Review: The Tunnel

The Tunnel by Dorothy M. Richardson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Richardson’s form seems to be newer than it perhaps is. In this fourth book of the second volume she seems unaware of the perfection of her method. I for one got hooked up to the Pilgrimage series after reading the first instalment of the first volume “Pointed roofs”

Miriam is an acute observer you could almost feel space described by her, be it a room, people at a dinner table, the forest etc. Characters are presented in the same vivid but fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way it happens in life.

Dorothy M. Richardson(D.M.R) has form carried to punctilious perfection. I mean there are so many themes explored in this single volume I could write a whole book about it. One thing this has done to my reading is that I have had to slow it down to get what D.M.R was getting to; or perhaps it was me getting to DMR's personality through Miriam

When we talk about Art, method and form one thing Dorothy still amazes me at is how she projected her life through Miriam so candidly. Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close.
Look at how characters have been forged through art, method and form through this discourse – “Miriam's mother, of her sister Harriett, of the Corries and Joey Banks in Honeycomb, of the Miss Pernes and Julia Doyle, and the North London schoolgirls, in Backwater of Fraulein Pfaff and Mademoiselle, of the Martins and Emma Bergmann and Ulrica and " the Australian" in Pointed, Roofs. The mere "word-painting" is masterly. . . .” Unmistakably D.M.R

This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not tell; be it through silence, books, descriptive writing, phrases and all that mess.

I will tackle a theme that seemed resplendent through and through the book. Silence is a major theme no doubt, but in these few lines let me tackle bias.

There is a skewed view either intentionally or not about men through her writing. Miss Richardson does not mince words when trying to explain how “it’s a man’s world” To be fair, she was trying to articulate a point but while seated at one end of the table all limitations notwithstanding.

Men have been taken to the threshing floor time and time again to a point I thought about what wrongs men might have done to her. Below are the excerpts that show what I am talking about…bias as a theme…

“There is something about being Irish Roman Catholic that makes happiness.”

“Never mind, city men ; with a wisdom of their own which kept them going and did not affect anything, all alike and thinking the same thoughts ; far away from anything she thought or knew.”

" Devonshire people are all consumptive,"

“If there's any hearthrug standing it's the men who do it, smoking blissfully alone, and trying to look weary and wise and important if anyone comes in."
“I wouldn't be a man for anything. I wouldn't have a man's consciousness, for anything."

“Men are simply paltry and silly all of them.”

“Boys and girls were much the same . . . women stopped being people and went off into hideous processes. What for? What was it all for? Development. The wonders of science. The wonders of science for women are nothing but gynaecology all those frightful operations in the "British Medical Journal" and those jokes the hundred golden rules. . . . Sacred functions . . . highest possibilities. . . sacred for what ? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The Future of the Race? What world? What race? Men. . . . Nothing but men; forever.”

“It will all go on as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into the world . . . even if civilized women stop the colonials and primitive races would go on. It is a nightmare.” (sic)

“There was nothing to turn to. Books were poisoned. Art. All the achievements of men were poisoned at the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity.”

“Religion in the world had nothing but insults for women. Christ was a man. If it was true that he was God taking on humanity he took on male humanity . . . and the people who explained him, St. Paul and the priests, the Anglicans and the non-Conformist was the same story everywhere. Even if religion could answer science and prove it wrong there was no hope, for women. And no intelligent person can prove science wrong. Life is poisoned, for women, at the very source.”

Thomas Henry Huxley. “But he built his life up complacently on home and family life while saying all those things about women, lived on them and their pain, ate their food, enjoyed the comforts they made . . . and wrote conceited letters to his friends about his achievements and his stomach and his feelings.”

“Men can always get away. I am going to lead a man's life always getting away. . . .”

“Women can never go very far from the protection of men because they are physically inferior.”

“A young lady, taking a bicycle ride in a daylit suburb. That was what she was. That was all he would allow. It's something in men.”

On reading a book “A man's reading was not reading; not a looking and a listening so that things came into the room. It was always an assertion of himself.”

“Perhaps that was why husbands so often took to reading to their wives, when they stayed at home at all ; to avoid being in the room listening to their condemning silences or to their speech, speech with all the saucepan and comfort thoughts simmering behind it.”

“A doctor could see nothing in marriage but children. This man saw women with a sort of admiring pity.”

As a man, I will now stop.

A good read.

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