‘The Priest and the Doctor’: Medical Mystique as a Substitute for Religious Authority in the Work of Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin

Abstract

This essay examines the encroachment of the doctor upon the territory of the priest in Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn (1977) and A Few Green Leaves (1980), and Philip Larkin's ‘Days’ (1953), ‘How’ (1970) and ‘The Building’ (1972). Pym's novels of the late 1970s examine in detail the increasing reliance of the average person on the medical profession to provide the guidance and care which they would previously have sought from the parish priest. The anthropologist Emma Howick, in A Few Green Leaves, notes with surprise the consensus in the small village in which she is staying that ‘the doctor's really the most important person’. Emma's assumption that, ‘if there was no Lord of the Manor, surely the rector was the most important person rather than the doctor?’ is proved wrong by the enthusiasm with which the general practitioners' clinics are attended, while the local church is left virtually empty and the rector rendered a pitiable figure. Larkin demonstrates how the word ‘congregation’ applies to a hospital setting in ‘The Building’, where he examines the ways in which the hospital has replaced the church as a location for contemplation. Pym conveys a sense of physical opposition between the two buildings in Quartet in Autumn, in which the poor attendance of the church opposite the hospital means that it can offer only a ‘bare minimum of Sunday Services and nothing on weekdays’. In this novel, she explores the reasons for, and dangers of, a willing subordination to the doctor. Like Larkin, Pym is clear-sighted about the failure of religion to appeal to the average person in the late twentieth century, but Marcia's absolute abdication of power to her surgeon, Mr Strong, is just as problematic.

Keywords:

• National Health Service
• doctor
• priest
• religion
• Larkin
• hospital

Notes

1 Since all of the doctors and priests in Pym's and Larkin's work are male, I refer to them collectively as ‘he’.

2 Lines such as ‘Little did we think…’, ‘Well now…’ and ‘Yes, one does feel’ convey the awkwardness of the speakers in the face of Marcia's death (155).