A Seaside Story

Elizabeth Taylor, seeking a world outside the mundane constraints of social life, turns to fairy tale for inspiration; the energy of the fantastic to magically transform the dull dramas of domestic routine. An angry young woman, attacking a repressive society? No. The 1950s as much about escape as rebellion and graft. This novelist knows that the only freedom is transcendence. The Sleeping Beauty. Not social protest but art to set us free, if you have the wit to use it properly.

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To think you know best; to look after, to care for someone, to treat them as a patient, who cannot live without your support - helping them? The old hospitals looked like prisons…. A nurse has the ill person in her dominion, but at least she is a professional, and departs after shift’s end. Friends and family are forever on the job. ‘I will look after you. Settle in my house, have your own room; I’ll give you all the support you need.’ An act of power, whose disguise - I am a good person - gives added frisson to one’s pleasure, the pleasure of a will allowed free rein.

Rose plays the martyr. She has taken charge of Emily, who is told to do no work; because you are feeble…. No! Work gives us strength, encourages independence, forces us to live by our own resources, as we confront the demands of obstacles and others. Not to work increases Emily fragility; Rose the servant who, through her own servitude, masters her mistress. All those household tasks, so boring and thankless…that is Rose’s story. Do we believe her? No! They are the thorns and bushes that keep this sleeping beauty safe inside her home. Then there’s the bodyguard, Philly, a child with learning disabilities, who is Emily’s constant companion…. What man, we imagine her thoughts, to come close to that? Rose is safe. This beauty never to escape her castle.

Rose, the quiet one, always in the background, afraid of life, its wilfulness and lack of control - no wonder her one foray into love ended as a disastrous marriage to a drunk - has always been in Emily’s shadow; Emily the wild girl with her bohemian charm. We imagine the years of resentment and jealousy, the narrowing down of mind and will, as she tried to protect herself against the beautiful and popular sister. It is how puritans are made. Such a terrible training now paying off, as - miracle of miracles: Emily’s car accident - Rose can now inflict this mental poverty on her rival; she hems Emily in with her own fears about life. Because of those body scars, that lovely but oddly immobile face, Emily has withdrawn from the local scene. Rose’s chance! She takes it. Rather than persuading Emily to go out, to meet, to confront her fears, Rose shapes and exaggerates them. She will make her sister weak, remove all her fight and joie de vivre. To lock poor Emily up inside her own philanthropy.

This is how the weak control the strong. By looking after them. A form of power either overlooked by most feminists, or dismissed as part of their oppression. Why so insouciant about one’s own instincts? But then you’ve already guessed. To admit power hunger is to acknowledge that Woman is no victim. Indeed, in many relationships, it is the woman who has most control, because the home - the wife’s domain - is the centre of our social universe; husbands dependent on the house comforts supplied by those female serfs…. But hang on! It’s not just men. Rose dominates her sister. Rita won’t free Vinny from their useless marriage because she’s jealous of Isabella. While Evalie Hobson likes to cause trouble; and since most of her acquaintances are female they are forced to suffer her ‘helpful' advice. Women hate women and like to see them in pain. Much of feminism a rebellion against their own sex.

Men offer an escape from the female dungeon. Emily to recover her sangfroid through an unlikely love affair with a dull fellow. But it needs luck and artifice to bring them together - two scary cats frightened of every breeze and blow. The accident badly scarred Emily’s body, and fixed her face into an unearthly beauty, which doesn't show emotion; this unsettles and deters her former beaux. Few comfortable with the uncanny. But perennially beautiful…Emily has the attributes of art, which she enhances by wearing a hooded cloak and walking with Philly on the beach on dark evenings. Vinny sees her there. And falls in love with a Romantic heroine.

Vinny, trapped inside a fragile sensibility, is terrified of sexual engagement, with its emotional hullabaloo. A sensitive man, who makes easy friends of women, Vinny is unable to break through such friendships and touch their bodies; for he is scared of the emotional violence of the sexual act. His feelings fragile his desire is frozen; and thus he cannot love, with its fracturing of the persona; that great leap into the unknown, a Wild West of the emotions. Not the high heat of lust; but the lower temperatures of care, pity and liking is what attracts him. Vinny is something of a women himself. Although he lacks the competitive rivalry that can turn Rita and Evalie nasty. We assume he is a bachelor. Thus the shock of finding he’s married. Trapped by a saucy lass who saw an opportunity for financial gain. Like all such weak creatures Vinny is likely to fall victim to the fortune hunter, who can con a man into suddenly losing himself. The excitement quickly dying away, cold calculation and emotional frigidity rarely live together long. Today, husband and wife prosper in different towns. They hardly meet. Sex long since consigned to Siberia. It suits them both. Rita to enjoy sexual adventure in her market town, while clothing herself in the respectability of a widow (she has a talent for tall tales). There are compensations for Vinny: Rita another woman he can look after: he manages her bills. 

How do we escape ourselves? Well, there’s art, those carefully constructed scenes on the beach. There’s accident. Or should I say accidents…. Vinny bumps into Emily on the sands, and she falls into his arms, revealing that beautiful face. Love at epiphanic sight. Love. A rope ladder. The feelings to escape the watchtower of the mind.

This novel is a reworking of the famous fairy tale, whose magic is incorporated within a realist plot and a naturalistic psychology. Amazing stories can transform the banal. Vinny has seen a princess! He is determined to win her. Taken wing by his imagination, this encounter frees his feelings, which no longer worry about where an adventure takes them.

Love makes us feel and do incredible things. A kiss a key that unlocks a door. It is Rampunzel’s hair….

Emily and Vinny get close through his usual technique of sensitive sympathy, but already - because of that Romantic image - he feels more strongly than usual. There’s Rose’s reaction - he is stepping on her territory - which raises the emotional temperature. As does the need to hide this friendship from Isabella, whose husband has just died (another accident: his yacht went down) and who has dreams of marrying her old friend. The emotions so hot they melt the ice bars of his mind. Also the situation, this odd friendship with its mechanics of sympathy: to help Emily, it is not enough to be sensitive to her suffering, Vinny must free her from it, for it debilitates the object of his care. He has to take her way from Rose! Whose pretty petals - her care, her attention - hide sharp, imprisoning thorns. To bring Emily back to life, to make her go out into the world, he has to play the hero. This Prince Charming a dull stockbroker. 

Love is a psychic explosion. It is why Vinny starts acting out of character, or perhaps we should say, has found it at last: at fifty he finally goes through a rite of passage, to find his maturity. Compare with Isabella’s Laurence, who, when walking in on his mother and Evalie absurd in their face packs, thinks of himself as father to the woman who bore him. It is by letting yourself go - Laurence had a brief affair with Betty - that you become an adult. Emily did this a long time ago. The accident sending her back to childhood (the ironies are subtle and deep: Rose doesn't like her own brain damaged daughter, Philly, but is happy to turn her sister into a disabled child). Now another accident returns her to adulthood. The long sleep is over. Emily recovers her natural vivacity. There is nothing the gnomes and trolls can do.

“I asked her if it was right for the Estate Agent’s,” Isabella said with a look of pride; but this expression faded at once. “She stared at me, my face, then my hat, then my pearls, very slowly, and rudely. Then she said: ‘There is no Estate Agent.’ I apologised and said I was wrongly directed. I wanted to pass her and go down the stairs; but although she didn’t in the least bar my way, I couldn’t take one step forward. She leant against the wall and kept swinging her door-key to and fro on one finger and watching it, then staring again at my clothes. She said, ‘What do you really want? It is something to do with my husband, isn’t it?’ I told her I did not know her husband and she said: ‘Oh, yes, you do, and I think he has sent you here because he does not like coming by himself.’”

“Her husband?” said Evalie.

‘“Oh, you won’t tell a soul? You do most faithfully promise?”

Evalie’s lips moved impatiently.

“It would be so dreadful. What would Vinny think of my spying in that way? Or does he already know what I have done? But if he knows, he could not have told me that he is marrying Emily so soon.”

“This woman was his wife, then”

Isabella nodded in a terrified way. Although they were alone in the house, their voices had sunk to whispers.

“But perhaps they are now divorced?”

“No. That is one of the things she said to me. ‘I will never divorce him….”

This will stop them. Will it heck! Emily is too wild and aristocratic to care about such moral trivia. And Vinny? There is nothing a hero won’t risk. Prison? What’s a few months inside, when you’ve freed a fairy princess.… Something the respectable will never understand, always happy to use the nation’s laws to restrict the exuberance of others. Love and its liberty. Such fairy tales! Sometimes they come true.

Review: The Sleeping Beauty