The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
mother had been a popular actress in San Francisco, who died giving birth at the age of 19, the narrator comments:
The utter calmness, and freedom from embarrassment, with which these announcements were made, almost shook Miss Belinda’s faith in her own identity. Strange to say, until this moment she had scarcely given a thought to her brother’s wife; and to find herself sitting in her own genteel little parlor, behind her own tea service, and with her hand upon her own teapot, hearing that this wife had been a young person who had been “a great favorite” upon the stage, in a region peopled, as she had been led to suppose, by gold-diggers and escaped convicts, was almost too much for her to support herself under. But she did support herself bravely, when she had time to rally. (21–22)
Miss Belinda’s identity is anchored by her domestic, material objects figured in the tea service and teapot, which are, emphatically, “her own” while they are also the objects that facilitate the most ordinary and ritualized community activity, the Slowbridge tea parties. The notion of public display unsettles her fundamentally domestic identity, an identity reinforced by the community activity of taking tea. Her hand, resting on the teapot, enables her to “support herself bravely,” the teapot a reassurance of her community values. For Belinda personal identity and community identity are one. Questions of identity, however, concern Octavia as well, and in her relationship with Lady Theobald’s granddaughter Lucia, also 19, she strives to find a kind of emotional coherence between her English family connections (and, thus, identity) and her American upbringing and home (and, thus, identity). The riddle Octavia seems set to solve is the possibility of unifying her geographically bifurcated family history and current relations with her personal identity. What community provides the material context and the shared values that can make her identity something more than mere individualism? That community does not yet exist on either side of the Atlantic for Octavia, so she herself becomes the focal point of a transatlantic community in the making, which begins to emerge in a series of personal interactions that reshape Octavia and that transform Slowbridge.
In an effort to manipulate Lucia into marrying a man who, Lady Theobald thinks, would help secure Lucia (and by extension, herself) a fortune, Lady Theobald encourages Lucia to spend time with Octavia after Octavia becomes an object of interest for the, unbeknownst to him, intended. Lucia and Octavia become friends and agree to “help each other” by each telling the other her faults. Lucia says:
“If you will tell me when I am wrong, I will try to—to have the courage to tell you. That will be good practice for me. What I want most is courage and frankness, and I am sure it will take courage to make up my mind to tell you of your—of your mistakes.” Octavia regarded her with mingled admiration and respect. “I think that’s a splendid idea,” she said. (175)
Unselfconscious courage and frankness are appropriate descriptors of the qualities in Octavia that have so unsettled Slowbridge, in addition to her visually arresting appearance. The first “mistake” Lucia points out to Octavia concerns her hair; the wavy bangs that obscure her forehead, she suggests, make Octavia resemble an actress. Octavia responds by directly cutting off the bangs, an act she instantly regrets, saying that “anyone who was used to seeing [her hair with bangs] […] would think I looked horrid,” to which Lucia replies: “They would think you prettier,—a good deal” (181). Subsequent events confirm Lucia’s assessment and Octavia concedes the point, figuratively becoming more herself in adjusting to the expectations of Slowbridge. That physical adjustment extends to Octavia’s moral bonding with the town reflected in Reverend Poppleton’s assessment of Octavia: “I wish that they [the ladies of Slowbridge] knew her—her generosity and kindness of heart and ready sympathy with misfortune” (193–94), the very qualities the ladies of Slowbridge (and of Cranford) assume among themselves, and that by the end of the novel they recognize in Octavia.
A Fair Barbarian ends with Miss Belinda’s brother, Martin Bassett, arriving in Slowbridge with Octavia’s fiancé, Jack Belasys, in tow. The wedding takes place is Slowbridge, affirming the new English grounding of Octavia’s American identity and extending that identity to her American husband in a celebration of Anglo-American unity. The Reverend Poppleton officiates, and after the wedding Octavia showers her Slowbridge relatives and friends with gifts, singling out Lucia for special notice with a gift that “dazzled all beholders.” The last words of the novel confirm that the wedding represents more than the union of two individuals.
When she was borne away by the train, with her father and husband, and Miss Belinda, whose bonnet-strings were bedewed with tears, the Rev. Alfred Poppleton was the last man who shook hands with her. He held in his hand a large bouquet, which Octavia herself had given him out of her abundance. “Slowbridge will miss you, Miss—Mrs. Belasys,” he faltered. “I—I shall miss you. Perhaps we—may even meet again. I have thought that, perhaps, I should like to go to America.”
And, as the train puffed out of the station and disappeared, he stood motionless for several seconds; and a large and brilliant drop of moisture appeared on the calyx of the lily which formed the centre-piece of his bouquet. (258)
The American presence that had so shaken Slowbridge at the novel’s opening, in the end, has become, like Octavia, an object of desire; the Reverend Poppleton, representative of the state church, the center of English village life and moral values, is drawn out from the village, yearning for an idea of America embodied by Octavia—youthful, beautiful, wealthy and an agent of social change through the making of a new community where the traditional and the vital interanimate each other. She is also, quite obviously, an object of Poppleton’s sexual desire, which becomes sublimated in his wish to go someday to America. Change, thus, does not necessarily mean the uncertainty of an unknown future; it means equally the rediscovery of the past. The tear on the lily, a flower watered with the yearnings of a man representative of the moral core of the nation and suggestive of spring—of Easter renewal—combined with the image of the train, present in embryo an image of the organic growth of an Anglo-American future. The sexual undercurrent of the novel underscores the town’s and the nation’s need for revitalization.
I am describing here a literary manifestation that anticipates some 20 years in advance what Alex Zwerdling describes as a “displacement of traditional Anglo-American rivalry and mistrust by a new spirit of concord.”16 In Burnett’s novel of 1880, deeply responsive to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of 1853, we see how “traditional mistrust” was woven into the fabric of individual family histories. By presenting an estranged but ultimately reconciled Anglo-American family in the Bassetts, and in basing that family in a village recognizable from its original imaginative manifestation in the 1850s as quintessentially English and fragile, Burnett anticipates a larger cultural project that created conditions within which later political, economic and social accommodations could be articulated. The concessions to their own misjudgment that the ladies of Slowbridge make in their final acceptance of Octavia, despite what they had misperceived as her crass materialism and arrogance, coupled with Octavia’s realization that she has much to learn about the importance of community customs and values, anticipate in miniature the concessions, Zwerdling argues, that had to be made between England and America as the center of imperial power shifted from London to Washington after 1898 and the Spanish-American War. “If Britons and Americans can learn to think of themselves as a single people, fulfilling their joint destiny,” he explains, “the unpleasant fact of the passage of power from one nation to the other might be ignored. The glorious fate of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ thus serves as a useful myth to assuage Britain’s inevitable resentment” (27).
Burnett’s contemporary critics could not have anticipated the thematic resonance of A Fair Barbarian, a resonance that became more audible after the turn of the century. Most would have agreed with the reviewer in the April 1881 issue of The Literary World, who concluded a review of the novel with these words: “Mrs. Burnett’s manner is at her lightest in it, well suited to a sketch designed simply to amuse the reader, with only the faintest shadow of a moral lying within any of its outlines.”17 As I have suggested, however, the comic cultural collisions