Intoning the Male and Female Voices in a Novel by Eva Figes

Abstract

The book Light, with Monet at Giverny: A Novel is a story that imaginatively describes a day in the life of the Monet family. It is written by one of the feminist writers of the first wave which ended in the seventies, “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett”,1 as described by Susan Watkins in Twentieth Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Watkins' book describes these women as being opposed to contemporary interpretations of Freudian theory, and in particular to certain aspects of his description of the Oedipus complex which they see as patriarchal and arising from capitalist values2 and the hypothesis that hysteria is self-motived rather than a problem of sexuality.3 Yet what Sally Robinson recognizes in Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction4 as the refreshing plurality of the voices of these feminist authors is characteristic as well of those who remain faithful to religion or Christianity, which are traditionally feminine voices. This paper searches for the developing voice of women in this work of fiction by Eva Figes and recognizes as well the presence of the continuing male voices. A positive aspect of Figes' novels is the fact that she often finds a way for a character to thrive despite harsh conditions.Throughout the novel, exterior sounds such as a clock counting the hours, a nearby passing train, singing birds and galloping horses create some sonorous effects. As the land lies amongst hills and a river, echoes can also be heard. These sounds punctuate the dialogues and silences within which much of the meaning of the story is contained. In this novel about an artistic family, the auditory effects are enhanced by visual motifs of light and color. In another of her novels, The Knot, there is a similar recurrence of ‘[n]ot merely sound, but now light, coming and going‘.5 Light follows human voices and activities that accompany the passing of the daytime sun. However, if the auditory and visual effects in The Knot may be broadly attached to hallucinations, in the present novel under discussion, light and sound come from natural sources, and indeed for the patriarch of the family, the visual artist Claude Monet, the sun is central to his creativity. The title of the novel is an obvious allusion to his life and work.The writer Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) described in 1889 Monet's Impressionist style of painting that portrayed light and water as if they were contained in an envelope.6 Mirbeau also appears as a character in Figes' novel. The theme of visual art within a literary work requires that the art leave within the reader a sentimental or existential impression. The critic Sally Robinson discusses the impact of painting as a subject for a novel and concludes that the visual effect replaces the word as subject.7 Monet was an artist who chose to reproduce the natural world rather than imaginatively create a new image, such as accomplished by his successors such as Picasso and by Courbet, a predecessor who in 1854 painted his studio as L'Atelier, Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years of my Artistic Life. In rephrasing a comment of Julian Barnes, Robinson discusses the artistic motivation behind naturalistic painting and imaginative portraits, which “ helps answer the question of why Courbet is painting a landscape in his studio rather than en plein air: Because he is doing more than reproducing the known, established world, he is creating it himself. From now on, the painting says, it is the artist who creates the world rather than God.”8 Monet creates a new world within the context of what he sees outside. This model of mirroring the outside world is also seen in the minds of the characters who we realize are experiencing existential and personal doubt at an historical time when the Great War was approaching and the social mood was cautious. One hoped for a God and interiorly fought an increasing despair in man's ability to live peacefully together. Using Robinson's analysis, we can probe further into the atmosphere of the volatility of the historical period before the war by considering Monet's obsession with painting water lilies. Describing visual art in a novel allows the author to replace character development with thoughtful imagery and Robinson therefore sees novels about art as innovative in that they are more representative of a narration of thought than a narration of action, more about words and their ability to communicate than about character.9 Water lilies being the subject of Monet's painting at Giverny, Figes narrates how he painted a beautiful yet fragile plant slimly anchored to the bottom of a pond, a representation of beauty in arrested motion, as in Keat's “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”When making note of the use of auditory voices and silence in the novel's characters, we are indebted to Paul Ricoeur's writing about narrative and identity. Ricoeur has noted that such common auditory effects as the spoken dialogue, the monologue and silence are generally understood to emanate from a coherent communicating being. In Light, three outside voices heard are those of the author, a narrator and the author's persona, the gender of the two latter voices being ambiguous. An aesthetic discourse of abstract imagery occurs between the beings at Giverny. There are occasional direct and indirect allusions to traditional voices of poetry and prose such as William Carlos Williams, Hermann Heine, Jewish exilic authors and the novelist Charlotte Brontë. The polite predicatability of ongoing dialogues has a static effect, as if it follows patterns that have long existed and is as anchored as the water lilies. The stylistics of the voice effects are interesting and perhaps merely that. Brian Richardson has commented that it is unreasonable to assume that an innovative use of voice in a novel implies an ideological stance.10 When voices paint a sound picture it shows an aesthetic style with little ideological content.Yet Figes is interested in ethical issues of peace and conflict. Since many of the characters are often silent, can we judge them to be ethical people living in a truthful society? As Monet paints, he contemplates the scenery in silence and certain women in the story choose to remain silent within the traditional feminine social role. The reason for the women's silence may be seen in their felt need to not misrepresent what they deem necessary to say. Emma Smith in the journal Contemporary Women's Writing draws to out attention a quotation from the critic Andrew Gibson regarding silence and truth. While encouraging us to read Spinoza on this topic, Gibson says of truth and knowledge that “In the context of [a Levinasian] ethics for which ethical and epistemological questions are inseparable, distinctions between modes of narration are also the crucial ethical distinctions.”11 Spinoza, in his writing “On miracles” states that the story of a miracle is written to “inspire wonder”12 and that therefore we should consider who is describing a miracle and what we know about that person when we evaluate its real or its metaphorical value. Can such a novel with its long silences express ethical statements about war and tragedy? The search for truth lies within the domain of ethics, a traditionally male pursuit and the male conversation in the novel is unhesitatingly straightforward, in contrast to the female voice.The narrators are less so and her male narrator, Monet, as well as many of the female characters intentionally mask their critical attitudes, towards others as well as towards art and given Gibson's analysis, a writer using a supposedly omniscient narrator or a narrator with a partial knowledge of the facts or with a desire to write only through metaphor could sow confusion through a deliberate omission or an unexplained contradiction. The writer may be motivated to be silent on certain things and so to conceal events in order to complicate the plot and render the narration more interesting or he or she may judge them to be extraneous to the point. Finally, he or she may wish to avoid social or political repercussions. A similar scenario of withholding knowledge and opinions presents itself in Winter Journey when a critically important situation involving the female character becomes a visually provocative event represented by the sign : ‘The folder at the bottom of the bed said NOT TO BE EXAMINED BY THE PATIENT.'13 When reading Spinoza, one realizes that the philosopher recognized just such a necessary ethical constraint when a writer of fiction is deciding what to write about in describing hope and miracles and what to leave out. Eva Figes writes with a plurality of voices, from marginalized women whose voices are often muted, or from superior men, and to borrow an expression from Emma Smith, she values a ‘democracy of voice.'14 These voices speak in many ways and their words do not represent ideas or ideologies,15 but present muted realities and events as fleeting yet as anchored as the short life of water lilies.The voices in Light are often detached from reality in an existential manner and in the context of female demureness. From an aesthetic point of view, the characters' use of silence, or white space, creates an impressionable effect. In the presentation of silent voices, the image of an empty page arises when Monet's wife, Alice, writes a household list on a blank piece of paper. She is organizing the home as well as gratifying a need to impose order on disorganized thoughts. Although her list is dismally brief, containing only one item, it nevertheless speaks to the imagination and is the beginning of a positive revelation of her capabilities as a domestic housekeeper if not a servant. The allegorical figure of the passive servant is indeed within a recognized literary framework. Other female characters are also associated with allegorical masks: Marthe is the helper and Germaine, the lovesick girl. They act in a way to show the outer world their allegorical mask that in turn conveniently hides their individuality. While we know some of their inner thoughts and feelings, or we can deduce them from spaces, the women are largely protected by the mask and ideally, the men feel reassured by the transparency of their outwardly simple appearance.Further, the female voice is melancholy, a nature associated with existentialism. The sad and anxious voices of the women emanate from positions of passivity that recall the sitting figure of Durer's “Melancholia.” Figes often depicts women sitting in isolation at a far distance from others in such dark interiors as a mental hospital, a ghetto, a filthy hotel room or, in the case of Alice, sitting or lying down in her bedroom with the door shut. In their mental suffering we recognize the ‘moral pre-eminence'16 of all authentic self-expression. It is implicitly noble to humbly endure pain, as in the servant figure, or “cleaning-lady,” as found in the novel B, she may sit only after completing her work. The housekeeper in Winter Journey expresses her activity as ongoing until “eternity splits into a second and only one direction remains which ever way you turn, [then] I will sit down.”17Other women in Figes' novels who are more lethargic and taciturn prefer to be left undisturbed, hoping that in keeping an isolated distance from men they will have space to tell their own story. The woman who narrates the novel Days is lying in a hospital bed and in Nelly's Version she prefers to stay in her hotel room. Their worlds are both real and unreal, any containments of unreality being promiscuously reflected in iridescent lights, such as within the hospital's electronic equipment, the “faint mauve shadow that darkens like a fist on the horizon”18 or in the housekeeper's bedroom, “the face of the tin alarm clock [which] glowed green in the dark.”19 As we begin to understand more about them, it is seen that their lethargy is helping them work through past memories and present realities. When Alice Monet is dressed in mourning and withdraws to her quiet, dark room at a moment during the picnic outdoors, it is understood that the shade and darkness therein will hasten the coming of evening and ease her mind. Her avoidance of verbal and visual communication reflects more an existential questioning of the meaning of life in the tragic sense of Hamlet's paralyzing angst rather than a social fear or depression, this hypothesis being supported by the use of black in Innocence and Experience to represent self-doubt rather than mourning.20To compensate for the absence of gaiety in Giverny, the garden flowers are appreciated for their bright colors in the sunlight. The polarities of light and somber grey darkness are in a moment united in Claude Monet's thoughts: he speculates as to whether the servant girl is indeed doing what he wishes and imagines her to be doing, which is dusting the corners of the rooms to rid them of the dust motes that he supposes she would be able to see clearly reflected in the sunlight. He is again reproducing the world in his mind's eye. An appreciation of dust is unique to the visual artist. A painter such as Delacroix includes the topic in his journal as an important element within a picture since its hues will diminish the original color of the object, such as a table or a floor. In the same way, colors of flowers appear different in the shadow. Further, to make the picture appear real, the painter must mix paints to produce a shadowy grey and then apply them so as not to corrupt the brightness of flowers or the polished table.To return to the question of the ethics of truth revealed raised by Spinoza, both shadows and sun can be seen in their reality and both should be included in a narration just as they are within a painting, although in a story they have different connotations than they would in a painting. The descriptive image of the mysterious, shadowy servant appearing in Monet's mind is understood as being part of a darker allegory of the story. The persona assists in the creation of the shadow, and although Monet does not seem to recognize it, the servant girl is his wife, Alice's double. Identity is relative, and social symbiosis is noted in an ironic comment from Mirbeau: “‘The trouble with servants,' said Octave airily, ‘is their tendency to get corrupted by the people they serve.'”21 The fragile border between truth and falsehood, light and shadow, clarity and obscurity, servant and master and men and women is evident where the colors are seen to run and blend together. The use of allegory facilitates our grasp of this concept and images such as masks and portraits lend themselves to seeing a second self as a double in a mirror.If the women's personalities are portrayed from the various perspectives of allegorical roles within a family, the presentation of the male figure is more actualized in reality. Claude Monet embodies a historically real and legendary figure within a socially patriarchal society. As a father of a Christian family, he protects the fragile female existences and as such must interact with the natural world of Giverny – a house surrounded by gardens, close to a pond, upstream of a valley. Nature, which is not a part of Christianity, but which was recognized in our pagan past, observes and participates in their lives. Nature is fully yet simply described in a pragmatic manner as she would appear to the eyes of a painter. In the gardens are found the simple echoes of a family life within an archipelago of water, fields and trees. The physical presentation of the space is sensible and pragmatic. Monet's decision to remove the protecting pine trees that had lined the drive to the house was met with displeasure by Alice. The element of ecological ideology inherent in growing trees and respecting all primitive conditions are aligned positively with the natural redemptive qualities of nature. Eden should be left untouched.However, Monet prefers sunlight and cuts down some of Giverny's natural setting, thus removing parts of its shadowy mystery. He worships the sun, rising in the morning to greet the outdoors and counting each hour of passing sunlight as it is seen beside the lengthening shadows. When painting this light and shadow he is relaxed and at peace. His wife asks for the protection of trees as she dislikes the vagaries of the outside world and although the symptoms of her melancholy do not include a consumptive hypersensitivity towards the elements, she does prefer being in solitude indoors. As described by the third narrating voice, for her and for the reader, there emanates from these trees and this archipelago a symbolic reality that is from a different eschatological realm. The trees, important in Jewish symbolism, have an association with natural time and with our ability to understand the world. At the end of the story, the shadows are impressive.Within Alice's dark thoughts and as well in the imagination of other members of the family, sinister elements may occasionally be found. These are in effect predecessors of the approaching conflict. Occasionally, in her mind, Spinozian figures of ghosts, God's vengeance and corruption form a fearsome triangle. She mourns a lost daughter and sees the child's premature death as retribution for her liaison with Monet. For his part, the artist is depicted as a fox waiting to catch domesticated animals as they approach his den. Sometimes the prey in question is the sun as “Slowly, silently, it steals over the horizon and falls into my mirror.” (33) The next sentence in sequence in this particular paragraph describes his daughter Lily's inner thoughts, thus juxtaposing a father's animal appetite with the image of the silent and innocent young girl :We are then also introduced to Lily's playful dreams. She is counting steps and observing the dew on a spider web glistening in the sunlight. Her spider web observation will be recalled to us later by the analytical mind of the third narrator. The silent narrators often repeat, interprete and explain the silent thoughts of the female characters.This persona of the author, presented as an unknown silent figure who looks at this world from a detached point of view, is intimately connected to the characters and as already discussed, his or her vocalized impressions and observations arise from the natural spaces surrounding the home. It is a supernatural, eternal voice, although not a god. At the beckon of the persona, a character tends to lose his or her rational ground and she or he recedes into the background. We lose sight of why the character was doing something, and become more aware of the immediacy of her action and the time of the movement. This transition is indicated by a diegetic shift in modes of speech (that is, a shift in narrative perspective). For example, in the following passage a temporal adverb is emphatically placed to allow a focus on the present and the character's immediate loss of free will:The emphasis on the temporal reminds us that this is a semi-historical novel. As the painter has finished his morning work, this abstract shadowy voice is heard again as it recalls young Lily Monet‘s activities of the morning. The temporal transition occurs following the narration of Monet's inner thoughts and we are ushered into the exclusive point of view of this third metaphysical voice. In this passage, the voice is describing metaphorically the effects of the sun, and the sun is a natural marker of time passing: Lily had been searching for spider webs and the sun “dried out Lily's cobweb. […] It blistered the paint of window shutters […] caught in the web of growth and dust”(41). In contrast to family members who speak about light and life, this voice will recall to us lost growth, decline and death and their occurrence in time. Such spiritual voices are associated with women who are traditionally dependent, relying on the supernatural for their salvation, and who believe more readily in irrational forces.Within the Monet family itself, communication is restrained and topics such as death and sentimentality are never mentioned. Such social silences between the people increase their sense of isolation. At the beginning of the novel, despite Claude Monet's efforts to not disturb his wife in the early morning, Alice Monet is only too aware of his actions in the adjoining room. Remaining still, she quietly anticipates the tasks that the new day will demand of her. The narrator reveals that “She had lost all sense of time” (18). Her inability to leave her room and her general speechlessness reflect the fragmented identity of the isolated individual. In the words of the sociologist Jerry Schuchalter in his book Poetry and Truth: Variations on Holocaust Testimony, a painful memory is “pure, free from doctrine or ideology, only intent on recording the events as they happened, its moral pre-eminence resulting from the incredible suffering experienced by the individual victim”.22 Alice's silence is powerfully existentialist, and is quietly observed. Family communication, whether silent or verbal, is intended to facilitate social attachment and listening to their dialogues or interpreting their silences allows us to escape into the ontological dynamics of this functional family.Despite her silence, Alice Monet “is still there. The female (or male) voice is neither lost, nor ignored […] but her identity [is] now defined by her absence, ultimately becoming the creation of other people's epistolotary enterprises – a projection of their longings, wishes, and hopes.”23 Her voice will eventually disappear from the narrative to be replaced by spoken voices such as those of children or family members. The purpose of Alice's ongoing and ever present reflection and silence is to finally recover “memory […] [,] meaning the end to trauma and the creation of an intact identity.”24 The echoes of a voice persist although Alice does not truly ever succeed in finding her own voice. Ironically, while Monet's son speaks for his father at a moment when his father cannot find the words, the daughters do not have the same ability to help their mother during social conversation. “‘He doesn't approve of progress,'”(65) declares Michel when a discussion ends in an embarrassing silence during the dinner. The male voice asserts itself in its reasoning.If Monet's paintings are to be understood within the context of this natural environment which he undoubtedly loved and wherein he found inspiration, we must understand Walter Benjamin's comment that his Impressionist paintings were created as a reflection of the modern experience of the world. In Benjamin's view, Monet would have wanted to show how people who live in large cities filter streetscapes out of their consciousness. In his interpretation of Monet's picture of the cathedral of Chartres, Benjamin interprets its essence as a large pile of stones in the shape of an anthill which is how the cathedral is experienced by the city dwellers who, in hastily passing by, regularly overlook any and all surrounding architecture.25 Today, we look at this impressionistic painting from the perspective of light and we describe it as “lacey” and beautiful.Either way, Monet's rendering of the cathedral allows the object to recede into the background while its subject, light and sun, form a visible image, beautiful or not, natural or impressionistic. Similarly, light and external sounds and voices also shape the story in the novel and their absence or presence allow for a narrative rhythm. Family life at Giverny as a whole follows this rise and decline of subject matter. The people's thoughts and actions are lost and then found within the frame of light and sound. Just as with the lacey windows of the cathedral when the light passes through, when the characters are lightly described with colors, they become more visible and transparent. When the characters are well developed through dialogue and intent, form and content, they are more clearly understood.Figes plays with such aesthetic impressions. In an early passage in Light, she presents the image of an envelope of colors and light when Monet is using a rowboat in the early morning to go out to the water lilies. His activity follows the first spoken words in the story as he says to his servant Auguste, “‘Let's go,'” (11). The two men proceed onto the pond of glistening and changing light with fish to keep an eye on in a thin shimmering envelope of a boat. Monet was to actually paint of course these flowers and boats. Another actual painting alluded to within the novel is that of a woman and a child, wearing hats, descending a small hill along a footpath. In the foreground is mirrored a second pair, a woman and child, leading them onward. The colors and motions of these echoing motifs are expressive of life and light. The subjects of the bright and sunny painting, a woman and a young girl in summer dresses and with a parasol, move into the foreground while an identical pair fills the lower quadrant as a double. Such rhythms of light and shadow are in constant motion within the novel, beginning with Monet's morning painting excursion and with Alice's hesitant start to the day. Rhythms of light and shadow form an impression of a slow but constant trickling series of moving images that function as well to shape our understanding of the characters.In the book's opening, this famous painter of Impressionism is lying in bed as his silent thoughts turn back in on themselves. At this moment, “The sky was still dark when he opened his eyes and saw it through the uncontained window” (5). The only sound is the song of a bird song occurring as Claude quietly leaves the house, a sound that does not seem to enter his consciousness. As indicated by temporal shifters, the song is only heard by the author, for “Now [emphasis added] a single bird had begun to call out in the gloom. […] its sound persisted, echoing through the cool shadowy spaces […] Soon it was answered by a second cry” (8). Monet's historical reality cannot be denied, although the novel is more about the person as a fictional character than about history. Within the story “history and memory occupy two distinct planes, with individual memory being the final arbiter of truth.”26 His personality as described indicates an interest in the physical world where appetite encourages art. He is inspired by the sight of the valley and archipelago but will often pause for a cigarette. He is at ease with time and space, using both to express and fulfill his needs.Alice, on the other hand, struggles to gain a foothold. Living in her memory, she is out of step with time and out of joint with the physical and real world. Continually mourning for her daughter, Alice lives “as though,” a phrase used repeatedly in the second chapter of the book. Weak and tired, she merely observes that the “girls would find husbands [and] suddenly it seemed to her that the room was empty and that she was no longer in it”(42). If on the one hand, this silent thought refers to her melancholy, it also alludes to a vast angelic space, repository of human suffering. As a fictional character, Claude Monet's voice is only imagined, and his known or unknown words mere speculations. We read that, “He heard only […]. He could smell […]. He took stock […] nothing had changed”(12) within the context of his desired lighting of the background for his painting and we are led to believe in his word and in his knowledge.His personality has three obvious attributes. Firstly, towards family and friends he speaks without hesitation about his needs and less openly about his opinions. He assumes that his voice is heard. His frankly energetic personality is the first voice heard in the story as he and Auguste approach the rowboat. Secondly, he has ongoing artistic thoughts about light, its presence, appearance and use. He waits for light, a natural reality essential to his art and thus his work, and his family mirrors this obsession. Thirdly, he is motivated by desire and pleasure, a trait clearly described by the sensual manner in which he is shown descending into the rowboat that carries him onto the shimmering envelope of the pond. From there, his interior voice accompanies the sounds of brush strokes and reflects his consciousness of the greater world as he paints: “The water lilies were fully open now […and] he was conscious of a growing edge to things”(40). As the sunlight begins to cast unfavorably longer shadows, Monet slams the box of paint shut, leaving the painting for another day and the story enters its second phase which is the account of the food preparation by the women and of the picnic.As we are introduced individually to each of the female characters, it is difficult not to see passivity as their core. On the other hand, in Lily we see a young girl who has similar qualities as Catherine Healthcliff from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Figes has admitted a liking for the strength of this woman over that of Jane Eyre. However, the intertextuality with the latter creation of Charlotte Brontë appears in the description of light striking Lily in the face (38) and again in the struggle between Lily and her brother Jimmy. Lily is sitting on the veranda – a shared female space where sewing is done, and other quiet female tasks – when Jimmy approaches and looks down at her. His two feet seem, to her, to form a triangle with her head, an obvious spatial advantage in an abstract construction of dominance.At that moment, she quietly refuses to acquiesce to his willful demand to give him a clay water pipe (48) and with regard to childhood happiness the narrator remarks that “Memory holds the shining bubble, bright with the newborn glory of the world” (51). Later, when Jimmy boldly releases her helium balloon into the sky,