ABSTRACT
Provoked by the suggestive title of Penelope Fitzgerald’s sixth novel, Innocence, John Gross writes,
the theme of innocence […] is treated with subtlety that goes beyond cut-and-dried allegorical patterns. No one in the book is wholly innocent, and innocence itself is shown to have its undoubted drawbacks. Still, it is the relative innocence of the characters that enables Mrs. Fitzgerald to see through their follies and take an affectionate or lenient view of them at the same time. (Gross)
Although Gross does not emphasize the point, it is the case, as he implies that “the relative innocence” of Fitzgerald’s characters connects not only with the author’s “affectionate or lenient view of them” but with point-ofview more generally. Yes, innocence is the novel’s dominant mood, especially as exemplified by the novel’s heroine, Chiara Ridolfi, yet it is a mood that Fitzgerald understands as largely inseparable from point of view, a matter that, like innocence and happiness, albeit more quietly, constitutes a principal theme. That Chiara so beautifully fills the expectation of a novel’s heroine might, in fact, connect with her own sensitivity to the matter: she “could not escape from the unsettling vision of other points of view, the point of view of every living creature, all defensible” (59).1 Ultimately, it is Fitzgerald herself who most truly experiences this “unsettling vision,” whereby the point of view of “every living creature” is both acknowledged and granted its warrant. It is not an easy vision to entertain, either abstractly or empathically, but Fitzgerald does entertain it, and not simply abstractly.
