The following article is a short essay and review realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can also read an essay about NW by Zadie Smith, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach and The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
Critically discuss the text’s deployment of notions of allegiance and inheritance, domesticity and community. Identify key passages and comment.
As Corocoran states,
The Heat of the Day, a story about entangled loyalties and treacheries -in war, in love and in relationships across the generations- is itself a generated out of a radical sense of destabilizations and disorientations. (Corcoran, 2004:168)
It is to underline that the notions of allegiance, inheritance, domesticity and community are deeply modified by the context in which they develop: the war and a London destroyed by bombing.
Characters yearn for a time when the family and its home could fulfill their need for purpose and identity, but they also suspect that this is never to be. Torn between romantic nostalgia for wholeness, security, and stability and denial of their often-disappointing history, they understand but ignore the way a perfectly knowable past foretells their difficult future. (Lassner, 1991:75).
These notions are also intertwined in different ways throughout the novel: in chapter 15, for example, allegiance goes together with community. In chapter 5, community lies in the same field as domesticity and allegiance. Inheritance goes with community, and so on. As well as these notions intertwine between one another, the book also deepens the effects of the “big history” -World War I, the battle of Dunkirk in 1940, the bombing in London and so on- on the domestic lives: Victor, Stella’s husband, leaves her for his nurse who took care of him after he was wounded during WWI; also Robert was wounded and became lame after the battle of Dunkirk.
During chapter 5, the protagonist, Stella, ponders on the changing behaviour of the inhabitants of London and the idea of community: “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned” (Bowen, 1983:126); “each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown” (1983:126) “[…] the indifference of the embattled city to private lives, the exiguousness and vagueness of everybody’s existence among the ruins could, but for Roderick, have made that easy” (1983:128).
The war changes the priorities in a society, making everyone aware that the person sitting next to you could be your salvation or your sentence to death. “The boundaries between self and other, ally and enemy have collapsed” (Gildersleeve, 2014:124). Knowing “whom or what to believe” (Ritchie, 1974:61) is one of the central ideas of the novel: Stella goes against Robert to protect him, literally surrendering to Harrison. But she does not know who Robert really is, until chapter 15 when the discuss all past experiences together from a new point of view. At this point strongly steps in the idea of allegiance, not only from the point of view of Robert, now uncovered, but also from Stella’s view. Robert points out his idea of democracy and freedom: “Freedom. Freedom to be what?—the muddled, mediocre, damned. […] Tell a man he’s free and what does that do to him but send him trying to dive back into the womb?” (Bowen, 1983:379-380)
The clearest references of the novel are the ones to allegiance: as it could be interpreted as a spy story, the loyalty to homeland is a basic assumption. Of course, the first idea we can make of this notion of spying comes from the relationship between Stella and Robert. The notion of allegiance also lies in the relationship between Stella and her son Roderick, a 19-year-old boy who becomes a soldier. Stella always fears to lose him but mainly his essence lost through the the presence in the army.
For what nagged at her, what flickered into her look each time she confronted the soldier in battle dress, was the fear that the Army was out to obliterate Roderick. In the course of a process, a being processed, she could do nothing to stop, her son might possibly disappear. (Bowen, 1983:49)
In chapter 15 Robert explains Stella the reason why she is mad at him: “What is repulsing you is the idea of ‘betrayal,’ I suppose, isn’t it?” (1983:379). Allegiance is a concept also present in the complicated relationship between England and Ireland. After his death, Cousin Francis cannot cross the sea to be buried in Ireland. We also read of bitter opinions about Ireland: “Ireland? Things may not be what they were in that unfortunate country, but you won’t get me to believe that chap [Cousin Francis] is an Irishman! So what was he up to there, I should like to know?” (1983:110).
In this book we are far from the idea of domesticity we see, for example, in To the Lighthouse. Stella and Louie, female protagonists, are never described while doing some domestic work, as it always happened with Mrs. Ramsay. In the first part of the story Stella lives in Louie’s house, but for her this does not mean feeling safe or protected: she finds shelter in people: “What the inheritance came to be for Roderick, Robert was for Stella—a habitat” (1983:123).
The two women also have a strange consideration of respect in a couple: the seem to look for partners for the sake of monogamy. Louie meets other men in order to remember better her husband, away for the war, while Stella sacrifices her own reputation not to reveal the real cause of the end of her marriage, maybe also for the delight of being considered a femme fatale.
The notion of inheritance is soon related to Roderick: after Cousin Francis’ death, he inherits a property in Ireland:
“As against this, Roderick now owned property he had never seen. Last May, he had inherited from a cousin of his father’s a house in the south of Ireland, Mount Morris, with which went about three hundred acres of land. Probate, likely to be retarded by the complication of Mount Morris’s being where it was, had not yet been” (1983:65).
As he can leave for the war, Roderick also thinks about the possibility of dying.
“Death could not estimate what it left behind it. […] Roderick reflected that, as things were, there would be nobody but his mother to be his heir, either: he felt this with chagrin both for himself and her—between them, they should have come to something further than this. He began to mutiny—which took the form of striking match after” (1983:443).
This paragraph is particularly striking: a 19-year-old boy reflects not only about death, but also about material concepts related to one’s death, contemplating the possibility of his unnatural departure before his mother’s.
Bibliography
- Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day, Penguin Books, 1983. Quotes from a PDF version of the novel.
- Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen. The Enforced Return, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004
- Gildersleeve, Jessica. Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma. The Ethics of Survival. Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2014
- Lassner, Phyllis, “Elegies of Loss and Dispossession.” Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction 27, pp. 75-96. Twayne Publishers, New York, 1991. 75-96.
- Ritchie, Charles. The Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries 1937-1945, Macmillanm London, 1974
