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BOOK REVIEW

Mona Caird, The Wing of Azrael, ed. by Tracey S. Rosenberg. Valancourt Books, 2010, 370 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1934555941.

Reviewed by Emelyne Godfrey.

In 1889, Mona Caird was the name on everyone’s lips.  Scholars of the New Woman in fiction and history may remember her “flaming bomb” of an article about gender relations in marriage, published in the Westminster Review in 1888, as well as the ensuing phenomenal public response when the Daily Telegraph asked its readers to comment on the question, “Is Marriage a Failure?”  People in all walks of life, from barristers to barmaids, were drawn into the debate. To put the strong public reaction of 1888 in context, the paper received around 27,000 letters on this topic: some 6,000 more than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently received from well-wishers on their marriage. Caird was arguably the most famous feminist that year. What is much lesser known is Caird’s thrilling and bleak third novel, The Wing of Azrael, which followed on the heels of Jack the Ripper. The Wing of Azrael presages much of the imagery, characterization, and social commentary which distinguish her much more famous The Daughters of Danaus (1894), reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1989, yet it remained out of print for many decades, until 2010.

The title, The Wing of Azrael, refers to the ancient figure of the Angel of Death (also known as Azazel) to whom a scapegoat was offered. This dark figure hovers over Caird’s powerful indictment of the pressure society placed on women in the 1880s. Viola is the only daughter of the Sedley family. Her father and older brothers are spendthrifts while her youngest brother, Geoffrey, is too fussy to look for a job. So that her brothers can live life to the full, she is denied a decent education and, like many New Woman heroines, is weighed down by the restrictions placed on her movements. Despite lacking her male peers’ education, Viola is a profound thinker and, like Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus, she is musically gifted.  Viola always hears the sea. Her feelings of yearning described so eerily by Caird invoke the work of Caird’s contemporary, Lady Edna Clarke Hall (1879-1979), whose watercolours currently form part of an exhibition at Tate Britain. In the 1890s, Hall was educated at the Slade School, which was particularly receptive to the ideas associated with the New Woman. After her 1899 marriage, the canvas became a means of projecting the feeling of domestic entrapment for Hall. Like Caird’s Viola, Hall’s lone female figures stand against a tertiary background and gaze longingly out to sea, whilst tethered to the land by nets and balls and chains of domestic duties. The cover image of the Valancourt Books publication sets the keynote for the contents: a young woman with large brown eyes wilts with despair.

Viola’s sensitivity is matched by that of the epigrammatic, dashing, and sympathetic Harry Lancaster, with whom she falls in love. However, family pressures prevent her from marrying him, and as a female, Viola has already drawn the short straw. Like the mythical scapegoat offered to the Angel of Death in the title of Caird’s novel, Viola is sacrificed to a young rich man, Philip Dendraith, to replenish the Sedleys’ drained financial resources and exonerate the sins of the male Sedleys. Caird symbolically infuses this theme into Viola’s wedding ceremony in a melodramatic manner, making readers think of blood:

Viola was standing in the line of the sun’s rays, and the colours stained her dress, passing across her in a broad band of radiance, and falling in the cold stone floor behind her, and on the half-effaced brasses at her feet. Upon her bosom a deep blood-red stain glowed in fiery brilliance, like the symbol of some master-passion in her heart, or perhaps a death-wound. (153)  

Philip is cruel, suave, and “chillingly handsome” (43), quite similar to the mysterious figure Diana Mayo encounters in Edith Maude Hull’s The Sheik (1919), a novel that captured the public imagination thirty years later. Philip’s teeth are suspiciously white, like those of a vampire, and he takes pleasure in hurting animals and playing with women’s feelings, two pursuits often attributed to villainous Victorian husbands.

Even before being forced to marry Philip, Viola’s childhood and adulthood involve numerous confrontations in which Viola is pitted against forces stronger than her own. The violation of Viola’s bodily integrity disturbingly starts when she is asked as a child to kiss Philip and his father. Viola backs away from Philip Dendraith Senior and, on seeing Philip maltreat her poodle, throws the teenage Philip out of the window of his family’s Norman castle. It is intriguing that Philip’s chiselled features are likened to cold Romanesque stonework, just as Caird draws together the themes of animal cruelty and patriarchal architecture in The Daughters of Danaus (in the pro-vivisectionist Professor Theobald’s appreciation of Norman architecture). When Viola witnesses Philip savagely beating a horse, she vows to break off their relationship, but her mother presses her to do her duty. Far from protecting her sensitive child, Mrs Sedley is powerless to stop the marriage. She is irritatingly self-effacing, the kind of ‘dis-eased’ mother who passes on to her daughter her own bowed-headed, meek acceptance. Viola submits, enthralled by her mother’s entreaties to suffer in silence. This passive stance vexes Philip, who would actually prefer his pale-faced wife to show some emotion he can quantify. On top of this torment, Viola must also tolerate the prying questions of other locals, including Mrs Pellett, the moral watchdog. As Caird points out, turning a blind eye to evil is just as pernicious as being wicked: Mrs Sedley’s toleration of her own husband’s boorishness, for example, only makes him worse.

The same is true for Viola and her husband. Life under Philip’s stony rule is mentally unbearable and physically demoralizing. Viola finds cold solace in the castle’s West Wing, where she hides a dagger, a wedding present from Harry. It is just as well she has this weapon, as the shadow of Bluebeard is always lurking behind the drapery of this novel: in the eighteenth century, Philip’s ancestor murdered his wife in the West Wing and this cruel strain has been passed down through the Dendraith generations. Taking a cue from John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women’, Caird uses Philip’s thinly veiled sadism to question the power a husband has over his wife.

For readers today, Caird’s depiction of Viola’s mental anguish may evoke some of the emotions of a novel like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: readers find themselves aching for the heroine to question her own subservience to a system that crushes her and those she loves. Enter the figure of Sibella Lincoln, the novel’s New Woman, who has left her husband and, ostracized by society, lives on her own by the sea. She and Harry join forces to encourage Viola to escape with Harry by boat across the roaring waves that have been beckoning her since her childhood. Increasingly desperate, can Viola can release herself before the ratchet locks into place?

Once overlooked, Caird has been given more critical attention in the last fifteen years or so. A reviewer of The Wing of Azrael in the Academy stated in 1889: “It is impossible to say whether she is a born novelist or merely a born controversialist” (Academy, 25 May 1889, 355). As if in answer to the Academy’s reflections, Lyn Pykett and Ann Heilmann have persuasively argued that Caird was more than a sensationalist. For Pykett, Caird’s fictional writing constitutes an artistic exploration of the female mind, while Heilmann has identified Caird as a pivotal figure in the development of radical feminism. 1 Moreover, Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Literature (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005) has persuasively argued that The Wing of Azrael discussed darker aspects of the marriage question that were avoided in the 1888 marriage debates.

In 2010, three reprints sprang up of The Wing of Azrael, seemingly coincidentally. These were the British Library’s digitised copy, an annotated version edited and introduced by Alexandra Warwick as part of Pickering and Chatto’s New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899 2 , and the Valancourt Books reprint, edited with notes by Tracey S Rosenberg. Given that they appeared at the same time, these annotated versions invite comparison. Warwick gives a wide perspective on the novel, discussing many important aspects from Caird’s involvement with the suffrage movement and her anti-eugenic stance as well as the literary influences behind The Wing of Azrael. However, the admirable New Woman Fiction collection is not easily accessible outside a handful of academic libraries. While both Rosenberg and Warwick provide highly useful notes, Rosenberg’s comments follow the text, which makes this format particularly user-friendly. Working in parallel with Caird’s exposé, Rosenberg uncovers the meanings behind numerous classical and religious allusions, turns of phrase and references to everyday life in the nineteenth century, which may have been dusted over with time and lost to the modern reader.

Indeed, Rosenberg’s edition shows just how valuable Caird’s fiction is as a historical source, providing snapshots of nineteenth-century life. For instance, the Sedleys’ lack of money becomes even more apparent when we learn from Rosenberg’s notes that Mrs Sedley is wearing “turned” clothes, i.e. clothes that have been reversed for reuse. In her introduction, Rosenberg covers the relevant themes, but explains why the Daily Telegraph took up the marriage question in the summer of 1888. She also considers how Caird’s triple-decker style and cliffhanger plots were shaped by the pressures imposed by the circulating library. Indeed, it seems that this long-drawn plot is a rather effective format for Caird’s detailed depiction of mental torment. While I think that the three-volume format does Caird’s novel a service, it does not lighten the load of the modern library-goer’s rucksack. The Valancourt Books publication is niftily condensed into a lightweight soft back book offered at a very reasonable price. In addition, it includes annotated contemporary reviews, some of which are rather humorous. Thought-provoking, polemical and with the right level of suspense and horror, Tracey Rosenberg’s edition of Caird’s long-neglected novel, The Wing of Azrael, will not disappoint the reader.

Notes