Mrs Ritchie by Willa Muir

 

Willa and Edwin Muir escaped parochial Scotland in the 1920s, living and working in Germany and enjoying the culture of that nation and the importance the arts played in the development of its unique weltanschauung. They were true internationalists, part of the Scottish renaissance that included Hugh McDiarmid, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Like others of the renaissance, left-leaning and forward-looking, the Muirs had to reconcile the inherent tension between nationalism and internationalism. These viewpoints are not, as might at first be supposed, antithetical, but rather can be combined harmoniously. This may only happen, however, if the nationalism is an open and affirmative one, optimistic, bold, aspirational.

And this was not the aesthetic the Muirs left behind in cold, Calvinist Scotland. Where Germany was devoted to new ideas and new life, Scottish society seemed premised on keeping everyone in their places, on abjuring ambition, developing almost a blockade of progress. This, of course, was particularly the case when it came to the role of women in contemporary life, and this subject was a passion of Willa Muir’s.

It is an all too predictable injustice that Willa Muir is now less well-remembered than her husband, but Mrs Ritchie, her first novel, has an absolutely savage intensity and offers a searing critique of the stultifying, unfulfilling lives of women in the 1920s and 1930s. It is somewhat old-fashioned in its approach, with its intense psychological analyses of the characters and their actions, but it remains an astonishing novel.

It follows the progress of Annie Rattray’s life, from a bright, if intense child growing up in the fictional town of Calderwick (based on Montrose) at the back end of the nineteenth century, to a broken harridan furiously awaiting judgement day in the years following the Great War. Annie, someone prone to taking any idea to its logical conclusion and then much, much further, becomes obsessed by her presbyterian fears of judgement and sin and eternal damnation. At one point, we are told:

[Annie’s] God frowned upon all other demonstrations of feeling [than indignation], for to open one’s heart in joy to the world was to invite the devil; but righteous indignation was an emotion to which no blame could possibly be attached.

What emerges is the self-fulfilling consequence of such a tyrannical imposition of social mores and religious beliefs. Young Annie Rattray grows into Mrs Ritchie and a child downtrodden and repressed becomes a woman whose sole mission is to inflict the same injustice on her own children, in the name of God and in the hope of everlasting salvation. It is an obscenity that has been wrought on generations of Scots.

However, Muir is critiquing more than Scotland’s baleful Calvinist instincts. She was deeply concerned by the dangers of patriarchy, and the wounds it inflicted on women and on society in general. While Mrs Ritchie is truly a monstrous woman, she was made so by the male-dominated society in which she lived. A clever child, she was offered the glittering bounty of a grammar school education, only for it to be snatched from her. Poor, working class girls didn’t do that. One of Annie’s earliest influences, Miss Julia, sums up what her future should be:

To wish to become a domestic [help] in some Christian family, what a proper ambition for a young, unprotected female!

The novel also offers a savage critique of war, in particular the Great War. The experiences of Mrs Ritchie’s son, John Samuel, and the psychological trauma it wreaks on him, are beautifully but harrowingly written. At one stage, John Samuel writes of his experiences to his sister, Sarah Annie, and it scars her, too:

Sarah Annie kept that letter under lock and key. But she could not keep it out of her mind, especially whenever she saw a detachment of soldiers marching through the streets to entrain for the Front. The tears would come into her eyes, a hysterical lump would rise in her throat; there went Everyman, marching to his death; there went Everyman, having shed his individuality, his spiritual values, become merely a numbered animal whose vitality and courage were doomed to mechanical extinction.

This, then, is the inevitable concomitant of a society which seeks to repress individual thought, to make hollow the hopes and aspirations of its young, to ensure that nothing changes. Because, ultimately, everything changes, for good or ill.

Mrs Ritchie is not a flawless book. Kirsty Allen, in her doctoral thesis on Muir, writes that:

the novel moves remorselessly towards its relentless conclusion and the three-dimensional complexity of human nature is sacrificed to the pursuit of a psychological absolute.

There is truth in this, and the novel becomes somewhat unbalanced by the end, something which Muir herself acknowledged many years later, when she said: “I lost control of it in the second half, although the first half is quite good.” Contemporary criticism, though, was decidedly mixed. The Scotsman wrote of it:

Mrs Ritchie is Greek drama in the kail-yard. Psychology takes the place of the gods, but is no less ruthless and long of memory than they were. . . . [T]he result is a novel more admirable than likeable. It rouses fear but not pity, and makes one wonder if ever a woman was quite so mad inwardly and so sane outwardly as Mrs Ritchie, whether in life there is not always some breaking up and blending together of that madness and that sanity.

The casual connection of Mrs Ritchie to the kailyard is inappropriate and wrong. This novel is as far from JM Barrie’s Thrums or JJ Bell’s Wee McGreegor as it’s possible to be. What it puts me in mind of most, oddly enough, is a writer for whom I suspect Willa Muir would have held no sympathy, Flannery O’Connor.

Like the distorted presbyterian lens through which Scots Calvinists viewed the world, O’Connor held a Roman Catholic worldview that was extreme in its fundamentalism. The Old Testament wasn’t enough for O’Connor: the Douay-Rhiems translation, dense and polemical, formed the basis of her thought and was the blueprint for her fiction. When I see Mrs Ritchie, systematically destroying her family in the name of God, I hear the laughter of Flannery O’Connor as she enjoyed the privations of her characters in the name of redemption, the buggery of Tarwater by the devil, the death of Haze Motes, the grandmother killed by The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

People who see only a purity of purpose lose sight of the humanity that lies shattered in its wake.