Recognizing oneself as one really is and not as one appears to others is the major theme of Elizabeth von Arnim’s work. Von Arnim, an Australian brought up in England, married her first husband, the Count von Arnim, in 1891, and had three daughters in quick succession (the couple eventually had five children). The family then moved to Pomerania, and the experience formed the basis of her first, incredibly popular novel, “Elizabeth and Her German Garden,” from 1898, which details the retreat of an upper-class woman from the concerns of domestic life. Rather than focussing on the élite society in which von Arnim moved, the book turns a precise, clinical eye on how personality is shaped by one’s environment. By the end, its heroine has undergone a radical transformation and asserted her independence. Von Arnim herself separated from her husband, and when he died, in 1908, she began a long affair with H. G. Wells, only to remarry and then quickly leave that husband, the second Earl Russell. She was a woman unconcerned with social niceties despite belonging to a world that depended heavily on them. Her novels, underneath their light exteriors, are quietly but unmistakably subversive.
“The Enchanted April,” which von Arnim published in 1922, follows her earlier work in centering on the minutiae of women’s daily lives, and in particular on how emotions subtly shift in new, unfamiliar places. The plot is simple: after reading an advertisement for the rental of a “Small medieval Italian Castle” in the Times, two middle-class English women pool their money to go to Italy for the month of April. (“To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” the advertisement croons.) To make the trip more affordable, the women—their names are Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot—invite two others. Lady Caroline Dester, beautiful, rich, unmarried, and bored, joins on an impulse borne of “a longing to get away from everybody she had ever known.” The last of the quartet is Mrs. Fisher, an older widow whose father was a famous Victorian critic.
The novel slowly and luxuriously develops the changes that the quartet’s Italian travel brings. Von Arnim suggests, through her delicate, wry narration, that one of the major challenges all four women face is a sense that their social selves and their internal selves are not in alignment. More, they consistently make themselves feel awful trying to negotiate others’ views of them, ignoring the fact that if we base our lives on what others think of us, we will quickly find ourselves exhausted. Lotty, for instance, is the anxiously frugal wife of an upwardly mobile solicitor who wants the family to live within their means. Her attitude toward life is one of scarcity and stress. (Thrift, “like moth,” von Arnim writes, had “penetrated into Mrs. Wilkins’s clothes and spoilt them.”)
Frustrated with the pressures of marriage, Lotty flirts briefly with imagining her life beyond its contours. But von Arnim’s women don’t exit their suburban, domestic worlds permanently. The sensory pleasures that the castle provides loosen the pull of obligation and allow them to return, enriched, to their daily lives. Lying in bed without her husband on her first morning at the castle, Lotty feels “the cool roominess of it, the freedom of one’s movements, the sense of recklessness, of audacity, in giving the blankets a pull if one wanted to, or twitching the pillows more comfortable! It was like the discovery of an entirely new joy.” The evocative description of her limbs reaching out under the coverlet to bump into nothing makes the pleasure she finds in her solitude deliciously palpable.
Rose’s predicament is also one of marital tension, but it hinges on moral rather than financial angst. Her husband, Frederick, makes a comfortable living writing scandalous books about history’s famous mistresses. His book on Madame du Barry, the paramour of Louis XV, is particularly painful to Rose: after its success, he bought a “dreadful sofa,” with “swollen cushions” for the living room, a piece of furniture that appears, to Rose, to be the “reincarnation of a dead old French sinner.” In Italy, Rose’s sense of moral righteousness undergoes a sun-drenched softening that strengthens her marriage and seems to repair her self-worth.
Lady Caroline’s plot is the most romantic. Her somewhat implausible problem is that her bad feelings—her irritation, her boredom—never register as such because of her beauty, her wealth, and her pedigree; so great is her beauty that even her nastiest moods feel like a sunny glow to others. In London, men follow her like devoted puppies. She has come to Italy to escape the marriage market, but San Salvatore unexpectedly presents her with a suitor she finds attractive.
The fourth woman in the group, Mrs. Fisher, is the most compelling, in part because she is the most annoying. She is both pious and rude—she basks in her memories of her girlhood and the Victorian luminaries who orbited her father. The rooms in her home are hung with signed photographs of the great sages she knew as a child; their heavy furniture, maroon curtains, and glass aquariums have remained unchanged since her youth. She has stubbornly maintained a kind of girlishness through adulthood and into old age, a sense of being younger than she is, which manifests not as openness or enthusiasm but as a cowed, resentful fury. When she is affronted, she retreats into a pretended frailty; when she is irritated, she doubles down with the stubbornness of a child.
Mrs. Fisher, in other words, is not a character one aspires to be. She is not young and beautiful, nor is she youngish, married, and sorting out her life’s story. But she, too, experiences a change at San Salvatore. Her story doesn’t unfold in a familiar novelistic way, which is to say that it’s not a story of social liberation. The other three women benefit from their time in Italy by virtue of their release from familial and social demands. But Mrs. Fisher’s life in London has no such pressures. Her husband died long ago; she has no children. Her misery—a misery she barely recognizes as misery—comes from a lifelong failure, a failure of affection.
Mrs. Fisher’s ruling desire, her desire to be thought well of, has made her grudging toward other people and anxious to preserve her own dignity. When the castle’s housekeeper, Francesca, brings in a dish of spaghetti on the group’s first night together in the castle, she balks. “Mrs. Fisher had never cared for macaroni, especially not this long, worm-shaped variety,” von Arnim writes. “She found it difficult to eat—slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr. Fisher.”
The novel hints that Mr. Fisher, when alive, was too wriggly for Mrs. Fisher; his bad behavior, almost certainly of a sexual variety, seems to have overshadowed the brevity of their marriage. Mrs. Fisher’s insecurity, barely papered over with affront, has only increased since his death. The misery of not being able to enjoy spaghetti because it offends one’s self-seriousness hangs over the entirety of Mrs. Fisher’s personality.
One appealing aspect of “The Enchanted April” is that no single plotline is presented as more naturally interesting than another. When I first read von Arnim’s novel, I was captivated by Lady Caroline’s story, which struck me as a gentle corrective to the usual marriage plot. On my second reading, my interest was caught by Lotty’s and Rose’s problems, which concern the challenges of living with another person after one has made a commitment to them. In my most recent reading, my attention was drawn to Mrs. Fisher’s story unfolding in the background.
As the women prepare to leave San Salvatore, Mrs. Fisher still seems as though she might depart untransformed. “Yet oftener and oftener, and every day more and more, did Mrs. Fisher have a ridiculous feeling as if she were presently going to burgeon,” von Arnim writes. “Sternly she tried to frown the unseemly sensation down. Burgeon, indeed. She had heard of dried staffs, pieces of mere dead wood, suddenly putting forth fresh leaves, but only in legend. She was not in legend. She knew perfectly what was due to herself. Dignity demanded that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age; and yet there it was—the feeling that presently, that at any moment now, she might crop out all green.”
The action that finally breaks Mrs. Fisher’s shell is an embrace: Lotty, drawn in by an expression on her face, kisses her. Surprised and touched, Mrs. Fisher puts out a hand to touch the younger woman’s face, “this living thing, full of affection, of warm, racing blood.” Though not erotic, the kiss pulls Mrs. Fisher into her body—a body that, von Arnim implies, she has spent her life denying. The sunshine, the wisteria, the spaghetti, the flowers, Lotty’s momentary, deeply felt, human gesture—all of this breaks through the social anxiety and sense of unbelonging to which Mrs. Fisher has clung.
The problem with dignity is that it is another way of holding on to social rules without really noticing where those rules come from—very often, from inside our own heads. By temporarily losing what makes us ourselves—our husbands, our shopping trips, our houses, our families, our dignity—we can, if we’re lucky, see the edges of that self clearly enough to be comfortable with letting them blur and dissolve when intimate life makes its demands. Sometimes we need to let ourselves go to properly move in.
Great Job Claire Jarvis & the Team @ Everything Source link for sharing this story.
