Petersen 1 Emily Petersen Thesis “What Did Women in Her Position Do?”: Ambivalent Feminism in Dorothy Whipple’s The Priory Sociologists and cultural theorists alike have highlighted the ambiguity of female roles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following second wave feminism―during which Betty Friedan identified “the problem that has no name” (63) and Susan Brownmiller famously called femininity increasingly exasperating (89)―women found themselves, “in a conflicted state, torn between very traditional and stereotypical ideas about who and what they ought to be and rather progressive and liberating concepts of who and what they can be” (Henry 274). Such ambivalence over female identity is not new, nor is it a product of the 1970’s feminist movement. Women have experienced the conflict between social expectations and ideas about challenging female roles for hundreds of years. In 1405 in France, Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, a collection of martyr stories promoting women’s strength. In England Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote landmark essays in 1694 and 1792, respectively. In the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for suffrage in the 1800s. Activism and subsequent ambiguity over earned rights has a long tradition. I would like to focus on the 1930s, when Virginia Woolf sought equality for women in both schools and professions. Woolf was the most famous feminist of her time; however, other authors represented the same angst over inequality and a woman’s identity during that era. British author Dorothy Whipple (1893-1966) published eighteen books that often met praise in book reviews. J. B. Priestley, the well-known British novelist and dramatist, described Whipple “as the 20th century’s Jane Austen” (Cooper 16). Despite her reception, little critical Petersen 2 attention has been paid to Whipple’s work. Nicola Beauman, the owner of Persephone Books, a press interested in reclaiming a feminine literary heritage, says women’s novels from the 1930s focus on “the steadfast dailiness of a life that brings its own rewards, the intensity of the emotions and, above all, the importance of human relationships” (5). Whipple wrote about traditional domestic subjects. I argue that Whipple presented a conflicted and ambiguous feminist sensibility in the novel The Priory (1939) and explored such ambivalence through female identity in marriage, education, and maternity. Her work also explores feminism, yet ultimately fails to articulate a clear feminist ideal because of a traditionalist attitude toward marriage and a woman’s place within that union. Because Whipple is relatively unknown, an introduction is necessary. Dorothy Stirrup had a happy childhood in Blackburn, England, where she was born in 1893. Her friend, George Owen, died during the first week of World War I, and in 1917 she married widower Henry Whipple for whom she worked as a secretary. She is a neglected author, but she enjoyed success with her nine novels at the time of their publication. “Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr. Knight (1934) and They Were Sisters (1943), were made into films” (Persephone). Included among those successful novels was The Priory. The plot centers on the occupants of the old mansion Saunby Priory. Major Marwood and his children face immediate conflict when he asks an aging spinster, Anthea, to marry him. Their marriage is not the fairy tale Anthea imagines it will be, and when she has twins, Marwood grows more distant because he is failing financially and cannot afford more children. However, his two daughters, Penelope and Christine, soon marry and leave home. Penelope marries an unattractive yet rich and kind man who adores her. In contrast, Christine’s rocky marriage becomes the focus of the story, Petersen 3 with her in-laws controlling the money and her husband cheating on her with an old girlfriend. She leaves the situation and tries to become independent but eventually returns to her marriage. The servants of Saunby Priory also face dilemmas, with the groundskeeper Bill Thompson caught between Bertha, the conniving shrew who tricked him into marriage, and Bessy, the angelic mistress who becomes pregnant. Despite the many conflicts surrounding marriage in The Priory, Whipple creates a happily-ever-after ending, in which everybody finds a way to survive their circumstances. Before discussing The Priory in a feminist context, it is important to understand feminism’s background and its place during the 1930s. Although feminism may be broadly defined as a struggle for women’s equality, the movement is much more complicated. According to Ellen Rooney, editor of the Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, “No approach can summarize this protean body of work or claim to represent it in its totality . . . [and] the internal conflicts and varied, indeed, contradictory approaches . . . are more daunting to the project of generalization than the sheer number of workers in the field” (9). In short, as both a literary theory and a social movement, feminism is challenging to summarize or to define. The term “feminism” was “coined in France in the 1880s as feminisme,” and it was “always controversial, in part because of its association with radicalism and in part because proponents themselves disagreed about the label” (Freedman 3). Many female social activists rejected the label, but their work focused on suffrage, as explained by Nicola Beauman. “For most middle-class women, . . . feminism, until the end of the First World War, was synonymous with the fight for the vote” (63). Because the fight for equality focused only on suffrage, “novels written just before the First World War often portray heroines who struggle at first but soon defer gratefully to their lovers” (65). Such novels were attempting to articulate an early feminism but Petersen 4 did not fully recognize the freedom women wanted and needed in marriage, education, and motherhood. The Priory certainly follows this pattern of heroines who explore freedom but ultimately return to men for resolution. This changed in the 1920s, when feminism “became more a question of personal integrity, of women fulfilling themselves for themselves. To do this, they felt that they must fight for equality for women” (69). Novelists began to explore gender inequalities through their writing. Many of them embraced the label “feminist” and wrote specifically about their beliefs in the changes that had to occur. They wrote in the tradition of what Nicola Beauman calls “Old feminism” (70). She explains, “The feminist novels that were written between the wars tend to be in the tradition of the ‘Old’ feminism, being concerned less with the stark realities of either male or political oppression than with women’s chances for self-fulfilment [sic] in a still unequal society” (70). Women became more concerned with self-fulfillment and potential rather than emphasizing the difference between men and women. Despite these explorations of feminism, “the solutions were far from clear-cut and many of the novels . . . still end with the same old sop to convention, namely the heroine deferring gratefully to the protection of her male lover” (Beauman 70). Whipple’s The Priory presents the inability to solve women’s dilemmas, yet she attempted to define what those obstacles to self-fulfillment were. She did so in the context of the contemporary version of feminism. Virginia Woolf, one of the leading feminists of the 20s and 30s, espoused the main ideals of the movement for women’s autonomy in A Room of One’s Own (1929), and much of what Whipple’s protagonists face parallels Woolf’s exploration of women’s disadvantages. Woolf wrote, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to Petersen 5 write fiction” (231). This metaphorically extends to all women, for they must have their own property, education, and money in order to have freedom. Woolf addressed such independence against the backdrop of marriage. As she imagined Judith Shakespeare, she admitted, that a women of that time “could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband” (249). Limiting a woman’s status to nothing more than a wife contributed to her silence throughout literary history. Woolf believed this should be rectified and suggested that women need their own resources. A second feature of Woolf’s argument is that women were not given equal opportunities in education. Woolf described the poor state of education for women. While men feasted at the imaginary Oxbridge, women sipped clear broth for dinner. One of her most famous lines tells us: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes” (238). The consequences of a poor education include dependence on a husband or family and the inability to earn money. Woolf wrote: “[T]o earn money was impossible for them, and . . . had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned” (240). Woolf acknowledged that women had no earning power because of a poor education but took the issue a step further by pointing out that even if it were possible, a woman would not be allowed ownership of her earnings. Woolf’s ideas illustrate the difficult situation women found themselves in during the early twentieth century. These situations play out in Whipple’s novel, which ultimately concludes that while solutions exist, considerable obstacles rendered them nearly impossible to implement. Woolf also acknowledged maternity as a feminist issue, arguing that freedom of an equal marriage or an education is hampered by the ties a woman has to her children: Petersen 6 First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. (Woolf 239) Children dominate a woman’s time, and if she has more than one―Woolf mentioned a woman who had thirteen―then her entire life is spent caring for the children, making an ideal marriage or an education superfluous (239). Woolf questioned norms and identified the sites of sociopolitical conflict for women. The issues of marriage, education, and maternity are what Whipple’s characters face when it comes to finding autonomy. Whipple explored these issues as Woolf did, although to a lesser degree. The way her characters deal with gained freedom present these limits. Although the women experience freedom from marriage, they are ambivalent about the gains because freedom is difficult to maintain. A lack of education hampers a woman’s ability to sustain freedom. A woman who works may earn money, but it will not likely be enough to maintain the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Children also make autonomy difficult because of the time associated with raising them, as Woolf highlighted. From these obstacles, we learn “the moral is that even emancipation does not bring happiness” (Beauman 71). Although the women of The Priory experience freedom or struggle for feminist ideals, they are ultimately ambivalent about those advances because of inequalities in marriage, education, and maternity. We will explore these sites of conflict in the order in which they tend to appear in The Priory, beginning with marriage. Marriage is a site of conflict because of its inequalities. It is an institution that brings the sexes together, yet within such a union the differences in privilege for men and women become glaring. Although two of the female characters in The Priory illustrate this struggle, I will focus Petersen 7 on Christine, as both narratives ultimately highlight the same inequalities in marriage. For Christine, marriage seems to present an escape or a happy ending, but she has new identities imposed on her in marriage, which lead to ambivalence about both the institution and her role in it. Through this ambivalence, Whipple presents feminist thinking, yet Christine finds resolution through returning to marriage and domesticity, thus maintaining the status quo. Before marriage, Christine voices her ambivalence: “I don’t know what I’m going to be yet; whether I’m going to be important in myself or just married” (Whipple 113). Her thoughts reflect a binary: choosing between success and marriage. Christine’s comment echoes what Elaine Showalter calls “a phase of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity” (13). Christine struggles to define her identity but feels she must choose between being important or being married, where there would be no room for importance. Christine realizes the social constraints of being married. She tells her sister, Penelope: “The worst of being married and having children is always having to be bothering with other people. I like to be free. Not to be tied up to man, woman or child” (113). Although Christine has only been raised for marriage―illustrated by her father’s realizing that the girls “existed [. . .] [and] [s]omebody would have to see about getting them married” (19)―she recognizes that such an institution does not offer freedom. Instead, a married woman is “tied up” to her husband and potentially tied to her children. Romance quickly replaces these progressive thoughts, indicating Whipple’s difficulty allowing Christine to realize a feminist ideal. The first time Christine sees Nicholas, she lets emotion decide her fate. When she looks at him, “their essential selves stood together alone and were supremely aware of each other” (153). This romantic moment of suspense and excitement Petersen 8 causes discomfort for Christine. She blushes and runs back to the nursery―a symbol of the safety of childhood. She is ambivalent about growing up and entering a world in which a man will be part of her life, yet she longs to please Nicholas. Christine thinks, “Would anybody think she was pretty, she wondered. Would he?” (154). She considers her looks and wants to return to the room where their eyes met. However, “the sense of disturbance and of singing exhilaration persisted” (154). Christine is both disturbed and excited by the possibility of having a romance, but she is ambivalent about such a possibility because she is not sure of her identity. She stands in her room, a “familiar girl’s life where she had been untouched, unconcerned, free” (154). Her conflict represents a common theme of female novelists, who were “concerned with the conflicts between art and love, between self-fulfillment and duty” (Showalter Literature 35). As Christine stands between these conflicts in her room, surrounded by the innocence of childhood, she turns “her back on it” and goes downstairs, which suggests that she chooses womanhood over girlhood and by extension love and duty over ambition (154). Christine forges a new identity, one that is tied to marriage; however, her hesitation suggests her ambivalence over such a change. Whipple represents marriage as unequal and therefore able to strip a woman of her identity, which is what Christine initially feared. When the honeymoon ends, “the gilt began to come off the gingerbread” (244). Christine moves to his hometown, where she has no friends and finds her surroundings unfamiliar. “For Christine, everything was new, strange and a great deal of it not what she wanted” (263). On the one hand, she thought she would enjoy being married, for her romance with Nicholas once seemed perfect. On the other hand, once she is joined in the bonds of matrimony, she is unhappy. She has a conflicted identity, one that leaves her dissatisfied and confused. She is experiencing identity “as a process of constant building” (Gonzalez 26). Petersen 9 Not only are Christine’s surroundings new, but she must play a role she has never played before. In contrast, Nicholas leads the same life, carousing with friends, gambling, and drinking. Christine must change for the marriage, leaving her family home and giving up her childhood identity. Her new identity is liminal, caught between her desire to be a wife and her repulsion of this role once she has achieved it. Their differing roles cause Nicholas to feel “separated from Christine, and she, sensing his mood, felt separated from him” (217). The change in identity for Christine because of marital inequalities separates the couple. Because Christine and Nicholas depend on Sir James, Nicholas’s father, for financial support, Christine feels she is still being treated as a child. She expected marriage to create her adult identity, but she must depend upon her father-in-law for money. Christine confesses to Penelope that her father-in-law is “terribly kind. But you have to keep thanking him . . . I find perpetual gratitude kind of . . . It makes me feel kind of false” (229). Here, Christine voices ambivalence about her role as a wife and daughter-in-law. She appreciates Sir James’s generosity, but she also recognizes her dependence on it and his knowledge of their dependence. Christine realizes that she has no money and therefore no freedom. This situation shows Christine that “marriage is simply another form of bondage and servitude” (Showalter Literature 171). Christine has a difficult time admitting that her new life is not as full of freedom as she would like. She keeps telling herself that the flaws are bearable because she has Nicholas (230). Penelope notices Christine’s dissatisfaction when the sisters talk about Christine’s new life: “‘So on the whole,’ remarked Penelope with some satisfaction, ‘you weren’t too pleased’” (231). Christine denies this observation, but Penelope points out that Christine doesn’t like her new house, the control Sir James has over everything, and the overall change to her life (231). Petersen 10 Penelope can see that Christine is conflicted about her role as a wife before Christine recognizes it. Again, Christine shrugs off her sister’s comments because she has Nicholas (232), but he does not live up to Christine’s expectations. Christine’s ambivalence over her identity becomes more pronounced once she recognizes Nicholas’s flaws. When he comes to bed drunk, Christine finds “[f]or the first time, her confidence in life was shaken. She felt fear and distrust of life. If Nicholas fell short of what she had thought of him, she could never be happy” (271). Christine experiences expectations of perfection that cannot be met. She has idealized marriage and her partner, causing any flaw in Nicholas to shake her confidence. Her expectations do not intersect well with the realities of a marriage, which include Nicholas’s imperfections and compromise in order for marriage to work. Although Christine has felt ambivalent over her marriage thus far, the events surrounding Nicholas’s affair with Cicely Hoyle allow Christine to reject her unhappy role of wife. Christine’s discovery of Nicholas’s infidelity magnifies the ambivalence she feels. Upon discovering the deception, Christine says, “You slept with her when I was having a baby. D’you think any woman would forgive that? No woman would, and I never shall. Never. Never” (365-66). The marriage, although imperfect, has now fallen completely apart. Christine leaves. When Nicholas and his father come to get her, symbolic of her treatment as property, she declares: “It’s you who are wasting your time . . . I’ve said I’m not coming and I mean it” (394). Christine takes a stand, breaks the hold that marriage has over her, and decides to be free. She says, “It’s like asking me to eat something that’s just made me sick” (395). Her rejection of Nicholas causes him to flee both the house and his parents. Petersen 11 Even when Sir James wields his power and says there will be no money until she returns to her marriage, she fights back. She tells her father-in-law: “I see where Nicholas gets his morals from. From you. Like father, like son. . . . You may drive your wife and son, . . . but not me. From this time on, you’ve nothing to do with me” (397). Her words are strong, and they represent an emerging feminism, one that rejects oppression. She even tells him that the events have freed her (397). She echoes a feminism described by Carolyn G. Heilbrun: “[S]ome gifted women unconsciously and indirectly take power over their lives by committing an ‘outrageous act,’ a social or sexual sin that frees them from the constraints of conventional society and its expectations―defying parents, rejecting religion, leaving a marriage” (qtd. in Showalter Inventing 19). Christine rejects her marriage and the power it has over her. She tries to forge an identity not based on domesticity but on her own desires. Her ambivalence is not resolved; Christine feels her options are exhausted when Nicholas disappears. The bravado of the previous events has evaporated, and Christine, instead of feeling free, describes life as “a dream that went from bad to worse” (418). She thinks, “These things couldn’t have happened to Nicholas and her” (419). She still feels connected to Nicholas and has not made a complete break from her role as a wife. She decides that “it is so much easier to go than to be left. Now she was the one to be left” (419). Whipple weakened Christine’s feminist leanings by allowing her to backpedal when it comes to freeing herself from an unequal marriage. We can see that women who are constrained by marriage also experience ambivalence about being free. Christine recognizes the inequalities but also misses the romance, companionship, and financial security. Being a single mother is difficult because of a lack of education, another area of conflict. Education is essential when it comes to supporting oneself. Petersen 12 To free oneself from an unequal marriage, a woman would need a way to support herself through education. Whipple explored the inequality in education for men and women, much like Virginia Woolf did. Whipple realized the same dilemma for female children who were raised primarily for marriage. Once marriage falls apart, these women have no skills or education on which to fall back. This feminist sensibility is represented through the daughters of Saunby Priory who are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to education. Penelope’s and Christine’s brother has had this opportunity, but they have not. According to Elaine Showalter, this scenario was common, as she explains: “For . . . girl[s], the departure of a brother for school was a painful awakening to [their] inferior status” (41). As young women in a time where the opportunities for women were changing, Christine and Penelope recognize their marginalization. Through their struggles, we see an emerging feminist sensibility for equality in education, yet Whipple resolved this conflict by allowing marriage to save the women, despite the complications with such an institution. Christine is limited when she decides to take a job and to be responsible for herself and her daughter Angela. The constraints on women are represented by Penelope’s husband, who remarks, “She can’t do it, I tell you” (423). He knows that Christine has no education and that it is impossible for her to support herself financially because of it. He wants Christine to work but sees any vocational opportunity as a way to distract her. He does not take her actions seriously, nor does he truly support them. This situation shows how dire Christine’s circumstances are. Her only means of survival is marriage, yet hers has failed. Whipple has freed her heroine from the constraints of marriage, but ambivalence comes through in the inability to sustain it because of a lack of education. Petersen 13 Because of unequal education, Christine cannot get work that pays well or that is satisfying. Christine works for two pounds a week in a London salon. The work is less than ideal, and her living quarters are small and filthy. She must also give up her role as mother to work. Baby Angela stays in the country with Penelope, and Christine sees her only on the weekends. According to the University of Geneva’s Dr. Deborah L. Madsen, who explores trauma theory and its connections to femininity, Christine’s situation shows a female inability to “forge a relationship with the world on her own terms” (209). Christine is instead relegated to a sphere of work that is as closely tied to domestic duties as it can be. Estelle B. Freedman, a cofounder of Stanford’s feminist studies program, teaches that “working-class women often marketed their domestic labor. They worked as servants, sold food or household products, or provided sexual services. Women received neither a full living wage nor social rewards for these forms of labor” (124). Christine is unable to support herself financially because of the poor wages, and she must give up her identity as a mother, something that once gave her comfort in the wake of a failed marriage. Christine’s lack of education compromises her identity. Not only has she escaped a marriage that forced her to give up her old life for a new one, but her boss forces another ill-fitting identity upon her, including a new hairstyle and makeup. Christine is no longer defined by her role as a mother because her sister Penelope is now raising Angela. She is no longer a wife, stripped of her privileged life as a member of the upper class. Instead, she joins the working class and must change her image and her name. She hardly recognizes herself (442). Her identity is ambivalent because “[s]he was without husband, baby, wedding-ring, name, and now she was without her own face” (439). These changes disturb her. She is again struggling with her identity, and she feels that “[h]er very self was missing” (440). Her new life is not Petersen 14 pleasing to her because she continues to be conflicted about her purpose. This situation becomes similar to the one she just left; she is forced to change her identity and can no longer recognize herself. When she goes home, her baby does not recognize her either. Whipple then presented a woman’s dilemma in that era. She poses the question: “What did women in her position do? What did they do? If there was only marriage for girls brought up in the way she and Penelope had been brought up and marriage failed, what then?” (424-25). In this rests the theme of the novel. The question goes unanswered, but an implied point is that women deserve better preparation for life because marriage is not enough. What can a woman do in such a situation? One option is nothing. The other is to raise daughters differently than they have been. Whipple shows us the latter, with Christine deciding she will not allow her daughter to suffer the same fate. Christine vows, “If I’ve to scrub floors or eat the bread of dependence all my life, Angela shall be educated to earn her own living” (426). Her own daughter won’t be in the “hole” in which Christine finds herself (426). The image of the hole shows that Christine understands her subservience because of the difference in education and inheritance laws. The hole is one that society has created for women, and its inequality appalls Christine. Whipple comments: According to this young mother, everything was going to be different for Angela. Angela should profit from her mother’s misfortunes and mistakes. Angela should be educated, Angela should be equipped to earn her own living, Angela should never be obliged, like her mother and other unfortunate women, to drift about among relations because their parents had treated them badly in the first place and their husbands in the second. (462) Petersen 15 Whipple injected herself into Christine’s predicament and articulated the problem of unequal education. Christine must depend on parents or on her husband to care for her financially. Whipple called for independence, and it was for the next generation that Whipple saw this happening. Christine becomes a stepping stone for future generations and paves the way for a fuller feminism. This issue of education extends into the domestic sphere, in which women are expected to be maternal. Christine thinks, “Women are being pushed back into homes and told to have more babies. They’re being told to make themselves helpless. Men are arming like mad, but women are expected to disarm, and make themselves more vulnerable than they already are by nature” (425). Christine sees the disservice her own father has done her in raising her to be only a wife and mother instead of educating and employing her. She blames the unfairness and inequality of her situation on society and its way of raising boys and girls differently. Because Christine can do nothing but try to raise her own daughter differently, her seeming independence feels more like imprisonment. She is free from a bad marriage but oppressed by her poverty and the new identity thrust upon her: “Life was a nightmare, thought Christine . . . She was walking with her own personal disaster in a world of disaster. Everything was black, within, without; there was no hope anywhere. If only she had Nicholas and Angela” (477). She laments how young women are dependent on men, yet she finds that she was happier allowing her husband and his family to take care of her. She longs for domesticity instead of the narrow independence she has discovered. In this, we see how hard it must have been for women in the 1930s to stand up for the change they could see was needed. This concern with feminism in that era is an important history for those of us who enjoy education and equality today; however, Whipple’s novels show that this change was a hard one for those who went through it. Petersen 16 Christine’s educational background is made clearer by her sister’s experience. The disadvantage women faced without equal education is presented when Penelope decides she wants to work in London. She consults her brother, who responds, “What an idea! What could you possibly do? You aren’t trained for anything, and your education, my poor child” (238). The comments highlight the educational disadvantages women had when compared to men. Penelope has not had this opportunity; in her family, only her brother received an education. Penelope cannot support herself, even if she has the ambition to do so, because she has not been educated. She is trapped and without opportunity. Despite her brother’s discouragement, Penelope writes for a secretary job anyway. Yet her education stands in her way even in the act of writing for employment, for she writes “in a hand that would have done no credit to a kitchen-maid” (261). Penelope’s and Christine’s lack of education help us to understand the obstacles uneducated daughters faced even in applying for jobs, let alone performing them. The inability to join the vocational world adds to their ambivalent identities. The reason women were uneducated is reflected in the attitude of Christine’s father, Major Marwood. He is of an older generation, one that raised its children according to such inequality. When Penelope marries, he decides he will provide her with a decent trousseau, justifying this by thinking, “Besides, turning one’s daughters out properly on their marriage was one of the things one had to do; like educating one’s sons” (325). Through his thoughts and comments, it is clear where daughters and sons stand when it comes to receiving an education. It is proper to marry off daughters and likewise proper to educate sons. The language he uses to describe marrying off one’s daughters is also telling. Marriage for a daughter is described as “turning daughters out,” a phrase that does not connote love nor care. Petersen 17 We can see that both marriage and education are sites of conflict when it comes to feminism. Without an education, women are limited in finding employment that is respectable and lucrative. Unequal education can also trap a woman in marriage, limiting her independence, especially if her marriage falls apart. The last site of conflict is maternity because it can also limit women’s independence. The female characters in The Priory display ambivalence and apprehension over their roles as mothers. The absence of their own mother may contribute to this for Christine and Penelope, but feminist realizations and subsequent ambivalence are also presented. Their attitudes may be shaped by the lingering ideas of maternity from the Victorian era. In 1850, George Henry Lewes described maternity: “[T]his we regard not only as her distinctive characteristic, and most endearing charm, but as a high and holy office―the prolific source . . . of the best affections and virtues of which our nature is capable” (qtd. in Showalter Literature 68). With such high expectations placed on maternity, it naturally becomes a site of conflict for women and feminism. In The Priory, ambivalence over maternity is represented through the upper and lower classes, as even the servants of Saunby Priory struggle with it. Christine’s pregnancy reveals ambivalence over maternity because she lies about her apprehension. Instead of announcing her news happily, Christine tells Nicholas suddenly, “with a scared expression over the piece of tomato on her fork, and when she finally put the tomato into her mouth, she couldn’t swallow it” (277). She is not happy about the situation, but instead full of worry and confusion. Both she and Nicholas agree that the timing is too soon. They are wary of the change that will come into their lives. Christine is unsure of herself as a mother. Such an occasion is not happy, but instead reveals the ambivalence women may feel about becoming mothers. Petersen 18 Maternity serves as an alternative to marriage, creating further ambivalence over female roles. Instead of being a uniting force for a married couple, Christine decides that the baby will replace marriage. She thinks, “Perhaps marriage, instead of being a union, is a separation. . . . She had to follow her own path now, to turn off from being a lover and become a mother” (322). Maternity represents the death of a marriage. Although already unhappy with her new role as wife, Christine is wistful about trading marriage for maternity. She accepts motherhood, yet the transition is not easy. Instead, maternity becomes another change in identity: “Before she had time to adapt herself to any of these experiences, she was plunged into the still stranger experience of having a baby” (322). Although maternity seems to release her from the frustrations of her marriage, because she sees it as a way to move on, it becomes another site of ambivalence. Again, Christine has difficulty adjusting to the changes in her life, and the new identity is to her strange rather than joyous. Because of the conflicts in marriage, Nicholas’s actions solidify Christine’s belief that she must turn her attentions to maternity. When the baby is born, Nicholas “had been to London to see his tailor, be measured for shirts and have his hair cut” (341). Christine is unsupported by him during this difficult time, and it seems as if she must cling to her role as mother to forget her unpleasant role as wife. For Nicholas, this change is described as “emotional discomfort” (341). He purposefully missed the birth in order to distract himself. This scene represents the belief that “[t]he dirtier aspects of housekeeping and child rearing were . . . part of women’s sphere, which separated them from men with a line they were not to cross” (Wolf 169). Maternity also serves as a uniting force when it comes to female identity. Christine ultimately chooses to return to domesticity because of her maternity. Although she has experienced and explored the inequalities of men and women in a vocational sphere, she still Petersen 19 feels tied to her role as a mother. Angela becomes ill, and it is then that Christine quits her job and returns home. She decides to choose her identity, instead of allowing somebody else to place it on her. She does what Allison Weir describes as “a false belief that . . . identifications commit us to a conformity to some preexisting identity category” (Weir 111). Instead, “we participate in the constructions of our identities,” and when Christine does this, she finds contentment rather than conflict (111). Whipple highlighted maternity as another hindrance to feminism. Maternity causes women to be dependent, especially without an education. Christine returns to her in-laws because she realizes that she cannot support herself. When she asks Sir James and Sarah if she can come back, she says: “Only pride has kept me from asking you before and I haven’t any pride now” (499). This undermines the progress Christine has made in earning emotional independence. She has felt angry about her marriage, angry about her betrayal, and angry about her upbringing. Instead of embracing her knowledge of gender inequalities, she returns to a life that reinforces them. She returns with the hope that Nicholas will return. Her actions represent a reversal of the feminist sentiments that she once expressed, again showing the ambivalence she feels over her many roles. Christine’s sister Penelope serves as a different model: a married woman who does not want children. Penelope rejects maternity as a vital part of female identity because of her ambivalence over being a mother. When Paul Kenworthy proposes to her, the first item of business is that Penelope does not want children. Paul readily agrees. He says, “Blow children. You must please yourself about that” (283). In 1952, Simone de Beauvoir addressed this issue: “If as wife she is not a complete individual, she becomes such as mother: the child is her happiness and her justification. Through the child she is supposed to find self-realization Petersen 20 sexually and socially” (455). Such expectations are high, yet Penelope rejects them, and Paul chooses to support her. It seems that Penelope knows what she wants and how to achieve it. She does not allow herself to become a victim of biology. Penelope represents the ambivalence of women on this issue. To openly choose to be childless is revolutionary. Penelope is not ambitious or career-oriented, but she “had a deep fear of child-birth. She could not have told when the seed of this fear had taken root, she only knew that it was now a dark tree shadowing her life” (247). Like Christine, Penelope is uneducated and cannot find work. But her fear is not related to financial independence. Penelope is married to a rich man who takes care of her, and so her identity is conflicted over this issue of maternity because of her fear of childbirth, yet her desire to be a mother once she cares for Christine’s daughter Angela. Both Christine and Penelope feel ambivalent about maternity whether they have children or not. The absence of her own children does not exclude Penelope from the conflicts of maternity. Penelope cares for Angela and teaching her, feeding her, playing with her, and dressing her up. For Penelope, the experience of being an aunt and watching Angela once Christine works simulates the role of a mother, and she finds that she enjoys it. Penelope does not want her own children, yet caring for a child who loves her back creates conflict over maternity that she cannot solve. Penelope and Christine reveal maternity’s conflicts for women within marriage. In contrast, one of Saunby Priory’s servants, Bessy, gives the perspective of a fallen woman. Maternity is a threat to her freedom, and she represents the limited opportunities for women who had children without husbands. She knows, “The unwed mother is a scandal to the community, and illegitimate birth is a stain on the child” (Beauvoir 655). Children limit any woman’s life Petersen 21 because of the bodily sacrifice and subsequent childrearing, as seen in Christine’s situation, but a new dimension of limited opportunities presents itself to a woman who has no husband when pregnant. Bessy decides that her only option is death and attempts to drown herself. Yet she is conflicted about her actions, as she thinks, “How could she kill her heart?” (295). Despite Bessy’s will to live, she does not have any other option because of the time in which she lives. However, she cannot complete the act. She knows her condition is shameful, yet she feels her worth and her humanity through the beating of her heart. Hers is botched a suicide, yet Bessy realizes that “it was worse to live” (296). Despite her decision to live, a small step toward independence, she is saved from her situation by Johnny Spencer, who has long tried to court Bessy despite her affair with Bill Thompson. Bessy symbolically rejects the notion that an unmarried woman with a baby should kill herself, yet her predicament is solved by a man. Bessy’s marriage to Johnny subverts feminist sensibilities because Whipple describes it as giving into circumstance (392). For women to gain equality and freedom, they must reject circumstance, especially when it is created or upheld by a social order that does not value women as much as men. Instead, Bessy gives into this, and she becomes a victim. Like Christine, Bessy is trapped in a man’s world, and the only work she is capable of performing cannot support her and a child. She must allow Johnny to take care of her if she is to survive. From these three situations, we understand that maternity is an issue for women whether married with children, married and childless, or unwed and pregnant. Maternity creates ambivalence because of its limits on women’s freedom. Although this problem is identified, it is interesting to note that Whipple uses patriarchy to resolve the issue, although such a system is certainly part of the problem. Petersen 22 The inequalities surrounding marriage, education, and maternity can be summed up by the houses in The Priory. Saunby, Christine’s childhood home, is described as an ideal place, where “[t]he beeches were whorled with golden buds. . . . The green slopes rolled back on either hand from the drive, like the sea leaving a passage for the Israelites” (452). The Biblical imagery alludes to the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt with Moses as their leader. The exodus is symbolic for Christine because she compares her childhood home to a place where she will be free from slavery. In a sense, her marriage has become limiting and bonding for her, and she sees her childhood home as the place that can make such problems disappear. It is a symbol of protection and of the past, which she longs to regain. This description of Saunby also shows the idealization of Christine’s upbringing. She longs for her childhood and the place where it occurred, leaving her ambivalent about marriage. When Christine compares Saunby to Mansbridge, where she and Nicholas live, the description is not as flattering. “Looked at from Saunby, Mansbridge seemed very new, hard and glaring, with its blocks of hotels and villas cut into sections by asphalt pavements” (176). The town is characterized by its manmade components, reminiscent of phallic symbols. Even the name is masculine, a play off of the word “man.” The town does not have the female images of trees with golden buds or grassy slopes to welcome one home. The comparison shows Christine’s longing for her family home and upbringing, but it also emphasizes the difference between Christine and Nicholas, between gentry and new money, and between men and women. Saunby represents the upper class, and Mansbridge represents the nouveau riche. The descriptions are not flattering to the Ashwells, who have more money than Major Marwood, but they do not possess his social class. Christine, a product of Saunby, can claim this aristocratic heritage, while Nicholas cannot. These differences highlight the inequality in their marriage. Petersen 23 Christine may not come from money, but she has the good breeding that Nicholas cannot buy with his father’s money. The two are opposites in the social world, making their match a difficult one simply because of this divide in social class. Not only does Saunby reflect a Biblical and mythical status, but those who live in it are also described as such. In the opening scenes, Christine and Penelope are described as “young illuminated saints with pure, grave faces and downcast eyes” (33). They are angels of the privileged class, and the lack of money cannot take this status from them. However, angels cannot survive in the real world. And, as the rest of the novel illustrates, these angels are ill-prepared for what marriage and life has to offer. The image of angel is like that of the Angel in the House ideal of Victorian times. In 1939 women were still emerging from this ideal, which comes from Coventry Patmore’s poem of 1854 that found popularity well into the twentieth century. In 1931, Virginia Woolf read an essay to the Women’s Service League titled “Professions for Women” in which she defined the angel as sympathetic, charming, and unselfish. Woolf suggested that a woman writer would have to kill the Angel if she were to become independent. When Christine learns Saunby is for sale, “[t]he look of happiness she had from being under the same roof as Angela was dashed away” (448). She is visiting her daughter on a weekend, yet her contentment in her role as mother is disrupted by the thought that her ideal home is going to be sold. She is also upset that her brother and father are willing to let the place go. For Christine, Saunby is a symbol of idyllic domesticity. Although she is grown, she cannot let go. She has made strides toward equality, yet she yearns to go backwards. This longing for home adds to Whipple’s ambivalent articulation of feminism because Saunby is the place where Christine was raised without an education and only for marriage. Petersen 24 Although it is described favorably and even mythically, the for-sale sign describes the mansion as “historic,” and certainly it is for what it represents in the progress of the daughters who grew up there (451). The home is the place where Christine and Penelope were raised only for marriage, yet in their adult lives, they realize the unfairness of such an upbringing. They understand that education could allow “an initial wedge into the public sphere” (Freedman 47). The mansion is a relic in these women’s lives, yet the women yearn for it, visit it, and return to it. The resolution of all of the novel’s conflicts is problematic. In fact, contemporary critics found the ending to be unrealistic. Forrest Reid said, “[Whipple] does too obviously arrange matters at the end . . . without actually mentioning that they lived happily ever afterwards” (68). Another reviewer called the ending “oddly old-fashioned” and “naïve” (J. 1). These reviews question the realism of Christine’s return to her domestic lifestyle and its idyllic nature because Nicholas is suddenly willing to change his life to fit hers. Christine once felt as if she had given up everything for marriage, but now Nicholas is willing to compromise to make Christine comfortable. Nicholas is working, finally rejecting his father’s money, and has stopped drinking. These changes seem to be what will make Christine happy. However, this reconciliation also opposes Christine’s own development, a plot turn that represents the “very tradition of the domestic novel” (Showalter Literature 181). On top of it all, Nicholas and his father decide they will buy Saunby, meaning Christine can return to the marriage on her own turf. The rest of the family is rescued as well. “One part for your father and his family, one part for you and Nicholas, and one part for Mother and me,” says Sir James (520). Instead of continuing to resent the power Sir James has over her because of his money, Christine is ecstatic about his offer, for she can return to domesticity in the comfort of her childhood home. Petersen 25 What can we make of this contrived ending? Certainly, carving a new identity is harder than accepting an imposed one. Christine, instead of choosing to embrace her freedom and independence, decides that domesticity and dependence on marriage for money is her only option. This shows ambivalence over changing women’s roles and undermines a clear feminist sensibility. However, what choice does Christine have? What choice did Whipple have? She wrote in a time when these questions were raised but not answered. She also wrote for women who may have found themselves in similar situations. Furthermore, Christine’s conflict over being a single, working mother is as strong for her as her feelings about female education and equality. The return to an unequal marriage may have been the only way a woman could have solved her problem. It is manipulated and sugar-coated, but we have to understand that Whipple could only explore such issues to a certain point before she ran out of answers for this difficult dilemma that women faced. Although Whipple explores the inequalities in marriage, education, and maternity, she does not articulate a clear feminist sensibility. Her characters question societal norms, yet they return to their prescribed roles. Although Whipple gave a problematic resolution to the feminist issues raised, we have to understand that she explored questions that she could not answer. This represents much of the work done by women writers of the era, who were “closely connected to a female tradition in their themes and awareness, but they seem[ed] to represent a passive rather than an active continuity” (Showalter Literature 34). Whipple subverted readers’ expectations by presenting feminist ideals that were impossible to implement. Such feminism ultimately creates ambivalence and conflict for the female characters. Whipple’s work is a complex attempt to negotiate new ideas about female roles and represents the ambiguity surrounding female identity in marriage, education, and maternity. Petersen 26 Works Cited Beauman, Nicola. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39. London: Virago, 1983. Print. Brownmiller, Susan. “Femininity.” Fifty Great Essays. Ed. Robert DiYanni. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print. 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