The Plight of the Stepchild in Mrs.Oliphant's 'A Country Gentleman and his Family' (1863)

 With Mrs. Oliphant do not expect a conclusion wrapped up with  a bow.  She leaves events in mid stream with the characters having their personalities as fate.  This is contrary to the usual denouement of the three volume novels that were geared to the circulating libraries of the day. Not exactly a pause button more like this is as far as our history takes us.  The fabulous has died and gone to fictive heaven.  It is life just as we know it with questions hanging.  The deal was not closed.

In ‘A Country Gentleman and his Family’ has a close examination of the psychology of the stepchild Geoff and his step father Theo Warrender.  Geoff is a precocious child tied to his mother but also attempting to not be an obstacle between his mother and her new husband.  The boy at 8 to 10/12 in the novel is not very likeable with mutual clinging between mother and child.  Add that Theo Warrender is a jealous man who wants the youngster gone and the conflict is sure to boil over.  The attempt by Oliphant to immerse us in the inner workings of the child’s mind is generally convincing.  Remember a full half pint is as full as a full gallon.  

Stepchildren must have been commonplace in life as well as fairy tales during the Victorian era given the rate of maternal mortality.  ‘David Copperfield’ (1849)   has a rejective stepfather but David is a likeable manly little chap whereas Geoff (1863) is a little twerp if that isn’t too harsh.  He tries to break out of his over protective cage, but his health is delicate and he is without friends of his own age.  However Eton beckons with poor food, fagging and caning. How very jolly.

A good read with intermissions of humour and fallen women, potential bigamy and comfortable clergymen.  

Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life. by Mrs. Oliphant

 ‘Hester’ A Story of Contemporary Life was published in 1883. It is regarded as a proto-feminist novel but don’t hold that against it. Everything is quite credible and if mapped against the life of its author moderate in its display of female capacity. Catherine Vernon is a firm woman who comes to the rescue of the Vernon Bank when its male head brings it to the brink of ruin by gross extravagance. There is going to be a run on the bank. Market day is nigh and rumours have intensified. John Vernon has decamped, Mrs. John is unaware of the crisis and offers the 20lb. In her purse to stanch the bloody flow of capital not matched by the gold in the coffers. Who are you going to call? Catherine a major shareholder of another major branch of the Vernons has money of her own. The Bank of England supplies the bullion the sight of whose chests eases the fear of Vernon Bank customers. Whew! 

The novel uses the excellent device of counterparts. Catherine and Hester as against John Vernon and Edward Vernon. Edward is a Vernon cousin and has a taste for living on the stock market gamblers edge of great profit or mighty ruin. He is the presumed future head of the bank and is also the love interest of Hester as John Vernon the defalcator seemed to be of Catherine. In the end he married another woman. Their daughter Hester has inherited the decisive manner of the true Vernon stock and manages her mother with a nice precision.  

Mrs. Oliphant wrote a lot very quickly and Virginia Woolf who admired her regretted that she had not the time to produce a finished work of art. That seems true but the diabolism of it is that it is entirely false. Writers with an intelligence as quick as Oliphant’s use pressure to draw on the active imagination. The narrative swerves are more real for being as haphazard as life itself. Catherine Vernon is always known as Catherine as being of the town’s psychic family and having the dignity of a Christian name like a knight of the realm. She establishes a Veronry where all the genteel members of the Vernon clan that are distressed gentlefolks reside. This is a large mansion divided up into self contained units. The relationship of its tenants to Catherine, abasement before her, bitchy behind her back is expressed to an exquisite level of noticing probably from the author’s own life and the retainers that she supported with her inveterate labor. Being helplessly obliged is uncomfortable and unforgivable. Their grumbling at this onerous predicament is amusing and Catherine who is well aware of their genteel ingratitude is ironically detached from their ostensible fawning.  

In the common garden the summer house is a matter of territorial conflict.  

“It was at this moment that the two ladies appeared who considered the summerhouse their special property. They were tall women with pronounced features and a continual smile—in dresses which had a way of looking scanty, and were exactly the same. Their necks were long and their noses large, both which characteristics they held to be evidences of family and condition. They followed each other, one always a step in advance of the other with a certain pose of their long necks and turn of their shoulders which made some people think of the flight of two long-necked birds. Mr. Mildmay Vernon, who pretended to some scholarship, called them the Cranes of Ibycus. They arrived thus at the peaceful spot all chequered with morning light and shade, as with a swoop of wings.”

Other residents with a prominent role in the drama are a Captain Morgan and his wife, octogenarian relations of Catherine’s who become friendly with Hester as she is growing up. Their grandchildren Roland and Ellen come into the story also. The young man is a stockbroker, handsome, charming and sure to be a love interest. But there’s Harry Vernon who is courting Hester without success. Will his sturdy if dull soundness win the day or will it be Edward Vernon the putative heir.  

Meanwhile the gambling on the market unites Roland and Edward the one cool and controlled professional and the other a potential addict seething and resenting his subaltern role. Will there be a bust? The Vernon Bank is not too big to fail and can history repeat itself in another key. A financial smash and the crushing betrayal of Catherine by Edward may disable her this time. The story moves along smoothly, with sharp observation of the social setting and the machinations of those that would challenge the dominance of the matriarch.  

This is a superb novel. I read that Mrs. Oliphant is coming to be recognised as an important writer unjustly neglected. Her characters seem real much more so than the papier mache constructions of the average Trollope. 

Shankaracarya's Upadesa Sahasri and the Problem of Pain

 In the first chapter of Upadesa Sahasri by Shankaracarya, the one dedicated mainly to the establishment by Sruti/Scripture of the unity of the Self with the absolute Brahman, in the midst of a plethora of citations we get the irruption of what is inevitable - pain! The glory of the realised state of unity seems contradicted by that very salient fact. 

#33:

If he says, “ The pain due to burns or cuts in the body and the misery caused by hunger and the like, Sir, are distinctly perceived to be in me. The supreme Self is known in all the Srutis and the Smritis to be “free * from sin, old age, death, grief, hunger, thirst, etc., and devoid of smell and taste’. How can [ who am different from Him and possess so many phenomenal attributes possibly accept the supreme Self as myself and myself, a transmigratory being, as the supreme Self > I may them very well admit that fire is cool | Why should I, a man of the world entitled to accomplish all prosperity in this world and in the next and realize the supreme end of life, i.e., liberation, give up the actions producing those results and yajnopavita etc., their accessories?”

In all philosophy the interaction of the physical and the psychical is a perennial puzzle. There is evident interaction but the causal connection between extended matter and unextended consciousness is opaque. We stub our toe, we feel pain which we may identify materially as the firing of c-fibres. It is a fact that I feel that pain myself. The Self apparently is in pain. How is this compatible with the state of release from all the ills of this transmigratory existence which is supposed to be the natural state of the Self?

34. The teacher should say to him, “It was not right for you to say, ‘I directly perceive the pain in me when my body gets cuts or burns ’. Why? Because the pain due to cuts or burns, perceived in the body,’ the object of the perception of the perceiver like a tree burnt or cut, must have the same location as the burns etc. People point out pain caused by burns and the like to be in that place where they occur but not in the perceiver. How? For, on being asked where one’s pain lies, one says, ‘I have pain in the head, in the chest or in the stomach’. Thus one points out pain in that place where burns or cuts occur, but never in the perceiver. If pain or its causes viz., burns or cuts were in the perceiver one would have pointed out the perceiver to be the seat of the pain, like the parts of the body, the seats of the burns or cuts.

What the teacher is pointing out in his rebuttal is the objective nature of the perception of pain. It is felt by the Self. The pain is not in the Self but is perceived in the same way as we perceive a tree or any objective phenomenon. The Teacher goes on to elaborate this subject-object understanding.

#35

Moreover, (if it were in the Self) the pain could not be perceived by the Self like the colour of the eye by the same eye. Therefore, as it is perceived to have the same seat as burns, cuts and the like, pain must be an object of perception like them. Since? it is an effect, it must have a receptacle like that in which rice is cooked. The impressions ° of pain must have the same seat as pain® itself. As they are perceived during the time when memory is possible (i.e., in waking and dream, and not in deep sleep), these impressions must have the same location‘ as pain. The aversion to cuts, burns and the like, the causes of pain, must also have the same seat’ as the impressions (of pain). It is therefore said, ` Desire ^ aversion and fear have a seat common with that of the impressions of colours. As they have for their seat the intellect, the knower, the Self, is always pure and devoid of fear.”

Lurking behind this position is the deeper ontological thesis of the inert nature of the body-mind. It is unconscious by nature or jada. Advaitins speak of the chit jada granthi or the knot between the inert and the conscious. Related to this is the elaboration of the concept of the Saksin or Witness which gives a theoretical underpinning to the firm if false feeling that the Self is identified with the body-mind and its modifications. 

Bina Gupta in her book on the Saksin ‘The Disinterested Witness’ : A Fragment of Advaita Vedanta Phenomenology” enumerates six approaches to the understanding of this concept.

1.The saksin is indubitable, unerring, eternal. It is always directly manifested and its manifestation is not due to any extrinsic reason.

2. The saksin is the neutral (pure) consciousness as qualified by a modification of the inner sense.° 3. The saksin is that which is never concealed.® 4. The saksin manifests ignorance.’ 5. That which directly manifests is the saksin.® 6. The saksin is that which illuminates everything.

Clearly the concept is a complex one and deserves a note on its own. Probably the Saksin as a modification of the inner sense would be the most significant characterisation. More an

on.