by Sheila Ray
Ruey needs very little persuasion to take her beliefs more seriously, but Naomi Elton (Trials for the Chalet School, 1959) has actively rejected God, after being lamed in a fire which also killed her parents, and the book is largely concerned with her journey back to faith. It is Mary-Lou Trelawney who has to cope with Naomi’s “I don’t believe in God. Or if He really is there, then He just doesn’t care,” and it is her staunch faith, even under difficult and dangerous circumstances, which impresses the other girl.
The thesis of the book is finally unconvincing, for Naomi makes a bargain with God — if she is healed, she will believe. New treatment does make it possible for her to receive medical help, but this is surely one of the worst bases for faith. Nevertheless, the attempt at grappling with lack of faith is an interesting one; it is unique even for Miss Brent-Dyer, and would have been unthinkable earlier in the series.
Naomi’s ultimate return to faith is inevitable, but this is not a facile bowing to the establishment. For the author and others like her, it was unthinkable that anyone should be left in the misery and loneliness of refusing to take the comfort and support offered by God. Mary-Lou takes charge on the basis of “how could anyone bearing the disabilities she [Naomi] did go through life without some help, and who could give it but God?”, and this is very much the feeling of the author.35
Is God a man?
Whatever the attitude of individual authors, they unite in accepting the premise of a male God, male priests and a male-oriented theology, with apparently no awareness that this might pose any problem at all for women. Much work has been done by feminist theologians over the last century demonstrating the silencing and absorption of women even by the male language of theology as woman becomes “the silent Other of the symbolic order”36, and there have been many attempts to cope with the difficulties.
Some, like Phyllis Trible and Mary Evans, have tried to reinterpret and reclaim biblical texts, emphasising the inadequacies of past translations and the woman-affirming structures within the texts.37 Others, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Fiorenza, have espoused a more radical rereading, attempting to “bring to bear the whole force of the feminist critique upon biblical texts and religion” and to “denounce all texts and traditions that perpetrate and legitimate oppressive patriarchal structures and ideologies”.38 Some have found that the attempt leaves them outside the Church altogether; Mary Daly has rejected orthodox theology for a spirituality based on more ancient forms of women-centred worship39, and for Daphne Hampson, “women are disrupted in their worship by the masculinity of the religion to the point that it ceases to be for them a vehicle through which they can love God”.40
Men have been associated with that which is above, spiritual and like God, whereas women have been associated with that which is below, of the earth, sexual and unlike God, and this inferiority is the basis of difference and of the violently anti-woman premises of the early church fathers.
Woman is deprived of both Word and Image. In current theological debate Nonconformist churches are refusing to admit women to positions of teaching or leadership because of Paul’s remarks in 1 Corinthians 14: 34-6 and 1 Timothy 2:8-15 about women being silent in church, while the resistance to the ordination of women as priests in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches is justified by the perceived inability of women to be a true icon of the male Christ.women’s submission to men was (and still is, in many circles) clearly taught as a divine imperative, valid in all contexts. Graham Leonard, until recently Bishop of London said:
Headship and authority is [sic] symbolically and fundamentally associated with maleness . . . symbolically and fundamentally, the response of sacrificial self-giving is associated with femaleness . . . For a woman to represent the Headship of Christ and the Divine initiative would, unless her feminine gifts were obscured or minimised, evoke a different approach to God from those who worship.41
The Headmistress: an authority figure
With this theological background, it can be seen how vital and empowering an image is that of the authoritative woman, and here the school texts manage, in their treatment of the headmistresses, to circumvent traditional theology without anyone even noticing. It was, after all, inevitable that a girls’ school should have a female Head and, despite the considerable personal qualities of these women both in fact and in fiction, they were rendered generally invisible by two factors. First, girls’ schools had much less status than did boys’ schools. One of the frustrations of trying to research the former is that so many have never been convinced enough of their own importance to keep their records, and it is clear from the statements of headmistresses involved in joint public school organisations that they felt themselves to be second-class citizens. The second is the perception of society in general (i.e. of men) of the Head herself.
It was at this time that ISIS (the Independent Schools’ Information Service) was set up, and the idea met with initial resistance from school bursars (almost entirely male) and from the girls’ schools who were doubtful about joining an organisation which they suspected would be dominated by headmasters and who feared that closer co-operation might encourage the transfer of girls to the sixth forms of boys’ schools. Neither of these objections appears unreasonable, but both were dismissed by one headmaster (with the clear approval of John Rae) as “the long-felt complex shared by many headmistresses that they were second-class citizens”.
Authority was conceived in male terms. So was the faculty of rational thought, so that an intellectual woman in a position of authority was caught in a double bind. Either she was accused of having denied her femininity, or she was treated as a sex object anyway, whatever her position and qualifications. For Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, writing in The Public School Phenomenon (1977), Mary Alice Douglas, Head of Godolphin School for over 30 years, was transformed into a pseudo-man by 29 years of “power and adulation”, and he proves his point by comparing 2 photographs of the woman.
In 1890, it is certainly a strong face, but it is a feminine one; she has long hair pulled back and piled up, a long skirt, fine bosom and a slender waist. In 1919 she is wearing collar and tie, a pin-stripe coat, a waistcoat, a skirt (or are they trousers? It is impossible to see); she has the short-cut hair, greying at the temples, and the level gaze of a successful headmaster.42
Heads of schools in this country have traditionally enjoyed almost complete power and autonomy within their own domain. They can thus hardly avoid symbolising an ultimate authority, and while this is in itself an unusual enough position for a woman, it is further extended by the fact that temporal authority was seen very specifically as mirroring and representing the authority of God, to whom all earthly authorities were finally accountable. “It is not easy to place oneself under discipline when one believes one has outgrown such a necessity,” declares the Headmistress in May Wynne’s Honour Of The School (1926), “but the very effort will help you to understand that we are under discipline all our lives to a Higher Power.”43 It is very interesting, therefore, to see how this authority is presented in the books.
The vast majority of fictional headmistresses are extremely impressive women — as, indeed, were their actual counterparts; it was the exceptional characters who pioneered girls’ education, as in all other fields. They combine absolute authority with large measures of understanding and loving-kindness and are, almost without exception, both adored and fervently respected by their pupils, “the terror and the adoration of the whole school”.44 In some of the earlier books these feelings are expressed in ways which are inevitably amusing to a modern reader. Angela Brazil’s Miss Kaye is annually garlanded with roses on her birthday45, and Kits Kerwayne kisses her Headmistress’s hand in token of affection46, but perhaps this kind of treatment is appropriate for ladies who attire themselves in “amethyst velvet and old lace”, or who can be described as “a glittering vision in satin”. Despite their gentility, however, there is no doubt at all about the autocracy of even the
early heads. They are the supreme authority, and the most requisite characteristics of any such quasi-divinity are those of justice, mercy — and control.
Justice, with its implication of totally predictable right, goes hand in hand with dependability, and headmistresses are almost always bastions of serenity, reliability and security. Winifred Darch’s Miss Eliot is respected by her pupils because, despite her strictness, “she was the most absolutely just person you could imagine and her word was to be depended upon utterly”47, and in the beginning-of-term chaos at Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Maudsley Grammar School,
nobody knew where to find anybody, and no-one was settled or tranquil, except the headmistress, working steadily and quietly in her study, where she might be found by all who sought her, the one really abiding person in this upheaval of newness.48
The implementation of justice inevitably implies punishment, and few indeed are the Head-mistresses who cannot reduce a schoolful of unruly girls to subjection by a mere glance from their chilly blue eyes. Their methods of control range from the remorseless wearing down of the culprit by calm, well-balanced arguments to the fury of Sybil Owsley’s Miss Silverlock, who confronts her erring pupils in a blaze of confused metaphor: “Her white hair was hurled from her forehead. The deep pools of her eyes had changed to smouldering fires.”49
Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Miss Annersley can be as crushing as most, as evidenced in her reply to Len Maynard, who is blaming herself for the bad behaviour of some juniors:
Go away, Len, and please try to overcome this absurd scrupulosity of yours. If it goes on, you will end up by becoming morbid. No blame attaches to you for whatever they are up to, and no blame is attributed to you. Now please go away. I have too much to do to be worried by the need to soothe your conscience.50
There is a fundamental dissatisfaction with heads who are weak and biased like Mrs Lane in May Wynne’s Playing the Game (1947), who condemns pupils on the flimsiest of evidence and is totally unsympathetic to her girls. Even Antonia Forest’s Miss Keith, the Headmistress of Kingscote eventually follows the pattern, despite being initially presented as a disaster. Miss Keith, vulgarized from the beginning of Autumn Term (1948) by her niece’s irreverent appelation “me Auntie” is a silly woman, pompous, unsympathetic and addicted to psychological experiments rather than to common sense, but she is not ineffective. She can reduce sinners to pulp with the best of her forebears, and even manages eventually to imbue her irrepressible niece Tim with a modicum of respect for her position.51
The Headmistress: a divine figure
Ultimately this supreme authority finds its natural expression in quite specific images of divinity. Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Miss Annersley is referred to by her pupils as “the Abbess”, though this is the image of the convent rather than the Church and is limited by the historical submission of female religious orders to the male church hierarchy. Nevertheless, it is an image of great dignity and authority, and Hilda Annersley can certainly be seen as the archetypal virgin goddess, self-contained, inviolate, totally controlled and totally controlling, yet doing so with justice tempered by mercy, humour and compassion. Ethel Talbot’s Miss Graham takes the imagery further; she is presented as the High Priestess of the Rookery School, and is given divine attributes — her greeting to her excited and noisy girls is described, quite seriously, as “after the thunder, the still, small voice”52, the phrase used to describe the appearance of God to Elijah (1 Kings 19:12).
Angela Brazil’s Miss Cavendish rules St Chad’s from a sanctum which bears a remarkable resemblance to a cathedral, including “a large, stained-glass window, filled with figures of saints, that faced the doorway”.53 The theme is continued even in Joanna Lloyd’s much more light-hearted books, where the girls most sacrilegiously use the name of their Headmistress, Miss Atherton, as an oath in startling phrases like, “Did she, by Atherton”, and “Good Atherton! What was Catherine doing now?”54 It can even be argued that, together with omnipotence, these women take on within the books something of the divine quality of omnipresence. A recent article on Brent-Dyer’s Hilda Annersley concludes:
If I’d been asked I would have said that Hilda plays a large part in the majority of the books, but by doing the necessary re-reading for this article, I realised that this is not so — she invariably has only a small role: a welcoming speech at the beginning of term; a staff meeting; the chastising of a difficult pupil, and often little else. Yet the impression is there of her presence — the firm hand steering the characters through yet another turbulent term.55
The Headmistress: a mother figure
However, it is possible to argue that the giving of power and authority to women in this way is itself problematical, merely replacing a male hierarchy with a female one, and posing no questions about power structures in personal relationships or in community — merely, in fact, changing pronouns. Mary Daly has pointed out that if the masculine character of God remains unchanged, the position for women is actually worsened as the God of the tradition, now female, absorbs women’s reality into the tradition of western theological thought:
The use of the feminine forms merely suggests that the christian divinity is so superior and magnanimous that he can contain all female values . . . the christian god can arrogantly announce that he is also a “she” (during alternative services).56
The point is valid, but is avoided in school stories by combining the divine role with the strongly maternal function of both the Head herself and the school. The already quoted incident between Hilda Annersley and Len Maynard provides an illustration of the duality of the Head’s role, for Miss Annersley is an old friend of Len’s family and is actually very fond of the girl, to whom she is “Auntie Hilda” out of school hours.
For as well as administering justice, Heads must possess a world of experience and kindly wisdom; indeed the two are in many ways indivisible, as discipline is only justifiable and bearable in a context of love. It is deeply significant that this is mother love. Because our theology has perceived God as being exclusively male, and because our society has cast male and female human beings in different roles with different emotional responses, we have cut ourselves off from a vital aspect of God’s love. The love of the father has to be earned and is dependent on good behaviour; that of the mother is eternal, unconditional and dependent only on relationship — we are loved because we are her children. The father is the judge, the punisher, the giver and upholder of the law, the one who gives us what we deserve; the mother is the refuge, the comforter, the one who accepts, upholds and gives, controlled by the impetus of her love, not our deserts.
However true or untrue this picture might be in relation to individual relationships, the social symbolism is immense and very deep-seated; thus if we perceive God only as Father, we are cosmically separated from the aspect of God’s love which, perhaps, we most need. Thus, in the fusion of God-like authority and maternal love, school fiction opens up to us fundamentally different possibilities of perceiving and relating to God.
Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Headmistresses
All Brent-Dyer’s headmistresses, even in her most lightweight books, show this fusion of authority and relationship in their interaction with their pupils. Miss Baynard, Head of Janeways, (Caroline the Second, 1937) has eyes which “could be very kind. But they could also be very piercing”; and when Philadelphia, the new Head Girl, complains because a friend who has returned to school unexpectedly early has not come to visit her, Gwen replies: “Dear idiot! I was the only one, and I’ve had Baynie to myself since four” — to which Philadelphia can only say “O-oh! You are lucky!’’57
In Leader in Spite of Herself, Iris has behaved in a way which causes her to fear expulsion, and she is astonished when the Head, Miss Norris, treats her instead with kind and reasoned explanation of all that has gone wrong.58 When Beechy goes to the Harbour School as a new pupil who has recently lost her mother, we are told that “for the first time since her mother’s death Beechy felt that in Miss Eliot and M
atron she had found two people who would stand by her” — and this despite the fact that she has been living with affectionate relatives.59
In the Chalet series, too, firebrand Cornelia, also motherless, is deeply upset by the serious illness of the Head, Mademoiselle Lepattre — “motherless from early babyhood, she had had most of her ‘mothering’ from Mademoiselle”, and her cry of anguish is a broken, “‘Guess I — feel ’sif — my mother —’’60; and when, in an earlier book, Juliet Carrick is abandoned at school by her parents, Madge Bettany accepts her as her ward with remarkable calm.61 It is significant that when, in Gay from China at the Chalet School (1944), the senior staff are injured in a car accident and Miss Bubb takes over as Head, she is a disaster, not because she is academically incompetent, but because she cannot understand or handle the relationship between staff and girls at the school.
Obviously it is the Heads of the Chalet School who are the most clearly realised, and this becomes more true as the series progresses. Madge Bettany marries early in the series, and is thus automatically excluded from the school community; this is presented as her decision, though an inevitable one, but married women were not, of course, allowed to continue in teaching until the 1950s. Therese Lepattre, initially Madge’s partner and later Head of the school herself, is a less clearly realised character than her successors. She is shadowy enough for Brent-Dyer (who was, admittedly, notoriously careless in her writing) to change both her Christian name and the spelling of her surname between one book and another, and, as the younger women staff become the focus of the action, Mademoiselle is allowed to become seriously ill, to give up her job and, eventually, to die gently off stage.
