Belchamber

Howard Sturgis' third and last novel, Belchamber (1904), reworks a favorite theme of Victorian fiction: the woman whose life unfolds as a narrative of total or near-total suffering, all of which proves redemptive at the end.  Sturgis shifts the protagonist's gender from female to male, but his "Sainty" is "effeminate" (as we are told several times), preferring needlepoint to sports; during his life of major pains and minor slights, Sainty variously endures his mother's sneers against his virtue, his younger brother's pleas for cash, his Cambridge friend's hypocritical idealism, his wife's infidelity, and his adulterous wife's son's death.  Sainty's life combines frequent passivity with failed action, in a manner familiar to anyone who has read much Charlotte Yonge.  Thus, when he tries to protect his mother and brother from each other, he finds instead that "all he had striven for, all he had effected, [was] swept away at a touch; he saw too that the mischief was done, and irrecoverable; there was no good in saying a word" (160).   But what's pointedly missing is the promise of future recompense.  Not only does Sainty learn virtually nothing from his experiences--it's only at the very end that he manages to show some real spirit vis-a-vis his wife--but also the novel itself offers no sign of an afterlife.  What little Christianity we see ranges from largely ineffective (Sainty's governess) to self-contradictory (Sainty's mother) to beyond nominal (the Jewish "convert," de Lissac). This is suffering without any consolation--or, one feels, any point--whatsoever.

Sainty is, in essence, Daniel Deronda gone haywire.  Daniel's moral paralysis in Daniel Deronda derives from his ability to sympathize with everyone: he possesses a "subdued fervour of sympathy" that leads him to feel for anyone in pain, with the paradoxical result that he cannot find a direction for his moral energies; Daniel matures fully only when he chooses the Jews and, therefore, takes a side.  Similarly, Sainty spends just about the entire novel sympathizing with (and furthering) the needs and desires of others, often accidentally reinforcing their immorality in the process. Except that Sainty's sympathies have a bad habit of being imaginative projections of his own feelings, as when he traps himself into his disastrous marriage: "If, however innocently, he had led her to think he cared for her, if in her youth and inexperience she had mistaken his friendship, his interest in her studies, for a warmer feeling; above all, if the inscrutable workings of the female heart had led her for some reason to return it, was he not in honour bound to think only of her happiness in the matter?" (194).  Sainty's thinking here typifies his practice elsewhere in the novel.  He posits a set of possibilities only to transform them into realities, and believes that he must relinquish his own desires to satisfy desires that he himself has imagined! The twin Victorian virtues of sympathy and self-sacrifice form their own destructive psychological prison, as in May Sinclair's even bleaker The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922).  Unlike Daniel Deronda, Sainty develops not in positive terms, by choosing a side, but in negative terms, by deciding that a side has no value.  As he says of his wife near the end, "[i]t was nothing to him, he reflected, whether she went or stayed, whether she played out the dreary farce of their married life to the end, or broke away to follow her own devices" (331). 

And yet, far from being unrelentingly grim, the novel abounds in Sturgis' wry sense of humor.  "Instead of not attending the synagogue," the Jewish convert Mr. de Lissac "now stayed away from church" (73); Lady Eccleston's "hair, having a choice in the matter, had very naturally elected to stay young with her waist rather than grow old with her countenance" (73); Sainty receives a "huge heraldic claret-jug of monumental hideousness" from his brother Arthur, only to much later find himself "[paying] the bill" for it (99); and when Sainty loses faith in a friend, he finds that "[t]here is no furniture so encumbering as a fallen idol; we trip over it a dozen times a day" (167).  The novel's tone has a decidedly 1890s feel, as though we have accidentally stumbled into one of the aristocratic nonentities who meander through The Picture of Dorian Gray.