“Things come and things pass”: Medieval Consolatio in Rumer Godden’s The Doll’s House
The Dolls’ House, a British book for children published in 1947, is a consolatory novel. Following the war a number of children’s writers were interested in medieval forms, and I wonder if Godden was one of them, because this is a story that shares a number of features with medieval consolatio.
If you don’t know the plot of The Dolls’ House, here’s a brief summary. The protagonist is Tottie, a hundred year old wooden doll. The narrator explains that Tottie has been passed down several generations into the hands of two children called Emily and Charlotte. She is inherited with a needlework sampler of the same age. The children select a range of second hand dolls to become Tottie’s family: Mr Plantaganet is her adoptive father, Birdie her adoptive mother, and Apple her adoptive brother. The dolls possess consciousness, but their feelings, thoughts and movements are invisible to their owners. To begin with, the dolls are housed in a damp and insecure shoe box, to the particular distress of Mr Plantagenet. His longing for a safer place to live replicates the experience of many contemporaneous Britons. In the year Godden was writing, heavy bombing and the wartime suspension of building programmes had left England and Wales with a housing shortfall of 750,000. Fortunately the dolls are able to retrieve a dollshouse Tottie remembers living in during the nineteenth century. They spend a brief period of living there contentedly. Their new found security is disturbed by the arrival of Marchpane, who is also bequeathed as an heirloom to Emily and Charlotte. Emily asserts that Marchpane should be the new mistress of the dolls’ house and the new mother to baby Apple. The rest of Tottie’s family remain in the house, but are relegated to the position of servants. They comply until Marchpane deliberately endangers Apple’s life by allowing him to play with a lit candle. Birdie intervenes and is burnt to ash in the process. When the children find Birdie’s remains, Charlotte telepathically senses the cause, and convinces Emily to donate Marchpane to a museum. Ownership of the house is restored to Mr Plantagenet.
Not, then, anything obviously connected to the middle ages, or at least not to the same degree as contemporaneous stories. In the late nineteen-forties and throughout the fifties, numerous writers for children were seeking inspiration in the medieval period. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis applied their knowledge of medieval epic and romance to fantasy fiction; Henry Treece, Cynthia Harnett, Rhoda Power, and Rosemary Sutcliffe took the middle ages as a setting for historical novels; while Dorothy Hosford, Ian Serrailer and Roger Lancelyn Green, were amongst those retelling stories from the middle ages for a young audience. Flo Keyes argues that the attraction of high medieval images, namely those of the romance genre, lies in their power to assuage anxiety in a time of social upheaval, and we may account for it’s post war appeal in this way. However, Rumer Godden appears to pursue a slightly different strategy. She draws on consolatio and elegy rather than romance, epic, or history. A sense of continuity is still evoked for the implied reader, but the likelihood of change in the future is also addressed.
When I use the term “consolatio”, I mean a particular literary genre with the following features: a character in the text experiences a loss, a “wise” guide counsels them using a range of stock arguments or consolations, and the implied reader is then educated in turn. Moses Hadas categorises the three principal arguments as follows - the first argument is that all must die; the second is that lamentation is futile; and the third is that, it is best to rationally accept all pain eases with time (Hadas 253). It’s a genre with classical antecedents, and includes examples such as Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the Dream of Scipio. However it’s the Medieval use of consolatio that interests me here. Between the fifth and fifteenth centuries AD, the consolatio form was imbued with neoplatonic Christian imagery. I’m most interested in the idea that the transitory, small goodnesses we may encounter are metonymic of God’s perfect and enduring essence; and that we might parry the pain of external loss by a focusing on the internal pursuit of faith and virtue. The most relevant use of this idea can be found in the sixth century text The Consolation of Philosophy, which was written by the Roman consul Boethius. The text proved to be profoundly influential, on writers as varied as Thomas Acquinas and Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as a wealth of anonymous elegiac and devotional verse such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Dream of the Rood. I think Boethius can also illuminate our reading of The Dolls’ House.
If we read this as a consolatory story, Mr Plantagenet is the character most in search of solace; Tottie has a more stable history, and Birdie, though apparently “not quite right in the head” (13), lives happily in the moment. From the first chapter, we’re asked to “listen to the story of Mr Plantagenet… for a long while he was hurt and abused and lost” (11). His mistreatment by his original owners overshadows the kinder treatment of Emily and Charlotte and he repeatedly expresses he “doesn’t feel safe!” (18). He believes a new home would let him forget, and the arrival of the dolls’ house soothes some of his fears, but he’s dogged by the notion their safety is temporary: “Suppose it isn’t our home after all?” he asks. ”Suppose we have made a mistake? They couldn’t take it away from us, could they?” Despite being nominally young, it falls to Tottie to assuage the concerns of both her parents. The ongoing impact of Mr Plantagenet’s traumatic memories is partly conveyed by his dependence upon her. According to the narrator, “He could still not quite believe he was Mr Plantagenet. He was still easily made afraid, afraid of being hurt or abused again. Really you might have thought that Tottie was the father and he was the child; but there are real fathers like that.” (12-13)
If Mr Plantagenet fulfils the consolatio role of a character seeking solace, then Tottie is the “wise guide.” She’s associated with virtue, and durability. Throughout this novel reference is repeatedly made to Tottie drawing strength from the trees. In the first example of this, the narrator states that Tottie “liked to think sometimes of the tree of whose wood she was made, of its strength and of the sap that ran through it and made it bud and put out leaves every spring and summer, that kept it standing through the winter storms and wind. ‘A little, a very little of that tree is in me,’ said Tottie. ‘I am a little of that tree’” (10). (endquote) At times when she must act virtuously or bravely, she reminds herself that she, like the trees, is made from “good strong wood” (38). The idea that Tottie comprises a little of her originating tree resonates with the neoplatonic image, central to the consolatio of Boethius, that the earthly experience of goodness is metonymic of God’s goodness. This resonance is strengthened when we consider how early medieval poems such as Elene and The Dream of the Rood imagined that trees share an affinity with Christ because the cross on which he died was fashioned from wood. Tottie’s reference to the passing of “trees” can therefore be simultaneously be read as a reminder of Christ’s mortality, of her own mortality, and of the relationship between her own goodness and that of God.
So, Tottie’s well placed to impart consolatory messages. Let’s think about the argument that all must die, and how Tottie attempts to reconcile Mr Plantagenet to this. When Birdie dies, Tottie confirms to Mr Plantagenet that “Everything [passes], from trees to dolls” (138). Godden’s already been preparing the reader for this message for some time. As early as the novel’s second page, it’s made clear that Tottie’s original owners are dead. There are repeated allusions to Tottie’s heirloom status, including her knowledge that she may one day be owned by Charlotte’s grandchildren (90). Every generation passing is inevitable. As I mentioned earlier, Tottie is inherited alongside a needlework sampler. Significantly, the sampler’s motto refers to the certainty of death. The verse stitched upon it states: “Fain am I to work these nosegays…Content, please God, my time on earth to dwell, Till death shall claim me and I say farewell” (48). Because the sampler has accompanied Tottie throughout the previous century, she is positioned as the bearer of its Christian message of living virtuously in the expectation of death. Conversely, Marchpane’s self-serving lack of solemnity on what it means to die signals that she is dangerous. Marchpane’s remark, with a yawn, that “people don’t last”, (110) is the first indicator to Mr Plantagenet of her callousness.
Let’s think now about the second consolatory argument – that lamentation is futile. Mr. Plantagenet’s preoccupation with owning a house that lasts, and his fear of the family’s fragmentation, is repeatedly challenged by Tottie. The argument that “lamentation is futile” underlies a number of her admonishments towards him: “Stop saying “Oh dear,” (38), “Don’t bleat” (38), “Don’t waste time hating” (114). She advises him instead to make “wishes” – even though the narrator states that “wishing showed no sign of changing anything” (114). But Tottie seems to treat “wishes” as a proxy for prayer. They’re emblems of a successful, internal pursuit of faith, rather than the unsuccessful pursuit of external rewards. The text’s implicitly Christian response to traumatic memory, fear and suffering becomes explicit in the description of Mr Plantagenet’s response to Christmas morning. As they listen to the carols and Christmas hymns that travel from the street outside, Mr Plantagenet is remembering the dark toy cupboard, and finds a consolatory power in these sung prayers. “I like Prince of Peace,” he muses, before proceeding to say, “I know about peace now.” (92).
What about the third consolatory argument? Like Boethius and writers of the medieval form of consolatio in general, Tottie’s suggestion that “everything passes” encompasses the idea that worldly pain, too, will eventually lessen in time. This third argument is invoked in the last chapter, during an exchange with Mr Plantagenet that suggests some time has elapsed since Birdie’s death. The narration makes clear that the dolls have established a new routine: Mr Plantagenet goes to work in the children’s toy post office, and Tottie keeps house. While sitting before the evening fire Mr Plantagenet quietly ruminates on the bad times that have been left behind. Tottie’s response implies that the time to grieve has ended. “[The bad times] come and pass, so let us be happy now,” Tottie tells him. The chapter concludes with a description of Birdie’s belongings still taking a place amongst their cherished possessions in the dolls’ house, conveying a continuity of history for their family, and the implication they can be looked upon without pain.
If Mr Plantagenet is a character in search of solace, and Tottie occupies the role of Wise Guide, that only leaves the reader needing education. This is a children’s story, and didacticism comes with the genre, but the moral is strikingly subversive. The children referred to in the story include Tottie and Apple, as well as the human children Emily and Charlotte. Only Apple receives any guidance from an adult character; and that guidance is overtly dangerous; Marchpane leads him to commit risky, and ultimately fatal, acts. The text therefore constructs a world in which children are unable to trust the adults around them, in which they may be burdened with the emotional instability of their parents, and in which, as a consequence, they are also burdened with high levels of responsibility. This burden is depicted as particularly acute for Emily, who makes most of the decisions regarding the dolls’ welfare. When Mr Plantagenet laments Emily’s poor decisions, Tottie defends her by saying: “Think if you were… walking on a road by yourself, and there were not any signposts…Sometimes you must make a mistake” (114). Tottie, is of course, also walking on a road unaided by her nominal parents. Consolatory works typically invite the reader to identify with the character in search of solace; but this book’s disjoint between the didactic adult voice of the narrator and the unreliability of diegetic adult characters means the implied reader has no singular point of identification. Are they to identify with Mr Plantagenet, who listens to Tottie as the reader is extolled to listen to the narrator? Or are they to identify with the children in the text, whose only guides are unreliable? In either case, the conventional didacticism of the narrator is belied by Godden’s subversive suggestion adults can not be relied upon. In this context, Tottie is a stoic model for an implied reader who, like herself and like Emily, is burdened by excessive responsibility. The appeal of neo-medievalism in post-war Britain may have been its perceived potential to give young readers a reassuring sense of historical continuity. But by adopting the consolatio genre in particular, Godden offers children a philosophical framework for also accepting the inevitability of change.