London Writing of The 1930s by Cottrell Anna;

Author:Cottrell, Anna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Bored Women, Beleaguered Men

Wolf Suschitzky’s best-known image, Couple in a Lyons (1933), is of a lovers’ spat. The man is leaning over the table slightly, perhaps trying to resolve the quarrel quietly, perhaps intent on explaining himself, or simply not knowing what to say. But she is looking past him, not just angry, but completely indifferent, and possibly fixing her gaze on something or someone else altogether. Suschitzky explained later that he took the picture because ‘she seemed to be giving him a hard time’.24

There are many versions of this scene in the fiction of the period, such as Elizabeth Bowen’s shorthand of this mood in To the North – ‘a couple who smoked in silence eyeing each other glumly . . . a blonde in a red hat being insistent angrily’.25 And in Norah Hoult’s Apartments to Let, a teashop provides the setting for a spectacular quarrel between the newly engaged couple Elizabeth and Leonard. The reason for the quarrel is the same as in many 1930s novels – the lady is fashionably late. Leonard is an architect trainee and has only an hour for lunch, and for seeing his beloved fiancée. The subsequent meal is rendered as a comic pantomime: she tortures him with silence over their Lyons meal, ‘maintaining a bored and superior expression’, while Leonard struggles to re-engage her in conversation, ‘anxious and frowning’. She relishes the tension, and the obvious effect the performance has on other men: ‘Looking away she caught the glance of a man at the next table. Admiring? But perhaps a trifle amused?’26 Like the woman in Suschitzky’s photo she is smoking, right before the meal, much to Leonard’s displeasure. The monosyllabic dialogue between them finally peters out as she defiantly lights the cigarette with the matches she has just demanded from Leonard. He is reduced to a mere prop:

She puffed her cigarette in a bored fashion looking away from him. Once again she caught the eye of the man behind her. Her eyelids flickered. With exaggerated precision she dropped the ash into the tray provided.27

For Leonard there’s nothing left but to take up his hat and leave with a perplexed ‘Good-bye’. The less attention she pays to him, the more inarticulate he becomes, more and more reduced to his hat, and conscious of the prying eyes of the waitresses – ‘They seemed to be regarding him with combined amusement and scorn.’28 Although Elizabeth is only playing, her relish in her performance, and her unexpected lack of guilt about the suffering it causes Leonard, makes her eventually break off their engagement.

From their earliest appearances in fiction, teashops figured as a ‘new feminine constellation’ that posed a ‘threat . . . to a masculine subjectivity’.29 The precise nature of this threat consisted in the relegation of masculine subjectivities entirely to the realm of the visual or, more specifically, to fragmented, metonymic feminine vision. Men lose their voices, are drowned out by female conversation, and are transformed from psychologically complex characters into two-dimensional types, bit-players in women’s visual fantasies.

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