APORTE DEL TRABAJO SOCIAL

by stressing her essential innocence.

Barrie skilfully conveys the Painted Lady's emotional history and disturbed men- | tal state when she meets Elspeth and confides in her, after the other children have i run off. The last thing she ever wanted was to be independent. She asks Elspeth if | she loves Tommy and warns her not to let him know:

"When they know too well, then they have no pity". ... Suddenly she became con- ij fidential. "Do you think I showed my love too openly?" she asked eagerly. "I | tried to hide it,you know. ... I wanted so to be good, but-it is so difficult ] to refuse when you love him very much, don't you think?

The Painted Lady tells Elspeth that it would be very nice if men wanted women to be -f good but it bores them, and warns her never to say she wants a wedding. When %

Elspeth is afraid and begins to cry she tells her that women must put on their pret­ tiest gowns and laugh and pretend to be happy,and then men will tell them naughty

stories and give them jewels. She thinks it excusable to paint a little to keep a -4 man's interest and tells Elspeth that when they send you a letter rejecting you it 4

is best not to open it. Then she thinks she hears Grizel approaching and pours out a torrent of filthy abuse against her for following her mother.

Tommy appears and takes Elspeth away and when she tells some of the Moneypenny women about the incident they tell Aaron Latta (Tommy's and Elspeth's guardian) to keep Grizel away from Tommy and Elspeth. Naturally Elspeth was frightened by the incident but the Painted Lady should have been cared for somewhere rather than being allowed to lead, to all appearances, an independent life with only her child to rely on. Barrie makes us aware of the innate prejudice in the people of Thrums and their fear of what they cannot understand and pity. The tragedy of the situation is

summed up in Grizel challenging Tommy and Elspeth to come to her house and when:they refuse she says she will never come to theirs because "my mamma thinks your house is not respectable^.^ Barrie describes Grizel as a "Great-hearted, solitary chilcf"^

2 J M BARRIE : SENTIMENTAL TOMMY (LONDON :

1896) pp 217 & 218

3 J M BARRIE : SENTIMENTAL TOMMY (LONDON :

1896) p 220

4 J M BARRIE : SENTIMENTAL TOMMY (LONDON :

1896) p 263

108

and she lives up to this in nursing her dying mother by herself. There is certainly something very morbid and melodramatic about her staying alone with the body and in her letter to God, hoping that her father too will be damned. However, what is interesting is to see how Grizel's enforced independence, which was necessarily pre­ cipitated by her mother's failure to cope with life as an independent woman, proves 4

to be false but this is not revealed until she reaches adult life and loves Tommy. After her mother’s death Grizel is adopted by Dr McQueen and becomes a woman in

Tommy and Grizel (1900). As a girl she considered herself "the child of evil pas- J Y..

sions", meaning that she thought she had wickedness in her blood,and her greatest wish was to be respectable. She is afraid of meeting a man who resembles her father as she imagines him to have been, both powerful and irresistible. She realises that Tommy is that kind of man and she is attracted to him but at the same time she is 4 afraid of him getting a hold over her. Her maternal instincts find an outlet in 4 looking after Dr McQueen and he describes her as "a masterful little besom". 4 Grizel*s outstanding qualities appear to be her independence and her strength of

character. She does not tell Tommy that she loves him until she thinks he loves her. I thought God had made a sort of compact with me that I should^be the kind of woman I wanted to be if I resisted the desire to love you until you loved me.^ * This shows Grizel's emotional intensity, and her self-knowledge is revealed to Dr David Gemmell.

Yes,I admit that I am not quite as I was, but I glory in it. I used to be ostentatiously independent, now I am only independent enough. My pride made me walk on air, now I walk on the earthywhere there is less chance of falling. I have still confidence in myself, but I begin to see that my ways are not neces­ sarily right because they are my ways. In short, David, I am evidently on the road to being a model characterj ... Because I am^happy. ... in the old days I sometimes danced for joy... I could do it n o w . ^ ^

Dr McQueen had wanted Grizel to marry David Gemmell, his assistant in the medi­ cal practice, but had said nothing of this to Grizel because he thought that to press her was no way to make her care for David. He was afraid that Grizel's morbid fears would come back if she were ever to care for some "false loon". It is David Gemmell who tells all this to Grizel, being prepared to marry her as he had promised the doctor, but Grizel is delighted when he confesses that he really loves Tommy's sister, Elspeth, although she keeps her own love for Tommy secret at this point. David Gemmell was afraid that Tommy was a "false loon" and this later proved to be the case. Grizel had struggled to appear independent rather than love Tommy if he

i J M ■■BARRIE Î-T-OMMY-A-NB-.GRIZEL (LONDON : 19-3'8-)-p 1,60.,

df J

M

1 J M BARRIE : TOMMY AND GRIZEL (LONDON ; 1938) p 392 2 J M BARRIE : TOMMY AND GRIZEL (LONDON : 1938) p 4-29

I

did not really love her and when she discovers that he does not love her, because he is constitutionally incapable of really loving a woman, she again resumes the appearance of independence and lets people think that she has rejected Tommy,al­ though it breaks her heart to have them think it.

However, when she learns of Tommy’s illness she abandons any pretence of inde­

pendence, pride and self-respect and leaves for London only to hear that Tommy has 4

-■I

left his lodgings there and has gone to the Continent. After a nightmare journey

she catches up with him at St Gian only to overhear Tommy's declaration of his love i for Lady Pippinworth. Grizel leaves in horror and returns to Thrums, now pursued by

I;

breakdown, as a result of what she regards as Tommy's treacherous behaviour. Tommy .re­

marries Grizel to prevent her being sent to a mental hospital and eventually she '%

recovers her health;

Grizel progressed imperceptibly as along a dark corridor toward the door that shut out the light, and on a day in early spring the door fell.

She seems to have awakened from a bad dream and cries with joy when she hears of her marriage. Tommy asks her forgiveness but this is unnecessary as Grizel's love for | him never changed. Tommy makes his brief married life with Grizel as happy as he i possibly can and after his untimely death she resumes her independence and can look | back and see that she is the good woman she wanted to be when she was a child. She | lives on at Double Dykes, her childhood home, helping David Gemmell in the medical

practice and taking an interest in other people's babies:

2

And to her latest breath she went on loving Tommy just the same.

In my opinion Barrie's portrayal of Spinsters and Independent Women illustrates his perception with regard to women at its keenest. We see how he is ahead of his time in his attitude to the unmarried mother, the Painted Lady, in Sentimental Tommy and to the divorce'e, Kate, in The Twelve-Pound Look. In his speeches he jokes about female emancipation but is also strongly in favour of further education and practi­ cal independence for women. At the same time he is very much aware of their emo­ tional needs and knows that it is a rare woman who can find complete personal

fulfilment in a career and his admiration of his niece, Lilian Barrie, and Dr Bodie in A Kiss for Cinderella, is tempered with wariness. The women in his life and works reflect the changing times and the repressed sentimental schoolmistresses of

Quality Street and Sentimental Tommy appear dated in retrospect but their horizons were limited by the prevailing social climate as well as by their own natures.

110

In conclusion I would like to quote a passage from Tommy and Grizel (1900) where Barrie deals very sensitively with the problems of sexual stereotyping and rôle-

playing which are of great significance in our society. Grizel is one of the most 4 (\ppa.r«^lu[

apparant-l-y independent of Barrie's heroines but her strength depends on having a focal point for her feelings and when this is removed her weakness is revealed. Here Barrie appears to identify fully with Grizel,whose honesty and independence can be rather intimidating until her vulnerability is unmasked. In his own life he shows a preference for women like his mother whose apparent helplessness conceals a will of iron. At this point Grizel has rejected Tommy because she knows he is in­ capable of really loving her and she is left alone with her troubled thoughts:

Was it helplessness that man loved in woman then? It seemed to be Elspeth's helplessness that had made Tommy such a brother, and how it had always appealed to AaronI No woman could be less helpless than herself, Grizel knew. She thought back and back, and she could not come to a time when she was not man­ aging someone. Women, she reflected, fell more or less deeply in love with every baby they see, while men, even the best of them, can look calmly at other

people's babies. But when the helplessness of the child is in the woman, then 4 other women are unmoved; but the great heart of man is stirred - woman is his

baby. ... Instead of needing to be taken care of, she had obviously wanted to 4 take care of him (Tommy); their positions were reversed. Perhaps, said Grizel

to herself, I should have been a man.

If this was the true explanation, then, though Tommy, who had tried so hard, could not love her, he might be able to love ... a more womanly woman ... Some other woman might be the right wife for him. She did not shrink from consider­ ing this theory ... deciding ultimately, as she did, that there was nothing in it.

The strong like to be leant upon and the weak to lean, and this irrespec-

1

tive of sex.

In his understanding of Grizel Barrie has progressed far beyond his worship of the lifeless Mary Abinger in When a Man's Single (1888). However, just as his atti­ tude towards mothers developed and he showed more sympathy for fathers but not

2

understanding between parents, his conception of a mature adult relationship is marred by the idea of one partner being dominant. Barrie never experienced or wrote about a relationship where a man and a woman pool their strengths and weaknesses and each balances the other.

1 J M BARRIE : TOMMY AND GRIZEL (LONDON ; 1938) pp •^89’, 290 k 291

— 4 Now let us examine Barrie's relationship with women at both extremes of the ■%

social scale; servants and ladies of title. In Margaret Ogilvy (1896) Barrie re- i

calls his first contact with servants; f

The manse had a servant, the bank had another; one of their uses was to pounce upon, and carry away in stately manner, certain naughty boys who played with me. The banker did not seem really great to me, but his servant-oh yes. Her boots

k cheeped all the way down the church aisle; it was common report that she had 3

1 J M BARRIE : MARGARET OGILVY (LONDON ; 1897) p 151

2 J M BARRIE : MARGARET OGILVY (LONDON : 1897) P 153 3 J M BARRIE : MARGARET OGILVY (LONDON : 1897) P 154 4 J M BARRIE : MARGARET OGILVY (LONDON : 1897) P 114

flesh every day for her dinner; instead of meeting her lover at the pump she walked him into the country, and he returned with wild roses in his buttonhole,

his hand up to hide them, and on his face the troubled look of those who know ‘Ç that if they take this lady they must give up drinking from the saucer for ever-

1

more.

This suggestion that the servant was somehow the embodiment of the aura of social superiority and the rarefied atmosphere which surrounded the family for whom she worked was put to the test when Barrie, as a child, paid his first visit to a house­ hold which had a servant. This was the Free Church Manse at Motherwell,where

Barrie's sister, Sara, acted as housekeeper to Dr David Ogilvy, Margaret Ogilvy's brother;

Afterwards I stopped strangers on the highway with an offer to show her to them