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Pendennis and the Power of Sentimentality: A Study of Motherly Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert Bledsoe
Robert Bledsoe*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, El Paso
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Abstract

In Pendennis Thackeray redefines the meaning of “maturity” in order to suit the unusual needs of Pendennis in his compulsive search for emotional security. The narrator's ability simultaneously to denigrate and to celebrate the sentimental purity of Pen's mother, Helen, is the paradox whose development gives esthetic coherence to an otherwise commonplace story. Both Helen's youthful disappointments and her later possessiveness elicit protective responses from the narrator, although he goes out of his way to make her destructive nature increasingly obvious to the reader and to Pen himself. Moreover, Pen's continued inability to break away from Helen's demands reinforces her insistence on total allegiance from him. The narrator presents his characters' problems within a framework of psychological reality, but solves them only on the level of pseudo-incestuous fantasy. Therefore, final freedom from the terrors of insecurity involves Pen's willing enslavement to the mindlessness of Helen's sentimentality.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 871 - 883
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 See Robert E. Lougy's important discussion of the narrator's bitterness (I believe that the novel would support an even bleaker reading than his), in “Vision and Satire: The Warped Looking Glass in Vanity Fair,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 256-69.

2 See Robert Colby's more traditional interpretation of the novel as “primarily . . . about the development of a writer” in Fiction with Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), p. 148. Another approach focuses on the novel's theatrical imagery. See Martin Fido's “The History of Pendennis: A Reconsideration” in Essays in Criticism, 14 (1964), 363-79, and Edgar F. Harden's “Theatricality in Pendennis” in Ariel, 4 (1973), 74-94.

3 Hannay James, Studies on Thackeray (London: Routledge, [1869]), p. 25.

4 McMaster Juliet, e.g., feels that the “effusions” are “embarrassing” but that the narrator's voice which describes them is no more “the authentic voice of the novel (though Thackeray himself in some moods might have claimed that it was) than are the dry tones of the ironist that alternate with it.” Thackeray: The Major Novels (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971), p. 97. J. Y. T. Greig mentions that Helen is “infuriating” but “credible.” See Thackeray: A Reconsideration (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 125. Adolphus Alfred Jack's quaintly expressed comment is closer to the truth: “Even Laura and Mrs. Pendennis have their little fits of hardness, jealousy, and pique. But except for these Pendennis' mother and betrothed are as good women as ever passed their lives between the covers of a book. . . . Many are the readers whose eyes have dimmed over the death of Mrs. Pendennis, and who have closed the volume, and looked back and admired the delicate shades in this gentle picture of confiding motherhood.” Thackeray: A Study (1895; rpt. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat, 1970), p. 113. For a sound general treatment of good Victorian women, see Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 341-93.

5 All references to Pendennis are from the Everyman's Library ed. in 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1959). Volume, chapter, and page references will be given in the text, followed by the part number in the original serial publication.

6 In context, Bagehot is contrasting Thackeray with Sterne. The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), ii, 310.

7 In Thackeray's next novel, Henry Esmond, he developed a far more subtle relationship between character, event, and memory. See Henri-A. Talon, “Time and Memory in Thackeray's Henry Esmond,” Review of English Studies, NS 13 (1962), 147-56.

8 The narrator comments that the “maternal passion is a sacred mystery to me. What one sees symbolised in the Roman churches in the image of the Virgin Mother with a bosom bleeding with love, I think one may witness (and admire the Almighty bounty for) every day. I saw a Jewish lady, only yesterday, with a child at her knee, and from whose face towards the child there shone a sweetness so angelical, that it seemed to form a sort of glory round both. I protest I could have knelt before her too, and adored in her the Divine beneficence in endowing us with the maternal storgè, which began with our race and sanctifies the history of mankind” (i, Ch. ii, p. 20).

9 Note that at the very beginning of the novel the narrator lightly states that “This unfortunate superstition and idol-worship of this good woman was the cause of a great deal of the misfortune which befell the young gentleman who is the hero of this history, and deserves therefore to be mentioned at the outset of his story” (i, Ch. ii, p. 15).

10 The psychological insight behind this remark is often treated with more deference than I feel it deserves. See, inter alia, Lambert Ennis' Thackeray: The Sentimental Cynic (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1950), p. 179; Gordon Ray's Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 126; John Loofbourow's Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 189; and Barbara Hardy's The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (London: Peter Owen, 1972), p. 162.

11 I am inclined to agree with J.A. Sutherland's speculation that a deletion in the manuscript (and some other indications) suggests that “prevision of the Rachel-Harry union was not there from the first, that originally Thackeray began to write a novel with a much simpler love plot and simpler time scheme, and that the first book of Esmond belongs to this simpler novel.” Thackeray at Work (London: Athlone, 1974), p. 59.

12 “[Thackeray] is most effective, indeed, when he can give the old and the young version of the same character simultaneous existence, as he does with Helen Pendennis and Laura Bell.” Robert Alan Donovan, The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 199. Alexander Welsh rightly notes that this identification is further developed in Thackeray's next novel, since “in Henry Esmond Lady Castlewood is Helen and Laura rolled into one. Both novels begin to suggest that the ideal heroine is an attractive mother not much older than the hero—which may be a Freudian commonplace, but is also a logical extension of the domesticity of truth.” See “The Allegory of Truth in English Fiction,” in Victorian Studies, 9 (1965), 12.

13 Introd. to Pendennis, ed. Donald Hawes (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p. 14.

14 Combining the theme of Gray's “Elegy” with a Biedermeier sensibility, the narrator laments: “Scarcely more than of a nun in a cloister did people know of that pious and gentle lady. A few words among the cottagers whom her bounty was accustomed to relieve . . . —this was all, and except with one or two who cherished her, the kind soul was forgotten by the next market-day. Would you desire that grief for you should last fora few more weeks? and does after-life seem less solitary, provided that our names, when we ‘go down into silence,‘ are echoing on this side of the grave yet for a little while, and human voices are still talking about us? She was gone, the pure soul, whom only two or three loved and knew” (ii, Ch. lvii, p. 198). Though less intense, the tone of the passage is similar to that of the conclusion to George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872). The reasons for the narrator's point of view toward Helen in this last stage are well explained by James Wheatley's remark about the novel's ending: “The merely mock defeat of Pen's jilting by Blanche, and his subsequent reward in marriage to Laura, underlines the inadequacy of Pen's earlier estimate of life without essentially changing it. On one level, life turns out to be happier than he had dreamed possible, but on another level he has merely penetrated to the realm of transcendental passion, inhabited chiefly by mothers. This passion alone holds together and dignifies for Thackeray the sweetly sad view of life's limitations that Pen had held earlier.” Patterns in Thackeray's Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T Press, 1969), p. 113.

15 I wish to thank the Univ. of Texas at El Paso and its Graduate Research Committee for a leave of absence from teaching duties and a generous grant which enabled me to write this article.