparingly–she’s a snob, she beats the children, she doesn’t love Louie because Louie isn’t her biological child–but she sympathizes with her because Henny is the underdog. She never had a chance–raised for the marriage market (she had been taught nothing at school but embroidery, how to paint water colors, and the playing of Chopin), she failed to make a wealthy match and so must be a baby machine and a drudge: “a dirty cracked plate, that’s just what I am.” The hatred Henny feels for Sam is “bristly, foul, a hyena, hate of woman the house jailed and child chained against the keycarrier, childnamer, and riothaver.” Men make the customs and the laws, backed up by female paragons of convention like Sam’s awful sister Jo, a schoolteacher who writes sentimental verses and forces her unmarried sister to give up her baby at birth. Men hold all the aces; women are “the outlaws of the world.”
Where Christina Stead comes into the academic literary canon seems to be mostly as an Australian writer, especially as an Australian writer who–like lots of Australian writers–didn’t spend much time in her native land. A quick Google search came up with quite a bit of scholarship involving Stead and the concepts of place and exile. But I find myself wondering why she isn’t required reading in women’s lit courses or lit-about-women or gender-studies courses, why The Man Who Loved Children hasn’t been a cause célèbre for feminist critics or critics trying to discern a specifically female modernist tradition–after all, it’s a great book. (I’m not even asking, you note, why it isn’t required reading in courses on 20th century literature in general!) Is it just too upsetting? Not difficult enough to keep the grad students busy? Not enough gender-bending, androgyny, transexuality, and cross-dressing? Is Henny too negative a character for a female lead? You certainly can’t use her, as you can To the Lighthouse’s Mrs. Ramsay, as a pattern for an alternate, underappreciated set of virtues and values!
It’s too bad. I think students of both sexes would love this book. Stead was in her 30s when she wrote it, but it has all the passion, rage, and bitterness of early youth–all the feelings Woolf thought didn’t belong in fiction. Put this book in the canon, I say. And make people read it as a condition of getting a marriage license.
Katha
