|
by Mary Webb
A full introduction to this novel has been written for this website by Gladys Mary Coles, President of the Mary Webb Society.
Gone to earth was written in 1916 during the dark uncertainty and horror of the First World War. It is a novel most intimately related to this sad period; yet there is no direct mention of the war in its pages. This poignant story of a country girl, set in a remote area of the Shropshire border hills, and with only a handful of rural characters, is nevertheless an implicit and profoundly moving expression of the tragic spirit of those years when multitudes, slaughtered, were indeed 'gone to earth'.
Mary Webb imbued this novel with a lyrical passion and urgency that never falters. The narrative pace is rapid, and the sense of inevitability sustained, as the tragedy is worked out. The portrayal of Hazel Woodus, the central character, is, as John Buchan said, 'the chief beauty of the book....done with extraordinary tenderness and subtlety'. While Hazel is a vivid, original imaginative creation, she is also the embodiment of various aspects and attitudes of Mary Webb: her most elemental self, as a true child of earth, totally at one with nature, experiencing a 'mystical exaltation'; and warm, tender-hearted, vehement in her 'creed of love and pity', in her loathing of the hunt, of cruelty and killing.
At eighteen, Hazel is completely unsophisticated, knowing little of the ways of society. Vital, naive, uninhibited, she has a wistful quality in 'her morning air' her 'crude sweetness'; and there is something inexpressible about her, as there is about the landscape to which she belongs. She lives in an isolated country hovel with her uncaring father Abel, a gifted harpist, bee-keeper and coffin-maker. From her Welsh gipsy mother, who is dead, she has inherited a book of spells and charms, her Celtic nature and her love of the wild. Friend and defender of helpless creatures, Hazel identifies closely with Foxy, her pet fox-cub, and it is suggested from the beginning that their destinies are bound up together--in an ominous opening paragraph they are depicted standing in the lane above the cottage, 'two small sentient things' stained 'by the red light from the west', so that they 'seemed to be dipped in blood'. They are predestined to be the hunted, to be victims of cruelty in a callous world. Hazel's loveliness, spontaneity and innocence attract two men who desire and pursue her. At first she wants neither the one nor the other. The gentle Edward Marston, a Non-conformist minister, who marries her, wishes to protect her and unfortunately does not consummate the marriage; whereas the virile, fox-hunting squire, Jack Reddin, arouses her sexually. She becomes a divided being, torn between her conflicting spiritual and physical needs.
Throughout the novel Hazel is the vehicle of Mary Webb's convictions and themes. The spiritual nature of love, a recurring, cohesive theme in Mary Webb's work, is here part of her more dominant and pressing concern--human cruelty, the underlying savagery in civilised man, the sacrifice of the innocent.
Reddin and Marston are representative of the opposing physical and spiritual values between which Hazel swings (this gives the flavour of a Morality): the well-defined contrast between them is fundamental to plot and theme, but they are nonetheless convincingly drawn. The lesser characters are each masterly portrayals, sharply and often humorously observed: Mrs Marston 'the old sleepy lady', absurdly matriarchal; Abel, eccentric, coarse, self-absorbed, living for his music and 'the seething hives'; Vessons, Reddin's cynical servant, 'knowing of eye as a blackbird, straw in mouth, the poison of asps on his tongue'. These stay vividly in the memory. And there are other presences--eerie Undern Hall, a house of narcotic, haunted personality, 'crouched under its hill like a toad'; the Callow, a chill thicket of larch and birch 'that topped a round hill'; God's Little Mountain and Edward's grey parsonage with gravestones 'flat, erect and askew' in the garden; Hunter's Spinney, 'a conical hill', dark with woods and legends. In fact the landscape itself, streams, trees, leaves, birds, flowers, the winds and weather seem to be active in the events as well as passive. There is a strong sense of the essential timelessness of this lonely countryside, richly evoked; and at the same time these nature descriptions, with an abundance of acute sense-impressions, are relevant, heightening the mood or suggesting the states of mind of the characters. Everything coalesces in Mary Webb's intensely individual and unified world. The details of nature always carry a weight of implication (though occasionally over-strained). This, for instance, of Undern:
Secretly, under the heavy rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees, gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous lolling tongues.
Or this, of God's Little Mountain, 'solitary with the double loneliness of hill and woodland', where Reddin lurks, watching for Hazel at the parsonage:
The only sound except the intermittent song of birds, was the far-away noise of a woodman's axe, like the deep scattered barking of hungry hounds. Nothing else stirred under the complex arches of the trees except the sunlight, moving like a ghost.
Such descriptive passages, threaded throughout Gone to earth, have a cumulative effect, building up a pervasively strange, at times sinister, atmosphere.
Certain folk legends and superstitions associated with the landscape have a powerful hold on Hazel's susceptible mind, and her fate is bound up with them--primarily the myths of the Black Huntsman and the death pack, 'stealthy and untiring, following forever the trail of the defenceless'. Myth and ritual are very finely assimilated into the fabric of the novel. Hazel and Foxy, the ultimate prey, are symbolic of 'all things hunted and snared and destroyed', while the hunt, the Black Huntsman and the death pack are symbolic of relentless savagery and slaughter. The integration of these universal death myths in Gone to earth reflects the prevailing mood of the catastrophic period in which the novel was conceived and written, and Mary Webb's own pessimistic state of mind at that time, her tragic vision of experience. But she sees in 'earth' (nature), as opposed to 'world', the salving and the secret--here, 'if anywhere', lies 'the cradled God': man, if chained only to the world and estranged from earth, cuts himself off from a spiritual source. The primitivist element in Gone to earth is an implicit criticism of civilised society. Hazel is closer to the primitive than to the civilised world, happiest immersed in nature, where she exists in intuitive harmony with things of wood and field--she seems almost an extension of the natural world, an emanation of the landscape, and her being 'is more full of echoes than the hearts of those that live further from the soil'. But she is not allowed to continue in her simple existence; the mesh of her destiny is woven.
Mary Webb's question of central significance--'Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?'--is a protest and plea combined. Gone to earth reflects obliquely the influence of the Great War on her sensitive spirit. She was writing this novel when the tragedy of the war was intensifying; her three brothers were at the Western Front, the disastrous offensive on the Somme was resulting in appalling carnage; and it seemed that years of darkness and devastation lay ahead. She projected into her writing both her urgent compassion and her horror at the pitiless inhumanity of the civilised. Foremost a literary artist, she translated her pity into image, writing about what she knew best--Shropshire. Her setting is a part of the south-west Shropshire uplands where she was then living, the remote hills, woods and valleys around the Stiperstones, a high range bordering on Wales, crested by strange outcrops of rock and cut here and there by the deep fissures of quarries; and her characters are types of rural people she understood well--products of a countryside which has coloured their humanity with its elements. Viewed from one standpoint Gone to earth is a rural novel about the simple tragedy of a country girl; from another, it is a highly charged allegory.
The deeper meaning of this impassioned novel was little understood on its publication in 1917, though it was well received by reviewers, in general agreement that here was 'a notable work of fiction' (Athenaeum). It was with this, her second novel, that Mary Webb gained the attention of critics and secured an admiring, if small, following in the literary world: Robert Lynd commented, 'Mary Webb is unquestionably a poet', Gone to earth 'a book rich at once in beauty and excitement' (Daily News); Gerald Gould was impressed by 'the passionate beauty' of the novel 'conceived in a mood of poetry and mysticism'...'it is as a poet Mary Webb must be judged. Her narrative is strange, fantastic, symbolical' (New Statesman); and Rebecca West wrote enthusiastically of Mary Webb's 'genius', subsequently selecting Gone to earth as 'Novel of the Year'. John and Susan Buchan also rated Gone to earth highly, caught by its 'beauty of phrase and exquisite perception of nature', the style 'impregnated with poetry'.
Yet though Gone to earth was valued by the discerning, it was overlooked by the general public, a neglect owing much to the fact that it was published, as John Buchan pointed out, 'in the dark days of 1917--a time when readers were attuned to overtly patriotic or heroic war stories rather than to rural and symbolical narratives. It was never reprinted during Mary Webb's lifetime. She died, disillusioned, in October 1927 at the age of forty-six, and some six months later, when the public at last 'discovered' her work following Baldwin's recommendation, Gone to earth was brought out in Cape's Collected Edition. At once it captured the popular imagination: there were four printings within six months and regular reprints throughout the Thirties; in 1935 it was one of the first of the new Penguin paperbacks, going into successive monthly reprints; a film version was highly successful in the Fifties; it has been translated into various languages, and dramatised in France where, titled La Renarde it is widely appreciated. Today Gone to earth stands with Precious bane as the best-known and finest of Mary Webb's novels.
This timeless tragedy has the power of mythic narrative. The plot, when outlined, reads as romantic melodrama--and melodrama there is, but, as in Hardy's work, imaginatively clothed, and infused with an unabated poetic intensity: we are caught up, carried along by the ironic causal chain leading to the magnificent climax which arouses that cathartic 'pity and fear' specified by Aristotle as essential to tragedy. At the end Mary Webb offers no vision of hope or peace but only 'shivering echoes'. Her fervent cry against man's cruelty and barbaric impulse, implicit throughout the novel, becomes at the last a cry of universal pity and fear which encompasses all, hunters as much as hunted. And it is written with such impact that she achieves the effect she intended--purging and extending our consciousness so that, to quote Schweitzer, 'the stupid arrogance of thinking ourselves civilised loses its power over us'. By her poetic method, her use of symbol, image and myth, Mary Webb invested Gone to earth with echoing meaning, with resonances that continue to vibrate within us long after the book has been read.
© Gladys Mary Coles 2002.
The full text can also be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 487 kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of Gone to earth
Page created 29 November 2002 and last
updated 17 December 2002
For your literary enquiries and comments please see the Who to contact page.
Please read the general terms and conditions and about accessibility on this site, including the use of the UK government accesskeys system.
|
