Fast and Loose in Interwar London: Mobility and Sexuality in Elizabeth Bowen's To the North

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. See also Osborn 2006, Barreca 1993, Bennett and Royle 1995, Ellmann 2003, Lassner 1990, Lee 1978, Parkins 2001 and Piette 2002 on stylistic and thematic perspectives.

2. The intersection of female sexuality and urban space partly draws from Elizabeth Wilson's The Sphinx in the City, with the difference that I'm concerned with the ways women writers represent single women, whereas Wilson focuses on the way male authors objectify and label city women into generic types: ‘temptress … whore … fallen woman … but also as virtuous woman in danger’ (1991:5–6).

3. For telling remarks on her characters being found rather than chosen, and on achieving a ‘poetic truth’ rather than imposing a political agenda or following society's dictum in her writing, see Bowen 1950 and her exchanges with Graham Greene and Pritchett (1948).

4. In the context of postwar mourning, Summers-Bremner (2007) describes houses in Bowen's fiction as ‘tombs of one sort or another’, an especially apt description for Cecilia's and Emmeline's house, since their common link is a dead man (260).

5. For a fictional representation of this double standard, see Lehmann 1936. Coincidently, in her review of this novel Bowen describes the heroine as ‘alien, uncertain, nostalgic’ (Review 1986:141), words that could describe Emmeline as well.

6. I agree here with Wendy Parkins's assessment that ‘speed and travel are central to the representation of … modern female subjectivity’ in the novel; however, I would add that speed and travel are also central to the development of Emmeline's sexual agency in the novel (2001:82).

7. For a nuanced analysis of the impact of wartime ambulance driving on women's relationship to car and velocity during and after World War I, see Doan 2006.

8. I disagree here with Adam Piette's assertion that ‘Markie is extremely dangerous for Emmeline because he has adopted wholesale the provisionality of this new culture of ceaseless mobility and change’ (2003:58). Markie not only resists mobility and change of all kinds, but more crucially his hypocritical stance on female sexuality is the real danger to Emmeline.

9. Collins 2003 presents a differing view of Ellis's work. He notes that Ellis ‘could not abide the idea of a wife ‘regard[ing] herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible’ (2003:32).

10. Barreca 1993 rightly describes Markie as a man ‘whose appetite for sexual adventure belies a deep conservatism’ (126), especially where women's sexual agency is concerned.

11. In a telling scene between Emmeline and her aptly named assistant Miss Tripp, Bowen notes that ‘Emmeline's exaltation was dangerous and unsparing, she would have cut off her own hand to advance travel and had undoubtedly taken a finger or two of Tripp's’ (124).

12. Parkins argues that it ‘remains unclear whether the crash is deliberate or not, whether agency resides in Emmeline or the car’ (83); however, most critics tend to describe the scene as a ‘self-inflicted car crash’ (Rives 325), or a ‘murder and suicide’ (Lee 131), for instance.

13. Lassner (1990) reads To the North as a ‘gloss on the ideological assumptions which women writers must combat in order to create their own female characters’ (56). I would add that Bowen also questions assumptions against which women in real life had to struggle when ‘fantasies of nurturing family homes [were] questioned as a plot to form female character’ (Lassner 66).

14. Glendinning, for her part, describes Cecilia as ‘overbearing, restless, brittle, unable really to fall in love’ (94), while Heath sees in her the ‘personification of Miss Bowen's attitude’ (66). See also Kenney, who argues that ‘in her limited but courageous way, [Cecilia] chooses to live however she can by relocating herself within an acceptable fashion’ (46).