Novel Readings

She thought of all the girls she had known—some too fat, some too thin, some plain and bespectacled like Nancy, some stupid, some dishonest, some mean, some cruel: all given, at times, to giggling, sniggering, sniffling, smelling of their under-arm smell—and yet, somehow, they were all transmuted by Tom’s admiration into unearthly creatures, silver-white doves, delicate, diaphanous, lovely as female gods.

Olivia Manning’s The Doves of Venus is one of the bleakest coming-of-age novels I’ve read, I think. Perhaps it struck me with so much melancholy force because I read it right after School for Love. School for Love is hardly buoyant, but by the end, Felix’s future seemed—maybe not clear or easy, but robust with possibilities, as he heads to England feeling ready to take up an adult place in the world. It is, in other words, an idiosyncratic but also perfectly recognizable Bildungsroman. Ellie, the young protagonist of The Doves of Venus, is also settling into her grown-up life at the end of her novel, but it feels as if she is settling, not just because [spoilers ahead, in case you care] she marries a blandly safe young man but because her marriage makes her mother so happy—”I never dared hope for such happiness,” she tells Ellie through tears—and it is precisely her mother’s stultifying world Ellie wanted to much to escape. Ellie has survived her stint as an independent single woman, but she did not thrive on and could not sustain it; the ending thus felt to me like a retreat. It shows Ellie outgrowing naïve ideas about love, but without quite attaining a corresponding sense of self.

The novel is populated with many other women, young and old: that Ellie’s is not by any means the worst of their fates suggests the novel as a whole is grappling with the challenges faced by women in the 1950s, a time of rigid expectations but also some loosening constraints—a combination that brings a lot of risks, social as well as psychological. All around them are signs that it is now possible for women to rely on more than their looks for success and security, but women like Petta, the depressed wife of Ellie’s first, much older, lover, have not learned how—or maybe it is more accurate to say that they have not (or she has not, at any rate) learned to trust that they can get by on other terms. There’s a particularly poignant moment when Petta, feeling momentarily enlivened and confident, suddenly sees herself in a mirror among a crowd of younger women:

As she met herself emerging from among the petal-smooth girls, her smile went. Flushed and moist from the heat of the room, she seemed to have grown old in a moment.

Her face shocked her. It has an appalling pathos. She looked round at the girls as though there might be explanation of this change in her. They showed no surprise. She was a middle-aged woman. They accepted her age, just as they accepted their own youth.

Petta’s suicide attempts literalize the ways she feels dead-ended in a world that cannot see her as she still wants to see herself. But her pattern of latching repeatedly on to a new man thwarted the compassion I sometimes felt I ought to be able to show her: Manning makes her seem pathetic, not sympathetic, irritating if also pitiful. (Manning’s gimlet eye is part of the pleasure of her fiction—that detail about women smelling their under-arms exemplifies her unsentimental perspective.)

Ellie could have been set up as a clear foil for Petta, but she isn’t sure enough of her own value (or values) to play that part. Again, Manning doesn’t set her up for success: her artistic ambitions are not matched (as far as anyone else thinks, anyway) by either talent or drive, and she spends a lot of the novel moping about. The real contrast turns out to be Petta’s daughter Flora, who appears only very briefly late in the novel. “I want to study medicine,” she calmly tells her long-absent mother, and Petta is struck with “acute envy”:

It seemed that all she had been given herself—beauty, an unexpected fortune, the attention of countless men—was as nothing compared with the intelligence that would enable this plain girl to turn her back on a world where beauty and money held all the cards. She was simply side-stepping the whole damn-fool set-up.

None of the other women in the novel—and there are a lot of them—is so clearly prepared to live on such wholly different terms. Most of them have, like Ellie, internalized the idealized vision of women as “doves,” or, recognizing its unreality, have understood that nonetheless, those are the terms, the rules of the game they must live by.

Writers and critics have had a lot to say about the difficulties of writing a female Bildungsroman: what can it mean to tell a story about maturation when the conventional markers of adulthood are constraining rather than liberating? what if the place you are supposed to grow into is one that stifles or erases your identity, rather than establishing it? (This is a common and, I think, convincing way to think about what The Mill on the Floss is about, to give just one classic example.) Manning seems to be contemplating the same difficulties, as matters of both life and literary form: what life can a woman like Ellie really have that doesn’t carry some seeds of disappointment in it? The Doves of Venus carries Ellie from youthful folly through sad experience to a perfectly good marriage: the novel could plausibly be read as a happy ending, at least for her. I found the tone of the conclusion too melancholy for that, though, as Ellie heads home from a funeral in the “spectral quiet” of a winter night. But Flora, though: Flora gave me hope.