# A Clergyman's Daughter



## a mere housewife

Given the theme of the book (see the 'brief synopsis': basically the daughter of a clergyman loses her faith, though she remains in the church), I thought it might be good to post a review of it here. I finished the book this afternoon.

I think the ’stream of consciousness’ which Orwell is rather uncannily able to give Dorothy has more to do with a response to God as creator, than as Saviour (I understand more and more why Calvin makes that distinction in the knowledge of God): he doesn’t give her a very heavy consciousness of sin (pin-pricks and skipping bacon at breakfast for minor vices don’t argue a very heavy consciousness but almost the opposite) or attachment to Christ as one who died for her and is risen again. Certainly her 'evangelistic' efforts are not aimed at repentance and union with Christ but at getting the locals to baptize their babies and to communicate regularly in the church. I'm not sure how much her Anglicanism is a background to that frame of mind: he may have painted a non-comformist differently; but I'm not sure he would have had so much understanding of a non-comformist: his references in the book (even those seemingly not from Dorothy's perspective) aren't very sympathetic. It is explicit later on that there were at the time a great many 'Anglican Atheists'; and her own father is not exactly a fervent man. But Orwell doesn’t make her grapple with sin at all, in spite of all the evil she experiences, after she loses her memory: the evil is rather thrown off into the nature of things, than as an immediate moral problem. Sin is where the whole throwing-yourself-into-action- without-answers resolution breaks down: what actions?

But it was surprisingly fair and sympathetic, and true. The faith he describes could be under those circumstances so simply lost; and the loss would very likely have that effect on a person who habitually had it. Orwell does show you how it is a real loss; and in spite of his exposure of much of popular Christianity as merely the ‘biggest hedonism of all’, merely not having ‘fun’ here so that we can have ease and bliss forever - he makes you feel that the loss is primarily one of worship. Dorothy feels that the world is empty; there is no purpose in all these actions anymore because there is no transcendent reflecting down on the whole, worthy to be praised. I was struck with his sympathy and respect for — Christianity? Or just Dorothy? to be able to write about the need of faith, and the inability to satisfy it, without trying to score points. It reminded me of some things Bertrand Russell said, and Dostoyevsky: especially her not wanting to undeceive other people; but the Orwellian unyieldingness of Dorothy’s reality is so much more faded and everyday, somehow even emptier and feminine in tone.

It leaves one in the wake of it’s emptiness; though I think I’ve rarely had a happier response to a ’rescue’ scene than when she was in the train on the way home. He writes the ‘happiness’ in part so accurately because he writes desolation and emptiness with such unmitigated accuracy. It is the only happy ending in the book, and it isn’t the end. The sensed brevity and contrast of it made me almost giddy and willing to laugh out loud at small things. There is at last a sort of peace in the embrace of a way of life, of movement and action in that way of life beyond doubt. God is not perhaps, good: perhaps He does not even have the goodness to be there. (But since man is inherently good, socially correctable*, not totally depraved, this is not really the problem it might seem.) One could argue that this is the peace of an ant as he mindlessly tries with ceaseless effort and no reason at all to get around your finger. But this is the faith ultimately that Dorothy and all of her kind come to, and it preserves the ’spiritual’ decencies for oneself as well as the common decencies for others; Orwell makes a subtle refrain of the appropriateness, the naturalness of the way of life to her. Short of sin and a moral righteousness, appropriateness is the only truth one is capable of. (But appropriateness to what?)





Orwell is eminently readable. He expresses himself with a force of clarity; his ability to represent things in accurate detail moves you emotionally without his having to play directly for your emotions. His descriptions of some things are apt and memorable -- a lady with 'off' coloring as if she'd lived all her life under a bad light who spoke like badly written dialogue, a little too much in character. And at times he rises to glory and loveliness, or 'purple passages' of pain.Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship.​
But after all there must be _some _meaning, _some _purpose in it all! The world cannot be an accident. Everything that happens must have a cause — ultimately, therefore, a purpose. Since you exist, God must have created you, and since He created you a conscious being, He must be conscious. The greater doesn’t come out of the less. He created you, and He will kill you, for His own purpose. But that purpose is inscrutable. It is in the nature of things that you can never discover it, and perhaps even if you did discover it you would be averse to it. Your life and death, it may be, are a single note in the eternal orchestra that plays for His diversion. And suppose you don’t like the tune? She thought of that dreadful unfrocked clergyman in Trafalgar Square. Had she dreamed the things he said, or had he really said them? “Therefore with Demons and Archdemons and with all the company of Hell.” But that was silly, really. For your not liking the tune was also part of the tune.​*Orwell says that he almost always writes with a ‘political purpose’, a desire to move society in some direction. He did this with amazing integrity, both as an artist and a man, and his presentation of for instance a night on the streets in Trafalgar Square with a group of tramps is viscerally graphic: I was freezing, and I wanted to throw open our doors to tramps on the spot. He had actually lived such a life: it’s suprising that having no fixed belief in the goodness of God he lived through so many experiences of which he writes without more cynicism. Certainly there is the chilling edge of his tone; but he still had faith in the social salvation of humanity. His vision is uncompromising, and often of futility. But there is a hardness in his hope that is harder than all the hard edges of his disillusionment. You can see it in his eyes, actually, in pictures of him.​


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## py3ak

It is the smell of glue that keeps people going. And those who have had thankless jobs that nevertheless get done over and over will understand.


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