• 1 Lehmann was not to do so again probably because she did not feel legitimate enough, knowing as she (...)
• 2 The five short stories Rosamond Lehmann wrote were gathered as a collection entitled The Gipsy’s Ba (...)

1Rosamond Lehmann wrote seven novels but only five short stories. She wrote them in the early forties at the request of her brother, John Lehmann, who had founded a literary periodical entitled New Writing in 1936, in which he published works by leading poets and writers and working-class budding authors. It was the first time she had tried her hand at short-story writing and in ‘The Gipsy’s Baby’, she also dealt with working-class people for the first time1. Admittedly Lehmann seems an unlikely candidate for the study of the voices and faces of the left-behinds since most of her novels revolve around the unsatisfactory romances of women from the middle classes or the bohemian circles. As stated by Niall Griffith in 2006, however, her short-stories ‘move somewhat away from the focus of her longer works . . . . Well, here you will find wintry illness, dampness, fungus, privation, rural squalor’ (Griffith vii). This is particularly the case of ‘The Gipsy’s Baby’, which is the longest piece (it is forty-nine pages long) in this eponymous collection². In this short story with autobiographical undertones, the adult narrator tells in retrospect the story of the first encounter of Rebecca Ellison, a nine-year-old girl born into a rich middle-class family, with a destitute but loving family who has ‘a very low local reputation’ (23)—the Wyatt family with its nine members—and more generally with what had been hidden from her view until then—namely her own social position and prejudices and the intrinsic limits of her point of view.

• 3 ‘Mais les Wyatt ne sont là que pour servir une cause infiniment plus dérangeante que celle de l’ext (...)
• 4 ‘[subjects designated as ghostly] may also work with the metaphor [of the ghost], reshaping it to a (...)
• 5 Ross underlines the differences between their two approaches of spectrality: ‘This formulation bear (...)

2The text as a whole exemplifies the way the vulnerable family is denied audibility and as a result the ability to fully exist. The active processes of inaudibility and invisibilisation will be analysed in the first two parts of this paper. After having dealt briefly with the way spatiality is used by society to relegate the poor to the margins, I will focus on voice, using Guillaume le Blanc’s conceptualisations of humiliation, textual silence and invisibility and Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’: ‘a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière 2004, 13). On the other hand, the short story does more than simply register the partition of society, as suggested by Francoise Bort. In her analysis of Lehmann’s short story, Bort contends that the Wyatts are only here to showcase a cause which is less realistic than that of extreme poverty, namely the uncanny power some utterances can yield (Bort 91).3 She focuses rightly on the hypodiegetic story told by one of the characters, Chrissie Wyatt, in the last pages of the short story (43–47), the power of which is undeniable in spite of its fictionality. It seems to me, however, that this power may not be that of pure fiction but of the spectral in literature and this will be the focus of the last two parts of the paper. In that sense, the short story exhibits the power literature has to retrieve socially erased people from oblivion, bowing to their potential as haunting figures as shown by both Esther Peeren4 and Stephen Ross.5

• 6 ‘S’il existe [. . .] des lieux invisibles et inaudibles, c’est parce qu’il existe une spatialisatio (...)

3The short story opens on the description of a cottage in very bad repair, the Wyatts’ cottage, and its garden. The lexical field of decay is everywhere to be found: ‘decayed’, ‘old’, ‘broken’, ‘sinister’, ‘insanitary’, ‘mean’, ‘discoloured’. It is a waste land full of rubbish, discarded materials and worn-out bits and pieces, which signals to each and every one that the family living here is not the proper kind of family (3, 9, 39). The ‘excessive visibility’ of the place is at the core of ‘the paradox of avisuality’ (Peeren 33), since the people living here are physically present but not to be acknowledged.

• 7 ‘Pour se rendre invisible n’importe quel homme n’a pas de moyen plus sûr que de devenir pauvre’ (We (...)

7The short story is built on a series of disconnected vignettes affording different perspectives on the characters. Thus the reader is given the opportunity to listen once to the voice of the dispossessed father after the death of his wife in childbirth. Clearly the man is not voiceless in this passage; neither can he be said to be unheard by the narrator’s father, who lets him enter his house at night (through the French windows) and pour out his grief and his outrage at length. The long monologue that follows is hardly interrupted by Mr Ellison. All Mr Wyatt’s grammatical and pronunciation mistakes are inscribed on the page as well as his repetitions, hesitations, ellipses and silences as indicated by the numerous dashes and aposiopeses (34–36). The reader can hear what corresponds to the individual point of view of one of the poor, whose monologue is reproduced as earnestly as possible. The short story being autobiographical Mr Wyatt’s speech is not supposed to be fictional (although one must remain wary since the story was written thirty years after the events). The voice of Mr Wyatt is all the more likely to have struck the narrator as on this particular occasion it was different from his usual voice: ‘. . . he cried out suddenly in a terrible threatening voice, like an Old Testament prophet’ (34).

• 8 ‘Une société humaine humilie ses membres lorsqu’elle fait peser sur eux un doute quant à leur inscr (...)

11The pronoun ‘they’ the father uses to refer to the nursing staff as a whole suggests the insuperable gulf between the poor and the others in the Edwardian society, the two nations inherited from the Victorian era. At a time when contraceptive devices were increasingly available to middle-class people, who could afford to buy them, the social norms concerning numerous families were changing. This coercive ‘forest of norms’ was definitely middle-class and only served to discriminate against the poor. The implicit condemnation of their lack of chastity (most probably tinged with neo-Malthusianism) leaves Mr Wyatt aghast and even if he is still able to speak out and tell his truth, the aposiopeses to be found in the previous passage could indicate the wounds inflicted by the doubt cast on his love for his wife and by the normative definition of what a happy family should be like. Mr Wyatt’s grief is tinged with a feeling of humiliation since ‘a society humiliates its members when it questions their really belonging to humankind’ (translation mine)8.

• 10 In particular the semi modal verb ‘ought to’ similar to the one used by the medical staff.
• 11 Aristotle considered the ability to speak was only granted to certain people. This is Lyotard’s def (...)
• 12 ‘[. . .] sa voix est finalement rendue inaudible par le recouvrement que produit la voix des autres (...)

13In spite of his wish that they should all stay together and his dream of self-sufficiency, the father is no longer in a position to impose his will; his voice is obstructed by the expert who judges and knows what is to be done, as indicated by the modal verbs she uses.10 Since the father is a law-abiding citizen, respectful of expertise, he is cowed into silence and ends up crying. In other words he is now ‘speechless’. His reaction underlines both his passive helplessness and his disempowerment when confronted with the authorities. As a result, this man, who works as a shepherd, is dispossessed of three of his children and deprived of his authority as a father, namely the capacity to decide what is best for his family (the only thing which is his) and to try and remedy the situation. He finds himself on the wrong side of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ to quote Rancière: ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.’ (Rancière 2004, 13). According to Rancière, who is here referring to Aristotle,11 the ability to speak defines who is visible. The Wyatt father cannot be said to be ‘a speaker’ any longer. Bursting into tears he simply expresses his grief and his helplessness and finds himself on a par with his thirteen-year-old girl, Maudie, or as Aristotle would have said, with ‘a noisy animal’ (Rancière 2007, 12, translation mine). His son’s repeating parrot-like what the ‘lady said’—as underlined by the anaphora of the phrases ‘the lady said’, ‘she said’ (repeated twice each)—suggests the father has forfeited his right to have a say: ‘. . . his voice has become inaudible because it has been obscured by the voice of the others’ (translation mine),12 in this particular case the voice of the power structures. Henceforth he is to remain bereft of words till the end: ‘Mr Wyatt went on wringing his hands, speechless, for a long time, then said brokenly: “God bless you, sir,” and went away’ (49).

• 13 ‘Their voices were important, not pathetic. The family had obviously been the object lately of many (...)
• 14 Ross is here referring to Butler and Athanasiou’s conception of what he calls ‘material dispossessi (...)

14The passage also suggests that from the point of view of the rich, the poor are in desperate need of the help of those who are the rulers and who decide for them from above. In a way, the lady’s decision may be judicious—Maudie is only thirteen and she would have had to take care of six children, which could have been a handful—and the father bows to it. Although the recognition the family has received has boosted their own importance13, this recognition entails no overturning of the usual hierarchies, quite the opposite; their greater visibility is neither authentic nor empowering. The ‘Institution’ which is referred to in the previous dialogue turns out to be the workhouse, a place branded with infamy (even in the eyes of the nine-year-old narrator [39]), synonymous with the end of autonomy and similar to a prison; a place of punishment and social erasure where the three little boys’ bodies are to be administered by a disciplinary power as suggested by the ‘new suits’ (38) they are wearing even before entering the Institution. Paying no heed to the father’s wish and sending his children to the workhouse means reducing this family not simply to an object of discourse and thought but to the status of objects as such: ‘Far from enjoying the autonomy associated with possessive individualism, the materially dispossessed find themselves interpellated and constructed as subjects of oppression and abuse, as objects more than subjects, even—given their role in constituting the social wholes from which they are excluded—abject” (Ross § 14).14 Locked up in the Institution, the Wyatt children will be condemned to the ‘silence and invisibility [which] are part of the system of institutionalized precariousness’ (Regard 83). By the end of the short story, the three boys already mentioned as well as one of their sisters, Chrissie, will have been whisked off to diverse institutions, ‘included in the legal order through their constitutive exclusion’ (Owens 570).

• 15 To create: 1. to bring something into existence. 2 (informal) to make a fuss / complain (Oxford Dic (...)

16Chrissie Wyatt is the odd one out. Right from the start, the narrator insists on the singularity of the little girl. Whereas all the other Wyatt children are seen as a group, one long paragraph is devoted to the portrait of the little girl (4–5). She is conspicuous because she is ‘beautiful’ (22) and gipsy-like. She could be the destitute sister of dark-complexioned Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, at least this is how the narrator views her when she sees her nearby the gipsies: ‘I remember thinking then what a fascination the bright roving caravans must have for her; how congruous a part she would seem of the life of fairs and gipsies’ (42). She is also different on account of her muteness (12, 16, 21), her refusal to fawn over her betters and her capacity to dodge the system in unorthodox ways, not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s Kid (Le Blanc 2014). She goes her own way using silence or invisibility as weapons: ‘But Chrissie remained mute, tense, annihilating herself; all of her repudiating us’ (12, emphasis added); ‘Chrissie’s going to stop at ’ome. She went and ’id herself when the lady come’ (39, emphasis added). Silence and invisibility here become a form of resistance (“repudiating us”). From time to time she vents her feelings in an inarticulate way. For instance, when an aunt offers to take her after the death of her mother, the little girl makes a fuss: ‘But Chrissie created so our dad said for ’er to stop at home’ (39). As long as Chrissie wields invisibility, silence or inarticulateness as conscious weapons, she is safe, probably because she conforms to what is expected of ‘a noisy animal’ having simply the ability to voice pain or pleasure. In fact, some of the verbs and comparisons used to refer to her evoke animals: ‘might she not spit, screech like a monkey?’, ‘her eyes rolling fiercely, like a colt’s’ (5), ‘scuttle’ (24). But when she starts to use language so as to protest and assert her voice, she ends up being crushed by the authorities.

• 16 Interestingly, the only sentence that the narrator ever heard Chrissie say was: ‘“Yes, I bites,” wh (...)
• 17 ‘La visibilité des précaires tend à être une visibilité monstrueuse, dégagée de tout code de la vis (...)

18Making this story up is for Chrissie a way of becoming the centre of attention and acquiring some form of ‘narrative agency’ (Peeren 39), which enables her to bite back16. Her fictional story is a monstrous one because in a society where the flotsam and jetsam of society are most of the time unheard, monstrosity, that is to say deviating from the natural norms and disrupting the order of things, is their only recourse:17 “Horror toppled above the village for a short while” (43); “We were silent, beholding the monstrous image of a dead naked baby under the bramble bushes” (44) (emphasis added). As the author of this melodramatic piece of fiction, Chrissie exploits the deeply-ingrained prejudices of the population against the gipsies. Her story targets these people who are even more marginalised and precarious than she is in the village, considered as they are as a ‘load of alien humanity’ (42) confined to the gravel-pit field (41) but luckily for them in a way not on the books of the authorities.

• 18 ‘Chrissie invente de toute pièce un être vivant. [. . .] les mots engendrent des êtres, et des être (...)

19Chrissie’s monstrous story also corresponds to the return of a repressed traumatic event. The fictional lie testifies to the unresolved nature of past events; it is her way of of projecting her own feelings of loss, abandonment and exclusion but also of expressing what has been repressed until then. Although Bort adds that Chrissie’s story and thus the baby boy she invents are pure fiction (Bort 91),18 I contend that this made-up story could also be Chrissie’s way of grieving for a life that nobody deems worthy of grief, namely the infant who died a few hours before her mother did (33) and about whom even her elder sister says as if offhandedly: ‘We got enough babies, anyway’ (32). Doing so Chrissie makes this life ‘grievable’: ‘Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be perceived, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary / conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?’ (Butler xiv–xv). Emplotting her traumas into a hackneyed, melodramatic story, that is to say fitting death into a symbolic net, Chrissie ‘creates’ in the two meanings of the verb and becomes an agent. Her story is not meant simply to keep the people listening to it on tenterhooks; it is a mode of address synonymous with lodging a complaint and refusing indifferent fatalism. It is evidence that fiction, even of a poor sort, is the place where such a voice as hers can be heard—although it is not reckoned with in the embedding narrative itself. In the following pages Chrissie is simply condemned as a ‘bad wicked little liar’, ‘a bad, bad girl’ (47), ‘a wild wicked demon’ (48), punished for her lies as if she had truly committed a murder and dispatched elsewhere without much ado and further detail.

• 19 ‘Écrire, c’est entendre la voix perdue’ (Quignard 94, translation mine). In his essay, Quignard doe (...)

21The process at work behind the writing of the short story could be similar to the process which urges Chrissie to make up the story of the dead baby boy. As said before the little girl may have invented her story so as to retrieve an ungrieved life from oblivion; similarly, the author of the short story may have wanted to so the same by writing it, this time as a memorial to Chrissie. The title of the short story could be applied to the baby in Chrissie’s figment of imagination, the hypodiegetic story—which is a way of giving pride of place to a story which occupies less than five pages in the whole narrative—but also to the story of Chrissie herself, who is likened to a gipsy’s child throughout the story (4, 5, 22, 42). The story invented by Chrissie caught the narrator’s imagination on account of the image it brought to her mind: ‘We were silent, beholding the monstrous image of a dead naked baby boy’ (44). The same could be said of Chrissie, who endures under the guise of a glaring image forever imprinted in the narrator’s mind: ‘everything was as before . . . except for one small figure carried away on it, vivid, but dwindling’ (43, emphasis mine). Writing the short story is tantamount to rescuing from silence a life made inaudible but nevertheless deemed ‘grievable’ and worthy of a narrative by the narrator herself, the power of the ghost being ‘mostly exercised through the imagination’ (Peeren 3).

• 20 ‘[. . .] and everything was as before, except for the usual scatter of flotsam left by the retreati (...)

25One might wonder why Lehmann did not write this story earlier on or rather why ‘the principle of rebirth contained in this cold residue of experience beg[an] to operate’ (53) more than thirty years after. An inkling may be found at the beginning of the short story written during the early 1940s. Although situated in the Edwardian period, ‘The Gipsy’s Baby’ can be related to the Second World War through the arresting image of Chrissie. In the first pages of the short story, the description of the little girl underlines not only the fantasmatic quality of her singularity (‘[it] gave her the enhanced reality, or the unreality, of a portrait of a child’ [4]) but also her kinship with all outcasts throughout the ages and more specifically during WWII: ‘Whereas the others all looked, curiously enough, clean in a superficial way, she was always excessively dirty, and this increased her look of a travel-stained child from a foreign country: a little refugee, we would think now’ (5, emphasis mine). Building on the ideas of Harendt and Agamben according to whom the refugee is ‘the ultimate figure of bare humanity’ (Ross §40), Ross asserts that he/she is ‘also the world-historical figure of haunting, an overwhelming tidal return of the repressed produced by Western constitutionalism per se’ (Ross §40). Thus the glaring power of the spectral image of Chrissie, similar to ‘the usual scatter of flotsam left by the retreating tide’ (43),20 and its loud silence are likely to prey on the reader with even more intensity when s/he realises that behind the little girl all the invisible and silent refugees of WWII and beyond can be glimpsed at and hopefully recognised not simply as victims but as potential narrative agents.