ABSTRACT

If the public and private man, public and private values, are mimetic, how do they inform relations between the sexes? For Greene, women are adjuncts. Rowe’s mother has been ascribed some (at least nominal) role in the failure of domestic culture: she personifies ‘denial’ – through gentility and the mythology of childhood – cucumber sandwiches, The Little Duke, although whether she is promoting or simply reproducing such a stance remains unclear: at the very least she is an effective vehicle for petit bourgeois infaltilism. Rowe’s wife, the subject of his mercy-killing, is a shadowy figure who has already met her end at the beginning of the book. Nevertheless she provides a context for his soul-searching, a locus for his conscience:

The key role of woman in the book however appears to be developed through the character of Anna Hilfe – making her German, yet morally pure to the point of heroism, Greene challenges prevailing popular mores. Anna is a woman whom tragedy has left ‘brooding on some deeper, more unhappy level. Her brother had the ideas, but she felt them’, whilst in her brother, the experience had given him ‘an amusing nihilistic abandon’. She is depicted as feeling rather than thinking and, like a mother watching over recalcitrant children, she is beyond partisanship whilst simultaneously dispensing forgiveness: ‘You think you are so bad … but it was only because you couldn’t bear the pain. But they can bear pain – endlessly.’ Her ultimate role, not only as nurturer of the flame of goodness, of purity, but a person to be protected from ultimate truth – (‘he was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that’ (p 221)) whilst, paradoxically, remaining a source of ‘grounded’ wisdom, is a return to fundamental gender stereotypes: the Angel in the House20 strikes again. In an early canvas of the theme that was to become prevalent in Greene’s work – and more emphatic with the entrenchment of his Catholicism, the book ends with an attempt to balance the ambiguity and paradox of life with a tentative note of hope and stability, an acceptance of human frailty and plea for atonement: ‘If one loved one feared’ (p 220); ‘It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness’ (p 221). This near open-textured ending approaches the moral debate at the heart of the book – the fear that there are no ‘ultimate’ truths or values – yet it permits Rowe the illusion of mastery even over paradox, and of a tender, protected heroine, who ‘wanted him innocent and happy … He had got to give her what she wanted’ (p 221). Having met the confrontation with self produced by chaos, the retreat from history, ideology, metaphysics, the character fails to

meet the concomitant challenge: to be autonomous, to be authentic, in relations with others as well as the self.21