Beth was one of the first swallows of the woman's summer. She was strange to the race when she arrived, and uncharitably commented upon; but now the type is known, and has ceased to surprise. [The Beth Book, Ch. LII, 527]
Introduction
The Beth Book: Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, A Woman of Genius (1897), Sarah Grand's third and last protofeminist novel, is partly autobiographical and a Künstlerroman (or "artist's novel"), showing the self-development of a woman of high intelligence and literary talent, her repressed upbringing, lack of proper education, awakening feminism and aspirations to become a writer and a New Woman. Grand describes realistically Beth's poor childhood in Ireland, her alcoholic father, abusive and cold mother, a disastrous marriage, marked by her husband's frequent infidelities, and finally her feminist rebellion against male supremacy and women's subordination. It has, however, rather a surprising ending.
Beth's childhood and adolescence
More than half of The Beth Book is devoted to the childhood and adolescence of Beth Caldwell, who grows up in a badly off, male-dominated family in a seaside Irish village, and next, after the death of her father, in rural England (Yorkshire). In Chapter One, Grand employs successfully a proto-feminist critique of the conditions of Victorian women, describing Beth's mother, Mrs. Caldwell:
She was weak and ill and anxious, the mother of six children already, and about to produce a seventh on an income that would have been insufficient for four. It was a reckless thing for a delicate woman to do, but she never thought of that. She lived in the days when no one thought of the waste of women in this respect, and they had not begun to think for themselves. What she suffered she accepted as her "lot," or "The Will of God" – the expression varied with the nature of the trouble; extreme pain was "The Will of God," but minor discomforts and worries were her "lot." That much of the misery was perfectly preventable never occurred to her, and if any one had suggested such a thing she would have been shocked. The parson in the pulpit preached endurance; and she understood that anything in the nature of resistance, any discussion even of social problems, would not only have been a flying in the face of Providence, but a most indecent proceeding. She knew that there was crime and disease in the world, but there were judges and juries to pursue criminals, doctors to deal with diseases, and the clergy to speak a word in season to all, from the murderer on the scaffold to the maid who had misconducted herself. There was nothing eccentric about Mrs. Caldwell; she accepted the world just as she found it, and was satisfied to know that effects were being dealt with. Causes she never considered, because she knew nothing about them. [Ch. I, 2]
Mrs Caldwell is a typical Victorian woman, obedient, submissive, uncritical and incapable of independent judgment. Being in advanced pregnancy with Beth, Mrs. Caldwell skimps on firewood for home heating, but buys six bottles of whiskey for her brutish, authoritarian husband in order to silence his irritation when he comes back home from work. Beth's mother tolerates his alcoholism and philandering, but – strangely enough – abuses her daughter verbally and physically, scolding and beating her. Mrs. Caldwell passively accepts her lot and teaches Beth to behave accordingly. She believes that "absolute ignorance of human nature is the best qualification for a wife and mother" (Ch. VI, 45). According to Victorian social stereotypes, she believes that sons' education is more important than daughters':
The education of the children was a more serious matter, however – a matter of principle, in fact, as opposed to a matter of taste. Mrs. Caldwell had determined to give her boys a good start in life. In order to do this on her very limited income, she was obliged to exercise the utmost self-denial, and even with that, there would be little or nothing left to spend on the girls. This, however, did not seem to Mrs. Caldwell to be a matter of much importance. It is customary to sacrifice the girls of a family to the boys; to give them no educational advantages, and then to jeer at them for their ignorance and silliness. [Ch. XIV, 115]
Unlike his wife and in spite of predominant gender stereotypes, Captain Caldwell, Beth's father, prior to his untimely death, notices his precocious daughter's lucid intelligence:
Beth, I want you to remember this. When you grow up, I think you will want to do something that only a few other people can do well – paint a picture, write a book, act in a theatre, make music – it doesn't matter what; if it comes to you, if you feel you can do it, just do it. [Ch. IX, 69]
Contrary to her mother's expectations, Beth develops in herself a great moral sensitivity and independence of opinion and judgment. Ultimately, she rebels against the authority of her mother and her view of female roles. When Beth moves to England with her mother and other siblings to live on the charity of Mrs. Caldwell's brother, James Patt, she disregards gender roles. As a young girl she sometimes dresses as a boy and poaches a rabbit for the family dinner.
A disastrous marriage
In order to escape from the repressed atmosphere in her family home, Beth at 16 contracts a disastrous marriage to Daniel Maclure, although she knows almost nothing about his past life, occupation and character. Later she discovers that Dan is a medical superintendent of a Lock Hospital, an institution dedicated to the degrading forcible examination of women suspected of prostitution and treatment of venereal diseases, in accordance with The Contagious Diseases Act of 1864. Dismayed by his occupation, Beth calls him a "pander" (Ch. XLVI, 443). Dan turns out to be a dreadful and possessive character, a petty brute and bigamist, who brings his mistresses to live in their house. He reads his wife's letters and wastes her small inheritance. Later on Beth discovers another vice of her husband; he is a sadistic vivisectionist, who conducts morally deplorable experiments in his private surgery at home. Grand implies that Maclure's moral debasement is derived from both his work in the lock hospital and his inadmissible vivisection experiments. One night, when her husband was called to the lock hospital, she comes to his secret surgery in their home and discovers to her horror a vivisected dog still alive.
Beth, checked again in her search, was considering what to do next, when the horrid cry was once more repeated. It seemed to come from under the calico sheet. Beth lighted the gas, put down her candle, and saw a sight too sickening for description. The little black-and-tan terrier, the bonny wee thing which had been so blithe and greeted her so confidently only the evening before, lay there, fastened in a sort of frame in a position which alone must have been agonising. But that was not all. Beth had heard of these horrors before, but little suspected that they were carried on under that very roof. She had turned sick at the sight, a low cry escaped her, and her great compassionate heart swelled with rage; but she acted without hesitation. Snatching up her candle, she went to the shelves where the bottles were, looked along the row of red labels, found what she wanted, went back to the table, and poured some drops down the poor little tortured creature's throat. In a moment its sufferings ceased. Then Beth covered the table with the calico sheet mechanically, put the bottle back in its place, turned out the gas, and left the room, locking the door after her. Her eyes were haggard and her teeth were clenched, but she felt the stronger for a brave determination, and more herself than she had done for many months. [Ch. XLVI, 437]
Dismayed by her discovery, Beth forbids her husband to continue vivisection experiments at home and refuses any sexual relations with him. She finds affinity between animal vivisection and the degradation of women. Vivisection is thus paralleled with medical violence against women. She feels that she is being vivisected by her cruel husband:
I am not going to have any of your damnable cruelties going on under the same roof with me. I have endured your sensuality and your corrupt conversation weakly, partly because I knew no better, and partly because I was the only sufferer, as it seemed to me, in the narrow outlook I had on life until lately; but I know better now. I know that every woman who submits in such matters is not only a party to her own degradation, but connives at the degradation of her whole sex. Our marriage never can be a true marriage, the spiritual, intellectual, physical union of a man and a woman for the purpose of perfect companionship. We have none of the higher aspirations in common, we should be none the happier for tender experiences of parenthood, none the holier for any joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure, that might come to us to strengthen and ennoble us if rightly enjoyed or endured. And this, I think, is not altogether my fault. But however that may be, it is out of my power to remedy it now. All I can do is to prevent unedifying scenes between us by showing you such courtesy and consideration as is possible. On this occasion I will show you courtesy, but the consideration is due to me. A woman does not marry to have her heart wrung, her health destroyed, her life made wretched by anything that is preventable, and I intend to put a stop to this last discovered hellish practice of yours. I will not allow it, and if you dare to attempt it again, I will call in the townsfolk to see you at your brutal work. [Ch. XLVI, 440]
Beth realises that her marriage will be as nightmarish as her childhood. She feels completely degraded by her demeaning husband. As an ambitious and gifted young woman Beth continually strives for her own fair share in life. Feeling constrained by her husband, and unable to fulfill her innate passions and inborn vocations at home, she rebels against his male authority. She tries to pursue her artistic interests. First she engages herself in the art of embroidery. She begins to earn her own money by selling her works. Next she converts an abandoned attic room into her "secret chamber," where she avidly reads books and makes first attempts at writing. Determined to achieve her goal, she keeps saying: "I shall succeed! I shall succeed!" (Ch. XLII, 390).
Ultimately, she frees herself from marriage confinement; she leaves her husband and moves to a modest boarding house in London, where she achieves personal freedom and finds an outlet for her literary vocation. She meets a group of radical women who introduce her to feminist issues. Beth anonymously publishes a successful book of nonfiction on social theory. She also discovers her "natural gift" (Ch. LII, 526) for oratory and becomes a charismatic public speaker and activist in the London's women's movement, propagating feminist issues. She transforms herself from an oppressed wife into a "a woman of genius" – an iconic New Woman devoted to writing topical feminist texts and, subsequently, to public speaking. Through a successful career as a writer and orator, Beth ultimately gains financial independence and success in public life. Thanks to her own earnings, she rents a comfortable cottage by the sea which becomes her final home. But that is not the end of her story.
A female Künstlerroman
Up to now, The Beth Book may be classified as an early female Künstlerroman, i.e. a novel about a woman artist's growth to maturity, a sub-category of a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel). The female Künstlerroman usually narrates the rebellion of a female artist against patriarchal social conventions and a woman's oppression in marriage. The first part of the novel has an engaging plot and an interesting character development. The second part, however, which deals with Beth's writing and public speaking career, is less successful. Her extraordinary "genius" is not fully revealed by the narrator. The reader is hardly informed about Beth's polemical writing, and her public speaking is also cursorily sketched. The relationship between Beth and Arthur Milbank Brock, a poor American painter, whom she met at the boarding house in London, and nursed devotedly at her considerable expense during his long illness (rheumatic fever), is never explained convincingly in the story. Unlike many female Künstlerromane, The Beth Book ends on an inconclusive note. Beth is not fully satisfied and fulfilled with her success as a writer and public speaker, nor is she happy in her cosy seaside cottage. She will not return to her oppressive husband, but still cherishes a dream in which she saw a perfect knight coming on horseback to rescue her from her miserable married life.
Henry Marriott Paget's drawing of Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott."
Towards the end, this dream comes true when Beth notices a horseman approaching her cottage; it is Arthur Brock, who finally realised that Beth had sacrificed herself in order to save his life. The narrator alludes to Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott," suggesting that Arthur, like Lancelot, arrives to "save" Beth from her new confinement: a loveless existence without devoted male companionship. This metaphor is hardly convincing. In Tennyson's poem, the Lady of Shalott is a victim of unrequited love for Sir Lancelot. In the finale of The Beth Book the author/narrator swerves surprisingly away from the convention of a radical protofeminist Künstlerroman to a traditional sentimental romance.
When she was dressed that morning, she went down to her bright little breakfast parlour. Before her was the harvest-field, looking its loveliest in the early morning sunlight. As she contemplated the peaceful scene, she thought that she should feel herself a singularly fortunate being. The dead would be with her no more, alas! except in the spirit; but all else that heart could desire, was it not hers? The answer came quick, No! Something was wanting. But she did not ask herself what the something was.
The harvesters were not at work that morning, and she had not seen a soul since she sat down to breakfast; but before she left the table, a horseman came out from the farm, and rode towards her across the long field, deliberately. She watched him, absently at first, but as he approached he reminded her of the Knight of her daily vision, her saviour, who had come to rescue her in the dark days of her deep distress at Slane –
"A bowshot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves."
"The barley-sheaves!" suddenly Beth's heart throbbed and fluttered and stood still. The words had come to her as the interpretation of an augury, the fulfilment of a promise. It seemed as if she ought to have known it from the first, known that he would come like that at last, that he had been coming, coming, coming through all the years. As he drew near, the rider looked up at her, the sun shone on his face, he raised his hat. In dumb emotion, not knowing what she did, Beth reached out her hands towards him as if to welcome him. He was not the Knight of her dark days, however, this son of the morning, but the Knight of her long winter vigil – Arthur Brock. [Ch. LII, 527]
Beth appears to be ready to give up her independence as a New Woman in order to return to the traditional feminine role of a devoted and self-sacrificial wife. The novel is open-ended and the author does not reveal the aftermath of Beth's romantic reunion with Arthur Brock. "Despite her criticism of marriage in both fiction and essays, Grand believed that women's ultimate happiness lay in marriage, although she never married again" (Nelson 34).
Critical reception
After its publication, The Beth Book received a number of mixed reviews from critics. The contemporary reviewer, Frank Danby, accused Grand of "uncovering sewers" (qtd. in O'Toole 18). A reviewer in The Morning Post described the novel as "inferior in brightness, romance, with and poetry." Another reviewer in The Daily Mail concluded that Grand's "literary technique still leaves much to be desired," although admitted that the novel is "a fine piece of work, roughly hewn" (qtd. in Skaris 49). The Spectator concluded that "(i)n no ordinary sense of the term can The Beth Book be regarded as a novel. It is a prodigiously elaborate study of temperament merging into an impassioned and polemical pamphlet on the marriage question" (qtd. in Heilmann and Forward 467). During the period of modernism The Beth Book was not republished, although "it clearly contributed not only to the emergence of modernist women writers, but also, most consistently, to the more innovative writing of women during the twentieth century" (Usandizaga 130). Recent criticism offers Grand's novel much better assessment. According to Elaine Showalter, The Beth Book successfully describes "the creative psychology of the woman artist" (169). Patricia Murphy described The Beth Book as "one of the most vociferous fictional critiques of the constraints imposed upon Victorian women" (221). Ann Heilmann has pointed out that in The Beth Book "the quintessential New Woman is an artist, more particularly a writer" (107). Ilona Dobosiewicz argues that "Grand created in The Beth Book a rich and complex protagonist who embodies many ambiguities and contradictions of Victorian femininity" (98).
Conclusion
In The Beth Book, the last of a three-part series, which deals with social and individual constraints facing middle-class women, and participates in the late Victorian debate on marriage as an instrument of women's oppression, Grand undermines the traditional, patriarchal belief in the intellectual superiority of men. By presenting Beth as "a woman of genius," Grand argues persuasively that women possess a moral superiority over men, who often prove to be degenerate and maleficent characters. Women's regenerative role in society and marriage was, a rule, restricted in Victorian England to their biological function as a nurturing mother and a supportive wife at home, but Grand subverts that notion and claims that women are endowed by nature with spiritual and moral superiority over profligate men and therefore should take a more active and autonomous part in both the domestic and public spheres.
Bibliography
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Created 20 November 2022