This is another test bibliographical entry.  It links through to the first entry as you can see.  It has two associated categories.

Edwin Muir, The Marionette (London: Hogarth Press, 1927)

When Emma saw Hans working in the garden, she would feel: “I have won.”

The Marionette tells the story of ‘feeble-minded’ Hans Scheffer, and his relationship with his father, Martin. The two share their large house overlooking the city of Salzburg in Austria with their housekeeper, Emma. Since Hans’s mother died in childbirth, Emma has been the boy’s primary care giver. His father has lived at a deliberate remove from him – mostly hidden in his study working on comparative religions. On Hans’ fourteenth birthday, and at Emma’s instigation, Martin comes to confront the shame he feels in relation to his child. The novel describes Martin’s efforts to cultivate a closer relationship with his son, and to introduce him, through play with dolls and marionettes, to a wider world from which he has been sheltered. Though much of the book is taken up with imaginative play and dreams, these are built on labours that are rendered invisible.

The most fundamental of these labours is that of Martin’s wife and Hans’s mother. Memories of her death and her son’s birth are supressed or else approached only indirectly. Hans’s marionette-peopled fantasies are a case in point. Though there were sorrows as well as joys: ‘Two things never came into this world. The marionettes did not bear children, nor did they die.’ (p. 79) But there are other, less poignant and more quotidian, labours at play that are also important. For instance, in the devoted attendance of Emma to Hans and Martin’s needs, which is kept up even through the father’s and son’s reveries:

She came upon them in the passages, in the rooms, so deep in conversation that they did not see her as she passed. “It’s like a mad house!” she exclaimed to herself when she reached her room. But she went on cooking the meals, tidying the rooms, and waiting for the disaster which must come. They might need her then. (pp. 82-3)

Hans and Martin were also reliant on other specialist labours for their play: the craftsperson commissioned to construct Hans’s toy house; Frau Tuchner, the tailor who makes Hans’s own scaled-up marionette costume; Herr Hoffmann, the puppeteer literally hidden by a curtain whose creations peopled Hans’s fantasy life. The work that sustains the plot isn’t entirely absent from the narrative, though it is given short shrift compared to the inner lives of the principal characters. Hans is often described as experiencing these things (toys, costumes, dolls, performances) as though they have suddenly manifested themselves, out of nowhere. The novel ends with the marionettes and the fantasies they represented finally left behind. Father and son, rather, fill their time with walks in the countryside and with simple labours in their garden. The final line of the novel assures us that ‘Emma is still with them.’ (p. 154)

The relationship between the world of the marionettes and that of the ‘actual’ world – mediated by roleplay, dreamscapes, nightmares, and long, world-building conversations – is a constant preoccupation. However, in the end the novel is ambivalent about the usefulness of these fantasies for Hans’s development. This can be understood in terms of Muir’s own interest in Jungian psychoanalysis. These ideas come through most insistently in his later autobiography-of-sorts, The Story and the Fable (1940). The title refers to two narrative modes whose interrelationship constitutes life. The ‘story’ is the conscious, and discrete, adult identity through which we live, where birth connects to death in a linear arc. The ‘fable’ is a more mythic, unconscious, timeless plain, to which children tend to have more direct access. In dreams, intensely felt emotions, the arts, or imaginative play the ‘story’ can glimpse the ‘fable’. Much of Muir’s work can be understood in these terms. His poetry is often understood as unfashionable, out of their time. His later semi-autobiographical novel, Poor Tom (1932) is, like The Marionette and The Story and the Fable, similarly concerned with the complex compromises required for the alienated subject to reconcile themselves with the world, this time a coming-of-age in working-class Glasgow in the early part of the century.

Hans is disturbed by visions of an underground marionette world locked in apocalyptic conflict: ‘the fiery streets, the iron hills, the mechanical race bound on secret business.’ (p. 74) The source of these visions, and the most intense scene in the novel, is at a private performance of Faust arranged by Martin at the marionette theatre in Salzburg (the novel’s epigraph is also from Goethe). The setting, in Austria in the interwar years, gives these spectres a very particular historical resonance. However, the prominence of Goethe’s play also presses home more diffuse and lasting anxieties about modernity, what Marshall Berman called ‘the tragedy of development’ in his influential reflections on Faust.[1] Hans’s condition is described in the novel as ‘feeble-mindedness’, but this, in its contemporary 1920s usage, was quite indiscriminate in accounting for various neurodevelopmental disorders and even just neurodiversity more generally. Whatever the cause of Hans’s difficulties in relating to the world, and whatever lasting value (if any) his imaginative and emotional investment in the marionettes held, it seems that a healthy, or at least, sustainable, reconciliation with the world required some acknowledgment of its material realities, and the labours that arrange those realities.

Margery Palmer McCulloch describes how it is Emma, the housekeeper, that understands Hans’s need: ‘[to] learn to move from the safety of home and absorption with self into the external world of alien forces and challenging identities, a world with which he must come to terms if he is to achieve an integrated personality’.[2] While Hans was captivated by the ‘fable’ of human history represented by the marionettes, with all of its thrills and its horrors, this was all predicated on Emma’s intervention, sustained by her labours, managed by her disapproval, and it is ultimately resolved in what she sees as a personal victory: ‘When Emma saw Hans working in the garden, she would feel: “I have won.”’ (p. 154) Spurred by Martin’s neglect, and Hans’s needs, Emma exceeds the official remit of the housekeeper, directing her highly gendered emotional labour towards the management and production of feelings.[3] In combination her efforts underpin one small familial conjunction of ‘story’ and ‘fable’ in the hull of a broader process of social reproduction. In this we might glimpse a more tangled arrangement between domestic worker and employer, where it’s not always entirely clear who is pulling the strings.

Keywords: domestic labour, care work, emotional labour, immaterial labour, gendered labour.

 

[1] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Verso, 2010), pp. 37-86.

[2] Margery Palmer McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (Edinburgh UP, 1993), p.23.

[3] On ‘emotional labour’ see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 3^rd edn. (California UP, 2012).

 

A first example bibliographical item here.  It links through to another bibliographical entry and appears in one category.