Brief note: No Place for a Lady

Like many historical novels about war, Ann Harries' No Place for a Lady turns to nursing in order to represent the experiences of women near and on the battlefront.  In this case, the war in question is one not often fictionalized, the Anglo-Boer War, and Harries uses it to think through multiple transformations at the dawn of the twentieth century--most importantly, the ways in which the war was conducted over the bodies of the Black African population.  From the liberal point of view that dominates much of the novel, in the form of Emily Hobhouse and the English nurse Sarah Palmer, the Boers are martyrs to the brutal engine of British imperialism.  But the marginal recurring voice of Mrs. Mopeli punctures that narrative.  The Africans support the British, she explains, because "[t]hese Boers do not treat us like human beings" (161); as Mrs. Mopeli discovers all too soon, however, "[w]e expect the British to help us.  Now they have brought the Pass back worse than the Boers" (230).  The novel dramatizes how reformist politics, whether anti-war, anti-imperialist, or pro-feminist, consolidated themselves, in part, by not dealing with Mrs. Mopeli's pointed critique.

Although not explicitly a neo-New Woman novel, No Place for a Lady takes on the topics associated with that genre, including sexuality, professionalism, and organized feminism.    Louise, Sarah's best friend, is a serious nurse with no patience for female dilettantes; at the same time, Louise is man-crazed in ways that the more reserved (but far more conventionally beautiful) Sarah finds disconcerting.  But Louise's obsession speaks to one of the novel's questions about female identity: at the turn of the twentieth century, how could women conceptualize themselves apart from their supposed destiny as wives and mothers?  Emily Hobhouse's truncated romance plot, which haunts her for most of the novel, finally results in a sudden epiphany that leaves her residual desire "shed from her heart like a snakeskin which will never grow again" (349); although Patch, Sarah's eventual husband, will much later envision Emily as a kind of Miss Havisham figure (371), the novel implies that abandoning the romance fantasy frees her for her political activism.  Louise, by contrast, suddenly marries a Boer who is immediately deported, leaving her pregnant--setting up the novel's almost-final vignette, in which she moves in with Patch, Sarah, Patch's newly-found mother (a leper who had abandoned him at his birth) and uncle, and Patch's out-of-wedlock first child.  This alternative family, mixing as it does individuals of different national identities, genders, abilities, and social classes, not only echoes Dickens (whose David Copperfield speaks strongly to Patch) but also much neo-Victorian fiction: it's a comic conclusion that appears to celebrate the power of love to vanquish all apparent antagonisms.  But this family jumble pointedly excludes Mrs. Mopeli, never able to give Sarah a thank-you present for saving her niece (374)--this romance of union cannot and does not incorporate the Black population.  Moreover, Patch regards Sarah's growing political activism on behalf of the Boer women and children with notable coolness, thinking to himself that "this phase would pass--especially when she started producing his children.  That was what women were meant to be, mothers, not political firebrands" (365).  One detects seeds of dissent already forming in the happy alternative family...

One of the reasons that historical fiction falls prey to many of the rules is that (as Sir Walter Scott himself pointed out) it embodies historical trends in individual figures.   Great events thus tend to play out in small personal relationships, with the often-inevitable result that structural issues are resolved through local solutions.   Hence my quip about the fate of men in neo-Victorian novels: novelists who want to discuss Victorian patriarchal power do so by representing Vewwy Evul Victorian Patriarchs, a.k.a. the Male Monster.  (This is not limited to neo-Victorian fiction, of course.)  In some cases, this means that a female character may become Very Feminist and Destroy the Patriarchy simply by choosing a better brand of guy--which works very well for the novel's romance plot, but not so well as any kind of actual political analysis.  No Place for a Lady makes a concerted effort to avoid this literary trap.  Patch is an anti-feminist who neglects to inform Sarah about his supposed engagement to another woman, but he isn't represented as a Vewwy Evul Victorian Patriarch.  That's the point--there's no connection between one's relative niceness and one's investment in particular power structures, whether of gender, race, or class.  Similarly, the Boer women are represented as stalwart, even inspiring opponents to British power who are subjected to horrifying and frequently fatal conditions in the concentration camps--but again, from the Black point of view, the Boers are as unwelcome a presence as the British are.   And, as the novel goes on to point out, conditions in the concentration camps set aside for Africans were even worse. Emily Hobhouse's devotion to the cause of Boer women and children may be heroic, undertaken at great personal and physical risk, but when asked to support a "resolution [...] that would express concern for the fate of the indigenous peoples of South Africa who are clearly being exploited and ill-treated by both the Boers and the British," she responds that "to raise the question of black exploitation and maltreatment, especially at the hands of the hero of the day, would not do our cause any good" (154).   Even the most radical character, that is, still thinks in terms shaped by white political priorities.  At the novel's end, Mrs. Mopeli has been left out in more ways than one.