The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  The Obsession of the (Woman) Artist to Create New and Modernist Art

  In the first part of To the Lighthouse Lily has to contend with Charles Tansley’s sexist denigration, “women can’t paint, women can’t write,”10 through which Woolf evokes the Edwardian “Angel in the House,” a heteronormative ideal that positioned women in subordinate and supportive roles to men. In the final, modern part, Lily gains more perspective on this denigration and creates her painting. Across both parts Lily explores the compulsion of being an artist:

  Drawn … out of community with people into the presence of the formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention.11

  Lily needs to lose her consciousness, yielding the self to the rhythms of the brush across the canvas. Determinedly non-representational—Mrs. Ramsay becomes a purple triangle—she explains her method to the botanist, William Bankes, and his “scientific mind” comprehends her composition; “the question being one of the relation of masses, of lights and shadows”12 and the balancing of shadow and light, mass and space into a unified composition. The representation of the finished vision links to the post-impressionist exhibitions organized in London by Woolf’s friend Roger Fry:

  Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.13

  The novel ends with Lily completing the painting and hence confirming the importance of this theme of the woman artist. “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”14 Giant’s Bread is as strongly semi-autobiographical and literary as To the Lighthouse. In both novels, the art is transferred to a different medium; Giant’s Bread also makes the artist male in a further distancing technique. The novel opens with Vernon’s opera’s success, staged for the opening night of London’s new National Opera House, attended by royalty, the press, the fashionable and the musical experts. It is an opera consisting of the music and spectacle with weird lighting effects representing Man’s move through the stone age to machinery/skyscrapers and finally glass, a new glacial age. The elderly distinguished critic gives it the accolade of a work of genius as the music of the future, and links it to British composers such as Holst, Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, but modulated through the “Russian Revolutionary School.”15 Twice the text insists on the highbrow status of the music, which will not be commercial. Once it moves from the prologue, the novel’s focus is on the modernism of Vernon’s creation—connecting it to Vladimir Tatlin and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s work in Moscow, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky and the unappreciated Arnold Schoenberg. Linking to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Vernon argues that music needs to move away from the representational to something more scientific and “absolute,” arguing with a “white-hot conviction” that “there are notes they don’t use—notes they ought to use.”16 Needing new instruments to get the sound he requires, he turns to glass goblets despite the ridicule of his friends. Modernist music has to have “the courage to disregard tradition,”17 and is obsessive: “You couldn’t write music unless you gave your whole time, your whole thoughts, your whole soul to it.”18 The Hollow opens with Henrietta’s sculpting of a “Nausicca,” with obsessive weeks of agony, “driving her, harrying her … that urgent incessant longing,”19 ruined by the spitefulness of the model being translated into the clay and tarnishing her vision for the piece. Henrietta’s perfectionism causes her to sacrifice the piece, despite the experience of destroying her own flesh and blood. Here too the model is disappointed that it is not a likeness, but an abstract, where planes and shapes suggested by individual bodies are developed into a more stylized form. The pear-wood “The Worshipper” is destined for the International Group’s exhibition, signifying both Henrietta’s modernism and her success. She is described as a genius and Lucy Angkatell insists that she does not keep to feminine subjects such as animals and children (as D. H. Lawrence has his female artist, Gudrun, do in Women in Love), but she also “does” big constructions alongside the abstract figures, “advanced things, like that curious affair in metal and plaster that she exhibited at the New Artists last year. It looked like a Heath Robinson step-ladder. It was called Ascending Thought.”20

  The scientific endorsement and understanding of her work, where modernist techniques are linked to a more objective, rationalist approach, as with Lily and her botanist and Vernon and the mathematician, comes from the medical doctor Christow, who recognizes his wife’s essence in the powerful abstract form. He denounces Henrietta as “unscrupulous” in using the resemblance, but she is not unscrupulous; she supports Gerda through the social gathering at the Hollow and then through the murder investigation. John’s adjective is biased, and the epithet consistently assigned to Henrietta is “detached”; the quality of detachment is portrayed as allowing her an unconventional clarity of view. Tied to her artist’s eye, this characteristic gives her an attractive unsentimental rigor, in contrast to Vernon’s blind self-absorption. The female artist in The Hollow is allowed the most direct and accurate viewpoint, on a par with Poirot’s own. All three novels have artists wrestling with the modernist difficulties of being new and comment on the driven, obsessive nature of their calling.

  Familial/Generational Expectations of Normative Gender Roles and Conventional Marriage

  In the Edwardian part of To the Lighthouse, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay encapsulate the Edwardian binary gendered division of roles. Men have arduous public roles and deal in facts and reality, while women are unable to read a compass and, like Mrs. Ramsay, concentrate more on people’s feelings and support their men’s emotional inarticulacy. At the opening of the novel, this is conveyed through the parents’ comments to the young son regarding his desired trip to the lighthouse. His father speaks to the facts of the weather making it impossible, and is angered by his wife’s rejection of what he sees as the truth. She is upset at his insistence on dashing the loved son’s wish, and prefers an irrational hope that it might be possible. To her, women’s only purpose is to marry and support their men, and she is forever working to bring this about, matchmaking Paul and Minta, Lily and William Banks (both of whom are equally content with their work). Those who are not married are to be pitied, particularly “poor Lily,” whose lack as a sexual object leaves her valueless under Mrs. Ramsay’s terms, and Lily’s painting is viewed as a compensatory hobby to help fill her empty life. The moment when “arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty but apt),”21 she comes to discuss the evening and to urge Lily to marry, chimes with a significant characterization of Lucy Angkatell, in The Hollow, who disturbs her guests’ sleep for similar reasons. Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty, her eight children, her constant emotional self-sacrifice to her husband’s needs and the successful dinner party stand testimony to an Edwardian concept of the successful wife. Lily is represented as constantly having to battle this evaluation and desire, and its undermining of her confidence is represented by her inability to complete her painting until Mrs. Ramsay has died. After her death, however, Lily, Mr. Ramsay, Cam and James renegotiate the gender roles in less patriarchal, authoritative and less femininely self-sacrificial ways, which are shown to be viable.

  Giant’s Bread has a similar generational division between Vernon’s mother and father as the binaries of the past; he is reticent but honest and factual, while she is emotionally dishonest and histrionic, rejecting truth to live false normative roles of domesticity. Christie’s earlier novel takes a more phallocentric view of woman’s emotionality, in contrast to Woolf’s feminist twist. Here, as elsewhere, Christie ties this to heredity, giving the Deyres an artistic bohemian side; following desire is designated as “weak-willed, self-indulgent and attractive,”22 a trajectory shared by his father, aunt
and cousin Joe, as well as Vernon himself, in choosing the honesty of desire despite conventionality, and the consequent social disaster for the women. The father insists on giving this the accolade of “courage.” On the maternal Bent side, Vernon inherits the bourgeois “drive,” whether for music or business, though it is notable that this skips the selfish, damaging mother for the male side through the uncle. Both mother and uncle strive to marry off Vernon to his cousin, in a subplot that Vernon avoids, making his own choice, although his own wife, Nell, embraces similar marital stereotypes. The main issue of the past that Vernon has to battle is his ability to make enough money as a traditional husband to be able to afford the upkeep and restoration of his beloved family home, Abbots Puissant. This family house stands as the tradition at odds with his need to write music.

  In The Hollow, Lucy and Henry Angkatell serve as the Edwardian generation; he is the professional, ordered, matter-of-fact male with a public, imperial past as a governor of a British colony,23 she occupies the Mrs. Ramsay role as irrational, beautiful and charming, and determined to marry Edward off as a way to save the ancient family home. Here the Edwardian woman recovers the charm and attractiveness of an irrational emotionality, which aligns her more closely to Mrs. Ramsay. Lucy differs, though, in her ignoring of conventionalities, as she contemplates shooting people if they prove inconvenient to her matchmaking. To the Lighthouse has Mrs. Ramsay sacrificing herself to support her husband—The Hollow reverses the gendered nurturing and has Henry constantly worrying what his wife might do next. Her extraordinary appeal prevents her from being unattractive, although she borders on a sexist construction of irrational, in need of male protection, from her husband’s attitude to the butler who conceals the gun beneath the eggs. What is interesting is that all three texts create past heteronormative roles, where the men are rational and the women irrational, but give differing textual valuations to this phallocentric depiction, set in the Edwardian near past. The focus around traditional values includes an expectation of traditional marriage, which the artist has to contend with and in both Christie novels the marriage is given further traditional urgency by the need to protect an ancient family home.

  The Balancing of Love, Desire and Marriage with the Artist’s Obsession to Create

  This theme is the major focus of Christie’s Bloomian “swerve from” and serve “to correct and complete” what is misread as Woolf’s theme, allowing the space for Christie’s own meditation on the needs and demands of the driven woman modernist. It allows, coincidentally, the most insightful re-reading of To the Lighthouse.

  To the Lighthouse uses Paul and Minta’s relationship to explore Lily’s distance from sexual desire. This is constructed, as is so much in this complex text, as having two perspectives, one of love and romance, which Lily gets caught up in, wishing to help Paul’s chivalric hunt for Minta’s lost brooch, “so beautiful and exciting, … odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses.”24 But the other side is of male lust, “the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity” which has “fangs” that women are victims “exposed” to.25

  It is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.26

  Lust is so appalling that it transforms nice middle class gentility into working class East End aggression. Lily authoritatively states that women are dissatisfied with this sexual aspect of love, feeling, “This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane.”27 And she grasps her role as artist as one that saves her from such horrors:

  For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.28

  Lily believes that time shows that Mrs. Ramsay’s Edwardian obsession was wrong because, by this time, “the marriage had not been a success,”29 Minta has taken lovers, insolently coming home at all times of night, while Paul, lonely and miserable, frequents coffee shops to play chess. However, the final image of this failed marriage in the modern era is a fascinating one given Christie’s later texts.

  They were “in love” no longer; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious woman with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had compared her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to meetings and shared Paul’s views … far from breaking up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends.30

  Lily triumphs over Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit, arguing that friendship is more valid between the sexes in the modern world than an outmoded view of love. “It has all gone against your wishes. They’re happy like that. I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely.”31

  This same theme is the main focus of Giant’s Bread—Vernon’s desire for love, romance and sex is encapsulated by the two women in his life. Nell, the conventional and pretty wife, fulfilling all the normative roles of domesticity and sympathy but unable to understand an artist’s needs and afraid of his creativity, has his love, represented very similarly to Woolf’s romance as unreal and intensely emotional. The mistress, successful classical singer Jane Harding, has his desire, linked to her understanding of his obsession, and her emotional honesty challenges him to face the truths of a situation and ignore the conventions. Where Nell tricks him into marriage, fearing Jane and his genius, Jane sacrifices her own voice to build his career, indicating the novel’s positive evaluation of sexual desire stripped from false and self-seeking conventional trappings. In case the reader misses the structuring, when Vernon returns after the war to find Nell married to a rich American, she refuses to forgo her luxurious comfort in his family home, and he moves to Russia with Jane to allow Nell to remain married, and to concentrate on his music, thus living out the argument the experienced Jane made much earlier in the text that music demands everything of its creator. The youthful Vernon had aimed to rescue his family house and marry his love while becoming both financially successful and a great composer but Jane argues that devoting his whole focus may allow him to achieve just one of these four goals, since “Life isn’t like a penny novelette.”32 When Vernon challenges her experienced view, she responds that “to get what you want, you must usually pay a price or take a risk” and that if he chooses music “it will swallow up all the rest.”33 Vernon ignores her advice, trying to achieve all four goals and his friend Sebastian opines, “I don’t think a genius wants to be married to a real person. He wants to be married to someone quite negligible—someone whose personality won’t interfere.”34 His concern at this point is that Jane is too strong a personality—but Jane will take her own advice and sacrifice her voice and career to love one person fully.

  In this novel, focused on the clashing demands of tradition and the need to be new, the demands of overwhelming love and the obsession with creation, the artist’s genius comes from a dramatic rejection of marriage and family, enabling him to live in an honest relationship of sexual desire that enables him to focus on artistic creation. One of the problematic figures here, as in the Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947) is that the man’s success comes at the expense of the mistress’s self-sacrifice, and this is considered acceptable because it is the woman’s freely given choice.35 The gendered stereotype of the woman devoting herself to her man’s success, while perhaps more accommodated in the 1940s, raises real problems to twenty-first century audiences. The idea that so much has to be sacrificed to create great art links to the giant in the title of both the novel and its opera; when the critic questions who and what was sacrificed to go into the making of this Giant’s bread, intertextually citing the nursery rhyme, “fee, fi, fo, fumb,” leading to our final realization at the close that Vernon has sacrificed everything to it. Placing the success of his genius at the opening structures our evaluation of marriage and desire in re
lation to the artist’s need to create. Nell’s unattractive and selfish character juxtaposed with Jane’s selfless honesty ensures we favor the choice of the supportive mistress. In many ways, this text, by shifting the main creator to a male character, seems to reinforce Lily’s view that women cannot have an encompassing sexual relationship and be a painter or singer. Women get sacrificed as bones to make the artistic bread, while men can find a viable compromise between creation and desire outside of marriage.