Archives: Persephone Forum

Fidelity (1924) explores the fate of a young woman whose fidelity to herself makes her an outcast from the society in which she lives.

Ruth, the central character, falls in love with Stuart Wilson, a married man. Stuart is trapped within a loveless marriage and his wife Marion refuses to divorce him. Stuart learns that he has tuberculosis and decides to leave Freeport (the Iowa town in which the novel is set), for health reasons. Ruth goes with him to Colorado. In doing so she leaves her family, her childhood friend, Edith, and the close-knit community in which she lives. The only other person who knows about and supports Ruth in her decision to leave is Deane Franklin, another childhood friend who is himself in love with Ruth. Eleven years later, Ruth returns. Her mother has died and her father is dying. Most of the community remains closed to her; only her younger brother Ted, her classmate Annie and Deane Franklin welcome her return. Deane has recently married an outsider, Amy, who is being introduced into the social circles in which Ruth once moved. The arrival of Ruth leads to conflict between Deane and Amy because Amy is unable to understand Deane’s empathy for Ruth’s situation. After her visit home, Ruth returns to Stuart but when her younger brother Ted persuades Stuart’s wife finally to divorce him (finally giving Ruth the longed-for opportunity to marry Stuart) she decides not to and instead leaves him to make her own way alone.

Ruth’s fidelity to herself is at odds with the demands of the society in which she lives. Freeport offers a ‘pleasant, characterless’ sort of living ‘on a limited part of the surface of life’ and Ruth can see its attractions: even in the midst of her all-encompassing affair with Stuart, she is very conscious of the painfulness of ‘hurting her relations with people’, particularly her family. This awareness of the value of the ties that bind people together is even more acute when she returns to Freeport after eleven hard and lonely years living in Colorado with Stuart. She realises more fully the pain that she caused her family. As she walks through the town and looks at the homes there, she thinks of all the inhabitants and how their lives and feelings are so closely inter-woven:

‘…feelings which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences… It was love… that gave these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new combinations of people…The very thing that had shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which homes were built.’

She knows too the ‘kindly impulses’ that are there for anyone who plays by society’s rules. But she is also very aware that those ‘kindly impulses’ are ‘circumscribed’ by society. Various characters in the novel articulate just why someone like Ruth has to be treated so ruthlessly after she has done what she has done. She is regarded as a ‘traitor’, as having infringed rules which are necessary for the continuance of life as it is arranged within society; because she has defied the rules, she must be ‘shut out’. This is society’s way of protecting itself from a potentially disruptive force. Those within society must act for the greater good of the community, not on the basis of their individual desires as Ruth has done.

But Ruth feels herself drawn away from society by stronger currents than those that play on the surface of things. She feels these currents in her love for Stuart, which seems to her like an elemental force which she is powerless to hold back. She lives in a way that is open to the world, she feels vibrantly connected to it, caught up in the flow of life. This is a quality that is noted in her by Stuart and also by Deane Franklin – the ‘homely youngster’ with awkward movements, a wide generous mouth and ‘abrupt, hearty manner’ – who loves and supports Ruth throughout despite his unrequited feelings for her. Unlike so many of her Freeport contemporaries (Stuart’s wife, Marion with her poised and cool beauty and her ‘atmosphere of high self-valuation’, Mrs Lawrence, Edith’s mother with her ‘metallic pleasantness’ and the outsider, Deane’s wife Amy), Ruth is free from ‘those blurring artificialities that keep people apart’. She lives with empathy and reaches out to the world around her in a very human way. Deane, in particular, comes to feel that society tends to take away this humanity and replace it with a hard ‘crust’ of artificiality that is almost impossible to break through.

It is also Deane who most clearly articulates the opposition between ‘life’ and ‘Society’ that runs through the novel. On the one hand, there is life as it has been ‘arranged’ in society, all the things that bind people together in society together: trivial ties, stifling conventions and rules but also common experiences, love, and community and family life. Then there is ‘the whole flow of life’, and love and fidelity to oneself that, for Ruth seems entirely at odds with the society in which she lives. This is the main tension throughout the novel which Ruth grapples with and which propels her forward. And as she grows into her experiences, she experiences ‘a wonderful new feeling of there being as much for her in life as she herself had power to take’, as though the only limits on what she can do depend on her ability to collect and channel all the energies surging though life.

But she recognises within herself some of the instincts that help keep Society as closed and stifling as it is. On her return to Freeport, she encounters Mildred, a young woman who, like Ruth once did, is contemplating casting Society aside in favour of love for a married man. Ruth advises Mildred against following the course she has taken. She realises that her reaction is ‘just that thing which kept the world conservative. It was fear for others…’. There was something in ‘womankind [that] made them, no matter how daring for themselves, cautious for others. And perhaps that, all crusted round with things formal and lifeless, was the living thing at the heart of the world’s conservatism.’

Another female character in the novel, Annie, is freer than Ruth is from these instincts. Annie is an old classmate of Ruth, who Ruth once virtually ignored because she wasn’t part of the social set in which she and Edith, her closest childhood friend, moved. When Ruth returns to Freeport, Annie is one of the very few people who welcomes her and spending time with her awakens in Ruth a stronger sense of how to move on from the situation she is in. Despite the narrow circumstances of her life, ‘a marriage which offers no love or companionship, little in the way of material comforts or opportunities’, Annie shows no signs of being ground down by her life. She suggests that it is the very fact that she has had so little of what she would liked to have from life itself that has given her such a strong sense of self, a sense that what counts is what she thinks and feels. Annie is also a loving mother to her children but her views of motherhood have a very modern ring. She feels that ‘much precious life has gone dead under the idea of children being enough, letting them be all…Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea; then life’s never really lived, is it? Always just passed on, always put off.’

After her time with Annie, Ruth begins to face the fact that her love for Stuart, once such a bright, burning part of life, has been worn down by their life in Colorado, their ‘cramping little house full of petty questions’ and their ‘hard little routine’. She reflects that things might have been different ‘had the usual channels of living been opened to them..’. Indeed, she comes to feel that love has to be ‘related to living’ in order to remain ‘the heart of life…’. A love like theirs is not sustainable unless they can live out their lives as a couple whilst remaining part of society, part of a wider community. Yet despite this realisation, Ruth does not see their love as having ‘failed’. ‘Far from engulfing all the rest of life, it seemed now that love should open life to one. …it failed if it did not leave her bigger than it had found her… it should send one on.’

Someone at a Distance is quite different from William and Mariana, which involve young, central characters and have plots which follow their development as individuals. Someone at a Distance is a novel about family life, about a small world that is torn apart by the arrival of an outsider.

The scenario – a middle-aged married couple with children, an attractive, younger woman comes along and the husband has an affair – is relatively simple (Dorothy Whipple herself described it as ‘a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage’). But the way the scenario plays itself out is gripping. Like the opening scenes in a horror film, the early chapters of the book give a glimpse of a dark figure lurking on the sidelines while the main characters remain blissfully unaware of the danger. The book captures the changing psychological states of the characters and the flux of raw, underlying emotions, beneath some of the most simple, everyday scenes.

Louise, with her ‘clear-cut, almost exquisite finish’ could almost be Madame Bovary re-incarnated (and indeed her identification with Emma Bovary is made explicit when she reads to Mrs North from that novel). Like Emma Bovary, she is driven by the need to find a way out of the ‘excruciating boredom’ of provincial life. She does not set out to pursue Avery from the outset, she adapts to the situation as she goes along. On her second stay at the Cedars, there is the first indication of an attraction between her and Avery. But she nevertheless returns home and announces to her parents that she will marry the ‘horribly provincial’ Charles Bovary-esque Pharmacien, Andre Petit. Then chance cuts in: she changes tack when, the very next day, a letter arrives from Avery announcing Mrs North’s death and the legacy of £1,000. So she returns and installs herself at Netherfold where ‘gradually, the French scent stole under her door faintly permeating the atmosphere changing it, establishing her presence’.

It is a series of small things that lead events to take the course that they do. As the author notes, ‘there are times in our lives when the slightest move is dangerous’. Avery brings home a box of marron glacés for Louise. The gift becomes a secret between them because Ellen is, by chance, out, and when she arrives back, Louise takes the gift to her room. It is clear that Avery doesn’t realise quite what he is doing, but at this point, he becomes somehow committed.

Louise has ‘no particular design’. She is attracted to Avery and, as an attractive woman, feels entitled to his attentions. She is ‘ready to follow any advantage that was offered’, she is ‘casting about’. Once she has Avery’s attentions, she has control and is ‘in her element’ as the situation unfolds. She has honed her skills of deception in her earlier relationship with Paul and now she is excited to be ‘back in the game’: it is what makes her feel ‘truly alive’. And she relishes this situation even more than her previous relationship with Paul because this time, ‘the power was all herself’. Her motivations for ‘the annexation’ of Avery are about avenging herself on Paul and restoring her confidence in herself. As when she successfully concealed her relationship with Paul from the people of Avigny, she despises those that she can easily fool. Ellen ‘didn’t deserve what she had if she couldn’t keep it.’ Her envy of what others have is part of it: envy of Paul and Germaine, of Avery and Ellen, of wealth, of their ‘mediocre happiness’. When Avery and Ellen go to visit Anne at school, Louise goes through their things. She enters their sunlit room where ‘all was serene, charming’ and is gripped by ‘a sudden violent wish to upset it all.’ ‘Why must she always be the one on the outside?’ she asks herself. She is at a distance, from other people, from the world she looks into.

Louise is also driven by a bitterness about men and the fact that a woman like her must rely on them to get on in the world. During her time at Netherfold, she briefly seeks to build a ‘feminine partnership’ with Ellen in order to isolate Avery and tries ‘to strengthen Ellen’s hand by putting into it some of the cards she herself considered essential to the feminine game’. Her bitterness about the power of men is deep-seated. When Avery tells her to go home, she is infuriated because he is handsome, and is in a position of strength because of his wealth and his ‘maleness’. When she hears that Paul’s wife, Germaine, is expecting a child, her reaction is equally strong: ‘men had everything – she hated men, but unfortunately it was through them that women had to get what they wanted, at any rate, women like herself.’

Avery is good-looking and likeable with an air of indolent well-being. He gives way to his attraction to Louise ‘in a lazy amused way’, assuming that he has control over the situation. But it becomes all too apparent that he doesn’t know his own nature. He has an obsessive streak which surfaced in his pursuit of Ellen before they married and which resurfaces again in his relationship with Louise and when he leaves Ellen. There is ‘excess’ in his nature and it is an ‘excessive pride’ that prevents him from returning. There are rare moments when a softer side of him is apparent: Ellen describes a moment by her bedside after the birth of their first child when he was ‘so absolutely himself, so much hers… shorn of minor vanities and petulances’. She also is touched by his devotion to Anne. When they visit Anne at school, she ‘feels an intensification of her constant everyday love for Avery’ because he ‘gave himself entirely to being Anne’s father and ‘he was happy in a deep humble way’. This ‘knitted them together, indissolubly, or so it seemed’. Indeed, their unity as a couple seems to derive largely from their children, particularly Anne: ‘Anne’s name had only to come up for them to chime together like a pair of perfectly synchronised clocks’.

Ellen, on Louise’s analysis, is too good to be true, too trusting, too happy. She is Louise’s opposite: slight, fair, with no idea at all of trying to make an impression, and is perfectly content ‘looking after things’. Surprisingly, Louise quite likes her but her main criticism of her is that ‘she managed her husband badly – she was unselfish therefore he was not. He took her for granted. She was altogether too open and simple. A woman needed art and subtlety, Ellen had neither.’ Earlier on, another outsider, John Bennett, has observed Ellen’s selfless running around after her family, and Avery’s indolence, and questioned whether Avery really appreciates her. As the distance grows between her and Avery, Ellen becomes acutely aware of the ‘mutual and unique confidence’ that had previously existed between them and realises that she had never acted without him. When she confronts Louise without discussing it with Avery, she feels as if she is ‘breaking one of the countless Lilliputian bonds that bound her’ to him. When Avery leaves, though she finds a way of coping, it is  clear that its not easy for a woman in her position suddenly to have to fend for herself. As Mrs Beard says to her: ‘”you know how hard money is to come by for women like us? We’re not the new sort of women, with University degrees in Economics, like those women who speak on the radio nowadays, girls who can do anything. We’re ordinary women, who married too young to get a training, and we’ve spent the best part of our lives keeping house for our husbands. Not that we didn’t enjoy it, but now you’re out on your ear like me at over forty.’

There are a number of robust subsidiary characters in the novel, many of whom, in contrast to Louise, embody a sort of basic human decency: old Mrs North’s housekeeper, Miss Daley; Miss Beldon, Anne’s headmistress; Miss Beasley (who reveals that she also has a husband who left her); Louise’s ‘large, baggy’ parents; Mrs Brockington and even the rough-speaking Mrs Beard at Somerton. Most of the characters live within small communities: the village where Ellen and Avery live and Louise’s provincial home-town in France.

In Amigny, Monsieur Lanier opens the shutters each morning and greets fellow shopkeepers. Customers come and go in the shop and bring new gossip with them. Within this community, social position matters a great deal: it is why Louise cannot marry Paul, why Madame Lanier is so pleased when Germaine, Paul’s wife, invites Louise to host a stall at the town’s charity fete and why Louise’s inheritance is so gratifying to her parents – it gives her credit in the eyes of their fellow townsfolk. The descriptions of the Lanier’s routines and mannerisms make them very alive and sympathetic as characters: they tear up bread and throw it into their morning coffee where it bobs ‘like ducks on a pond’ and eat with great appetite wielding their ‘large leaden spoons’. Both parents defer to and even fear Louise, with her air of worldly sophistication. There is considerable poignancy in many of the scenes where the Laniers are altogether, particularly the scene where Louise’s parents anxiously await her arrival from Paris, standing on a dark, windswept station platform. Both parents are anxious to satisfy their daughter and are very conscious of how unsatisfactory they are in her eyes.

Ellen engages very little with the community in which she lives, because ‘her family was enough for her’. Nevertheless, there are descriptions of incidental characters here and there which give a flavour of village life: the cheerful ticket collector at the station, the one that Ellen and Anne both like; Ted Banks, the postman, with whom Ellen compares gardening notes. Their world is small and serene and cherished all the more by Ellen because of the dislocation war brought to their lives in the recent past. After Avery’s departure, Ellen finds refuge in another small community, at Somerton, which is also the place that she and her children found refuge during the war.

There is a sense in which Ellen loses and then regains her serene world as the novel progresses and, indeed, despite the emotional tension throughout the novel, all three of the central characters are happier when it comes to an end: Avery because he knows that Ellen, ‘the harmony of his life’, has forgiven him; Louise because she is calculating how she will manoeuvre herself out of her marriage to Avery with the maximum possible advantage to herself; and Ellen because she has learned to accept what life brings and because she knows that Avery is ‘restored’ to her.