Page 265 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

254 ENGLISH STUDIES

remembered, a schoolboy’s idea of what a Scottish baronial castle should
be. 83
Or rather, an estate agent’s, perhaps. This last passage, with the old ruins
‘neatly’ joined to a new house ‘in its own way almost as romantic’, can
stand as a metaphor for the incongruous union in these texts of aristocratic
decor and petit bourgeois domesticity. ‘Elegant’, ‘imposing’, ‘perfect’, the
houses are also reassuringly domesticated, cosy, suburban.
It impressed me, in spite of all its splendours, treasures and air of
luxury, as being a warm, happy place, the kind of house one could easily
live in and make a home. 84
He remembered how his mother had loved her rose-garden. He had not
really appreciated how many improvements she had made in the garden
and house until she was no longer there. 85

The simple sentence of female romance condenses the thematic unity of
marriage, home, children into a timeless moment. All subordinate elements that
might tend to qualify, ironize or historicize that moment are progressively
neutralized or eliminated. History itself, in a genre that is frequently ‘historical’,
is invoked only to testify to its own unreality, to the eternal and unchanging
reality of ‘love’:

I sat crouched in front of the fire, wondering first about Philip Chadleigh in
1939, then about the Philip of 1727. Had women loved him too? 86
Yet violence and murder, treachery and bitterness, were not the only
memories that lived in Holyrood…. If he had never known it before, he
knew now that love is eternal, unquenchable, a part of the Divine. For love
in Holyrood had survived the mortal hearts which created it, and it still
lived on. 87
The close association evident here between love and religious sentiment
links it to the related motif of self-sacrifice: the voluntary self-
subordination of the woman.
‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘The key-note of Nada’s last years was her
great, overwhelming love for Philip. That was what was of importance in
her life…. What matters then is love, not for yourself or for your own
peace of mind, but for Philip. Think of him, it is he that matters.’ I was
silenced; there was nothing more to say.
88
‘I was silenced’: the subordination of the woman to the narrative-
ideological syntax of home and children is strikingly visible in the
progressive extinction of her powers of articulate speech. The heroine of
Lord Ravenscar’s Revenge, bold and independent enough at the outset to
speak her mind to her sister’s tyrannical seducer, is reduced at last to
mumbling inarticulacy, as well as to depersonalizing conformity to the
‘eternal feminine’: