Restructuring Reality from the Margin
by Kathrin Melzer
This essay is an extract (Pages 110-118) from "The Corners are being rubbed
off nicely: Madness & marginalisation in J. Dawson's novels", a dissertation
by Kathrin Melzer, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (1991).
Notes and a list of sources referenced in the text are to be found at the end of the
piece.
1. The Inter-Relationship of Madness and Marginality
Some women, Carol Christ writes in "Diving Deep and Surfacing", "experience
their own nothingness so deeply that they begin to doubt the value of their own
lives, to consider themselves mad, or to contemplate suicide".(16). Others, like the
protagonist of The Ha-Ha, do become what society generally considers mad as a
consequence of their marginal role in society and construct an alternative reality to
the one that holds no promises for them. "Unable to adapt to the social codes of
femininity in [the] patriarchal world, Josephine invents a world of her own to which
she can retreat. . ." (Showalter 214). Hence her escapist obsession with the
"terrain inconnu" (70), partly represented by her wish to go "off to darkest Africa"
(45), her books, the "Manual of Seamanship" (54) and "a Swahili grammar" (69),
and her affinity to a world which is "hot and full of dryness"(19).
Besides its escapist quality, the schizophrenic world is also "an attempt to
understand and explain reality, to build a sort of truth" (Green 132). Madness is
marginality as well. Like the marginal position, which allows observing the social
mainstream from the 'outside in,' the mad view, "the cracked mind of the
schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane
people whose minds are closed" (Laing, Divided Self 27), even though it means
looking at the "world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a
bell jar" (Plath, quoted. in Ames appended to The Bell Jar 214).
The mad and marginal perspective seems particularly apt to be experienced by
women, Woolf postulates in A Room of One's Own, " . . . If one is a woman one is
often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down
Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she
becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical" (96). Josephine's
critical look at society and civilization is, for instance, represented by the literal
"view over the town" she has from her marginal attic-space on the "top floor" (23) of
the Mayburys' house - a mental space also occupied by Dawson's "lady who
accepted the universe." The latter has a view of cities and is conscious of the
transitoriness of civilization (Afterword to Ha-Ha 185), the proof of which
Josephine also searches for in her pursuit of the Thames and Severn Canal" until
it ends in nothingness (e.g. 80-81).
This perspective of looking in from the outside does not make her less "real"
than the people on the inside, although the latter may label her as mad (103) and
put on her the pressure to conform, as Josephine rebelliously argues with Sister
Schwarz:
Mine is not going to be that kind of existence. I want to live, to feel. I was born for
something more than mere sanity. I was born for so much joy. (128) You cherish
me like a diseased person. Why not put a coloured ribbon in my hair and make me
wear flowered pinafores, as they do on the chronic wards? But I am real. (129)
On the contrary, her subjective view of the world permits her to restructure reality,
to re-view the outside world, which, uncritically takes certain values and rules for
granted. For, as for Martha in The Four-Gated City , the things around her
seem "just like ordinary life, only more so" (Lessing 111) - seeing society
through the filter of an alternative mode of consciousness, Josephine, like
Martha, may be subjectively aware that she is "the only person awake and
everyone else in a kind of bad dream" (ibid. 81).
2. People and Other Animals
Josephine restructures reality in various ways. One of them is her view of the
absurdity of life, another the mapping out of the outside world in a mad
landscape. A third consists of looking at the people who inhabit this reality in the
form of animals.(125) This is connected with the 'view' as well - it depends on a
detached, critical approach. Martha, in Lessing's The Four-Gated City, when
walking the streets in a state of heightened awareness, perceives people as
animals (126) (520-521), who seem to be "sleep-walking" (522) and, "locked in an
invisible cage" (522), appear "not conscious of their existence" (521). Similarly,
the people in The Ha-Ha "never seem... to have any doubts about existence"
(50) in contrast to Josephine's preoccupation with "the fundamentals of
existence" (103). Martha discovers that "the price you paid for being awake..., was
this, that when you walked among your kind you had to see them, and yourself as
they, we are" (Lessing 524). The price Josephine pays for being conscious is the
experience of doubts vis-a-vis existence and to be labelled as mad by society:"...
some see how things really are... upside down, and get anxious and frightened, or
want to laugh..."(106).
The fact that Josephine connects people with the animals of her mad world is
rendered explicit by her statement: "They were always there, the things of the
jungle,(127) making their appearance 'when one or two people were gathered
together'." (13).(128) Consistently, the character of the animals depends on the
situative context. Her fellow students engaged in feminine activities, "Gale
fumbling with the zip of her evening dress" or "Prue pouting over her make-and
mend," are reflected in the "things, spotted or quilled or feathered" (12). Girls
exchanging feminine confidences turn into "mice" (76;77). Political marchers
become "files of armadillos with scaly shells, and hosts of big black flies" (13). The
sexual element is symbolized by the "snail" (59), the act of copulation is re-viewed
before the background of the "pranc[ing] and... "danc[ing]" "arthropods, the pigs,
the hippopotami, the even-toed ungulates and the ruminants" (61). The
encroaching attitude of the nurses in the mental hospital is transferred to the
animal world: "One was eating and had biscuit crumbs round her mouth. A black
bird swerved at the window with a worm dangling in its beak" (159). Josephine
herself is compared to a bird that has been caught in a "fowler's snare" (19) and
is about to "fl[y] from under the leaves, back to the busy sky" (18). (129)
Thus, the analogy between the human and the animal world allows a new,
subversive perspective of social behaviour. (130) In Josephine's case this also
includes the awareness of the absurdity of the social sphere expressed in a keypassage, which contains the culminating element of the multi-fold human-animal
metaphors and similes: "'We are flies,' I cried. 'We are flies! I too feel prophetic
and Delphic! Some are well-mannered and walk along the ceiling talking about
the rearing of children or art brut, or the property laws. But it's absurd. The whole
posture's absurd, absurd!'" (106). Like the author of "The Fly", Josephine
performs, what Gilbert and Gubar call, a "Blakeian reversal of customary terms"
(Madwoman in the Attic 278):
. . . it was they who became unreal, and what the textbooks could mean by
schizophrenia was only that whereas most flies crawl along the ceiling in a wellbehaved, decorous posture talking about the other sex, or income allowances or the
articles of faith that ought to be taught in prep-schools, some see how things really
are on the ceiling, upside down, and get anxious and frightened, or want to laugh at
the incongruity and oddness of that fantastic position. (106)
With this new perspective, Josephine restructures reality - hers becomes real,
and the term madness, as it is defined by society, just does not apply to her
anymore: "'I never was cured and I never shall be,' I protested" (106).
In The Four-Gated City, Martha reflects on the interrelatedness of herself
and her environment, and on the relativity of perspective:
On the white, near the window, the black cat sat in the sunlight, washing its face. On
the opposite corner, a black fly cleaned its head with its arms. Cautious, so as to
frighten neither, [sic] Martha reached out for a brush, sat up, brushed her hair.
Behind her, a shadow on the white wall attended to its head. Fly, cat, woman, their
images were shaped in no-light. ... If she were fly-size, would she then be able to
observe the working shadow from those energetic hairy arms? . . . Was the fly
looking at its shadow as it cleaned itself? (Lessing 115)
Similarly, Josephine's (and Dawson's, as it is expressed in her novels) philosophy
of life is one that is based on wholeness and integration. She tries to make an
organic whole of the many indices of existence. She does not exclude herself from
the animal world ("We are flies" 106). For her the "snail" and the "neighbour's
wireless," those "opposite ends of existence" (60) interlock, Alistair's fingernails
(which seem "like pools of water" 68) resemble "a piece of the moon" 96).
At one point, even the dead merge with the living and with the birds, the upper is
connected with the lower in an image of humankind's constant movement towards
death:
... trains were shunting backwards and forwards, and there were yards on one side.
On the other was a churchyard with tombstones bearing messages and blackbirds
resting on the top-sides, sharpening their beaks. I just stood while the steam floated
up from the shifting trains, and I thought of the messages of the dead underground
and the blackbirds on top. (146)
3. The Phenomenology of Laughter
Outwardly, Josephine expresses her awareness of the absurdity of life in the form
of laughter. Generally, she laughs at "la condition humaine" (33) and at
"existence itself" (63). In particular, she laughs at sexuality (61), feminine
behaviour (12), and pretentious, social attitudes (12-13). Her laughter emerges
when the seemingly "opposite ends of existence" (60) clash; it is then "a kind of
balancing mechanism, a shock absorber" (Lessing, Four-Gated City 525).
Josephine's humorous, often ironic way of viewing the world and society "upside
down" (106) additionally questions the values of that society. As Moi points out, the
"power of laughter can be just as subversive [as anger], as when carnival turns the
old hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable
ones" (40).
Josephine's laughter is also an external expression of her inner withholding of
compliance, and, in its social setting, a manifestation of madness. With regard to this
aspect, the phenomenon of laughter can be compared to what Laing says of
psychosis: "Indeed, what is called psychosis is sometimes simply the sudden
removal of the veil of the false self, which had been serving to maintain an outer
behavioural normality..." (Divided Self 99).
(131)
Josephine's laughter, which
emerges "loudly... coarsely" (61) and is described by Alasdair to be "like a disused
lavatory system" (68), represents a deviance from appropriate feminine behaviour
(132)
and is liable to be punished as such. Alasdair remarks accordingly:"... don't
laugh like that at Helena Bruce's or the big bad world will swiftly spit you back into
this particular outfit [i.e. the mental hospital]" (68). (133) Furthermore, as the cause
of her laughter is only visible to Josephine herself, it is incomprehensible to those
around her - for society it is an indicator of insanity (e.g. 13). Psychiatry terms this
pattern of behaviour "incongruity of thought and affect" (Laing, Sanity, Madness,
and the Family 131 ;236), "[i]nappropriate emotion.. .A textbook symptom" (North 8
- see also Green 18). Notably, Josephine's laughter is the primary reason for the
beginning of her psychiatric career (13).
After having been converted into a grotesque feminine figure in society's
levelling institution, the mental hospital, Josephine's laughter has become a
giggle (166-67). In contrast to laughter, "giggling [is] a retreat away from a fact
which need[s] to be faced" (Lessing, Four-Gated City 525) - a typically feminine
trait:
... with this terrible conflict, this terrible denial of a girl's true nature and nat ural
self,... she loses her creativity, her originality, her true personality, her confidence in
herself [.] She takes refuge in all those silly things that make one feel ashamed of
one's sex. She starts to giggle. A giggle is often a way of covering up a girl's wish
to say something, or to make a point in an argument or conversation, in a
feminine', non-aggressive way. Alternatively it is used to cover up her growing lack of
confidence in herself or her abilities. (Nicholson 32)
Ultimately, Josephine will have achieved freedom only when anger replaces the
giggle (172) and her view of the "comedy" (175) of life exterminates her
acquiescent conformity. The protagonist's humour and her laughter, which is also
implied in the onomatopoeic title of the novel, her personal 'ha-ha' are reinstated;
to quote Fleenor freely: "Humor defends against total disintegration, for [laughter]
has replaced the [madwoman's] scream" (20).
4. "Nothing in the Jungle Is Ordained" (134) - Rebellion and Escape
The Ha-Ha is a novel of experience. Mentally and socially, the protagonist starts
off from a marginal position. In the course of the narrative she experiences
dependency and insecurity, rebellion and conformity, passes through different
mental states, encounters various social microcosms and their respective rules.
As has been shown, the different structures of social reality encountered by
Josephine in the novel all proved to imply a marginal, crippling role for women. The
protagonist is disturbed by this social code of femininity. Consequently, her
experiences with the family, Oxford life, with psychiatry, the social and the sexual
world tended to reinforce both her marginality and her mad state of mind. However,
her initiation into reality and life with its sexual and social implications, like all rites of
passage, does not bring about "a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in
being" (Turner 102). In the end, Josephine has gained insight because of her
experiences. For, in the liminal, marginal phase, madness and "[u]ndoing,
dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation,
and the reformation of old elements in new patterns" (Turner 99). The last phase,
in which Josephine emerges from her marginal position and reclaims her part in
society and with which the narrative closes, represents a rejection of the
deadening feminine role.
The final stage of Josephine's journey through both her landscape of madness
and the various facets of life is initiated by the feeling of anger (172), (135) which
Josephine has repressed until then (39). Anger represents an emotion for which
female madness is often a disguise (e.g. Friday 116), for, "[a]nger is a painful and
dangerous display for those who feel and are relatively powerless" (Chesler 149).
Anger, however, is a positive emotion essential for confronting reality and a first
step to the conscious rejection of social strictures - in Camus' philosophy, to feel
angry and rebellious is to be (Camus, in Lebesque 94). Thus, with the help of
anger, Josephine recognizes that her position as patient in the mental hospital is
preparing her for a psychological "death" (173).
This insight results in Josephine's ability to "weep" which has been previously
blocked by her acquiescent "giggle" (173). Her tears represent a healing process
that leads to wholeness of self. At first, she is still detached from her emotions,
her tears are projected on "someone" outside herself: "All round me there was
someone weeping. It came down on me from all sides. They were weeping very
hard and my hands were wet with tears" (173). Then she overcomes her internal
duality and calls her emotions her own: "My tears had purged me and my taste for
life had come back" (174). Her vigorous physical gesture of biting into the tree (173)
both shows the vehemence of her emotion and stands for her almost aggressive
determination to prove that she is "alive" although she does not "know the rules"
(ibid.). Josephine's bout of "good," "pure self-pity" (173) gives her back her selfcenteredness and makes "grief" (174) for her situation possible with tears. This
implies insight and knowledge of self: "...das Erleben der eigenen Wahrheit und
das postambivalente Wissen um sie, ermoglicht, auf einer erwachsenen Stufe,
die Riickkehr zur eigenen Gefiihlswelt - ohne Paradies, aber mit der Fahigkeit,
zu trauern" (Miller 32).
Josephine's tears also melt her cold inner petrification symbolized by the frozen
landscape around her: "It was cold, very... The snow came sometimes, and yet
there was no snow because a master-wind blew it all into heaps in corners that
smelt of ice when the wind came off them. The air was stiff and painful, like a
grazed wound that can't bleed; like a grief where there are no tears" (174). Yet, the
possibility of a thaw is there: "For a moment the sun came out, and the snowheaps had a grey-blue shadow that was not snow, but the shadow of spring"
(174).
Esther in The Bell Jar, in the end rejects "forgetfulness" which "like a kind of
snow,... numb[s] and cover[s]" her experiences: "...they were part of me. They
were my landscape" (Plath 196). Similarly, Josephine acknowledges life with all its
implications, from which she first escaped into the mad, visionary world where she
thought to have found "God" "beyond... a bridge of snow" (160), and then into the
conformity to the hospital rules which derived her of authentic remembrance (165166). Through a "gap" in the hospital wall - that symbol of enclosure and isolation
from the outside sphere - Josephine again perceives the world. She is no longer
"bothered by the nature of reality" (55). Consequently, it has lost its menace: "I
climbed up and peered out, but there was nothing great to see beyond. ... The
world shrank as I watched it floating up and down" (174). Neither does her
awareness of the absurdity of life cause existential insecurity anymore - like the
"crumbling" wall (175), her inability to participate in life vanishes: ". . . the world
seemed to shrink to a little floating ball, a green sail flapping in an evening wind.
And life! what a chance, what a fluke it was!" (175).
Josephine has achieved a cure on her terms not via other people's definitions.
With the final reinstatement of her formally repressed 'mad' world view, she gains
the knowledge of an integrating principle, "something evolving behind the
haphazard and static lists of life"(Judasland 205):
There were the animals, my friends the animals, stalking down the glades or sitting
on lonely sands; swinging their tails, raising their prickles, or extending their claws.
Some were sleek and white and purring, some spotted and quilled, some hard and
bony with scales, and there among them within the stockade, perched precariously
on the carpet called civilization with wallet and fruit-knife and vita-tabs were
Helena and Tony, Alasdair, the Maybury s, and myself, while Julia's Fugitive Snakes
coiled round and round the trees in ancient circles, and the peacock opened its tail
with leisurely ease. (175)
With this integrating existential philosophy Josephine overcomes her feeling of
marginality and illegitimacy, because, as she states, "It was all absurd, but in the
comedy it was we who were the clowns, the bastards, all along, so there was no
time to lament one's oddness or to bother about anything but the strange thing
called life that was here and now" (175).
According to Camus, to fatalistically resign or to despair vis-a-vis the absurd is to
negate life (Camus, Myth 34-35): "Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it
alive is above all contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies only when we
turn away from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt"
(ibid. 53). True to this principle, Josephine rejects the "narrow little room like a
cupboard" (175), the role as a feminine 'no-thing,' assigned to her by society that
would keep her "resigned and contented with a certain way of life" (176). She
rebels against the compartment reserved for women and other "upstairs people"
which bears the label: "'Lie Low. Take cover. Try to be without corners or hopes or
promises" (UP 142). For her the future will not be determined by other people's
categories: " . . . I turned it down. For nothing in the jungle is ordained. The future
was a blank to do what I could with it. Who knew what possibility it held?" (176).
For, although she knows "that nothing is ["certain"] .. . this at least is a certainty"
(Camus, Myth 53); a sense of "indifference to the future" leads to "a desire to use up
everything that is given" (ibid.59), and thus to an authentic experience of life.
In the Frommian sense, Josephine has overcome the existential insecurity
connected with the feeling of "freedom from" the strictures of social rules she has
had in her marginal position and now experiences "freedom to":"... positive freedom
consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality" (Fear of
Freedom 222 - italics omitted). Congruently, Josephine leaves behind the
boundary that has split her experience in two ("I climbed over the pile of rubble that
had been my wall and had enclosed my world" 176) and dissociates herself from "the
hill" (176), (136) the token of her detached mad world that hindered her contact with life
and reality, that terrain inconnu which she now has found in life itself. Assured
that after "fourteen days ... they could not reclaim you," Josephine escapes from
the institution: "[I] ran and ran until I knew for certain that I had not after all been
extinguished, and that my existence had been saved" (176). (137)
The Ha-Ha ends on this note of liberation. How Josephine will fare in the world is
left open to the reader's conjectures. Dawson herself seems to have thought that
her ending is not decisive enough. In the afterword to her novel (written 1984), she
states:
If I could write The Ha-Ha again, I suppose I'd make it clearer that the heroine's
experience was sharpened and that she didn't just drift into the irrevocable madness of
disrelation; that her surprise-response was quickened, not slowly closed down; that the
silver dew on the spider's web glittered in the mornings, but did not blacken; that she
became more open to receive. Greedy even. (187-88).
Although the reader of The Ha-Ha may well be aware that Josephine will not
experience a "forgetful, knee-jerk happiness" but rather "the unblinkered
remembering kind" (Judasland 206), Dawson nevertheless achieves an optimistic
version of a female protagonist who manages to break the vicious circle of madness
and marginalization, so that it is not so "hard to convince oneself that a woman could
have more than one chamber in her castle" (Dawson, Afterword to Ha-Ha 182).
Josephine's story of initiation makes clear that although the society to which she is
acculturated may be destructive, her mad and marginal position as a woman
nevertheless allows a restructuring, a reinterpretation of reality in her terms - a ritual
in which "freedom is the other side of loneliness and isolation. When we take our own
lives into our own hands, we make ourselves, author of our own stories" (Myerhoff
132).
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Notes
(125) Psychologically, Josephine's tendency to perceive people in an animal form can be
interpreted as a protective strategy, a defensive mechanism - a kind of depersonalization
of those around her. "Depersonalization," Laing explains, "is a technique that is
universally used as a means of dealing with the other when he becomes too tiresome or
disturbing. "Thus, by treat[ing] him not as a person, as a free agent, but as an it," one
has the reassuring feeling that the depersonalized person cannot do harm (Divided Self
46). Josephine's detached View' of the world from an elevated position can be seen in a
similar way: "Other mechanisms of escape are the withdrawal from the world so
completely that it loses its threat... and the inflation of oneself psychologically to such an
extent that the world outside becomes small in comparison" ( Fromm, Fear of Freedom
159).
(126) Women's novels and accounts focussing on the mad experience are filled with
analogies drawn between people and animals. The resemblance is mostly depicted as a
threatening one. In Dawson's Fowler's Snare, the relationships between people are
compared to the "slow process of killing and eating" (175) in nature; Esther in The Bell Jar
views people as "worms"(131)and "blind white fish" amid "shark's teeth" (125). Woolf's
Septimus Warren Smith feels menaced by "[h]uman nature -the repulsive brute with the
blood-red nostrils" (Mrs Dalloway 82-83); Green's schizophrenic protagonist Deborah has
visions of "blood clotted in the streets" and of people as "bug-swarms" (249); North
recounts her paranoia vis-a-vis the rat-race in medical school and the unscrupulous
competition among the students: "I envisioned them as horseflies swarming around a
cowpie... No, more accurately they were piranha fish driven to the sight of fresh blood and
tearing away little hunks of flesh from live prey. I closed my eyes and felt a piece of my
foot disappear" (129). However, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea feels less threatened
by animals than by people, a state of mind which is similar to Josephine's relative
happiness in her animal world in contrast to the social world: "And if the razor grass cut
my legs and arms I would think 'It's better than people.' Black ants or red ones, tall nests
swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin - once I saw a snake. All better
than people" (Rhys 24).
(127) In The Ha-Ha, the jungle represents an element which is opposed to the rational,
schematized social world. It also stands for what Camus calls, "this chaos, this sovereign
chance" (Myth of Sisyphus 51) - a rich world without ha-has and boundaries, a sphere of
undetermined possibilities: "For nothing in the jungle is ordained" (Ha-Ha 176).
Interestingly, the jungle also symbolizes the indifference of nature and the Other in Wide
Sargasso Sea (Rhys 107). It Antoinette's element and is contrasted with the England (i.e.
the attic) Rochester will take her to (148). Significantly, Rochester feels threatened by the
"green menace" (123), by "the feeling of something unknown and hostile" (107). He says to
his wife: "I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.'" (107).
(128) The biblical quotation is Mt, 18:20: "For where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there I am in the midst of them." Josephine's use of the biblical reference in
the context of the appearance of the animals points to the ironic, maybe quasi-religious
quality they have for her. Her notice of the "things of the jungle" (13), of vermin (e.g. the
snail 59-61), birds (159), snakes (11), and "insects moving in the earth" (40) etc. is
reminiscent of the Christian world view that takes into account "things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth" (Phil. 2: 10) which will be reconciled by God
(Col.l:16&20). Josephine's philosophy of tolerance is also akin to the moral of
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. There the depreciation of the "thousand
thousand slimy things" (163) and the "water-snakes" (164), and above all, of the
Albatross, is punished. For, "He prayeth well who loveth well / Both man and bird and
beast" (175).
The Albatross-motif in connection with the sin of intolerance is referred to in Dawson's
later novels Strawberry Boy (179-180) and Judasland (132).
(129) Bird imagery is also used in order to convey the self-contained but pathetic, helpless,
and enclosed world of madness. Whilst searching for Alasdair, Josephine questions an
inmate, an "epileptic" "clutching a child's red wool dress" (137), whose colour mirrors the
"red plastic scissors" of a previously encountered schizophrenic boy, who makes her
"afraid. He looked so tormented" (135). In Josephine's eyes the hand of the epileptic is "a
bird fluttering in and out. The dress was a house, the sleeve was a stair, and the hem was
the saloon where the bird sat" (137-38). She, who is on the brink of experiencing a bout of
mad nothingness, identifies with the boy's autistic manner: "I... watched the bird. It drew
honey from the buttons which were its cups. I just stood there for a long time watching
the bird. It was suddenly peaceful" (138).
(130) For a particularly haunting narrative that describes women's experience in a frame
of animal imagery, see Rhys' short story "The Insect World" (Sleep It Off Lady 123-136).
Audrey, who is afraid of ageing and of losing the socially required feminine quality, is
slowly driven mad by the marginalization that results from social codes of femininity. She
feels halved: "Only one of the twins accepted. The other felt lost, betrayed, forsaken . . .
The other told her that all she accepted so meekly it was mad, potty" (126). After being
confronted with men's misogynist attitude, "the horror that was responsible for all the other
horrors" (127), she develops a paranoic feeling of being pursued by insects that "infect. .."
her with the devaluative attitude towards women and thus with self-loathing: "Jiggers got
in under your skin when you didn't know it and laid eggs inside you" (132). Finally,
consistent with her female experience, the protagonist comes to believe that all people
are insects, women are more so than men: "Most of them are what they call workers. They
never fly because they've lost their wings and they never make love either. Nobody quite
knows how this is done, but they think it's the food. Other people call it segregation" (136).
(131) In Dawson's short story "The Dress," the laughter of a girl (of which the I-narrator says:
"Her laughter always surprised me. lt was so abrupt and such a scream, like a cat's." 33) is
similarly incongruent with "her maid's starched cap" and the occupations of everyday life (ibid.).
(132) Significantly, Mrs Traughton, who "used not to like the way [Josephine] laughed so
much" (33), uses euphemistic diminuitives with reference to her daughter's disturbing
behaviour, thus rendering it more acceptable socially: "She used to call me her giggly girl',
or if it grew excessive, 'the giggly one'" (33).
(133) Similarly, in Jane Eyre, the presence of the protagonist's other, angry self is indicated
by her laughter. The quality of Bertha Mason's laugh, which is Jane's first and, for a long
time, only evidence of the madwoman's existence, is an essential attribute of madness and
characterizes the madwoman as a non-social, non-human creature, who is no longer a
woman but an angry, rebellious animal in a cage, issuing a "preternatural" (138),
"demoniac laugh" (179), and "a snarling, snatching sound (238).
(134) HH 176
(135) Dawson's novels mostly imply that women's anger is frustrated and self destructive. Thelma in A Field of Scarlet Poppies who feels "just [a] wife" (8),"drink[s] to
drown" her anger (11). In The Cold Country, Zay who has an instinct for self-destruction"
(85), is driven to suicide by her helpless anger at male oppression (139-140); and the
short story "Hospital Wedding" depicts how the anger of a female patient is
"institutionalized" (126), because she submits sexually as well as mentally to a psychiatrist
who coerces her into having a lobotomy.
(136) Josephine's farewell to the hill and its implications may also stand for her rejection of
the escapist quality of religion, which Camus views as a circumvention of the absurd, a
"philosophical suicide" (Myth 43): "The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the
conscious man, does not lead to God. . . . the absurd is sin without God" (ibid.42).
(137) In Camus' concept, the absurd offers "freedom of thought and action" (Myth 56),
but it also "cancels all. . . chances of tonal freedom" (ibid.) - freedom itself is absurd, for
all life ends in certain death. With reference to Josephine's escape to freedom, this idea
of its precariousness is ironically taken up by Dawson in Fowler's Snare. In the later novel,
*Joanna kills a beetle (182) whom she previously imagined to be "creeping back with
dignity under the wainscote [sic], congratulating itself on having chosen freedom, on
having escaped death, and writing in its journal or its novel: 'And I did not stop walking
until I knew for certain that my existence had been saved.'" (181). This evaluation of
women's limited possibility of freedom also illustrates Dawson's pessimistic description of
female lives which will dominate her novels succeeding The Ha-Ha for more than two
decades.
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Copyright © Kathrin Melzer 1991.
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NB. Jennifer Dawson's literary executors have tried to contact Kathrin Melzer to
request permission to reprint sections of her dissertation on this website, but
without success. We have decided to reprint her work in good faith, believing that
it makes a valuable contribution to the understanding and critical appraisal of
Jennifer Dawson's writing. If you know where we can contact Kathrin, please do
get in touch.