Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Lecture by Trudi Tate, Women Writers Season, 18 September 2021

Blog post by Lisa Hutchins

The emotional neglect of children at the hands of cruel and selfish adults, and the consequences of such abuse for the next generation, provide the devastating subject matter of Elizabeth Bowen's 1935 novel The House in Paris. It was described in this lecture by Dr Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge, as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century, written by a stylist of the calibre of Virginia Woolf.

This novel, full of difficult and complex relationships, can stay with the reader for many years. The novelist A. S. Byatt has described it as both elegant and a melodrama. Bowen interweaves different registers into a highly original narrative using a modernist prose style. With its insights into the human soul, it can be read productively alongside psychoanalytic texts: however, the ideas it explores are Bowen's own.

Some elements of the novel mirror Bowen's own youthful experiences. Born in 1899 as the only child in an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, her early life was marked by tragedy. Her father succumbed to mental illness, and her mother died when she was 13. This trauma may have caused the stammer she carried into adult life. The French and Anglo-Irish families that populate the novel, their values, and the people they accept or exclude, would have been intimately familiar to Bowen:

[Karen] had been born and was making her marriage inside the class that in England changes least of all. The Michaelis lived like a family in a pre-war novel in one of the tall, cream houses in Chester Terrace, Regent's Park. Their relatives and old friends, as nice as they were themselves, were rooted in the same soil. Her parents saw little reason to renew their ideas, which had lately been ahead of their time and which were still not out of date. Karen had grown up in a world of grace and intelligence, in which the Boer War, the War and other fatigues and disasters had been so many opportunities to behave well.

Trudi explained how the two children, whose chance meeting in a Paris house provides the novel's framework, are surrounded by manipulative and selfish adults who cannot provide emotional safety or protection. Henrietta, 11, is travelling to her grandmother's Alpine villa while Leopold, nine, is due to meet the mother he has never seen but who occupies a large and vivid place in his mind. Through the circumstances of his birth, his very existence has been denied by his relatives. He has been placed out of sight with foster parents who fail to grasp his needs or personality.

Bowen’s work often has unexpected turns. We enter the narrative through the eyes of Henrietta, who we initially view as its protagonist. But Leopold and his mother Karen are the real focus of the work. Trudi argued that Karen is the archetypal insider, a member of a stable, comfortable class who live a pleasant life and change little from generation to generation (she drew a parallel with inhabitants of Forster novels). Yet even the most comfortable insider might find ‘inside’ a pretty uncomfortable place. Leopold's birth is the result of a brief affair with a friend's fiancé, Max, a young Jewish banker, a man cast as an outsider who despises conventionality yet, in many ways, yearns to belong.

Karen's wish to escape her pre-ordained conventional path emerges far earlier than the affair, as she discusses her own fiancé, Ray, with her aunt:

I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is. With Ray I shall be so safe. I wish the Revolution would come soon; I should like to start fresh while I am still young, with everything that I had to depend on gone. I sometimes think it is people like us, Aunt Violet, people of consequence, who are unfortunate; we have nothing ahead. I feel it's time something happened.

Karen has no ostensible restrictions on her behaviour. She is free to go as she pleases without explaining herself, and to pursue her interest in art. However, she must behave correctly for a girl of her class by making a suitable marriage. Karen finds this a kind of death of the soul, and does not know how to free herself. Her affair results in a pregnancy which rocks this closed world, but Karen then chooses to save face and remain within her class by giving away her wanted baby.

We realise that however outwardly nice or pleasant the older generation of women seem, they are powerful, manipulative and controlling, especially of their own children. They enforce complete fidelity to class and position, but do not offer moral leadership or take responsibility. Mme Fisher, the mother of Max’s fiancée Naomi, has a hand in bringing Max and Karen together, then drives Max to suicide. The children must often work from incomplete information and don't always draw good conclusions from it. The actions of the adults have consequences that cause widespread pain and affect others for years to come. Henrietta's mother is dead and the girl carries a huge burden of pain that her brief time with Leopold helps her realise.

Where is decency to be found in this novel? Which adults, if any, take responsibility? How can children thrive when they live among adults so short of empathy? Trudi argued that Bowen offers some hope, but the book is a powerful indictment of families who run on secrets, lies, and bullying.

*

This lecture and seminar on Elizabeth Bowen will be repeated on Saturday 2 April 2022, 6.00 pm.

Coming up

Miles Leeson will be lecturing on Iris Murdoch's The Bell on Sunday 26 September 2021, 6 pm.

Literature Cambridge continues with the following events throughout October:

• Winifred Holtby, Land of Green Ginger, with Claire Davison, Saturday 23 October 2021, 6 pm.

•  George Eliot, Middlemarch, with Corinna Russell, Saturday 30 October 2021, 6 pm. SOLD OUT.

•  Ivor Gurney, Life and Poetry, with Kate Kennedy, Sunday 31 October 2021, 6 pm.

Plus the Virginia Woolf Season from 3 October.