13. Normality and Stickiness in A Clergyman’s Daughter

Audio version

Edition used: George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2000), and is referred to as ACD. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.

Content warning: sexual violence.

Orwell’s second and least well-known novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is more interesting and subtle than it might seem on a first encounter.[1] It’s been described, by Michael Levenson, as a novel that ‘disclose[s] the truth about a contemporary social emergency’ by dramatizing ‘a collapse of routine.’[2] There are many candidates for this idea of a ‘social emergency’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter: the most obvious is the degrading effects of patriarchy and domesticity on women, but it could equally well be class injustice, to which the novel devotes a great deal of attention. Already we can see that the book is working in multiple directions. This is a novel about what happens to a young woman when the things she’s used to—domesticity, village life, religious routine—are stripped away. Discussing A Clergyman’s Daughter and Burmese Days (1934) in tandem, Levenson writes: ‘A paradox inhabits these novels, which articulate an ethic of workaday routine that can only be understood through a radical recognition.’ Their depictions of violence and the violence they do to narrative itself are part of an ‘attempt to lay bare the rickety structure of an obsolete social form by taking it to its limits. This makes for an unsteadiness of tone, especially in [A Clergyman’s Daughter], when the fiction moves from ordinary life to the extreme vantage point from which it can be seen.’[3] Orwell’s interest, here, lies in making the familiar unfamiliar, in transforming what’s normal and expected into something weird, strange, and even terrifying.

With these emphases in mind, it’s quite easy to construct a line working out from A Clergyman’s Daughter to, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which a similar reorientation of the familiar is given a monstrous emphasis. Winston Smith’s ordinary, expected world is turned upside-down, and a nightmare ensues. To stick with Levenson’s terms, Winston’s routine collapses, revealing the truth about a very particular kind of social emergency: the increasing power of totalitarian societies. Winston’s normality is abandoned. A sticky situation follows. Orwell had a knack for this kind of thing. The same pattern exists in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Dorothy Hare, accustomed to the life and routine of living in the Rectory with her father, Charles, suddenly finds herself out in the cold, and away from home. This physical removal enables a perspectival shift. She sees the life she used to lead in a new way. But quite whether this ‘makes for an unsteadiness in tone’, as Levenson puts it, is open to debate. A Clergyman’s Daughter is most obviously Orwell’s most quote-unquote ‘experimental’ novel, in the sense that it’s the novel in which he most conspicuously plays with structural and generic convention—in which he writes a story that is, at some level, itself about finding a way to tell a story (just as Dorothy struggles to find the right words to tell hers, at the novel’s end). Many readers dislike the ‘segmented’ feel of A Clergyman’s Daughter, and a good many critics have claimed that its structural transitions are a sign of the novel’s failure, rather than its success. Yet we could just as feasibly argue that segmentation, far from being an ‘unsteady’ side-effect of Orwell’s inability to write an ‘integrated’ work of fiction, is exactly what’s being aimed at here—that the book is meant to feel ‘unsteady’, precisely because the unsteady complications of its heroine’s life are the main thrust of what its narrative wants to address.

Why, in other words, should we feel obliged to talk about a novel like this in terms of failure and success, as ‘steady’ or ‘unsteady’? What if we change tack, and ask different questions of A Clergyman’s Daughter—what then? My view is that the novel’s five-part form needs to be seen not as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but as the structural counterpart to its main themes: collapse, abandonment, and rediscovery. The story of A Clergyman’s Daughter as a whole is a story about a young woman who leaves and then comes back to the normality to which she’s accustomed. It’s a circular story, about comings and goings, departures and returns. Each of the novel’s chapters are in this sense about the same things. In the first chapter, Dorothy wakes up in the Rectory, journeys out into her father’s parish to look after its poorly constituents, and then returns to the Rectory, after her fateful encounter with Mr Warburton. The second chapter begins with Dorothy lost and unsure about who she is, on the New Kent Road, south of the River Thames; she then leaves London, before returning to it, at the chapter’s end. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters can be thought about in similar terms: Dorothy’s circular journey around Trafalgar Square; around education; around the remnants of her old life. Each of these excursions and recursions involves a slightly different emphasis: home, destitution, city, schooling, and then home again, having been schooled by life, and by the great unknown. Why wouldn’t each section of the novel be written slightly differently? Why wouldn’t it be a bit segmented, in consequence? What’s wrong, in other words, with a difference in approach on a chapter-by-chapter basis in order to signal the different stages in Dorothy’s pattern of life, loss, and return?

I stated a moment ago that Orwell had a knack for writing about ‘sticky situations’—about when things go wrong, and when people get themselves in a fix. He was also fixated on stickiness as an idea. There’s a lot of sticky things in Orwell, from the sticky bathroom basins in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933); to the idea of a boredom that makes the mind sticky, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936); to Winston Smith’s gummy socks, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).[4] One of the most evocative passages in Orwell’s work, I think, is the account of stickiness given in Homage to Catalonia (1938), when he’s reflecting on the terrors of the battlefield:

But on the sodden ground it was almost impossible to move quietly. Do what you would your feet stuck to the mud, and every step you took was slop-slop, slop-slop. […] There was a dreadful moment when I kicked against a tin and thought every Fascist within miles must have heard it. But no, not a sound, no answering shot, no movement in the Fascist lines. We crept onwards, always more slowly. I cannot convey to you the depth of my desire to get there. […] When you are creeping at that pace you are aware as an ant might be of the enormous variations in the ground; the splendid patch of smooth grass here, the evil patch of sticky mud there, the tall rustling reeds that have got to be avoided, the heap of stones that almost makes you give up hope because it seems impossible to get over it without noise.[5]

Here, stickiness is a condition of the world; an unpleasant thing to be endured, a horrid source of adhesive constraint. A Clergyman’s Daughter, by contrast, is structured around the idea of stickiness: in its narrative structure, in which Dorothy’s life comes unstuck before being pasted back together; in the design of its five chapters, which mimic the circular stickiness of the narrative as a whole; and in the symbol of glue, which Dorothy uses to stick together children’s costumes, bubbling away on the stove.

So what is it from which Dorothy comes unstuck? And what are the implications of her being stuck back on or in to it? Her normal life is a life of entanglements. Usually, she’s ‘seized’ in the morning by ‘an insidious and contemptible self-pity’ (ACD, p. 1), just as, in various other ways throughout the novel, she’s caught by various kinds of constricting and restricting people, ideas, and processes. The most obvious of these is Mr Warburton, who typically interacts with Dorothy by touching her without her permission. This puts her body in ‘constant crisis’.[6] Dorothy is ‘genuinely fond’ (ACD, p. 42) of him, although not in the way he’d like. Mr Warburton likes to pinch Dorothy’s elbow, something she hates; tends to place his hands on her shoulders ‘pseudo-paternally’ (ACD, p. 38); and later, jumping out of a taxi, ‘seize[s] her by both hands’ (ACD, p. 267). And, in the scene which comes immediately before Dorothy’s departure from Knype Hill, he draws her unwillingly ‘against him’ (ACD, p. 79), before trying to kiss her. We learn later on, if we didn’t already realize, that Mr Warburton has no sense of embarrassment or indignity. ‘His sense of shame’, we’re told, ‘if he had ever possessed one, had perished many years ago. Perhaps it had been killed by overwork in a lifetime of squalid affairs with women’  (ACD, p. 284). In Orwell’s original version of the novel, which was altered at the request of his publisher, Gollancz, Warburton was to have raped Dorothy. Orwell removed this element of the text. A sign of it remains in the fact that, two years before the action of the novel begins, Warburton tried to touch and kiss her ‘violently, outrageously, even brutally’ (ACD, p. 41). From start to finish, his view of and his actions around Dorothy are despicable—for him, whatever his protests might be, she’s little more than an object to be possessed and ensnared.

Mr Warburton is a kind of displaced father figure, as the ‘pseudo-paternal’ emphasis implies. Dorothy’s actual father, the Rector, Charles Hare, is similarly unthinking. He’s been called ‘demanding’, and demanding he is.[7] But he’s also thoughtless, callous, and absent-minded, and has a habit of ‘irritably’ (ACD, p. 5) expecting Dorothy to attend to his whims and needs. Once the post has been delivered, the fact that he only tends to collect the letters he’s interested in (ACD, p. 13), leaving the others for Dorothy to sort through, is a small but telling sign of his self-interested behaviour. He expects his daughter to wait on him, hand and foot, but doesn’t do anything in return, tending instead to drift off into nostalgic reveries about ‘an imaginary golden past’ (ACD, p. 28) in which his financial woes, and their likely impact on Dorothy, don’t exist. Like his bedroom, the Rector is ‘stuffy’ (ACD, p. 5); he’s old-fashioned and pompous. When he does take closer notice of his daughter, it’s for self-serving reasons: in leaving Knype Hill, and in leaving her duties not only to her father but also to its parishioners, Dorothy also leaves her father in the lurch. He’s forced to make his own breakfast, and he hates her for it: ‘A girl who would suddenly walk out of the house without even taking thought for her father’s breakfast was capable of anything’ (ACD, p. 189). Obsessed with trivialities, and hardened against his daughter ‘beyond possibility of forgiveness’ (ACD, p. 190), the Rector lets everything in the parish slide into disrepair in Dorothy’s absence (see ACD, p. 287).

The scenes building up to Dorothy’s departure from Knype Hill establish the stifling world in which she lives. This particular note is set from the start of the novel. As soon as Dorothy wakes up to begin her day’s errands, she’s ‘exhausted’ (ACD, p. 1). Self-censuring quotations from the Bible admonish her into action. An ice-cold bath, in which she immerses herself with ‘gasping and wriggling’ (ACD, p. 2), gets her going. Having inspected her ‘To Do’ list, she sets out for Holy Communion, while the church’s only bell tolls ‘funereally’ (ACD, p. 6) in the distance. During the service, Dorothy pricks herself with a glass-headed pin when she catches herself ‘not attending to her prayers’ (ACD, p. 8). She feeds her ungrateful father his breakfast, and then makes her rounds, visiting the dilapidated church; encountering Mr Warburton and Mrs Semprill, the local gossip; massaging Mrs Pither’s ‘large, grey-veined, flaccid legs’ (ACD, p. 55); and making costumes for the local schoolchildren in the Rectory’s ‘horribly hot’ (ACD, p. 58) conservatory. She then has to endure Mr Warburton’s unwanted attentions yet again. Along the way she witnesses a by-election parade, its conservative candidate promising change, ironically, ‘for ever’ (ACD, p. 35). A moment’s peace during all of this comes when Dorothy catches sight of a wild rose growing beyond a hedge. She picks a fennel frond, inhales it, and is transported away into a pantheistic daydream (ACD, pp. 55-6). But the moment doesn’t last. Once she realizes that she’s drifted off into ‘a half-pagan ecstasy’ (ACD, p. 56), she stabs herself with a thorn, and gets back to her duties. Dorothy’s daily experiences are monotonous, painful, restrictive, wearying, and cheerless.

This is the normality from which Dorothy escapes, or from which she’s pushed away. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about Dorothy’s departure from Knype Hill as an ‘escape’, as this implies an agency on her part. It suggests that she chooses to leave, which isn’t right at all. On the contrary, Dorothy leaves Knype Hill not only because she goes through something traumatic (Warburton’s advances), but also because her life there is intolerably overburdening. Loraine Saunders describes how Dorothy’s accumulating trauma is carefully established throughout the opening pages of the novel, calling them ‘assiduous in their commitment to detailing the exhausting and intolerable pressures’ Dorothy undergoes.[8] They push her over the edge, into a long series of ‘abysses’ (ACD, p. 85). She moves from a burdening normality to a burdening strangeness: in the hop fields, in Trafalgar Square, in Mrs Creevy’s school. The intriguing thing is that she moves back from strangeness to normality—back from the margins to the centre. Any attentive reader will want to know why. Why does she come back to Knype Hill, a place that for all intents and purposes is a place from which she would want to escape? As Tanya Agathacleous puts it:

Dorothy Hare, the title character [of A Clergyman’s Daughter], undergoes a loss of faith in the Anglican religion preached by her father. She searches for other ways to provide her life with meaning, but marriage—one of the only ways she can support herself without the help of her father—seems to her a poor alternative. The solution, she eventually decides, is to carry on as if she still believed in the religion that had previously dictated her life and daily responsibilities. She continues, therefore, to live the dutiful, dull existence that we see her rebel against at the beginning of the novel. The novel makes the point that “faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.” It also shows, through Dorothy’s return to a life of service, how people often participate in their own oppression—a topic that was to recur frequently in Orwell’s writing.[9]

There is a sense amid all of this that Dorothy’s return to Knype Hill, unlike her departure from it, is a choice—a knowing choice, but a choice nevertheless. We might also pay attention to the fact that Dorothy’s return to Knype Hill, even as it remains a choice, is also constructed by the novel as inevitable.

I’ve said already that Orwell had a knack for writing about sticky situations—about moments and encounters in which people get themselves in a fix. Dorothy’s situation is stickier than most. She gets into a sequence of sticky situations, but in a sense the situation in which we find her, right at the start of the novel, is too sticky to escape altogether. The recurring image of the gluepot suggests as much, as do all the little signals of stickiness that accompany her story from start to finish: from the ‘unstamped envelope sticking in the letter-flap’ (ACD, p. 13) of the Rectory; to the ‘sour-smelling children’ who grime her dress with ‘sticky little fingers’ (ACD, p. 48); to Dorothy’s own fingers, which get ‘stickier and stickier’ (ACD, p. 60) as she makes the children’s costumes; to her glutinous eyes, which become ‘sticky with sleep’ (ACD, p. 84); to the ‘sticky greyish stream’ (ACD, p. 160) of milk that Ginger blows out from a tin in Trafalgar Square; to the ‘transparent sticky paper’ (ACD, p. 262) Mrs Creevy uses to tape back together a dirty pound note; to Mr Warburton’s suggestion that ‘consecrated bread’ might ‘stick’ (ACD, p. 276) in Dorothy’s throat. All of these little details do their work in positioning Dorothy in a world of adhesive returns and consistencies. The end is signalled in her beginning. When she wakes up, remember, ‘an insidious and contemptible self-pity’ seizes upon her. Already, long before Dorothy is seized by duty, things are sticking her in place.

What, then, are the implications of this sticky circularity, this process of being taped back into normality after strangeness? Dorothy, we know, is adept at working with sticky substance. ‘From long practice’, we’re told, she can ‘make very nearly anything out of glue and brown paper’ (ACD, p. 59). Eminently practical, Dorothy gets on—she makes do. A little stickiness won’t get her down, or hold her back. We also know that memory itself, in her case, has a sticky logic. Standing in a village post office in earshot of pealing church bells, Dorothy has a pang of homesickness that brings back to her ‘with momentary vividness a medley of remembered things’ (ACD, pp. 136-7), chief among which is ‘the smell of the glue-pot in the conservatory when she was making costumes for the school play’ (ACD, p. 137). What is homesickness, after all, if not a kind of sticky immurement? At a deeper level, though, we know that the very framework of understanding through which Dorothy knows the world around her is sticky, just like everything else. In the novel’s most emotionally culminating scene—the discussion with Mr Warburton on the train back to Knype Hill—Dorothy struggles to articulate why going back to her old life isn’t such a bad thing:

What she would have said [if she could find the words] was that though her faith had left her, she had not changed, could not change, did not want to change, the spiritual background of her mind; that her cosmos, though it seemed to her empty and meaningless, was still in a sense the Christian cosmos; that the Christian way of life was still the way that must come naturally to her. (ACD, pp. 285-6)

Dorothy’s faith isn’t sufficiently sticky to stay in place, but the underlying framework of ‘the Christian way of life’ is there, as it always has been, fixed and unchanging.

Agathacleous makes the surely correct point that Dorothy’s return home to Knype Hill is in one sense a willing return to a form of stifling domesticity. She goes back, knowing full well what awaits her—what Warburton calls, in a splendidly Orwellian list, ‘Girl Guides, the Mothers’ Union, the Band of Hope, the Companionship of Marriage, parish visiting and Sunday School teaching, Holy Communion twice a week and here we go round the doxology-bush, chanting Gregorian plain-song’ (ACD, p. 286). There is also the thought, as D. J. Taylor has suggested, that the ending of the novel shows us Orwell trying to resist his ‘determinist impulses. Left to himself, you feel, Orwell might have sent Dorothy back to the streets rather than the thraldom of her father’s gloomy rectory.’[10] In this view of things, the return to the Rectory is the better of several options—at least Dorothy doesn’t go back to Trafalgar Square, with its ‘knot’ (ACD, p. 169) of vagrants and vagabonds. (The very fact that the ending of the novel can be interpreted differently at all suggests that something complex is going on—that A Clergyman’s Daughter isn’t quite the dreary or simplistic failure it’s so often made out to be.) And Taylor’s remark about determinism sticks in the mind—or it sticks in my mind, at least. I think it’s entirely possible to read A Clergyman’s Daughter as a story about fate: about the fate of a missing girl who seems, on a close look, to be rather interesting.[11]

Orwell’s interest in stickiness in A Clergyman’s Daughter is part of a broader concern with how people are drawn inexorably towards destinies that they can’t, by definition, escape. Dorothy’s sense that ‘the Christian cosmos’ is ‘the way that must come naturally to her’ speaks in a clear way to her decency—she will carry on being dutiful, albeit with secret, internally observed ‘changes in her habits’ (ACD, p. 286). Yet this passage has a deeper significance. It points to the idea that the very frameworks of our knowledge and understanding limit us in certain ways; that they keep us stuck within barely discernible horizons of thought and action which determine our very capacities to think and act in the first place. (There is a glimmer here, perhaps, of the non-naturalistic spectre of Winston Smith, who seems destined to end up where he ends up—in the Ministry of Love—because he was always going to have ended up there.[12]) And this matters because it invites us to think about A Clergyman’s Daughter less in terms of whether it ‘works’ as a novel, less in terms of whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and more in terms of what it has to say about large-scale codes of knowledge and frameworks of moral principle. A Clergyman’s Daughter aligns Dorothy’s particular form of Christianity with restriction, in this sense, but it also suggests, a little more obliquely, that in effect all forms of allegiance—to a cause, to a principle, to an epistemology, even—trap us, at some level. Hence Orwell’s obsessive interest in circular narrative forms. The novel, in his hands, becomes a symptom of unstoppable homecoming, marked by all the excitements and dangers of an eventful journey back to where we began.

[1] I describe these points of interest at much greater length in my introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel: George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), ed. Nathan Waddell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. ix-xxxvi.

[2] Michael Levenson, ‘The Fictional Realist: Novels of the 1930s’, in John Rodden (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 59-75, at p. 65.

[3] Ibid.

[4] I discuss Winston Smith’s sticky socks, and their implications, in this undergraduate taster lecture.

[5] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Lisa Mullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 52.

[6] Zhang Weiliang, ‘“A Strange Desire of Wandering”: The Female Body and the Problematic Structure of A Clergyman’s Daughter’, George Orwell Studies, 2.2 (2018), pp. 39-49, at p. 43.

[7] Carrie Kancilia, ‘Ageing Anxieties in George Orwell’s “The Clergyman’s Daughter”’, Modernist Review (3rd July 2020).

[8] Loraine Saunders, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2008; London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 61.

[9] Tanya Agathacleous, George Orwell: Battling Big Brother (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 32-3.

[10] D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003), p. 139.

[11] These words are adapted from the following passage in the novel: ‘Flo and Charlie had been reading the posts on the shop-front opposite; and this had revived them somewhat, because the posters reminded them of London and its joys. The missing girl, in whose fate they seemed to be rather interested, was spoken of as “The Rector’s Daughter”’ (ACD, p. 102).

[12] Compare this with John Bowen’s discussion, in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, of the many different ways Nineteen Eighty-Four is filled with events that aren’t susceptible to ‘naturalistic explanation[s]’ (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), ed. John Bowen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. vii).