The Flint Anchor

Sylvia Townsend Warner's wry, steely-eyed The Flint Anchor (1954), like Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1947) and Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1957), coolly shreds the Victorian domestic novel (and the pieties of the Victorian era along with it).  The Flint Anchor is not, strictly speaking, about anything, other than a character study of early Victorian patriarch John Barnard.  There is virtually no plot: instead, a relatively limited palette of characters come and go through Anchor House, the Barnard home, in the seafaring village of Loseby, and engage in the usual rounds of courtship (ineptly), marriage (unhappily), and gossip (frequently).   Events of national or international importance usually register themselves only indirectly, often in terms of the Anchor House walls and fences (which, pointedly, imprison as well as protect).  In that sense, The Flint Anchor descends from a novel like Middlemarch, which imagines the birth of the Victorian period in a community well outside the metropolis.  But unlike Middlemarch, The Flint Anchor boasts no ostensibly sympathetic narrator, asking us to dwell on the better side (or, at least, to find some empathy for) even the most unpleasant characters.

What The Flint Anchor does take from Middlemarch is Eliot's observation that we are all "well wadded with stupidity"--an insensitivity that protects the self as much as it renders it incapable of penetrating other minds.  Here, though, the stupidity renders the characters opaque to both themselves and others; except for Barnard, whose habits of introspection invoke and parody evangelical self-examination, the entire cast lives in a state of non-reflective self-satisfaction.  Hence the novel's ironic comedy: the characters repeatedly come a-cropper because they are incapable of registering that other characters possess agency, desires, or even imagination.  Barnard chooses his wife, Julia, in large part because "[i]t is not conversation that one wants in a wife" (12)--a symptomatic decision that defines Julia (who proves fertile in the best Mrs. Pocket tradition) by her ample body and not the personality that inhabits it.  As the novel unfolds, Julia both transforms into an insistently present, increasingly heavy body and silently resists her much-resented maternity by turning to alcohol; when, near the end of the novel, she angrily tells her husband that she will not take a temperance pledge because "I drink.  I am a drunkard.  I have been a drunkard for the past twenty years" (239), the moment is shattering not only because she destroys the family's veneer of domestic tranquility, but also because she asserts her "I" (even if self-destructively) against her husband's willed ignorance.  "You saw me worn out by bearing children," she rages,"one after another as though I were a beast, and disheartened by your sulks and your fidgets, and grown fat and hideous and hypocritical--but you shut your eyes to it and went on calling me a model wife and mother, because I was too painful to contemplate" (239).  The fiction of domesticity within Anchor House rests on the husband's desire not to know its inhabitants or, really, even himself; Barnard retreats to Victorian pieties about femininity, self-control, and maternal devotion, rather than "contemplate" a rage that would challenge the supremacy of his own pleasantly-stereotyped position as ruling patriarch.

The core failure of Barnard's life, as he himself eventually realizes, lies in his quasi-incestuous worship of his daughter Mary.  From the very beginning, Barnard regards Mary as "without flaw" (24), a quiet play on her name echoed elsewhere (e.g., a character comparing her to a painting of the Madonna).  Although priding himself on concealing this favoritism, it is immediately apparent to every other character in the novel, although most of them are grateful rather than otherwise (Mary turns out to be the only child who can keep her father in good sorts).  And yet, what Barnard refuses to see is that this a Virgin Mary entirely lacking in feeling for others: like all of the children, she is "almost without compassion," and "[s]o while she was aware that Papa was unhappy, it did not occur to Mary that the deaths of two sons and the desertion of another was anything special for Papa to be unhappy about" (45).  The feminine, virginal purity that Barnard worships in his daughter--he will eventually acknowledge that he gave himself over to "idols" (304)--is yet another Victorian fiction, and one that singularly lacks any redemptive quality.  In one of the novel's many ironic deconstructions of Victorian plots, he believes that she has been debauched by Thomas Kettle, a "seducer," an "ingrate and libertine" straight out of the sensation novel (147); seeking to save Mary's honor, he forces Thomas to marry her, even though nothing at all happened.  Thomas, who has the misfortune to repeatedly be charged with sexual malfeasances of which he has no actual knowledge, eventually figures out that "from the moment of his marriage he and John Barnard had contested for Mary.   John Barnard had won" (202). The emptiness of this victory--akin to Dobbin's eventual conquest of Amelia in Vanity Fair--once again up-ends the Victorian domestic novel, in which marriage marks a happy comic ending, and the young woman safely passes from one male household to the next.  And it sardonically condemns the fantasy of the idealized Christian woman sanctifying the private sphere, for it is precisely Barnard's adoration of his supposedly perfect daughter that undoes the potential happiness of every other child.  One of the supporting characters, Thomas' father Simon Kettle, writes and publishes the kind of evangelical narratives that tend to appear on this blog; regarded in one light, Mary is every evangelical tract's "good child" gone badly haywire.

This unfolding of Barnard's failures (along with everyone else's) relies for much of its punch on Warner's detached style, which runs heavily to free indirect discourse and ironic understatement.  "She began the New Year with two good resolutions," the narrator says of Julia, "to put on stays, and to pursue a social life" (90).  This random example is typical: it leads the reader to expect one mode of commonplace moralizing (don't we all come up with grandiose resolutions at the New Year?), then promptly deflates the banal into the utterly trivial.  Moreover, it illustrates how the novel's characters default almost automatically to a purely exterior definition of self-improvement; Barnard may think of his wife in terms of her embodiment, but so, for that matter, does she.  Similarly, when Mary contemplates her first kiss, in a lengthy passage of FID, she tries desperately to fit herself and Thomas Kettle into grand, tragic romance plots (The Bride of Lammermoor, Faust, French novels), ascending to cod Wilde as she casts herself as an abandoned lover: "This would make a great difference to her music, for one cannot really sing until one has known love.  There would be plenty of time to practise, as she would not be going out to parties now.  Everything would be different because everything was over.  Her heart had awakened; her heart had broken" (139).  This perfect storm of cliches, amidst the incongruity of her belief in her own musical artistry, points to the emptiness at the core of her little adventure.  For she has no "heart," as the reader already knows, and she cannot express herself, even silently, without falling back onto someone else's stories and worn-out words.