Mrs Craddock

by W. Somerset Maugham

  With Mrs Craddock, however, Maugham had few models to copy. The social problems spawned by the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century had given rise to what were called condition-of-England novels, among which were Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronté’s Shirley (1849), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Also known as “industrial novels,” they focused, however, on the rising working class and its inevitable conflicts with the owners, as well as on the poverty and social ills that accompanied the dramatic urbanization of Britain. Even at the end of the Victorian era, the novelists who seriously treated social issues—George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, Thomas Hardy, and others—wrote about the lower classes.

  The Edwardian period, in the years following the publication of Mrs Craddock, saw a major shift in emphasis in social novels as authors turned their attention to the middle class. They had begun to recognize that the condition of England and the future of the country were being shaped by the middle class, which was growing in size, power, and complexity. Thus, when Forster poses the question of who should control Britain in Howards End, he does not look outside the middle class for the answer. The range of his interest lies between the lower-middle-class Leonard Bast and his wife and the upper-middle-class nouveau-riche Wilcox family.

  Forster had already written about the middle class in Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905, and Arnold Bennett did so in Clayhanger, published in 1910. H. G. Wells, one of the most prolific and persuasive analysts of the British class system, had written a critique of the British squirearchy in the form of a satiric fantasy, The Wonderful Visit, in 1895, but most of his early works of fiction were scientific romances. It was not until Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr Polly (1910) that he produced the studies of the middle and lower classes for which he is admired. John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906), the first novel of his Forsyte Saga trilogy, dramatized the same kinds of conflicts between culture and Mammon presented in Howards End, and in the process he offered the finest portrait of the philistine nouveau-riche man of business in Soames Forsyte.

  A year after the publication of The Man of Property, Galsworthy wrote The Country House, a novel with affinities to Mrs Craddock. The estate to which the title refers is Worsted Skeynes, owned by Horace Pendyce and the center of the doings of a number of representative figures of the time: Horace’s brother, a major general; the local rector; a member of Parliament; a justice of the peace; several lawyers; and Horace’s wife and three children. The Country House begins with a witty catalogue of the society of Worsted Skeynes, and many of its pages, like those of Mrs Craddock, present a detailed satiric picture of the narrowness and pretensions of that society. But, whereas Maugham remains contemptuous of the landed gentry throughout his novel, Galsworthy equivocates in his criticism. In Jefferson Hunter’s words, Galsworthy “cannot decide about the country house.” He disapproves of its way of life but he enjoys it—“he is a disillusioned insider who cannot bear to leave.” Thus he contrives a sentimental ending, one which stretches the credibility of several important characters and alters the tone of his writing.

  Despite these differences, there are some interesting parallels between The Country House and Mrs Craddock, particularly in the wives of the squires of the houses. Fifty-two years of age, Mrs. Pendyce is much older than Bertha Craddock and, having been a squire’s wife for many years, she has learned to play the part with patience, silence, and obedience. She enjoys the benefits of being the lady of the house, but she has paid a heavy price, as Galsworthy reminds us in describing Mrs. Pendyce’s Sunday morning habit of waiting meekly for her husband to summon her to go to church:

  She had sat there till her hair, once dark-brown, was turning grey; she would sit there until it was white. . . . But all this was to be expected, nothing out of the common; the same thing was happening in hundreds of country houses throughout the “three kingdoms,” and women were waiting for their hair to turn white, who, long before, at the altar of a fashionable church, had parted with their imaginations and all the changes and chances of this mortal life.

  Mrs. Pendyce, representing as she does so many women of her class, is Bertha’s possible future, what she could have become had she allowed her own imagination to be stifled by Edward’s patronizing of her and by her role as the wife of a country squire.

  Bertha, however, possesses too many elements of the New Woman of the turn of the century—vitality, independence of mind, and sophistication—to allow her to surrender her essential self to Edward’s view of her role as his wife. Being in her twenties and in the early years of her marriage, she has more at stake in the struggle for power in Court Leys than Mrs. Pendyce does in Worsted Skeynes, and her battle is presented more starkly. Nowhere is this more obvious than in an episode in The Country House that is so reminiscent of one in Mrs Craddock that it is hard to believe that Galsworthy did not have Maugham’s novel in mind. Worsted Skeynes has an orchard of cherry and pear trees, and Mrs. Pendyce, “brought up in an old Totteridge [her family] tradition that fruit trees should be left to themselves,” opposes her husband’s determination to prune them according to “newer methods.” “She had fought for these trees,” writes Galsworthy. “They were as yet the only things she had fought for in her married life, and Horace Pendyce still remembered with a discomfort robbed by time of poignancy how she had stood with her back to their bedroom door and said, ‘If you cut those poor trees, Horace, I won’t live here!’” Unlike Edward, Horace backs down in the face of his wife’s ultimatum, and the trees are never pruned; and unlike Bertha, Mrs. Pendyce abandons neither the house nor her husband.

  But though Mrs. Pendyce remains at Worsted Skeynes, where her essential self—generous, graceful, and humane—is buried behind a mask of gentility, she nonetheless leaves the house so that, in The Country House’s sentimental conclusion, she can save her son and her family from scandal and ruin. It is only a temporary removal to London, however, and at the novel’s end she is again the chatelaine of the Pendyce estate.

  Because so much of the satire in The Country House is weakened by Galsworthy’s desire for a happy ending, his novel is inferior to Mrs Craddock, published five years earlier, as a critique of the British landed gentry. Indeed, a case can be made that Maugham is too often ignored in studies of the British social novel of the turn of the twentieth century. In The Modern British Novel, for example, Malcolm Bradbury writes:

  H. G. Wells—now directly portraying Edwardian life with its commercial enterprise, its new social types and possibilities, and speaking up for the new classes, the new men and women, and the new spirit of sex, all of this seen in a light of a great world-historical vision—seemed a prototype of the modern. So did Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, exploring the social texture of a changing age that had left Victorianism well behind.

  On the strength of Mrs Craddock—and on the depictions of some aspects of Victorian/Edwardian life in Liza of Lambeth, The Hero, The Merry-Go-Round, and The Explorer—Maugham deserves to be included in this group.

  But Maugham did not intend Mrs Craddock to be social history; the social setting is the background for his real interest: Bertha’s story of romance, passion, unrequited love, the failure of a marriage, and the necessity to fight for emotional independence. In telling this tale, too, Maugham was ahead of his time, advanced enough in his treatment of women’s sexuality that few publishers were prepared to handle the novel.

  In terms of the form of the novel, Maugham was never much of an experimenter, preferring to leave innovations in chronology and the oblique point of view to Joseph Conrad; in the interior monologue to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others; and in surrealistic comedy to Evelyn Waugh and Ronald Firbank. In content, however, Maugham often pushed the limits of what was acceptable on the page or the stage, and from time to time he went beyond them. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office, responsible for lic
ensing plays in Great Britain, frequently demanded deletions of sexual or religious references from his plays—it required, for example, that the report of the discovery (offstage) of a pair of illicit lovers be made by a male character rather than a young woman, whose innocent eyes were not supposed to witness such sights. Fisher Unwin, the first publisher of Liza of Lambeth, insisted that the word “belly”—used as it was to refer to a woman—be replaced by “stomach,” and Methuen, having set up Maugham’s novel The Magician (1908) in proof, nevertheless decided against publishing it, very likely because of the female protagonist’s lurid sexual fantasies. When William Heinemann agreed to publish Of Human Bondage, an important part of which is the promiscuous behavior of a cockney waitress, he felt compelled to put an extraordinary clause in the contract, requiring Maugham to return a portion of his advance if the lending libraries found the book’s contents objectionable.

  The publishers’ unease about Maugham’s treatment of subjects over which writers had traditionally drawn a discreet Victorian veil is reflected in Maugham’s correspondence with his first agent. At one point he felt the need to assure J. B. Pinker that “I can be trusted to be suitably moral,” and later he wrote that “My novels have apparently been too shocking for the American public. . . . I don’t think there is anything in Loaves and Fishes [a play] that would bring a blush to the cheeks of an American matron.”

  Maugham had good reason to be defensive after the reception accorded Mrs Craddock. “It was thought extremely daring,” he later wrote, “and was refused by publisher after publisher, among others by William Heinemann; but it was at last read by Robertson Nicoll, a partner in the firm of Hodder and Stoughton, and he, though of opinion that it was not the sort of book his own firm should publish, thought well enough of it to urge William Heinemann to reconsider his decision. Heinemann read it himself and, on the condition that I took out passages that he found shocking, agreed to publish it.” Maugham made the deletions, Heinemann published the novel, and, following some critical success, reissued it a year later; in 1920 George Doran brought out the first American edition. It was not until 1928, when Heinemann and Doran both published new editions based on the original manuscript, that the public could read Mrs Craddock as its author had first written it twenty-three years earlier.

  Maugham later confessed that he “could not for the life of me imagine” what the offending passages were, and that he did not have the patience to compare the manuscript to the expurgated first edition. It was his bibliographer, Raymond Toole Stott, who first read the two versions side by side, and he demonstrated that Heinemann’s excisions were those that explicitly revealed the female protagonist’s sexual urge, particularly her desire for her young cousin, Gerald Vaudrey:

  FIRST EDITION REVISED EDITION

  . . . they might be separated by ten thousand miles, but they would always be joined together. How else could she prove to him her wonderful love, how else could she show her immeasurable gratitude? . . . they might be separated by ten thousand miles, but there would always be the bond between them. Her flesh cried out to his flesh, and and the desire was irresistible. How else could she prove to him her wonderful love? How else could she show her immeasurable gratitude?

  . . . She gave way; she no longer wished to resist. She turned her face to Gerald. . . . She gave way, she no longer wished to resist, flesh called to flesh, and there was no force on earth more powerful. Her whole frame was quivering with passion. She turned her face to Gerald.

  A more extensive analysis of the two versions is provided by C. Heywood in his 1967 article titled “Two Printed Texts of Somerset Maugham’s Mrs Craddock,” and he offers some interesting speculation on the nature of the deletions demanded by Heinemann in 1902. Heywood points out that the editor’s censoring hand was as heavy on Bertha’s passion for her husband, both before and after their marriage, as it was on her attraction to Gerald. “‘I want to be his wife,’ she gasped, in the extremity of her passion”; a confession here expressed as a private thought, it was considered offensive, as was her taking the initiative as an amorous wife: “He sat down and she put her arms around his neck.” Indeed, claims Heywood, any form of interest in the body shown by Bertha—her own “body” became her “person”—was abridged, even details about her pregnancy and childbirth. Any references to the duration and pain of childbirth were cut, to the point that the simile “like a woman when first she is with child” was dropped from Bertha’s perception of the germinating life of the Kentish springtime. And when her child is stillborn, her request of the nurse, “let me see the whole body,” was seen to be too blunt and so was deleted.

  Even in its bowdlerized form, Mrs Craddock shocked some reviewers and many readers. An unsigned review called “The Strong Crude Novel” in Academy and Literature observed that “some pages are as crude as the crudest parts of Liza of Lambeth and in a more offensive way,” and Maugham’s friend Augustus Hare, known for his guidebooks to various parts of the Continent, noted in his diary that both he and Basil Wilberforce, the archdeacon of Westminster Abbey, “much regretted the author’s Zola-like realism and that his great talent was not devoted to nobler aims.” Even the Bookman’s St. John Adcock, a respected critic, wrote of Bertha that “with all her birth and breeding, she is a woman in whom the primitive animal instincts are strongly developed.” Mrs Craddock, he concluded, was “a subtle and even masterly study of a certain feminine temperament that is not so uncommon as we would like to believe.”

  Adcock’s “as we would like to believe” is a revealing, if unintended, comment on the attitudes toward female sexuality in 1902, and it gets to the heart of the difficulties Maugham faced in securing a publisher for Mrs Craddock. Bertha is very likely representative of a great many young women of the time who were asserting themselves socially, intellectually, and, especially, sexually. What were uncommon were novels that portrayed such women explicitly and positively. Two years after his review, Adcock put the problem into historical perspective when he wrote of Mrs Craddock in Gods of Modern Grub Street that “good as it is, the times were not ripe for such frank handling of sex mysteries.”

  Thirteen years after the publication of the abridged Mrs Craddock, D. H. Lawrence discovered that the times were no more ripe when his novel The Rainbow was suppressed for its treatment of sexuality. He persevered with Women in Love, published privately in 1920, and then with his notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was not permitted to be read in its unexpurgated form by the general public until the 1950s. Lawrence is now rightly regarded as the author who most vigorously challenged the Victorian inhibition about sexuality that hung over British literature like a cloud in the early twentieth century, but Maugham deserves some of the recognition.

  Sex lies at the heart of Mrs Craddock, but in a curious kind of way the novel is a rebuttal of Lawrence well before Lawrence had begun to present his ideas of the “blood consciousness” and the need to surrender to the sexual urge in relationships between men and women. It has been suggested that, in writing of Bertha Craddock, Maugham was following the model of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and C. Heywood has gone as far as to claim that Maugham was influenced by The Doctor’s Wife, an English novel written in imitation of Flaubert’s great work by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in 1864. Maugham’s title, Mrs Craddock, would seem to echo those of both earlier novels, and his plot—a woman’s growing dissatisfaction with her marriage to an unromantic and unresponsive man—is similar.

  Maugham, however, takes the story in a fundamentally different direction. Whereas Emma is a romantic woman dreaming of a glamorous and stylish life, and sees her lover as a means of escaping her banal provincial existence, Bertha is realistic, intellectual, but highly sexed. Her sexuality draws her not to a man who is superior to her in class and experience in the larger world, but to one who is below her and of the soil. The attraction is clearly physical: Edward is “massively set together, big-boned,” with “a magnificent breadth of chest,” apparently “as strong as an ox�
�� and having “a firmness of character and masterfulness.” Even his clothes captivate her: “the knickerbockers and gaiters, the Norfolk jacket of rough tweed, the white stock and cap—all redolent of the country which for his sake she was beginning to love, and all intensely masculine.”

  Edward would not have been part of Emma’s dreams, but he could have stepped out of any number of Lawrence stories: The White Peacock, Love Among the Haystacks, Sons and Lovers, “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and many others. His brethren in those works are strongly physical, unintellectual, and sometimes nearly inarticulate, but their vitality and masculine sensuality awaken the women from their repressive intellects and social conditioning. Like Sleeping Beauty, they awaken from the somnambulance of their routine lives, and like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, they turn from the mirror to look on life directly. “Blood consciousness” conquers the overdeveloped intelligence, and the women are freed to live sensually.

  If Mrs Craddock had been published twenty years after it was, it might well have been considered a parody of Lawrence’s belief in the regenerating power of sexuality. For all of Edward’s animal sensuality, it is Bertha who is fired by passion, and she hopes that his vitality and strength will revitalize her increasingly enfeebled family line. But, rather than breathing fresh new air into Court Leys, Edward becomes more of the squire—in all the banality, narrow-mindedness, and pomposity of the position—than she could ever have imagined. And so, as Anthony Curtis observes, “Bertha obeyed the ‘wisdom of the blood’ when she married beneath her in defiance of society but where did it get her?”

  What her marriage to Edward got Bertha, in fact, was entrapment, and like so many of Maugham’s characters, her struggle becomes one of freeing herself from her imprisonment. “Oh, when I think that I’m shackled to him for the rest of my life,” she tells Dr. Ramsay, “I feel I could kill myself.” In a temporary escape to Italy, where life is joyous, vital, and unrestrained compared to the confined and dull routine of Court Leys, Bertha is described as being “like a prisoner so long immured that freedom dazes him, and he looks for his chains and cannot understand that he is free.” Even back in London, she exults “like a captive free from chains.” Such periods of liberation can be found only away from Court Leys, however, and, when Bertha becomes resigned to her prosaic and unfulfilling life with Edward, she finds her satisfaction in small things: wildflowers, solitary swims in the sea, and literature.