Lesbian Images: Essays by Rule Jane

Author:Rule, Jane [Rule, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480429697
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

Iseult, perhaps in the best position to understand Eva, tries to describe her. “‘Girl’ never fitted Eva. Her so-called sex bored and mortified her.” But Iseult’s asserting that “she did not need women. Their vulnerability antagonized her—as I found out,”35 is suspect, for Iseult did not want to be needed by Eva. When the doctors who are to help Jeremy question her, Eva tries to be frank in her answers. To the suggestion that she wished to be Jeremy’s father as well as mother, “‘Possibly,’ she ceded—not greatly startled.”36 It is in this interview that Eva’s deviousness is most clearly explained, based not on a desire to be untruthful but only on a need to protect herself from the unloving interference of other people.

Iseult, like Mrs. Kerr, is the chief villain, half awakening first Eva and then Jeremy, and then not taking the responsibility for their need because she herself is torn between her intelligence and her passion, her gift as a teacher and her desire to be a woman. In the time she has been separated from her husband, she has obviously turned herself into a prostitute in an effort to kill whatever is left of her intelligence. She is made not only the emotional cause of the tragedy but the provider of the actual weapon. It is as if the gun planted in The Little Girls, which was never allowed to go off, had to be planted again for some real purpose.

Eva is, of course, doing the same thing to Jeremy that Iseult has done to her. The difference is that Eva does not really perceive her error. She pays for it instead with her life, while Iseult watches on the arm of her recently rediscovered and devoted husband.

Eva Trout is Elizabeth Bowen’s most sinister comment about the power to destroy and be destroyed in those whose innocence has been neglected and then betrayed. It’s as if there were no bridge for those “originals” across the gulf of ignorance between childhood and maturity, and they are left with only the blundering power of need, which inadvertently causes harm. Eva is, perhaps, the great caricature of woman, denied sources of love and understanding, loose in the world to act out the charades of motherhood and marriage, her own bizarre and grotesque image of the world only underlining the greater distortions of the real world, in which sapphic love is immoral, female intelligence a curse, the lack of it a mortal danger. Diana, the traditional charmer and temptress, may get what she wants, but Eva, with her outsized longing for love and for knowledge, will not.

Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen satirizes the conventional world, but her judgments are harsher because she does not see the victims of power being the better for it. The distinctive girl child who doesn’t easily fit the narrow mold often does not survive at all, and, if she does, she may have to wait through repressed middle age for a Diana, or be turned into a monstrous caricature, dangerous to herself and other people.

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