Recovering the serious antics of Stevie Smith's novels

Laura Severin

In 1979, a mere eight years after Stevie Smith's death, Mark Storey published an article entitled "Why Stevie Smith Matters," for he feared that she was "in danger of sinking back, like a character in one of her poems, beneath the waves of oblivion" (176). Fortunately, Smith is no longer in danger of sinking beneath the waves, even in the United States, where she has never had the same popular following as in Britain. In 1985 Jack Barbera and William McBrien's critical biography reintroduced Smith to American audiences. Two recent articles on Smith's poetry have appeared in Contemporary Literature, one in 1992 by Sheryl Stevenson, the other in 1993 by Romana Huk. But if oblivion is no longer a threat to Smith's work, diminishment is. Despite Barbera and McBrien's efforts to convey the variety of Smith's career, Smith is now seen almost solely as a poet. Of course, Smith is an accomplished poet, and deserves the attentions of Stevenson and Huk, as well as others. But in recovering Smith as a poet, and solely as a poet, we are in danger of forgetting that she was also an accomplished reviewer, visual artist, performance artist, and, perhaps most important, a popular and successful novelist of the 1930s and 1940s.

Although Smith's three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938), and The Holiday (1949), have been reissued and are currently available, there are other ominous signs that Smith's reputation as a novelist is fading. In Breaking the Sequence (1989), Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's important work on women's experimental fiction in the twentieth century, Smith is not mentioned, even in the supplementary bibliography at the end of the book. Friedman and Fuchs rightly point out that an "exhaustive treatment of this tradition is impossible" (xiii), yet the omission is disappointing.

Current silence on Smith's novels can hardly be blamed on their reception in the 1930s and 1940s. All three of her novels were reviewed favorably, particularly Novel on Yellow Paper, which ignited Smith's career, and The Holiday, which was Smith's personal favorite. A more likely explanation for Smith's disappearance as a novelist is the lukewarm reception the novels received when reissued by Virago and Pinnacle. Many reviewers found them to be of historical rather than literary interest and expressed a preference for her poetry. The reviewer for the Critical Quarterly said that the novels can only be read as "glosses on the poetry" (92).

Although Smith's fiction certainly takes up many of the same issues as her poetry, such a verdict is frustrating for a number of reasons. First, the novels, because of their length and because of the novel form itself, make connections only briefly glimpsed in the poetry. Smith's critique of colonialism is implicit in poems such as "A Shooting Incident" and "Under Wrong Trees . . . or Freeing the Colonial Peoples," yet the link between colonialism and patriarchy is central to The Holiday. Second, it is most unfortunate that the novels are being dismissed just when feminist critics are beginning to create the theoretical paradigms needed to make sense of them, and to connect them to work of other women writers, such as Virginia Woolf. Friedman and Fuchs's book and Rachel DuPlessis's earlier work, Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), have begun to trace a tradition of women's writing, and Smith's work needs to be read in that context. Like many other women writers of the twentieth century, Smith used her texts to break patriarchal forms, particularly the romance plot, and to envision new ones.(1)

Each of Smith's novels marks an assault on the romance plot, although the techniques she employs are remarkably varied. Novel interrupts the romance first of Karl and heroine Pompey, then of Freddy and Pompey, with disruptive interludes - lists of quotations, fantasies, retold versions of the classics. Over teeters on a romance ending, but then abruptly vaults Pompey, the same heroine as in Novel, into one of the culture's few alternatives to the romance plot, that of the quest? Pompey's transformation from lover to soldier baffled almost all the reviewers, for they failed to see that the masculine quest plot is a natural escape hatch for a woman writer who fears her beloved main character is about to disappear down the rabbit hole of femininity, in this case through marrying Freddy, or one of Freddy's doubles, Tom Satterwhite.(3)

But perhaps Smith's most radical novel is her last one, The Holiday. Unlike Smith's first two novels, Holiday does not merely disrupt available cultural stories such as romance and quest: It attempts to found a new cultural story, based on what Smith was to call the "rhythm of friendship" (Novel 215). Celia, Holiday's heroine, spends the entire story visiting and chatting with friends, thus leaving the novel without a trace of the romance and quest plot's linearity. Aptly titled, the novel presents a holiday, or escape, from everyday patterns. Smith gives her characters a break from the boredom of daily reality, thus giving herself a break from narrative conventions. In so doing, Smith suggests that our dominant narrative patterns, based on rigid gender distinctions and mandatory heterosexual coupling, can give way to new and different stories, and therefore new and different lives.

Smith's social agenda is most definitely radical, but even more so is its political rationale. Set in postwar England, Holiday argues that the psychology of romance must yield in order to free society from its political incarnation in the form of imperialism, or global domination. Celia and Caz's attempt to free themselves from the trap of romance, the desire to posses the Other, is also their journey to free themselves from their part in England's role as imperial oppressor, yet another form of possessive desire. In her recognition of the interconnections between public and private spheres, Smith resembles Virginia Woolf, whose early novels, in fact, were very influential on the young writer (Barbera and McBrien 45). Smith most likely would have agreed with Woolf's statement in Three Guineas that "the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other" (142).

Yet Smith's Holiday is not a duplication of Woolf's Three Guineas, or even The Years, which also connects colonialism to patriarchy. The recovery of Holiday shows us how women's novels often speak to each other, even when they are unaware of doing so; a fuller recovery of the tradition can only yield a fuller dialogue. That dialogue sometimes entails a reinforcement of one another's ideas. In Years and Holiday Woolf and Smith are fearful that society will be unable to change, and thus will only continue to reproduce its destructive patterns. Although Rachel DuPlessis finds the "long final section of The Years is a reaffirmation . . . of the glimmer of 'a new world'" (160), other evidence suggests that this new world may not come about. The voice of the new generation is hardly encouraging, since Peggy's speech predicts that family patterns will merely replay themselves, and her brother North does not even make his speech. One of the most visionary characters, Nicholas, concludes the novel with ominous words: "There is going to be no peroration . . . because there was no speech" (Years 466). Smith, too, leaves us up in the air at the end of her novel; we as readers do not know if Celia and her cousin Caz will have the strength to leave their imperial posts.

In addition, the dialogue between women writers can reveal significant differences. Smith is less mystical and ultimately more practical than Woolf, perhaps because of their class differences, in charting what society will need to overcome in order to change and how it might go about doing so. According to Smith, a new world can only come about through the relinquishment of all forms of possessiveness, the psychological as well as the material. Smith is also perhaps more brave in admitting that radical change can come only at a great price; change will necessarily bring about depression, anxiety, and confusion. Holiday is therefore a strange utopian novel in that it is filled with sadness. At least one contemporary reviewer of the novel tactfully mentioned that she could have done without the novel's surfeit of tears (Holden). Smith might have responded that breaking one's attachments to both family and national identities, although necessary for survival, is a tearful, and almost impossible, process.

Hard pressed to locate a generic designation for Holiday in her 1979 introduction, Janet Watts at first describes the book's nonevents and then succumbs to the only category which seems to fit: "There is a love story in The Holiday" (3). Yet it is hardly a love story in conventional terms. And indeed Watts recognizes this when she admits, "The love in The Holiday is a strangled love; even the affection is restrained" (4). But to say that Smith "strangles the love" in Holiday is to suggest that the goal of her third novel is identical to that of the first two, to undermine the conventions of the love story. Instead, Holiday marks an attempt to recreate love by separating the necessary and revitalizing love of friendship from the possessive and damaging love of romance. For Smith, romantic love is doomed to disaster because it is based on the desire to possess the Other. Smith confesses she is drawn to romantic possessiveness, as portrayed in works such as Tennyson's Maud (Holiday 159, 163), but she ultimately prefers independence, as is revealed in "Over-Dew," a short story incorporated into the text (160-63). Her short story becomes a miniaturized version of the larger text in its rejection of romantic love - the modern Cynthia escapes, but the traditional Mrs. Minnim is made miserable by her family.

Our first clue that Holiday is not a conventional love story is its meandering, fitful plot, which refuses the closure typical of much romance fiction. The romance between Celia and Caz is hardly a central concern: meetings between the two, until they get to their holiday with Uncle Heber, tend to be chance occurrences. Instead, the plot is driven by encounters with a wide variety of Celia's friends and relatives; there is a party at Lopez's house, conversations with friends at work, these are lemon-curd tarts and coffee at Harrods with cousin Tom, talk with Aunt at breakfast, tea and conversation with Aunt and sister Pearl. Watts writes that the novel is "patchworked" with conversations (3); rather, it is a patchwork of conversations. Nowhere does the novel take a linear drive toward marriage and/or consummation. In fact, at the end of the novel Celia ends up asleep next to Caz, in full view of Uncle Heber, a kind of parody of a consummation scene.

For Smith, romance must be avoided because all possessive relationships end in the loss of identity for one member of the romantic pair, usually the woman. Celia fights the lure of romance, seeing herself, like her father, as a seafarer, traveling between home and work and friends (Holiday 37, 136). But she knows she continually risks being "caught": "But sometimes in the running round and the play-off there is a sudden dangerous capture made, made of oneself by a person who is outside" (27). The person Celia most fears, and at the same time most desires, is her cousin Tom, whom her Aunt and Uncle want her to marry. But Celia knows that to marry Tom means to become Tom, to succumb to the family's desire to "draw Tom's madness off" (27).

Not only is one's immediate family to blame for promoting heterosexual romance, but so too are a young single woman's friends. Society as a whole works to perpetuate and reinforce domestic ideology. Celia regularly visits married friends, she says to see "how the other people get along" (26), but seemingly as a way of reminding herself of the price of marriage. Although she is moved to marry at times throughout the novel, these visits remind her that she is not really the marrying kind: "I have never had such a thing [the desire for marriage] heigh ho" (26). Celia purports to admire her friend Maria for "having the children and keeping the house going on turning round the men" (26). Nevertheless, her relief at leaving suggests that Celia fears the loss involved in keeping a household "turning round the men."

Yet Smith is aware that the desire for possession can infiltrate all relationships, even those supposedly outside the cultural norm, such as homosexuals. Celia tells Lopez about "the jealousies, the ferocity, the cruelty of a couple of she-friends," probably her colleagues Eleanor and Constance: "One will play cat-and-mouse and the other will play doormat, and yet they love each other truly and cannot part" (60). No homophobe, at least in relation to lesbians, Smith does not criticize homosexuality itself; in fact, in one book review she applauds the love of women for each other (Me 191). What Smith dislikes is the dominant-subordinate paradigm, by which one partner becomes "a doormat."

Smith finds an alternative to society's mania for coupling in the shifting bonds of friendship, what she calls the "rhythm of friendship." The Persephone myth, based as it is on continual reattachment of affections, becomes Smith's metaphor for a fluid, shifting life style, founded on freedom rather than bondage. Always intrigued by the Persephone myth, Smith was to rewrite it many times in her career. Sometimes, as in her poem "The Lady of the Well-Spring," that myth becomes a way of envisioning a reconnection to the mother and all that implies - sensuality, affection, the body. However, she could just as easily declare her allegiances to the masculine world of Hades. In Smith's poem "Persephone," the speaker's refusal to leave the "wintriness" of her husband's kingdom can be read as a refusal to leave the kingdom of masculinity and the privileges it entails, for she calls the wintry kingdom the "new land of learning" (Collected 248). But Holiday marks Smith's most radical reading of the Persephone myth in that she uses it to endorse travel and fluidity. Celia does not have to choose between affections and privileges; as a seafarer, she wants access to all worlds.

And indeed, Celia does not make a choice. She retains her relationship with her aunt, a familial relationship which nevertheless marks an opposition to familial relationships as they are constituted in a patriarchal society. Despite the tendency of community members such as the grocer to regularize this relationship with her Aunt by calling her Aunt her mother (25), Celia knows that her relationship with her Aunt is not reducible to normal familial terms:

Most women, especially in the lower and lower-middle classes, are conditioned early to having 'father' the center of the home-life, with father's chair, and father's dinner, and father's Times and father says, so they are not brought up like me to be this wicked selfish creature, to have no boring old father-talk, to have no papa at all that one attends to, to having a darling Aunt to come home to, that one admires, that is strong, happy, simple, shrewd, staunch, loving, upright and bossy. (26, 27)

Yet the relationship between Aunt and Celia, precisely because it is dyadic, is not a life-style solution for Celia, but only one aspect of a solution. Smith continually emphasizes that any coupling, even between women, can be dangerous. Celia feels somewhat claustrophobic with Aunt and must get out in the world: "There is this straining and anxiety in this love between dear relations" (28).

Celia prevents the relationship between herself and her aunt from resembling heterosexual marriage by maintaining a complex network of friends outside the home. Part of this network is made up of female friends, such as Lopez. Smith most definitely recognizes that relationships between women are frequently less problematic than those between men and women because of the absence of gender hierarchies mandated by society. Celia relies upon Lopez's strength, yet does not feel threatened by it. However, Holiday is hardly a depiction of pre-oedipal bliss. Unlike Smith's earlier novels, this one focuses largely on relationships between the sexes; Celia maintains friendships with Tiny, Raji, and, most important, Caz. Although at one point Celia suggests that women can only accept or reject men, i.e., by accepting the dominant-submissive role of traditional heterosexual coupling or by rejecting them altogether, the novel itself is far more radical (and Celia is too, at other moments). In fact, the novel explores what relationships are possible between men and women. Celia jokes that she would like to be "the third wife, perhaps, with her own house" (128), but she largely pursues friendships. In these friendships neither partner is dominant, and although the partners may sometimes teeter on possessiveness, they never quite fall victim to possessive desires.

Celia's fantasy of the perfect, or at least better, relationship between men and women is presented in her poem (also Smith's poem) "The Castle," incorporated at the end of Holiday. Emphasizing the speculative character of this poem, Celia acknowledges that it is not "sensible" and may even be "morally indefensible" (157). At first, the poem seems like a disappointing retelling of the romance plot. The female character marries her beloved, and they live happily ever after on a seemingly deserted estate. But the poem becomes more interesting when read as Smith's most complex rendition of the Persephone myth. In other renditions, such as "Persephone" or "Lady of the Well-Spring," Smith imagined her female characters connecting permanently with either Father-language or Mother-body, but in "The Castle" the character is free to go back and forth, as she chooses, between the world of day and night. Her choices are not taken from her by possessive mother or father. The poem thus personifies the female Celia would like to stay: a traveler between worlds. In addition the poem suggests, in its confusion of the dark world of Hades with the dark world typically associated with the feminine, that the connection between men and women need not mean a surrender of the body and emotion, those attributes usually connected with the return to the mother. The speaker embraces her lover in the night world, no more cut off from the body in his world than in hers.

It is Celia's relationship to her cousin Caz that comes the closest to emulating the relationship described in the poem, one which denies domination and possession. Barbera and McBrien, in their analysis of Caz and Celia's relationship, suggest that Caz and Celia represent two halves of one personality, continually seeking, but never finding wholeness (168). While it is true that Caz and Celia often long for the union represented by a romantic relationship, it is important to note that they consciously reject this option, preferring freedom instead. Caz and Celia's fluid relationship contrasts with the dangerous and sinister relationship that exists between Celia and her cousin, Tom, whose relationship always threatens to drift toward marriage. Although Celia sometimes longs for Tom and the possessive relationship he represents, she ultimately prefers her free but insecure life with Caz. As Caz suggests, romance cannot be the answer: "You must not be romantic about Tom, you must not suppose there is a solution there, there is no solution for us and no answer" (Holiday 140, 141).

In following Caz's plea to reject Tom, Celia frees her desire from its socially mandated channels. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have explained in Anti-Oedipus, society represses by channeling the explosive, revolutionary force of desire into a desire for something, specifically for the Other: "Oedipal desires are the bait, the disfigured image by means of which repression catches desire in the trap" (116). Celia and Caz do not succumb to their incestuous desires, unlike Celia's father and Caz's mother, because they recognize that transgressing the taboo of incest is just another trap. Hardly a rebellious act, incest only affirms society's oedipal power by coding or channeling the nature of rebellion: "The incestuous desires are the disfigured image of the repressed" (Deleuze and Guattari 119). Rejecting oedipal law involves a recognition that its binary system of choice - to obey or rebel - is really a non-choice.

Celia and Caz, therefore, voyage out to a new world. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, "Every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society" (116). Thus Celia's (and Caz's) rejection of romance sets up an alternative societal pattern, one based on networks of many kinds of relationships. Significantly, this world is not merely an extended family, for, as Gayatri Spivak cautions, we should not be deluded by "the romantic notion that an extended family, especially a community of women, would necessarily cure the ills of the nuclear family" (82). Instead, relationships spiral outward in a chaotic and confused manner. The novel portrays all sorts of dyads: the familial (Aunt and Celia), the non-familial (Lopez and Celia) and the quasi-familial (Celia and Caz.) In addition, Smith presents all sorts of triads: the familial (Celia, Caz, and Uncle Heber,) the non-familial (Celia, Tiny, and Clem), and the quasi-familial (Tiny, Celia, and Caz or Raji, Celia, and Caz). And in turn these dyads and triads are part of a large, almost unbelievably complex network of shifting friendships and alliances. Smith's vision of a network of allegiances is similar to that of Woolf in The Years, where a familial structure is replaced by alliances between distant relations and friends. Yet Smith's vision is finally more dynamic and less insular than Woolf's in that Celia's "group" continually reconstitutes itself, frequently into a global community.

Smith's argument that heterosexual coupling ends in subsuming the identity of one partner, usually the wife, is a persuasive critique of social institutions, especially for women. Yet Smith's attack on the romantic dyad is more fundamental in that she believes global survival depends on its rejection. The historic period of Holiday, what Smith calls the "postwar," is no time of peace and rejoicing, but one of anxiousness and terror, with conflicts in India, Palestine, and elsewhere threatening to grow worse. When Caz wonders whether "we can bear not to be at war" (9), he is voicing the sentiments of many of the novel's characters, who fear that conflict and strife, not friendship, are to be the true rhythm of human life. Although Smith's book may have seemed outdated when it was finally published in 1949 (India, after all, broke from Britain in 1947), the book is now again curiously relevant, as nationalism reasserts itself and imperial domination spreads through the invisible weapon of capital. Best in its critique of the mechanisms of oppression, rather than its retelling of Britain's record with India, the novel suggests that society's channeling of desire toward a specified Other, whether that Other be female or colonial, is the foundation for oppression.

For Smith, the politics of imperialistic nationalism is another version of the politics of romance, complete with wooing and capture. Celia, the center of the colonial debate and the most imperialistic character at the novel's opening, is literally in love with India. To "leave India," the character's term for Britain's withdrawal of imperial power, requires the colonizer to experience the pain one associates with the loss of a lover. Smith's point is that "leaving India" is not only a political and economic decision, but a profoundly emotional one as well. Although Celia acknowledges all the rational reasons for withdrawal, it is her emotions which reject the leaving of India. She must unchannel her desires from the Other, in this case India, in order to achieve personal growth and in order for the process of global justice to begin. As Deleuze and Guattari have theorized, channeled desire colonizes, and in turn, leads to further colonization:

Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here, at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education. (170)

Only by resisting the channeling of desire can one resist the desire to possess, which leads to all forms of domination, familial and political. Freeing desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can only result in the explosion of society's repressive character: "No society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude and hierarchy being compromised" (116). Smith would seem to agree, as she shows Celia and Caz simultaneously rejecting romance and their colonial upbringing. During their holiday they resist the desire to marry and at least consider not returning to their jobs, which have decided imperial connections.

No doubt Smith's friend Inez Holden, who reviewed Holiday, would find this reading odd, since she found Smith's book too pro-English, "perhaps too loyal wherever Mother Empire and England my England cut across the prose" (132). But here Holden fails to recognize the novel's rhetorical strategy, which Shari Benstock has applied to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, its "rhetorical twists and turns" (142). Like Woolf in Three Guineas, Smith mimes the rhetoric of imperialism only to eventually subvert it. Celia, the heroine of the novel, voices imperial sentiments, but she is not supported by other characters and her views eventually change. Thus Smith exposes the psychological mechanisms of imperialism, revealing what triggers the "England my England" response to the suffering of oppressed peoples. Smith shows us that intellectual argument is powerless against the passions of nationalism; it is our emotions which first must be changed, not our minds. Smith's rhetorical strategy is also useful in that it reveals the process by which Celia learns to doubt herself and her loyalties, with respect to England. We as readers learn to doubt our own oppressive natures, as Celia comes to doubt hers.

The novel begins with nationalistic pride, as Celia declares herself staunchly pro-English (9). However, she gradually begins to feel ashamed of her position. In an argument over India with Caz, Celia defends a pro-English, pro-Imperial position, but finds herself embarrassed and unsettled by her statements. She defends the whipping law, yet knows in good conscience it cannot be defended. Her friend Tiny's analogy between England and Rome also hits hard, for she knows it is an apt one. Celia admits that her defense of Britain's imperialism prevents a new world order, yet she finds change difficult to achieve:

I thought, I am a middle-class girl, conditioned by middle-class thoughts, when I think of England, my dear country, I think with pride, aggression and complacency. I tie up my own pride and advantage with England's, I have no integrity, no honesty, no generous idea of a better way of life than that which gives cream to England. But where can one get this idea of a new world, and how can one believe it? (84)

Celia herself comes to long for a new world, and thus the imperialistic Celia at the beginning of the novel is not the more doubtful Celia of the novel's end.

In addition, the novel's other characters do not support Celia's pro-English positions, nor do they let her get away with her sentimental nationalism. After Celia defends the sanctity of English law - "But . . . at least the English law cannot be bought" (118) - Caz quips: "That is true . . . at least not by the poor, and also it is true of course that it is not quite so harsh as the medieval code" (118). New readings of Smith's novels should not simply equate Smith with her female heroines, nor should they assume that those heroines represent stable, unified ideologies.

The novel gradually circles away, as does Novel, which begins with a blatantly anti-Semitic statement, from a simple anti-Other stance. But it does so by mimicking the language of imperialism and anti-Semitism, slowly exposing the dangers of any language of domination. Unlike Woolf's novels, Smith's shows us why it is so hard to create the "new world." Smith reveals that the connection with the Other, the imperial nation with its colonial territories, represents a dream of undivided unity. Celia dreams of the time when she and Caz and Raji were children in India and asks how England can give up India when its citizens share these romantic memories: "And how can we leave India when we have these loving memories, how can we do it?"

But Smith reveals that these memories, which arise, significantly, when Celia is no longer in India, are illusory. Celia begins the novel as an Orientalist, since India is hardly a real place for Celia, but a construction. India for Celia is the Orient of romantic Orientalism, as described by Edward Said: "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences" (1). Contrasting her dream of childhood in India with an adult world of conflict, Celia cannot help being depressed. The old loyalties are severely strained. Caz criticizes his former childhood friend Raji for being a "London party-pet" (Holiday 85), untrue to his motherland, even though Raji has been beaten for his convictions. Caz, who professes anti-imperial statements, is supposed to leave the holiday at Uncle Heber's for a post in India. But as Celia herself reveals, her blissful childhood is an illusion; she remembers both violence and discord, as the image of the panther tearing open the throat of a prey reveals (82). That image is linked with the face of the adult Caz, showing the reader, if not Celia, that childhood and adulthood are both post-lapsarian. The image also suggests the real, if repressed, violence of colonialism. The India of Celia's childhood, as she herself shows us, is not the place of romance that she believes it to be.

But there is hope for Caz and Celia, partly because they come from a revolutionary lineage. Caz may be the son of Celia's father, who had an affair with Aunt Eva, Caz's mother and the wife of one of the governors of India. Despite the fact that they fall into the incestuous trap that Celia and Caz avoid, their affair marks a preliminary blow at both patriarchy and the empire. Eva's affair strikes out at Edmund as Edmund, her "cold and learned husband" (28), but also at Edmund as a functionary of the empire, Edmund the colonial governor, since she refuses to be completely under his domination. Ultimately, though, their affair is misguided, since they merely channel their desire into a desire for each other, thus allowing their rebellion to be diffused through incest.

A radical break with the past was too difficult for Eva's generation, but Caz and Celia may be different. Both Smith and Woolf place their hope in generational change, the world's radicals and outsiders slowly evolving, through intellectual affinity, an increasingly radical group of subversives.(4) Although Caz is supposedly leaving for a post in India at the end of the novel, he is having a hard time packing: we see his clothes strewn about and he goes for a walk with Celia, never to return to packing within the confines of the novel. And Celia may not go back to coding for the Ministry, which appears to be a British intelligence agency. She vaguely tells Tiny that she "suppose[s]" (170) she will go back to the Ministry, but gives him no positive reassurance.

And yet Celia and Caz have made no definite decision to rebel against the imperial motherland at the end of the book. They may indeed return to their own lives. Part of our doubt is created by the fact that Celia and Caz seem to have nowhere else to go. It is clear that Uncle Heber's way, the way of Christianity, which dovetails with his isolationist farm life, will not do for Celia and Caz. They, in fact, laugh at Heber's way of life and declare themselves a different generation. According to Celia, Christianity involves another version of society's cat-and-mouse game:

[This] Christian religious idea, it is too tidy, too tidy by far. In its extreme tidy logic it is a diminution and a lie. These rewards and punishments, this grading, this father-son-teacher-pupil idea, it too much bears the human wish for something finished off and tidy, something one can grasp lovingly and tight, trusting to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. (39-40)

Grasping, as Celia learns continually throughout the novel, only brings sorrow.

Unable to stay at Heber's and unable to return home, Celia and Caz are stranded at the end of the novel. We as readers do not know if Celia and Caz are strong enough to start a new life or whether they will succumb to the familiarity of the old one. But perhaps Celia's quoting of Confucius marks a change:

Confucius says that if you return good for evil, what then will you return for good? No, he says, return rather good for good, and for evil, justice. (182)

In quoting an Eastern source, Celia is perhaps moving away from her Euro-centric viewpoint. But equally as important is Celia's recognition of the reality of conflict, a sign that she is moving away from her dream of India, that sense of an undivided, unbroken world. If Celia does not like the tensions and ideological differences that exist even between friends and relatives, she has at least come to accept them. In accepting conflict, Celia acknowledges, as does Smith, that "new worlds" do not come easily, if at all.

Just as Smith's "new world" requires a new social paradigm, so does an acceptance of Smith's novels require a new literary paradigm, one based less on hierarchical judgment and more on an acknowledgment of literature's dialogic function. In making the comment that Smith's novels "gloss" the poetry, the Critical Quarterly reviewer reveals his or her judgment to be based on an oppositional and hierarchical framework. The implications of the statement are that the novels cannot stand alone, i.e., on the level with other famous novels, and that the novels are somehow subordinate, i.e., inferior, to the poetry. But what we need to judge Smith's novels is precisely a sense of their connectedness, both to the poetry and to other novels of the time. Smith can, and should, be connected to other women writers of her time, such as Woolf, but also to the era's writers of political literature. Barbera and McBrien make this last point when they link Novel on Yellow Paper with the autobiographies of John Lehmann and Stephen Spender and The Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood, which "record memorably the compelling yet menacing atmosphere of Germany in these years" (52). Jan Montefiore extends their comments to include a connection between Auden and Smith: "When she sent her heroine into a world of spying and melodrama in Over the Frontier (1938) she deployed that myth of frontiers and borderlines which Professor Hynes and Bergonzi see as classic 'Audenesque parable'" (23). Although its political implications have yet to be fully realized, The Holiday belongs in any list of literature on British imperialism, side by side with early works such as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934), as well as postwar works such as Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (1948), Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing (1950), George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Anthony Burgess's The Malayan Trilogy (1956-1959), and Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957).(5)

For too long, British women writers of the 1930s-1950s have been disconnected from the study of political literature of that era. A recovery of Smith's novels marks a start in re-establishing the political dialogue that occurred among writers in this period.(6) Such a recovery would seem to be necessary now that we are again facing problems of xenophobic nationalism and spreading imperialism, although in different forms. Despite the seeming frivolity of her work, Smith's novels are increasingly necessary, for they call for a complete reexamination of social structures.

Notes

1 Rachel DuPlessis sees an assault on the romance plot as one of the major preoccupations of twentieth-century women writers:

This book argues that there is a consistent project that unites some twentieth-century women writers across the century, writers who examine how social practices surrounding gender have entered narrative, and who consequently use narrative to make critical statements about the psychosexual and sociocultural construction of women. For all the writers selected, the romance plot, as a major expression of these social practices, is a major site for their intrepid scrutiny, critique, and transformation of narrative. (4)

2 For DuPlessis, twentieth-century novelists must necessarily struggle with the inheritance of the romance and quest tradition: "It is the project of twentieth-century women writers to solve the contradiction between love and quest and to replace the alternate endings in marriage and death that are their cultural legacy from nineteenth-century life and letters by offering a different set of choices" (4). Smith does not succeed in presenting a new set of choices in Over the Frontier, but we do see her using the traditional quest form to avoid ending her novel in marriage or death, both of which threaten her heroine Pompey throughout the novel.

3 See, for example, Victoria Glendinning's otherwise excellent review.

4 I am thinking here of Donna Haraway's definition: "Affinity: related not by blood but by choice" (155). Like Smith and Woolf, she longs for a political coalition that will "hold together . . . long enough to disarm the state" (155).

5 My postwar list is derived from Alan Sinfield's chapter on postwar novels discussing imperialism.

6 An excellent example of this recovery process is Alison Light's Forever England.

Works Cited

Barbera, Jack, and William McBrien. Stevie. New York: Oxford, 1985.

Benstock, Shari. Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1991.

Critical Quarterly 21.3 (1979):92.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

DuPlessis, Rachel. Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs. Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989.

Glendenning, Victoria. "Sturm in a Teacup." Rev. of The Holiday. Times Literary Supplement 18 Jan. 1980:54.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Holden, Inez. "Some Women Writers." The Nineteenth Century and After 146 (Aug. 1949): 130-36.

Huk, Romana. "Eccentric Concentrism: Traditional Poetic Forms and Refracted Discourse in Stevie Smith's Poetry." Contemporary Literature 34.2 (1993): 240-65.

Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Montefiore, Jan. Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women's Writing. New York: Pandora, 1987.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Smith, Stevie. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1983.

-----. The Holiday. New York: Pinnacle, 1982.

-----. Me Again. Eds. Jack Barbera and William McBrien. New York: Vintage, 1983.

-----. Novel on Yellow Paper. New York: Pinnacle, 1982.

-----. Over the Frontier. New York: Pinnacle, 1982.

Spivak, Gayatri. "Feminism and Critical Theory." In Other Worlds; Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, 1987.

Stevenson, Sheryl. "Stevie Smith's Voices." Contemporary Literature 33 (1992): 24-45.

Storey, Mark. "Why Stevie Smith Matters," In Search of Stevie Smith. Ed. Sanford Sternlicht. Syracuse; N.Y.: Syracuse UP, 1991.

Watts, Janet. "Introduction." The Holiday. Stevie Smith.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938.

-----. The Years. 1937. London: Hogarth, 1951.

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