The Old Wives’ Tale

I recently reread The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett (first published in 1908) and I thought the first part of the first chapter was worth some analysis and comment. Bennett was born in 1867 and died in 1931. He wrote 34 novels and 96 short stories; I’ve read three of his novels: The Old Wives’ Tale, which I think is a major work, and The Card and The Grand Babylon Hotel, which are entertaining but not serious.

My method of analysis looks at a narrative, or any substantial part of a narrative, from three perspectives or aspects: the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic. (I have borrowed these terms from James Phelan, but with some significant changes, which I won’t bother to explain here.) The synthetic asks of a narrative, How is it put together? The mimetic asks, What does it represent? And the thematic asks, What does it mean? These are simultaneous and they interact with each other. The best way to understand these aspects is to see them at work, so I will jump right into my analysis of a passage from The Old Wives’ Tale.

The novel tells the life stories of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, the daughters of a shopkeeper in the north of England. The novel is carefully organized. It’s divided into four Books. In Book One the two girls are living at home with their parents; Book Two follows Constance as she stays in the shop, marries, and has a son; Book Three follows Sophia, as she elopes, moves to Paris, and eventually runs a successful pension; and Book Four brings the two sisters back together at the end of their lives. In this post I will examine a short section, just five pages, the first section of the first chapter, paragraph by paragraph. I won’t quote the whole five pages verbatim, but I will try to give a sense of what I’ve left out.

Book One is titled “Mrs. Baines” and Chapter I is titled “The Square”; the sections of the chapters are numbered but not titled. There are seven (mostly long) paragraphs in the first section of the book. The first paragraph of the chapter begins: “Those two girls, Constance and Sophia, paid no heed to the manifold interest of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.” Thus the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first section of the first chapter of Book One begins with the names of the two principal characters. They are in the focal position. The beginning significantly does not tell us what the girls are thinking, but what they don’t think about. What they don’t think about is the larger world they live in, their situation. But the narrator does think about this, as we see in the following sentences. Many novels begin by locating the story, but the localization here is uncommonly detailed.

“They were, for example, established almost precisely on the fifty-third parallel of latitude. A little way to the north of them, in the creases of a hill famous for its religious orgies, rose the river Trent, the calm and characteristic stream of middle England.” Here I think the word “orgies” is used in its ancient Greek meaning, “religious rituals” rather than “sex parties”. But I don’t know what hill in England was famous for religious rituals; the notes to the edition I own don’t explain. The specification of the latitude I take as a joke: the girls’ ignorance of their situation is countered by the narrator’s overspecification. This passage continues with eight long sentences detailing the geography of the general area, middle England. At the end of the paragraph, the narrator notes that the county “has everything that England has [. . .] and England can show nothing more beautiful and nothing uglier [. . .]. It is England in little, lost in the midst of England [. . .].” There are thus three mentions of “England” at the end, picking up “middle England” from earlier in the paragraph.

The second paragraph returns to the girls, but only to turn from them to the county they live in: “Constance and Sophia, busy with the intense preoccupations of youth, recked not of such matters. They were surrounded by the county. On every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads and lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph lines, patterned by hedges, ornamented and made respectable by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by villages at the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun, spread out undulating.” This is followed by seven long sentences which mention trains, carts and waggons; boats and canals; messages; inns; people in the villages; labourers; and birds on the moors. “In short, the usual daily life of the county was proceeding with all its immense variety and importance, but though Sophia and Constance were in it they were not of it.” The paragraph ends, as it began—and as the chapter began—by naming the girls, again noting what they didn’t think about.

The third paragraph tightens the focus further, from the county to the district: “The fact is, that while in the county they were also in the district; and no person who lives in the district, even if he should be old and have nothing to do but reflect upon things in general, ever thinks about the county. So far as the county goes, the district might almost as well be in the middle of the Sahara. It ignores the county [. . .].” We notice the pattern of repetitions: the first sentence is a chiasmus (“county”, “district”, “district”, “county”) with an extra “district” and “county” and “county” added to the end. Further quotation from the passage would show more patterned repetition. The narrator now names the Five Towns that make up the district: Hanbridge, Bursley, Knype, Longshaw, Turnbull. The original reader recognized under these slightly altered names the towns of a manufacturing district famous for its pottery. As the narrator says, these towns “are unique and indispensable. [. . .] They are unique and indispensable because you cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns; because you cannot eat a meal in decency without the aid of the Five Towns. For this the architecture of the Five Towns is an architecture of ovens and chimneys; for this its atmosphere is as black as mud; for this [. . .]; for this [. . .]; for this [. . .]; for this [. . .]; for this [. . .]; for this [. . .]; for this it exists—that you may drink tea out of a teacup and toy with a chop on a plate. [. . .]” I omit the details, but I retain enough of the grammar to show the parallelism. The paragraph ends with further repetition of “district” and “county”.

The fourth paragraph develops the idea of the manufacture of pottery and continues the focus on the district: “Even the majestic thought that whenever and wherever in all England a woman washes up, she washes up the product of the district; that whenever and wherever in all England a plate is broken the fracture means business for the district—even this majestic thought had probably never occurred to either of the girls.” Once again we are reminded of the girls’ ignorance of their situation. “The fact is, that while in the Five Towns they were also in the Square. Bursley and the Square ignored the staple manufacture as perfectly as the district ignored the county. [. . .] Add to this that the Square was the centre of Bursley’s retail trade (which scorned the staple as something wholesale, vulgar, and assuredly filthy), and you will comprehend the importance and the self-isolation of the Square in the scheme of the created universe.” The paragraph ends with a summation: “There you have it, embedded in the district, and the district embedded in the county, and the county lost and dreaming in the heart of England!” This is a fine instance of gradatio or climax—AB, BC, CD, etc.—here reversing the order in which they were presented. I have discussed gradatio in previous posts, and I will say no more here, but I will add this one to my collection.

The fifth paragraph describes the various shops in the Square, including the five drapers: “The aristocracy of the Square undoubtedly consisted of the drapers [. . .]; and among the five the shop of Baines stood supreme. [. . .]”

The sixth paragraph describes the Baines’ shop: first it locates the shop in the Square; then it describes the exterior of the building; then the interior, in some detail. The narrator then explains that Mr Baines refused to have a sign on the shop: “He had always objected to what he called ‘puffing’, and for this reason would never hear of such a thing as a clearance sale. The hatred of ‘puffing’ grew on him until he came to regard even a sign as ‘puffing’. Uninformed people who wished to find Baines’s must ask and learn. For Mr Baines, to have replaced the sign would have been to condone, yea, to participate in, the modern craze for unscrupulous self-advertisement. This abstention of Mr Baines from indulgence in signboards was somehow accepted by the more thoughtful members of the community as evidence that the height of Mr Baines’s principles was greater than even they had imagined.”

The chapter ends with a short paragraph: “Constance and Sophia were the daughters of this credit to human nature. He had no other children.” Brevity here is a form of emphasis. We have taken a long time to get here, but these two sentences are the goal of the passage.

Section II begins with a pronoun: “They pressed their noses against the window of the showroom and gazed down into the Square as perpendicularly as the projecting front of the building would allow.”  The antecedent, of course, is Constance and Sophia. The division between the first and second sections is countered by the grammatical connection. I won’t analyze the second section, but I note that the beginning of this paragraph—“They pressed their noses against the window of the showroom”—forms a ring with the beginning of the next paragraph—“The girls could only press their noses against the window by kneeling on the counter”. Bennett’s careful arrangement of the prose will continue throughout the novel.

We have seen that the first section of this chapter moves the reader from a panorama to a close-up, from England (indeed from “the created universe” just before the summarizing gradatio at the end of the fourth paragraph), to the county, to the district, to the Five Towns, to the Square, to the Baines’ shop, to Constance and Sophia, all the way to the noses of the two girls.

This section is a masterpiece of composition and representation, synthesis and mimesis, as I hope my analysis shows. But what does it mean? Narrative meanings are not easy to paraphrase, and paraphrase is almost always inadequate. Often meaning is a matter of tone and feeling rather than propositions. Probably the full meaning of this passage can only be appreciated in the context of the whole book. As a first approximation I might suggest that the passage reminds the reader of the wider situation of the story of these two girls, even if the girls themselves have no consciousness of their place in the world. I am reminded of a graditio early in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen is trying to learn the names of places in America: “They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe”. In his geography book he writes, “his name and where he was”: “Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe”. Joyce and Bennett place their stories in a wider context, a universal context, but in very different ways: first, Stephen’s gradatio moves from the small to the large, while the gradatio in The Old Wives’ Tale moves from the large to the small; second, Stephen is aware of his place in the scheme of the universe, while Constance and Sophia are not—it is up to the narrator to make the point.