Biography
Christina Ellen Stead was born in Rockdale, New South Wales, on July 17, 1902. Her parents were David George Stead, a naturalist and fisheries economist, and Ellen Butters Stead. After her mother died of a perforated appendix when Christina was two years old, her father married Ada Gibbons, a society woman, and they had six children to whom Stead became big sister. Stead trained at the Sydney Teachers College, where she became a demonstrator in experimental psychology. As a public school teacher, she taught abnormal children and administered psychological tests in the schools. Stead suffered voice strain, however, and she later saw this as a symptom of her being unfit for the work. Like Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone, Stead studied typing and shorthand to embark on a business career.
In 1928, Stead left Sydney, sailing on the Oronsay for England. She worked as a grain clerk and as a bank clerk in London and Paris, experiences that became background for her novel about finance, House of All Nations. By that time, Stead had met the economist and writer William Blake (born William Blech), whom she married in 1952. Stead settled in the United States from 1937 to 1946, publishing several novels and working for a time as a writer with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio in Hollywood. At the end of World War II, Stead returned to Europe with Blake, living in various places on the Continent and returning to England when she feared that she was losing her feel for the English language. In 1968, Stead’s husband died, and a few years later, in 1974, she returned to live with one of her brothers in Australia. She died in Sydney on March 31, 1983, at the age of eighty.
Analysis
Christina Stead was preeminently a novelist of character. She identified herself as a psychological writer, involved with the drama of the person. Her stories develop out of the dynamics of characters asserting their human energy and vigor and developing their wills. Stead established personality and communicated its energy and vitality through her creation of a distinctive language for each character. This individuating language is explored in the characters’ dialogues with one another (Sam Pollit talking his fantastic baby talk to his children), in their interior monologues (Teresa Hawkins, walking miles to and from work, meditating on her need to find a life beyond the surface social conventions), and in letters (the letter to Letty Fox from her former lover, who wants his money back after she has had an abortion). The language establishes the sense of an individual person with obsessions and characteristic blindnesses. One gets to know the quality of the mind through the texture of the language. As Christopher Ricks has noted of Stead’s accomplishment, she re-creates the way people talk to themselves “in the privacy of [their] skulls.” Ricks’s phrase gives a sense of how intimately and deeply the language belongs to the person: It is in the skull and the bone.
In her novel Letty Fox, Stead has Letty sum up her adventures to date by saying, “On s’engage et puis on voit.” The statement (roughly translated as “one gets involved and then one sees”) is an existentialist one that reconciles what critics see as two forces in Stead’s fiction: a preoccupation with character that links Stead to nineteenth century novelists and an analysis of social, psychological, and economic structures behind individual lives that links her to her contemporaries.
The phrase “On s’engage et puis on voit” also sums up Stead’s method. First, she immerses the reader in the particular atmosphere of the character’s mind and world; only then does she lead the reader to see a significance behind the individual passion. The phrase implies that one cannot see clearly by being disengaged, looking down on the human spectacle with the detachment of an objective physical scientist. Instead, one must become part of the experience, seeing it as a participant, in order to understand its reality. Some of the constant preoccupations of Stead’s characters include family, love, marriage, money, and individual power.
The Man Who Loved Children
Stead’s masterpiece, most critics agree, is her larger-than-life depiction of a family, The Man Who Loved Children. Out of print for twenty-five years, the book enjoyed a second life because of a partly laudatory review by the poet Randall Jarrell; Jarrell’s review was included as an introduction when the novel was reissued in 1965. The Man Who Loved Children immerses its readers in the life of the Pollit family, in its swarming, buzzing intimacy. The father, Sam Pollit, is a garrulous idealist who advocates eugenics for the unfit but who fantasizes for himself babies of every race and a harem of wives who would serve his domestic comfort. On the surface, Sam’s passions are his humanitarian ideals and his love for his children, but his underlying passion is what Geoffrey Chaucer said women’s was—his own way or his own will. Sam is an egotistical child himself; he sees only what he wants to see. His characteristic talk is his overblown, high-sounding rhetoric expressing schemes to right the world and the fanciful, punning baby talk, whining and wheedling, that he uses with the children.
Henny, wife to Sam and stepmother to Louisa, is Sam’s compulsive antagonist, worn down with childbearing and the struggle to manage her overextended household. Henny’s passion is to survive, to fight dirt and debt and the intermittent sexuality that involves her in continual childbearing. Henny’s characteristic talk is insult and denunciation, castigating with graphic details and metaphors the revolting sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches that assault her. Stead emphasizes Henny’s eyes in descriptions of the fierce eyeballs in her sockets and her mouth in descriptions of her incessantly drinking tea and mouthing insults.
Stead’s way of explaining the unbridgeable gap between the minds and sensibilities of the marriage partners is to say that they have no words in common. Sam’s abstraction can never communicate with Henny’s particularity. They have no words that they understand mutually, and so for most of the book the two characters communicate with each other only through messages relayed by the children or by terse notes concerning household necessities. In spite of that essential gap, a sixth child is conceived and born to the couple during the course of the novel, and the resources of the household are further strained, finally to the breaking point.
What brings the family to destruction is a complex of causes, many of which are fundamentally economic. The death of David Collyer, Henny’s once rich father, is a blow to the family’s fortunes. The Pollits lose their home, and Henny’s creditors no longer expect that her father will pay her debts. Collyer’s death also leaves Sam without a political base in his government job, and Sam’s enemies move to oust him. The money crisis is intensified by Sam’s refusal to fight for his job. Instead, he retires to their new ramshackle home to do repairs and to play with the children. Sam grandly waits to be exonerated while Henny struggles to keep the family fed and clothed.
Another cause of the breakup of the family is the birth of Sam and Henny’s newest baby. Part of the trouble is economic: The new child means more expenses when Henny had promised her money-conscious eldest son Ernie that there would be no more children. The birth also brings an anonymous letter charging falsely that the child is not Sam’s because Sam has been away in Malaya for several months. The letter, filled with spite, probably has been sent by one of Henny’s disappointed creditors, but it exacerbates the mutual resentment of the couple and drives them closer and closer to serious violence against each other. (The pregnancy not only invades Henny’s body and multiplies her worries but it also costs her her lover, who deserts her when he hears of the pregnancy. Henny is more than ever in Sam’s power.)
A pivotal character in the fierce struggle between the parents is Louisa, eldest daughter of Sam and stepdaughter of Henny. Louisa’s emergence from childhood upsets the hierarchy of the household. The “man who loved children” does not love them when they question his authority and threaten his position as “Sam the Bold,” leader of the band of merry children. In retaliation, Sam calls Louisa names from “Loogoobrious” to “Bluebeak.” In disputing Sam’s ability to make it rain (his cosmic power), Louisa and Ernie—who is quick to jump in with what he has learned in school about evaporation—introduce norms from the world outside the family.
By the end of the novel, the family tears itself apart. Sam is unconsciously comparing himself to Christ and seeing Nature as his bride, while he says that women are “cussed” and need to be “run” and that he will send Henny away and keep the children. When Louisa asks for freedom to be sent to her dead mother’s relatives in Harpers Ferry, Sam says that he will never let her leave, that she must not get married but must stay and help him with the children and his work. The quarreling between the parents increases until Louisa thinks that they will kill each other. The quarrels become physical battles, and Henny screams to the children to save her from their father. In despair, Ernie makes a dummy out of his clothes and hangs himself in effigy. Sam teases and humiliates the children, insisting that they stay up all night and help him boil down a marlin, an image that is reminiscent of Henny, with its staring eye, deep in its socket, and the wound in its vitals.
Louisa sees the two parents as passionate and selfish, inexorably destroying each other and the children, completely absorbed in their “eternal married hate.” To save the children, Louisa considers poisoning both parents. Sam provides both the rationale, that the unfit should make room for the fit, and the means, cyanide that he ghoulishly describes as the bringer of death. Louisa succeeds in getting the grains of cyanide into only one large cup of tea when Henny notices what she has done and drinks it, exonerating Louisa and saying “damn you all.” Even with Henny dead and Louisa’s confession of her plan and its outcome, Sam refuses to believe her and refuses to let her go. Louisa’s only escape is to run away, thus seizing her freedom.
The power of The Man Who Loved Children derives in part from the archetypal nature of the conflicts—between parents and children for independence; between man and woman, each for his or her own truth and identity; and between parents for their children, their objects of greatest value. The power also results from the particularity of the characterization, the metaphors that Stead employs to communicate the nature of each family member, and the astounding sense of individual language mirroring opposed sensibilities.
Letty Fox and For Love Alone
The epigraph to another Stead novel, Letty Fox, says that one can get experience only through foolishness and blunders. The method that Letty follows in her adventures puts her in the stream of picaresque heroes; the novel’s subtitle, Her Luck, makes more sense with reference to the notion of a submission to experience, to one’s fate, than it does with reference to the common meaning of “luck” as “good fortune.” Letty’s “luck” is that she survives and learns something about the ways of the world.
Stead once said that in For Love Alone, the novel that preceded Letty Fox, she wrote about a young girl of no social background who tries to learn about love, and readers did not understand the story. In Letty Fox, she thus gave American readers a story that they could understand: the story of a modern American girl searching for love and trying to obtain status through marriage.
In both novels, the social structure tells young women that they have no valid identity except through the men they marry. In For Love Alone, Teresa Hawkins, like her friends, fears becoming an old maid. Even though Letty Fox has had a series of lovers and a series of responsible, interesting jobs, she does not feel validated without the security of marriage. This firmly held conventional belief is belied by Letty’s own family situation. Her beloved father, Solander, has a mistress, Persia, with whom he has lived faithfully for many years. The family women wonder how Persia can hold Solander without a paper and without a child. On the other hand, Mathilde, Letty’s mother, has the marriage title but little else. She has three daughters—Letty, Jacky, and the much younger Andrea, conceived in a late reconciliation attempt—but Persia has Solander.
Like the picaresque hero, on her own, Letty learns the ways of the world. She truly loves Luke Adams, who tantalizes her with pretended concern for her youth and innocence and fans her fascination with him. She lives for a summer with a married man and has an abortion for which she must repay him. Originally confused by Lucy Headlong’s interest in her, Letty refuses a lesbian affair with her. Letty sees a range of choices in the lives of the women around her: from her sister Jacky, in love with an elderly scientist, to her younger sister Andrea, sharing the early maternal experience of her friend.
Letty wants the security of marriage, but the men she knows do not want to make serious commitments. In For Love Alone, Teresa remarks on the short season for the husband hunt, with no time for work or extended study. In the marriage market for the comparatively long season of seven years, Letty does not catch a husband, even when her vicious cousin Edwige does.
Except in the matter of marriage, Letty trusts her own responses and takes credit for her own integrity. When her lover Cornelius is about to leave her for his mistress in Europe and his wife, Letty faces him with the truth of relationships from a woman’s point of view. She tells Cornelius that she has ambition and looks. She works for men, and she is their friend. She suffers without crying for help and takes responsibility for her life. She sees men run after worthless, shiftless women and honor the formality of marriage when there is no substance to their relationships with them. All these facts might be just part of the injustice of the world, but Cornelius and many other men Letty knows also expect that she should be their lover and yet admit that there is no love involved but only a relationship of mutual convenience. Like the British poet William Blake, Letty sees prostitution as an invention of men who have tried to depersonalize the most intimate relationship between people. Letty affirms the reality of the sexual experience in its intimacy and its bonding.
With all her clear sight and all her independence, however, Letty does not feel safe and validated until she is married to her longtime friend Bill Van Week. Ironically, Letty marries Bill when he has been disinherited by his millionaire father, so the security Letty attains is not financial. In summing up her life to date, Letty does not claim total honesty, but—like a typical picaresque hero—she does claim grit. She says that with her marriage, her journey has begun. Here Stead limits the awareness of her character. At the end of the novel, Letty says that marriage gives her not social position but self-respect. In this retreat, Letty joins the social mainstream but denies her individual past experience. Self-respect is not an award; it is not issued like a diploma or a license. Letty, who may stand up very well to the practical problems of real life with Bill, is by no means liberated, and her awareness is finally limited.
Dark Places of the Heart
Dark Places of the Heart, which was published in Great Britain as Cotter’s England, is an exploration of the influence of Nellie Cotter Cook on the people around her—her family, friends, and acquaintances. A central concern is the relationship between Nellie and her brother Tom, a jealous relationship with which Nellie seems obsessed. Like Michael and Catherine Baguenault, the brother-sister pair in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Nellie and Tom seem too close to each other, too intimately attuned to each other’s sensibilities. In their battles, Nellie calls Tom a man out of a mirror who weaves women into his life and then eats their hearts away. Tom calls Nellie a spider who tries to suspend a whole human being on a spindly thread of sympathy. Tom also criticizes Nellie’s bent for soul saving, saying that it gets people into trouble.
The motif of hunger and starvation runs through the novel. When Tom brings a chicken to the family home in Bridgehead, no one in the family knows how to cook it. When George goes away to Italy, he writes that Nellie should buy cookery books, a suggestion that she scorns. Seemingly exhibiting a strange kind of hunger, Nellie craves followers who will make her destiny.
Nellie and Tom’s battles often center on Tom’s relationships with women, which precipitate a tug-of-war between Nellie and Tom for the love of the woman in question. Many allusions and incidents in the novel suggest that Nellie’s interest is lesbian. Nellie begins her luring of these women by demanding their friendship and, ultimately, by forcing them to prove their loyalty through death. Such demands literalize the existentialist definition of love, that the lover puts the beloved beyond the value of the world and his or her life, making that beloved the standard of value, the absolute. The demand is messianic, and in this novel the cost is the suicide of Caroline Wooler: After witnessing what seems to be a lesbian orgy, Caroline climbs a building under construction and jumps to her death.
Nellie views Caroline’s death as a personal triumph. At the end of the novel, with her husband dead, Nellie goes with the window washer Walter to a temple, a “Nabob villa,” where she explores “problems of the unknowable.” Like Sam Pollit, who at his worst compared himself to Christ, Nellie Cook is drawn finally to outright mysticism, an interest that combines, in Nellie’s case at least, a fascination with death, a craving for a high destiny, and an uncontrollable urge to manipulate other people. It seems that for Stead, the “dark places of the heart” make people dissatisfied with their humanity.