by Jean Devanny
Expressed briefly Devanny’s ideas about the family are these: in prehistoric times all property was held in common by the tribe or other communal group; in this situation there was no notion of private property and so there was no idea that people might belong to other members of the group. This was most obviously seen in relations between men and women, which, according to Engels and Devanny, were ones of equality. Women were the first agriculturists and the first tamers of animals, Devanny claims. However as people developed the idea of holding their own property distinct from that held by the group so the idea of monogamous marriage occurred, and it was an idea of marriage in which the woman was seen as the man’s property. From this development other evils followed—for example women became neurotic, degenerate, and frigid as a result of their bondage to their husbands. Men then turned to prostitutes as an outlet for their sexual needs.
The answer to this predicament was for women to become economically independent by joining their husbands in the work force. Then they would no longer be able to be regarded as their husband’s property. All other property would also become communally owned. The family as Devanny had experienced it—and as most New Zealanders know it—would disappear. Functions hitherto carried out by the family, such as housework, child care, and education would become the responsibility of the whole community. ‘Few women’, stated Devanny, ‘wish to have constant care of their children.’17 The world Devanny wanted for the future was one in which the communist economic principle which she saw as prevailing amongst primitive peoples would be linked with the ‘marvellous technical development of the era of electricity and steel’.
Although Devanny expressed a belief in economic freedom as a necessary means to spiritual and emotional freedom, few of her heroines achieve or even desire economic freedom. Margaret Messenger longs to be free in mind and body, but she never considers how she will finance such freedom. In Dawn Beloved Dawn Devoy moves from a failed marriage to a relationship with an older man, binding herself once more to a masculine breadwinner. In some later novels, Out of Such Fires and Cindie among them, working women are portrayed, though even in these many of them work in intellectual pursuits such as writing. Even the otherwise revolutionary novel Sugar Heaven shows women who have no occupation outside the home. What does eventually take these women away from their domestic role is the strike in which their husbands become involved.
Devanny uses The Butcher Shop to examine and propound her ideas about the family. Margaret and Barry Messenger are joined together in a marriage of purity and worldly innocence. Much is made in the early chapters of Barry’s ‘cleanness’ and his racial purity. Margaret too comes of ‘good clean stock’. Added to this, both of them are physically beautiful, and intellectually superior to those around them. Devanny predicts for them a marriage of intellectual, spiritual, and physical equality. There appears to be nothing inherent in the two people that can bring about disruption to their union.
But such perfection cannot be, because of the irrational expectation their community has of their marriage. The title alone suggests that Barry and Margaret are victims of forces beyond their control. They are caught in a slaughterhouse and have as much control of their future as a lamb in an abbatoir does. The allusion to man as an animal is carried on throughout the novel. In the opening chapter Barry delivers a lamb to a mother which dies immediately, in the same way as Barry’s mother had died in childbirth. The lamb is killed because there is no way of keeping it alive, and the reader is made aware at this stage of how tenuous Barry’s (and the other characters’) hold on life is. Like the lamb, Barry’s hold on life is only as secure as others like to make it. The sheep to Barry Messenger are no more than property, to be dispensed with when they are of no economic use.
When Margaret becomes Barry’s wife, she also becomes his property, an equal in economic terms with his sheep. Neither Barry nor Margaret realize this, but they unwittingly acknowledge the economic nature of the marriage when they describe it to other people. When Margaret considers the implications of Barry’s proposal her first thought is that ‘she would be mistress of that big house’. When Barry writes to Margaret’s father to ask if he may marry Margaret he ‘sells’ himself to Mr Errol in terms of what he owns.
The future that awaits Margaret and Barry is made explicit in the dream Margaret has the night she falls in love with Barry. The perfection of the anticipated union is made apparent—it will be one of Virtue, Hope, and Happiness, of love and reverence on his part, and surrender on hers. But the dream changes to a nightmare in which the woman becomes an animal because the man towers over her. In this situation of male dominance and female subservience they both look in amazement and fear at the body of a girl hanging on the gallows. (One is reminded of the final image in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Like Tess, whose fate is decided by ‘the President of the Immortals’ and thus is beyond her control, the Messengers are finally victims of powers they do not understand and cannot control.) Although Barry Messenger would like to have a marriage of equality with his wife, the society in which they both live will not allow that. As a husband Barry must be dominant, and consequently Margaret as a wife will become as an animal. The powerful meaning of the dream is unfortunately somewhat obscured by Devanny’s use of flowery, Latinate words such as ‘coruscate’ and ‘refulgence’. The meaning of the dream is that Barry and Margaret are seen as prototypes of all men and women entering a similar relationship. The intention is clouded by Devanny’s tendency to melodrama.
The idea that only a veneer of civilization distances men and women from the animal in them is continued through the novel. In the first ten chapters several events illustrate the point: a sheep has died in childbirth and her lamb is killed and Barry Messenger is left covered in blood; a shepherd is accused of cruelty to his animals; Margaret encounters the idiot boy who works on the Rodericks’ farm; Mrs Roderick displays her cat skins; Margaret finds a mutilated dog; and old George is murdered by his drunken mate Bill.
Juxtaposed to the image of society as a slaughterhouse is the wealth, luxury and comfort of the Messenger household. Margaret rules the house by virtue of her beauty and grace. The marriage is seemingly perfect. ‘They were pretty well acquainted and settled down.’ Margaret would have ‘found little incompleteness’ in her relationship with Barry had she stopped to analyse it. Yet all is not well—neither of them realizes ‘the inadequacy of civilization’s flimsy veneer in the face of primitive passion’.
At this stage it is worth noticing Devanny’s ambivalent attitude towards civilization. On the one hand she sees it is a hypocrisy which disguises from men and women the truths of their own natures. On the other hand Devanny is strongly drawn by the wealth and physical comfort in which the Messengers live. It is quite clear that both Devanny and her heroine enjoy the fact that no one in the novel ever has to worry about money. She is also attracted by the cultural dimensions of human civilization; in particular, in this novel, by the work of other writers in various fields—Joseph Conrad, and the ethnologists Edward Tregear, Elsdon Best and Johannes Andersen for example. Humanity may be blinding itself when it hides ‘primitive passion’ in the cloak of civilization, but in that civilization many things are created which Devanny considers important.
Glengarry is the catalyst necessary to demonstrate the inadequacy of ‘civilization’s flimsy veneer’. There is nothing inherent in Glengarry’s character that suggests that he should cause the chaos which results from his coming to the station. What he does is to awaken Margaret’s ‘primitive passions’, passions which we know have not been awakened in her by Barry. This she has not considered extraordinary, simply ‘Rather a pity, that was all’. The understatement and irony of that statement are soon to be proved.
Glengarry makes Margaret realize her potential as a sexual being. In doing so they are both ‘prey to elemental instincts, sharing with the habitant of the lair and the dweller in the temple the throb of creation’s invincible urge’. Their rela
tionship is one of passion, of ‘madness’, one in which reason (a civilized human response) is dead. Margaret’s relationship with Barry has been quite different; reason was paramount in a relationship which was largely without passion. And that perhaps is why Margaret, if she were prepared to admit it, has found the marriage rather boring.
So far in her marriage with Barry, Margaret has not been exposed to what is expected of her as a wife. The station on which they live is isolated from any other human settlement, and no one is seen to come into the property from outside it. We never see the Messengers interacting with people other than those with whom they work. And in that situation they are dominant—Barry because he pays the wages of those on the station, and Margaret because ‘the sheer gold and grace of her maturity had enslaved them all’. Glengarry is the first outsider to enter this self-contained unit, and he brings with him the conditioning and expectations of a society of which the inhabitants of the station are inevitably a part.
Margaret’s relationship with Glengarry does expose her to those expectations of society. In showing her what her position as a wife really is—the property of her husband equal in status to his sheep—Glengarry tames Margaret as surely as any animal on the station is tamed. Devanny illustrates this taming process by drawing the following parallel. Soon after he arrives on the station, Glengarry takes up the challenge of taming a three-year-old horse that no one else has been able to control. The horse resembles Margaret, who has persuaded everyone else to her way of seeing. On the surface both the horse and Margaret appear to be conforming—the horse is described as being of gentle appearance; Margaret appears to be content as a lady, wife, and mother, but her mind is far from being as gentle and conforming as might be expected. Glengarry succeeds in taming the horse, and through the passions he arouses in Margaret, her love for him, and her consequent compromise of her own principles, he succeeds in taming her too.
Glengarry makes Margaret aware of the power Barry has over her as her husband. Glengarry sees women as inferior to men. Margaret explains his position to him in the following way: ‘You know that I, the individual, am your equal: but you can’t separate the individual from the class. As a woman I must submit myself to the man who is my keeper, for the sake of preserving male prerogatives. You, by encroaching on another man’s preserves, felt yourself a traitor to your class…. Really, you are my enemy— All men are my enemies.’ It is a Marxist analysis, of women as a class, of human relationships seen purely in economic terms. By her analysis, Margaret manages to keep Glengarry temporarily in her power, and to dictate the course their relationship will follow. There is to be no more sexual contact, because it awakens in Glengarry primitive passions such as jealousy which may disrupt the rational nature of life on the station. It appears once more that Margaret is the tamer, rather than the tamed, yet she has not reckoned with the power of passions she has unleashed in Glengarry and which he has revealed in her.
For a second time Devanny introduces characters who are to be catalysts in the plot. The Longstairs arrive on the station at a time when ‘things went along smoothly at Maunganui’. They disrupt the whole fabric of life—they preach socialism to the workers, Miette’s dog upsets the children, and most importantly they introduce Margaret to the ‘primitive passion’ of jealousy, so that she is no longer able to keep Glengarry at arm’s length. Once she has submitted to the power he has over her because she does not want to lose him to Miette, she is made to realize that ‘he had stripped from her the rights of a human being and placed her with the cattle on her husband’s estate’. And he can do this because ‘in the early years of her life, she had become a wife’. At last, Margaret like the horse is tamed. Yet in the taming that thin veneer of civilization is torn aside to show the animal and barbaric nature below. Like animals, these once rational people kill themselves and each other because they can see no other way out of the predicament in which they find themselves.
The solution which Devanny suggests for the situation is a socialist one. The message is articulated by Ian Longstair when he describes to Margaret a future in which ‘a race of emancipated women, free in body and mind, economically independent, choosing their own mates, marching onward to that goal which the finite mind of man cannot even now perceive’, will exist in a communist economic system without private property in which the working class has been freed from economic slavery.
Margaret has already made a Marxist analysis of her situation when she chastises Glengarry for seeing her as a member of a certain class, rather than as an individual. One wonders therefore about the extent to which Devanny really believes in Margaret’s superior intellect when she has to be educated in something she already understands by a character who has done little to win the reader’s sympathy.
It is at this stage in the novel that Devanny’s criticism of it as ‘confused’ is appropriate. The message Ian Longstair delivers is clear enough, and is consistent with what has already happened and been discussed in the novel. However the Longstairs are such unattractive characters that any reader would find it difficult to sympathize with what they have to say. Miette’s version of bodily freedom is closer to prostitution than to a higher ideal of free love, and is unlikely to convert many to the idea that women should be free in mind and body. The fact that Margaret sympathizes with the message and regards it as illuminating does not make it any more persuasive. Her own life is in such chaos as a result of her principles that few readers are likely to want to adopt her ways of living and thinking.
What is clearly and powerfully conveyed in the novel is Devanny’s analysis of the institution of the family as she saw it had developed in the Western capitalist world. Devanny sees as a consequence of this development the bondage of the woman within the confines of the marriage relationship. She was to acknowledge later that motherhood implied a certain kind of slavery for women, but in the early novels she does not display this awareness. Margaret’s role as a mother increases her economic dependence on Barry, but she does not recognize this. Far from recognizing the limiting nature of the maternal role, Devanny glories in it. It is motherhood which makes Margaret the beautifully mature woman she is presented as for most of the novel.
One should note however that Devanny’s portrayal of motherhood in this novel (and in several which followed it) is grossly sentimentalized and romanticized. Margaret’s children never throw tantrums, fight with each other, or seem to need correction. Nor does Margaret ever need to face their physical demands, except for that of breast-feeding them which is shown more for its sensual than its nutritive value.
Devanny’s ideas about socialism are expressed less clearly than her ideas about the family. Because her analysis of the family is a socialist one her ideas about the family and about socialism are inextricably linked. However, it is clear that she related much more strongly to socialist ideas about the family than she did to other aspects of socialism.
Devanny’s ideas about economics emerge in attitudes to the workers and their conditions on Barry Messenger’s farm. In the first chapter of the novel Barry has cause to reflect on the nature of the men he employs, and his reflection is hardly flattering to them. He sees them as ‘machines putting through a certain amount of work in return for which they were allowed to live’. Society has placed these men ‘on a level with the sheep’, so no one can expect from them finer feelings such as that of compassion for animals, because that kind of sentiment comes only with ‘refinement, a certain amount of cultural development’. At the beginning of the novel Devanny reveals the confusion of her own feelings about the working class. Theoretically she should see them as Ian Longstair sees them—as the vanguard of the new order. But to Devanny they are a pretty low order of humanity because they lack the culture she thinks so important. Yet culture is a natural consequence of the civilization she saw as obscuring men’s and women’s true nature from themselves.
Devanny has no sympathy with the working class; her belief in them as the harbingers of a new order is theor
etical only. Her sympathies are with the Messengers and their life of culture, wealth, luxury, and plenty. The situation she allows to develop around them is of far more interest to her than is the question of wage slavery which Barry’s workers exemplify.
Interwoven with Devanny’s ideas about the family and its future are her theories about ‘the Maori race’. Like Margaret Messenger, Devanny had read the works of Edward Tregear, Elsdon Best, and Johannes Andersen on the Maori. Devanny believed that the pre-European Maori had a communal form of family life, and that consequently there were not the same property relationships between people as are found in a society in which the nuclear family is the norm. The Maori form of family life was therefore to be admired and eventually emulated, because it would free women from economic dependence on their husbands and domestic tasks would be shared by all adult members of the group. Although Devanny admired this aspect of Maori life, she also saw most Maoris as being less cultured and therefore less civilized than most Europeans. This meant however that they were more in touch with those ‘primitive passions’ which civilization has hidden from Europeans.