May Sinclair: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean - A Modernist Exploration

1. May Sinclair: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean(1)

2.  May Sinclair as Modernist  Sinclair’s career  Sinclair’s interest in psychoanalysis  Narrative technique in Harriett Frean.

3.  Born Rock Ferry 1863 (not 62 or 65)  Limited education -Cheltenham Ladies’ College  Career (Life?) begins after mother’s death  See Mary Olivierfor fictional autobiography

4.  Wrote novels from 1896 onwards  Crosses popular / literary divide  Edwardian novels -largely on marriage problems - very successful  A major figure in modernist circles -knew Pound, Ford, Aldington, HD  Early reviews of imagist poets and Dorothy Richardson

5.  1913: Donates to, and works at Medico- Psychological Clinic of London  1916: Writes review of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912)  1919 Mary Olivier  1922 Harriett Frean

6.  Heavy use of symbolism -in very short novel, symbols and motifs gain resonance through repetition -e.g. blue egg, red flowers  Examination of selfhood through exploration of psyche

7.  Self-consciously experimental -compression  Narrative style:  Sinclair first to use “stream of consciousness” in literary sense (in review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage)  HF uses omniscient third person narrative for passage of time, but  Complex interweaving of H’s “raw” thoughts with narrative commentary.

8.  “Objectivity” vs subjectivity an issue  Compare Dowell in The Good Soldier.  At the heart is “the pervading irony…[of] the disparity between the way things really are and the way Harriett perceives them.”  Brown, The Poison at the Source, p.36

9. Harriett sat a long time, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes staring into the room, trying to see the truth. She saw the girl, Robin's niece, in her young indignation, her tender brilliance suddenly hard, suddenly cruel, flashing out the truth. Was it true that she had sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents' idea of moral beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have married Robin and been happy and been right? "I don't care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it." But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible. (p. 128 new Virago ed; p.147 old Virago ed.)

10.  "My dear, your nurse had nothing else to do. Your wife has to clean and mend for you, and cook your dinner and mow the lawn and nail the carpets down." While she said it she looked at Robin as if she adored him. All through tea time he talked about his health and about the sanitary dustbin they hadn't got. Something had happened to him. It wasn't like him to be wrapped up in himself and to talk about dustbins. He spoke to his wife as if she had been his valet. He didn't see that she was perspiring, worn out by her struggle with the carpet. (p.107 new Virago ed.; p.126-7 old Virago ed.)

11.  In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother's place empty in space and time. But she was not there. Through her absorption in her mother, some large, essential part of herself had gone. It had not been so when her father died; what he had absorbed was given back to her, transferred to her mother. All her memories of her mother were joined to the memory of this now irrecoverable self. (p.93 new Virago ed.; p.108 old Virago ed.)

12.  "Maggie had a baby once. She took it up the lane to the place where the man is; and they put it behind the palings. Dirty blue palings. "...Pussycat. Pussycat, what did you there? Pussy. Prissie. Prissiecat. Poor Prissie. She never goes to bed. She can't get up out of the chair." (p.158 new Virago ed.; p.183 old Virago ed.)