"An Endless Variety in Language": The New Mother

A student asked me just after class whether I liked Lucy Clifford's story, "The New Mother."  I replied briskly that I did, and when the student wanted to know why I should like such a dismal little story, I replied once again briskly that it was thought-provoking.  I meant, of course, that the story is shocking and that its very shock-value prompts us to ask questions about the story.  But leaving class, I was troubled that I had not answered the question in a satisfactory way.  Sure, it is possible to "like" that which is not pleasant; this is one of the nifty things about art: we can like that which in real life would not be likeable at all.  But does this accurately account for liking a story such as "The New Mother," and what is there about the story to like?

I'll begin with the negative: the story contains much for any reader to dislike.  First, the obvious message about good behaviour, obeying parents, and accepting duty is rather heavy-handed.  Second, the message that bad behaviour may be a result of peer pressure and the desire for the satisfaction of curiosity takes a downright unpleasant form.  The little gypsy girl taunts Blue-eyes and Turkey and nudges them deeper and deeper into bad behaviour, and then she never does allow them to see the little peasant man and woman.  Indeed, perhaps the little man and woman never existed in the first place, and the gypsy child is a small female version of Mephistopheles or Lucifer.  The departure of the mother is disturbing, and so too is the "new mother" that appears to take her place.  The end is stark and bleak and unforgiving.  These children are babes in the woods at the end, and we know what happened to the babes in the woods.  Should we conclude that this is an example of the kind of brutal didacticism popular in the heyday of the so-called Moral Tale?  Is this story quite simply a warning to young girls to behave themselves or suffer the consequences?  If it is, then for me it would be a particularly unlikable and even unsavoury story.

But I do like it.  So what is there about this story to like?  I'll approach a couple of things here: 1) the psychological story of absences, and 2) the initiation this story offers readers into the complexity of reading itself.  This second point, simply stated, is: the story is about how we read, how we interpret.  Interpretation depends upon what the little gypsy girl in the story refers to as "an endless variety in language" (205).

First things first, and so I begin with absences.  The first thing I notice about this story is its insistence on things absent.  The two girls, Blue-eyes and Turkey, have names that derive from absence, Blue-eyes for her father who is absent at sea and Turkey for the wild turkey that is absent in the forest.  The fair in the village takes place the day before the girls arrive and so it too is absent.  They find no letter waiting for them at the post office, and this absence underlines the absence of the father.  When they tell their mother that they aspire to be naughty--to absent goodness from their lives, she replies that if they do this, then she will absent herself and leave a substitute mother in her place.  The plot turns on precisely these absences. The story is replete with absences of one kind and another.  The little man and woman in the peardrum are always absent.  I connect this absence with the psychic life, and to do so is to raise the spectre of desire.  Desire, by its very nature, seeks that which it does not have.  What the little girls have in the beginning of the story is comfort and security, a loving mother and protective home; they are sheltered and cut off from the dangerous world beyond their ken.  Yet their father is absent, at sea.  Desire on the part of the mother and her two older daughters to receive communication from the father sets the story in motion.  Then desire for the things the fair offers, for sight of the little man and woman, for the sound of the peardrum, for the little woman's secret, for the knowledge whether they have been naughty enough to satisfy the gypsy girl dominates the girls' lives.  They desire that which they cannot have.  And what they cannot have is that which they desire.  

The story is a small Lacanian drama.  Here two young girls living in harmony with their mother reach a stage in their lives when desire for that which is beyond the parameters of mother and home initiates a fall from unity with that mother.  The little village girl is dark and mysterious, seeming to appear and disappear as if by magic.  She is the 'other,' a person who, by virtue of her very otherness is both sinister and attractive.  And she harbours two little people who dance and comport themselves suggestively.  Whatever these little people represent, they clearly suggest something transgressive, that which the children's mother disapprove of, and that which the two young girls desire.  The behaviour called for by the gypsy child subverts the calm of early connection with the mother.  It disconnects the girls from their mother.  The gypsy child convinces the girls that they lack something, that their lives are without fulfillment.  Having been convinced of this, the girls set about trying to fill that lack, to accomplish fulfillment.  What the story reveals, however, is that the thing the girls think is necessary for their fulfillment is non-existent in the first place.  That which they desire is an absence, and therefore desire can never find satisfaction.  What's more, once the acceptance of desire as something devoutly to be wished is set in motion, once the children leave the mirror stage as it were (remember that they throw the mirror out the window and it crashes on the ground (206)), they lose contact with the mother they had known.  They find only separation.  The girls are doomed to a life of separation and frustration and fear.  An absent father and an absent mother mean a wilderness future for these girls.  All they can do is "long and long, with a longing that is greater than words can say, to see their own dear mother again" (213).  This is a longing that is doomed to remain frustrate.

Before I leave this Lacanian longing, I note the relative absence of males in this story.  The father is at sea; a little man with a wide-brimmed hat proves absent; and the man with the dancing dogs lurks in the background, appearing before the girls meet the gypsy child and then later playing a flute as his two dogs slowly waltz round and round.  What do we make of this grotesquerie?  One thing seems likely: the absence of the girls' father makes the whole series of events possible.  Their desire is to reach out to the father, and the little man accompanied by a little woman in the peardrum box is a reminder of male-female relationship.  This couple compels the young girls' interest.  Then we learn that the man with the dogs is somehow connected to the gypsy girl.  The question that occurs to me is: does this man represent the master of the revels, the power in the background, the one who controls things?  This is a parodic father and his two dogs are parodic children under his control.  Perhaps the story is even more darkly pessimistic than I at first thought: disaster can happen when fathers are absent (I think too of Sendak's Outside Over There), and disaster results when fathers control children.  The Law of the Father ensures desire's dance will keep us unhappy and isolated from that which has kept us safe: the mother.  The "new mother," after all, is a decidedly phallic mother with her long and wooden and powerful tail.  In this story fathers win the day, but the result for women is dire.

So far, this shapes up to be a dreary story about the inevitable tragedy of human existence.  But another reading is possible.  The story delivers one surprise after another, most often linguistic surprise.  This is a story of reversals.  And the reversals more often than not derive from misunderstanding, from misinterpretation if you will.  Examples are numerous: the peardrum has strings, but it is actually played by turning a handle, not strumming or plucking the strings; the gypsy girl appears to be crying, but she is cheerful; she says she is rich, but she looks poor; shabbiness is respectable; unkindness is being naughty without including your sister in the naughtiness; goodness is akin to a crime; and of course the most dramatic reversal is the "new mother" herself because she reverses (perhaps "inverts" is more precise) the good mother.  Each of these reversals has something to do with a failure of interpretation on the part of the girls, a failure which is deeply related to language itself and the failure of language to be transparent.

The dark stranger the girls meet in town is vague and ill-defined; at first they think "it was someone asleep," then they think it is a poor sick woman in need of food, and finally they see that it is a "wild-looking girl" who seems "very unhappy" (195).  They are wrong on all counts, except for the apparent fact that this is a female.  Their interpretation fails; they misread what they see.  The reason for this misinterpretation has something to do with a failure of precise connection between signifier and signified.  The gypsy girl as signifier does not offer a clear and transparent signified.  I keep calling her a "gypsy," but the story nowhere states this.  The girl remains vague and mysterious, like language.  As a signifier, she may point to many signifieds: child, gypsy, peasant, urban street arab, disenfranchised poor person, demonic force, daughter of the devil, Mephistopheles in child drag, absence itself, tempter, enemy, and so on.

Like language in its infinite variety, I might add.  Note several instances of slippage between signifier and signified.  "A little shabbiness is very respectable," says the gypsy child (197).  If this is so, then what do the words "shabbiness" and "respectability" mean?  Are respectable people shabby?  And what constitutes a "little shabbiness," as opposed to a lot of shabbiness?  Such questions remain open.  Or what do we make of the gypsy child's assertion that her shabbiness is "quite lucky"?  Just what does "lucky" mean here?  Is shabbiness a matter of luck?  At another point in the story, the two girls claim that they "are very fond of crying" (199).  Is this true?  And if it is, then why should crying be something they like?  If this is not true, then the girls deliberately use language to obscure a truth.  A simple and clear example occurs when the two girls urge the gypsy child to "go on" singing, and she replies, "I'm going," as she walks away (202).  Clearly the connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary, unpredictable, and slippery.

Twice in the story, the narrator alerts us to the failure of understanding.  When the mother explains to her daughters just how love works to dispel unkindness, the girls reply: "We don't know what you mean" (200).  A little later, the gypsy child tells the girls that language has an infinite variety, and the narrator informs us that, "the children did not understand" (205).  What the two girls cannot do is interpret; their grasp of language remains rudimentary and simple.  Why can't we be naughty and still love mother, they think.  Why can't naughtiness be something simple--like words.  But words are not simple, the story indicates, and the girls are left at the end on the outside looking in.  The darkness has drawn down and become impenetrable; this is inevitable in a world in which words are beyond human understanding.  But the story as I conceive it here is not simply dreary and pessimistic; it is an object lesson in reading.  The reader has the opportunity of understanding how language can work to isolate and obfuscate.  Readers learn yet another Lacanian lesson: everything depends upon the letter.

 A change of pace. Last words on George MacDonald

George MacDonald, A Valedictory

 

 I began work on George MacDonald in 1970 when he was a relatively obscure figure from the Victorian period. We had Joseph Johnson’s 1906 study, C.S. Lewis’s influential Anthology (1946), and Robert Lee Wolff’s The Golden Key (1961). Shortly after I began my studies came work by Robert Reis, Muriel Hutton, Colin Manlove, Rolland Hein, Stephen Prickett, and David Robb. I met all of these people, with the exception of Richard Reis and Rolland Hein. I also met George MacDonald Davies, MacDonald’s godson, and somewhat later William Raeper, John Docherty, Bob Trexler, and John Pennington. All of the people I met in the MacDonald community were warm, friendly, and unfailingly kind and supportive. I think this speaks to MacDonald’s deep influence. In any case, since my work on MacDonald slowed down, and then stopped, much work by many minds has raised the profile and increased our knowledge of MacDonald’s life and work. I think we appreciate him as a writer of prose more than we once did. We now have many scholars working on MacDonald’s life and writing. I could mention several names, but I will just note that MacDonald has moved both those inside the academy and those who work independently. He is a writer who elicits passionate response. Just think of the academic journal North Wind and the independent journal created by Barbara Amiel, Wingfold. In short, MacDonald is a writer who unites people far and wide, professionals and non-professionals. His is a rare and important voice.

Most of us have a book or books that are formative, that somehow motivate us in important ways. Meeting such books can come at any time. For example, I recently read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023), and the book not only impressed me with its incisive exploration of our cultural moment, but it also appealed to me simply because what Klein has to say fits so neatly into my sense of value, my ideology, if you will. It may seem strange to hear, but this book reminded me of when I met another book that proved to be formative in my life. I refer to George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), a book by a writer who lived in another time and another place, but whose vision struck me as essential when I first encountered his mysterious fantasy. This encounter happened in the fall of 1968 in a movie theatre in Toronto. I was there to watch Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this proved appropriate not only because Kubrik’s film takes us to another world, but also because my quest to learn about George MacDonald began just then. I can remember feeling I had come across what a “kindred spirit.” Lilith was strange, but strange in the way the mythopoeic works of William Blake are strange. What I did not know at the time is that MacDonald was an admirer of Blake and used one of Blake’s drawings for Robert Blair’s The Grave, a drawing known as “Death’s Door” (1808), for his bookplate. In any case, what struck me then is the kinship between imaginative visions of Blake and MacDonald, visions that are the product of what MacDonald calls “the fantastic imagination.”

            “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” This aphorism from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” seems to me to fit MacDonald’s vision. The aphorism, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” reminds me of MacDonald’s belief that each reader who reads a story will “read its meaning after his own nature and development” (“The Fantastic Imagination” 316). Perhaps the only difference between these two visionaries is that MacDonald’s sense of a person’s “nature and development” is that these may evolve or devolve. But, clearly, Blake’s call for a marriage of Heaven and Hell is a call to a coming to completion of all things in a unity, not uniformity, of being.

            “The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.” MacDonald writes in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination.” This pretty much sums up my initial impression of both Blake’s mythic work and MacDonald’s Lilith. These writers nudge us toward clarity of vision by first activating feeling. In his essay, “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald stresses the importance of a work of art first activating feeling that then prompts thought. But what connects MacDonald and Blake is that word “vision.” I take this word to mean a comprehensive understanding of things, an ability to make connections that may, at first, not appear connected. Both writers have the ability to take us to places we have not been before while at the same time making these places uncanny, doppelgangers of reality, if you will.

            When MacDonald discusses how the imagination works by first moving our feelings which then promote thought, he acknowledges that a genuine work of art will strike one person differently from the way it strikes another person. We call this interpretation, and the interpretation of art is expansive, open, full of possibilities. As MacDonald says, a work of art may mean many things. What matters is the creative relationship between the reader and the book. Let me offer an example. The opening paragraph of Chapter XVIII of Lilith sees Vane, just after his encounter with Lord and Lady Cokayne, walking in a forest. His companion is the moon; she is ”dark and dented, like a battered disk of old copper” (273). She looks dispirited, and Vane imagines her saying, “Is this going to last forever.” In the previous chapter, the Raven, sitting in a beech tree, advises Vane that some words, all and ever are two of them, are too big for him and for Vane. Now Vane imagines the moon wondering if her situation is forever. He appears to have forgotten that some words are too big for him, and most likely for the moon too. In any case, Vane and the moon walk together for a while, “she the dull shine, and I the live shadow.” Vane is just about to discover the emaciated body of a woman who will turn out to be Lilith. I might also add that moon and shadow offer a binary that gives us male and female, light and dark, high and low. I will return to binaries a bit later.

            For now, let me notice that this first paragraph is a brief account of two travellers, strangers both in a strange land. The moon portends the ensuing encounter between Vane and Lilith. The short narrative lets us know that Vane is conscious of having a companion, here the distanced moon that Vane imagines as a female companion. The short bit also allows MacDonald to echo his first fantasy, Phantastes, thereby suggesting the connectedness of his work. Indeed, connectedness is a thematic thread throughout Lilith. This short paragraph also connects with the reader, in this case me, allowing me to play with interpretive possibilities. Vane’s companion here is female, reflective, virginal, mutable, and continually on the move. She connects to the various female figures Vane meets, Eve, Mara, Lilith, Lona; she suggests that these females constitute one figure, a malleable constantly changing figure. She is here connected to an old copper disk, copper being a metal that turns up several times in the Old Testament, sometimes connected to judgement. Vane mentions the moon as travelling companion just prior to his coming across Lilith. Lilith has connections with the moon in the Zohar, especially with the waxing and waning of the moon. Waxing and waning is a suitable description of the Lilith Vane is about to encounter.

            As soon as the second paragraph begins, Vane spies “Something on the ground” (273), something white and “cold like that which was once alive, and is alive no more.” This is the emaciated Lilith who turns out not to be dead, but to be clinging to life and in need of succour and care. The following couple of chapters carefully recount how Vane cares for this emaciated woman, using a nearby hot stream to warm her and grapes to give her sustenance. This lengthy episode serves to enlighten Vane. He learns that a person needs company to be fully a person. Two people are the beginning of a company, and a goodly company is what makes for humanity. Dare I say, “it takes a village” before humans can understand who and what they are. Vane puts it like this: 

I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man – that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm! So superbly constituted, so simply complicate, is man; he rises from and stands upon such a pedestal of lower physical organisms and spiritual structures, that no atmosphere will comfort or nourish his life, less divine that that offered by other souls; nowhere but in other lives can he ripen his speciality, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other (279-280).

We see the necessity for a community, a human family, throughout Lilith, in the Little Ones and most ecstatically in the “glorious resurrection-morning” near the book’s end. 

            Vane celebrates this resurrection-morning with the following description:

            The children went gamboling before, and the beasts came after us. Fluttering butterflies, darting dragon-flies hovered or shot hither and thither about our heads, a cloud of colours and flashes, now descending upon us like a snow-storm of rainbow flakes, now rising into the humid air like a rolling vapour of embodied odours…. I walked on the new earth, under the new heaven, and found them the same as the old, save that now they opened their minds to me, and I saw into them. Now, the soul of everything I met came out to greet me and make friends with me, telling me we came from the same, and meant the same. (414)

All is interconnected, children, beasts, insects, and all are friends. The synaesthesia here – embodied odours, snow-storm of rainbow flakes, smell, sight, touch all intertwined – communicates MacDonald’s sense of wholeness, unity rather than uniformity. All is connected, and each is distinct. What we have here is a call for an end to conflict and the beginning of a truly human community, a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14).  That Vane finds himself back in his earthly house simply reinforces the need for an endless ending, an ending always in the making, a community always taking shape.

            In other words, an ending that is not an ending. Paradox gives us a doubling, and doubling is at work throughout Lilith. From the outset, we have this world and the mirror world, the mirror signaling doubling, then Vane and his father. The old Librarian doubles as a Raven. Once Vane finds himself in the world beyond the mirror, he discovers a series of doubles: the Little Ones and the Bags, Mara and Lilith, Eve and Lilith, Adam and the Great Shadow, Bulika and the city on the hill, two leopardesses, grey cats and wolves, sun and moon, dark and light, self and other, reason and imagination, waking and dreaming, and so on. What Naomi Klein calls a “culture crowded with various forms of doubling” (11) is at work here in Lilith. We live in a world of doppelgangers, news and fake news, actual selves and virtual selves, theories and conspiracy theories. Sorting out the actual from the fake has become more difficult. In any case, way back in the late nineteenth century MacDonald was grappling with doubles and sorting out just what is real and what is not. Vane concludes his account with the comment that once he finally wakes, he will “doubt no more.” For the time being, he will live with doubts and uncertainty, with doubles ever present: does he wake or sleep?

Uncertainty is valuable because it indicates an ongoing quest for certainty, and certainty claimed without prior uncertainty, without prior grappling with issues and possibilities, results in stasis. Stasis is what the Bags offer. Let me return to Klein who focuses on “branding,” the modern way of placing an end-stop to questing. The brand, Klein remarks causes humans to “lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes” (66). In other words, branding gives us a form of doubling that is unhealthy, us and them, the Bags and the Little Ones. What MacDonald envisions is a form of doubling that is expansive, more than doubling. Take for example, the doubling of female figures in Lilith. We not only have Eve and Lilith, the two wives of Adam, but also Lilith and Lona, mother and daughter, Lilith and Mara and Lona and Eve all four aspects of the feminine. The Raven is a librarian and also Adam. Earthworms are butterflies and souls. Endings are beginnings and everything in between.

Lilith focuses on the individual’s search for understanding and connectedness. But MacDonald’s book is not without its political suggestiveness. Bulika is a city ruled by a dictatorial Queen; its citizens are fearful and secretive. The Bags too are a brutish citizenry. As for the Little Ones, they are as yet fully formed as a civilization, in need of the careful eye of Lona. As we move toward the apocalyptic ending, we move closer to a vision of an acceptable civilization, a city that offers safety and succour to all, a city in which doubling becomes tripling and quadrupling and so on. A sanctuary city indeed.

 

Works Cited

 

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

MacDonald, George. A Dish of Orts. London: Sampson Low Marston & Co, 1895.

--------. Phantastes and Lilith. Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans, 1964.