1Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932) is a novel of motion. In contrast to many of her works that focus on the locations of her characters and the spaces that they inhabit, this novel takes as its principal concern the processes of travel and transportation that serve to move her characters across towns, cities and countries. Several Bowen critics have remarked on the significance of travel and movement in To the North (Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle in Still Lives [1995]; Hugh Haughton, in his introduction to the Vintage edition of the novel [1999]; Maud Ellmann in The Shadow Across the Page [2003]), such that the defining events in this novel have become those recurring moments of transit in which the characters find themselves in trains, planes or cars, and during which their literal and metaphorical journeys make headway. Central to this approach is the novel’s unusually active title, for as Bennett and Royle argue, ‘To the North is in motion from its title onwards’ (25). Echoing Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Bowen’s title is a battle cry for movement (Haughton xvii) which propels the plot instantly forward. In fact, the novel’s initial moment of departure from a train platform in Milan initiates a narrative thread which, as this paper will demonstrate, is governed by a sense of perpetual motion. Bowen begins and ends To the North with two journeys, on two different means of transportation, both of which, crucially, head northwards. Indeed, Ellmann recalls how the very idea for the novel came to Bowen on a drive out of London—like Emmeline at the end of the narrative—during which she observed a large road sign with ‘“TO THE NORTH” outlined against the sky’ (Ellmann 100; Heath 58). This article examines Bowen’s textual development of this recurring northern trajectory which, I argue, is achieved through the mobilisation of narrative registers that depict an uncharted and deathly ‘north’ as a physical and figurative site towards which the entire novel must move.
2Several scholars have approached ideas of death in To the North, particularly in relation to the protagonist, Emmeline Summers. Hermione Lee (1978), for example, describes Emmeline as an ‘unawakened ice maiden’ and an ‘unfallen angel’ who is ‘not quite of this world’ (131). Phyllis Lassner (1990) notes that Emmeline’s ‘glacial’ nature foreshadows her eventual turn into ‘a goddess of death’ who is driven primarily by ‘unleashed sexual passion’ (55). Ellmann designates To the North as a novel of transport and argues that ‘[o]ne may be “transported” from this world into the next’ (97). Examining trauma in Bowen’s novels, Jessica Gildersleeve (2014) sees Emmeline as existing in a kind of ‘death-in-livingness’ (16) in the wake of her brother’s passing. This angelic stillness, Gildersleeve argues, generates ‘a kind of detachment from life’ (21), a ‘psychic death’ (25) that ultimately heralds the novel’s fatal climax.
3Arguments in support of Emmeline’s ‘deathly’ qualities rest frequently on the novel’s repeated use of cold, Arctic metaphors (notwithstanding Emmeline’s last name, ‘Summers’ which, I believe, only serves to highlight her paradoxically cold nature). Yet, while the frigidity of the titular ‘north’ reappears in Bowen criticism, none have thus far addressed it as a spatial axis around which the novel’s movements are affixed. The most recent engagement with Emmeline’s excessive coldness is Diana Hirst’s ‘Shaking the cracked kaleidoscope’ (2018), in which she examines Bowen’s use of aesthetic patterns emblematic of the Modernist art movement, including Futurist fragmentation and collage. Hirst analyses Bowen’s inclusion of scattered ‘fragments’ or ‘splinters’ from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1844) which, she asserts, ‘contains several of Bowen’s leitmotifs: the mirror, the splinters or crystals of ice or glass, . . . and above all the coldness which envelopes Emmeline and permeates To the North’ (72). Hirst’s choice of The Snow Queen, which according to Peter Davidson (2005) ‘is one of the paradigmatic narratives of northward journey’ (74), is not arbitrary: Bowen’s novel refers to Andersen’s story when Cecilia (Emmeline’s sister-in-law) describes Gerda Bligh (already a nod to The Snow Queen) as ‘a bad illustration to Hans Andersen’ (Bowen 2016, 116). Hirst’s article does not, however, bring these glacial images into dialogue with the north itself as ‘the centre of metaphorical and actual cold’ (Davidson 75) or as a destination for what she rightly describes as the overall ‘violent movement’ of the novel (Hirst 2).
- 1 Some examples of literary works that featured Arctic, Polar and, indeed, even Alpine glacial imager (...)
- 2 In 1912, Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen would go on ‘the first of seven “Thule” expeditions’ to Gre (...)
4Indeed, Bowen’s articulation of space and movement in To the North reflects an established vocabulary of ‘northerness’, both as a physical and metaphorical space, by which the north comes to exceed its geographical coordinates and espouse a myriad of historical, cultural and subjective dimensions. As early as the eighteenth century, Western ideas of the north as the ‘outer frontier’—that extreme and importantly distant edge of the known world—offered works of imaginative literature the opportunity to explore ‘nightmare’ and ‘apocalyptic’ scenarios of physical and ‘mental deterioration’ (Fjågesund 255–256, 373) that carried colonial undertones of territorial conquest and of the Arctic ‘as a place of desire and dread’ (McCorristine 41).1 Within cultural geography, works such as Davidson’s The Idea of North, Francis Spufford’s I May be Some Time (1996), Peter Fjågesund’s The Dream of the North (2014) and, more recently, Shane McCorristine’s The Spectral Arctic (2018) have eschewed the rigid distribution of the territories, landscapes and seascapes of the north in favour of a broader set of definitions that, like the Arctic Sea ice which dominated Western imagination for several centuries, floats and drifts with the shifting historical and cultural tides.2
- 3 The postcard in question is by Belfast’s John Cleland & Sons and is titled ‘Ulster’s Prayer—Don’t L (...)
- 4 Known as the Starry Plough, the flag, with its green background and golden plough, features the sev (...)
5For Davidson, notions of the north are personal, individual and subjective (10). This is certainly true for Bowen and her contemporaries—indeed, even for most readers today—for whom the north in Ireland is synonymous with enduring Irish-British tensions. In her account of the history of Bowen’s Court (1942), Bowen notes that ‘Ulster clung with fervour to English rule. . . . There did maintain this difference between North and South: in Ulster, the Protestant Ascendancy was a living fact; in Munster, Leinster and Connaught it had become, within the last fifty years, a ghost only’ (430). Similarly, in The Last September (1929), which exposes the contentious status of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, Bowen’s protagonist admits that her country is like ‘an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast’ (Bowen 1998b, 34; emphasis added). This ‘mooring’ of Ireland may have been inspired by an Ulster Unionist postcard in which John Bull engages in a ‘tug-of-war’ to save the island—particularly its loyal, northern province—from ‘drifting away from Britain’ (Bryars and Harper 40–41).3 To the Protestant Ascendancy, Ireland remains ‘anchored by the solidity of Ulster unionism, in contrast to the instability that they believe had been instigated by republican violence in the south’ (Arrington 240). Imagery pertaining to the North Pole, particularly the North Star, Polaris, and the constellation of Ursa Major, was also significant to Ireland’s political history as the banner of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA).4 For Bowen’s Irish characters, the north in the early-twentieth century thus functions as ‘a kind of mental anchorage’ not unlike the North Pole itself which, as Fjågesund notes, served as an ambiguous yet ‘ever-present point of orientation . . . in the northern hemisphere’ (420).
6Ireland would become increasingly ‘northern’ for Bowen, gradually taking on qualities historically associated with the north, such as separation, isolation and uncanniness, as the spectre of its politically charged north continued to hover over her personal and literary lives. If in The Last September the country remains ‘moored at the north’ to Britain (Bowen 1998b, 34), in The House in Paris (1935) it becomes, according to Lauren Arrington (2016), entirely ‘unmoored’ (240), its geographical separation now more and more underscored by its political strife with and its social alienation from its neighbour. The House in Paris’s brief interlude into the past explores this estrangement; Karen Michaelis refers to Ireland as an ‘unstrange place’ (Bowen 1998a, 70), a ‘neologism’ which, Arrington notes, surely ‘hints at the Freudian unheimlich, the basis for the psychoanalytic uncanny’ (241). By the time Bowen would write A World of Love (1955)—her last Irish novel—all reluctance to directly confront the ‘frayed’ relationship between Ireland and its Protestant Ascendency is cast aside (Bowen 1998b, 34): Lilia Danby, a woman in the wrong marriage, the wrong house and perhaps even the wrong country, now questions if it is ‘the place itself, her mistrust of Ireland or the uncanny attentiveness of the country which keeps her nerves ever upon the stretch’ (Bowen 1999, 52–53). Indeed, Arrington recalls several lines from The House in Paris which reveal Ireland to be a ‘place . . . marked by absence and paralysis’ in which even ‘[n]ature is inert’ (240; emphasis added): ‘Cork consumes its own sound: the haze remained quite silent’ (Bowen 1998a, 67), ‘[a]ll the ticking clocks did nothing to time here’ (76) and Aunt Violet (whose death is foretold in this section) was ‘becoming each year more like an ageless primitive angel’ (70).
7While these examples affirm Bowen’s ambiguous relationship with Ireland amidst the ongoing deterioration of the ‘Anglo-Irish landed class’ (Arrington 240), they also confirm Ireland as a place that is metaphorically (aside from also being geopolitically) ‘northern.’ Karen’s cold, silent vision of County Cork in The House in Paris, for example, is almost Arctic in its stillness, particularly as it is witnessed from the deck of a moving ship: ‘soon she was back on deck. The sun brightened the vapoury white sky but never quite shone: both shores reflected its melting light’ (Bowen 1998a, 66–67). Here, Bowen’s description of Cork echoes a well-developed, collective lexicon of ‘northerness’ which, as I will argue, is also aesthetically mobilised in To the North through the novel’s constant negotiation between ideas of motion and stillness and, ultimately, life and death. In the following section, I aim to demonstrate how Bowen prods and examines these dialectical relationships in a novel which establishes a direct and even confrontational relationship with the physical and metaphorical space(s) of the north from the onset.
8Bowen’s idea of the north in this novel is a concept that is itself constantly being negotiated. To trace the trajectory of this narrative from its opening pages to its cliff-hanger ending is, in fact, to be going perpetually ‘north’, taking the Anglo-Italian express with Cecilia Summers and Markie Linkwater from the windy platforms of Milan, then calling at ‘Chiasso, Lucerne, Basle and Boulogne’ (Bowen 2016, 1). As their train navigates this varying European landscape, Italy gently fades away and then disappears altogether, while the approaching scenery unfolds progressively ahead like a film sequence of a train journey moving gradually northwards along a map: ‘To the north there were still the plains, the lakes, the gorges of the Ticino, but, as the glass brass-barred doors of the restaurant flashed and swung, that bright circular park outside with its rushing girdle of trams was the last of Italy’ (1; emphases added).
9Bowen’s novel suggests that the space around Cecilia—that mappable space of her journey—is both formed and transformed as she moves through it and towards it, for as Ulrika Maude (2014) notes, the landscape around Cecilia ‘undergoes a metamorphosis’ (37). While traversing the St. Gotthard Tunnel, Cecilia remarks that ‘one was in Switzerland, where dusk fell in sheets of rain. Unwilling, Cecilia could not avert her eyes from all that magnificence in wet cardboard: ravines, profuse torrents, crag, pine and snow-smeared precipice, chalets upon their brackets of hanging meadow’ (Bowen 2016, 2). Here, the backdrop to Cecilia’s train journey is rendered temporary, perhaps even staged, as ‘the splendor of the Swiss landscape is reduced to a set made from “wet cardboard”’ (Maude 37). By drawing attention to this transient scenery, Bowen affirms her interest in the creation of ephemeral, mobile and insubstantial space(s). London, too, a destination hitherto unobserved and thus undefined until Cecilia’s eventual arrival in the novel’s second chapter, appears to gradually gain texture and dimension as she draws closer to it; she wonders: ‘why she had let frail cords of sentiment and predilection draw her back from Italy to the cold island where, in St John’s Wood, the daffodils might not be out’ (Bowen 2016, 8). To the north of where Cecilia is at this early point in the novel, London remains provisional, a figment of her imagination that ‘might’ or ‘might not be’ and that is, in turn, produced en route. Crucially, upon Cecilia’s arrival at Folkestone, the novel’s first journey ‘to the north’ remains unfinished, for she must go even further, to London, echoing Davidson’s remark that the north is always ‘shifting and recessive. As you advance towards it, the true north recedes away northwards’ (22; emphasis added). By choosing to open her novel in Milan (in what is, historically, part of the European ‘south’), and by placing her readers on this ongoing journey northwards, Bowen establishes her idea of the north as a literal and metaphorical site that is always in motion.
10In the final pages of the novel, this perpetual journey north continues, now with Emmeline and Markie in a car as Emmeline drives them recklessly northwards towards an undefined destination yet, perhaps almost certainly, towards death: ‘As they steadily bore uphill to some funnel-point in the darkness . . . this icy rim to the known world began to possess his fancy, till he half expected its pale reflection ahead’ (Bowen 2016, 236). Markie, taken hostage by Emmeline on this frantic and final journey, can only imagine the ‘icy rim to the known world’ as their ultimate destination—as an end in itself—when it is, in fact, nothing more than a rapidly shifting horizon, something ‘expected . . . ahead’ which, as Bowen establishes from the beginning of the novel, can only continue to elude him (236). In The Arctic in the British Imagination (2000), Robert G. David notes how the north is often depicted as ‘a vast landscape of wide horizons devoid of any obvious destination’ (45). Bowen’s elusive ‘north’ similarly offers its characters no ‘obvious destination’ or final resting place. In fact, it offers its readers no possibility of a narrative denouement, either; rather, this retreating narrative ‘north’ serves instead to foreshadow the novel’s own open ending, a continuously receding conclusion that fails to materialize: Emmeline shuts her eyes, and the scene trails off into a soft and meaningless ‘Sorry’ (Bowen 2016, 306). Cecilia’s final, gentle plea to her fiancé, Julian Tower, in the novel’s closing line (‘Stay with me till she comes home’ [307]) similarly derails the novel’s fast-paced plot and shocks the narrative into a quiet, deathly stillness. Ultimately, the inconclusive, final scene concretizes the novel’s want of a definite ending by leaving its two surviving characters—and, indeed, even its readers—in a state of perpetual suspension.
11Through its depiction of a repeatedly receding northern horizon, Bowen’s novel offers the north not as a fixed or stable physical destination, but as a shifting, subjective and malleable space that can adapt to the figurative possibilities of literary representation. Several scholars have remarked on this notion of a variable north: Esther Leslie (2017) notes that Caspar David Friedrich painted Das Eismeer (1823–1824) despite having ‘never travelled to the northernmost North’ (7); Fjågesund observes how ‘the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands . . . represent[ed] various degrees of northernness within the British Isles’ (190); importantly, Davidson distinguishes between the geographic north and a distilled, poetic, absolute north’ often depicted in works of literature (245). Bowen’s novel is well-aligned with these ideas of a north that gradually comes into being, that shifts as the narrative progresses (in the same way that the magnetic North Pole shifts) and that is, in turn, not limited to the circumpolar Arctic as a real, physical site but encapsulates instead a wide set of figurative tropes that become more evident as the novel nears its end (that is, as it approaches its own ‘northernmost north’ [Leslie 7]).
- 5 Because of the challenges in attaining its summit, Mount Everest, for example, has historically oft (...)
12In Bowen’s novel, the word ‘north’ itself appears fourteen times; seven of those instances are to be found in its final pages, in a culmination of the novel’s excessive and progressive coldness: ‘The cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them as street by street the heat and exasperation of London kept flaking away. The glow slipped from the sky and the North laid its first chilly fingers upon their temples’ (Bowen 2016, 296). But Bowen’s heroines (as is often their nature) tend to exaggerate their intentions; Emmeline’s and Markie’s final journey ‘to the north’ takes them roughly to Hatfield (the last notable landmark mentioned in the novel), just twenty miles outside of London, never quite reaching Baldock and certainly nowhere near the ‘cold pole’ whose ‘magnetism’ Bowen seems so keen to articulate (236). Instead, Bowen’s novel engages with the possibility that the qualities and attributes associated with the north are not static and may be transplanted onto other, comparable sites which, as Davidson argues, ‘have been perceived to embody an idea or essence of north, or northness’ (22).5 The north offered to Emmeline at the end of the narrative is, therefore, only an indeterminate ‘elsewhere’—to borrow from Davidson (9)—whose primary narrative role is to stand in stark opposition to ‘the heat and exasperation of London’ from which the ‘claustrophobic’ heroine hopes to flee (Bowen 2016, 236, 161).
- 6 There is an interesting contradiction here between the north as ‘Unknown’ and the mappable presence (...)
13As noted in the introduction, Bowen takes inspiration for this novel from one of the road signs that even today continue to ambiguously indicate ‘THE NORTH’ as a broad destination for drivers in Britain, particularly in the south of England (Ellmann 101). These signs, Ellmann notes, ‘amuse visitors from larger countries, where “the North” would be far too vast for signposting’ (101). Bowen is not alone in being drawn to these geographical markers; for Davidson, these signs ‘have a poetic or symbolic status’ (23), precisely, I would add, because of this explicit vagueness. In The Great North Road (1961), Frank Morley (to whom Davidson also refers) cites art historian Herbert Read’s resounding statement that ‘The Way North is the Way into the Unknown’ (Read qtd. in Morley 312). Morley adds: ‘To me that is a true feeling which I always feel when I am driving on the Great North Road and see the sign which bears the three words “to the north”’ (312). By granting motorists no precise, regional directions, these generic signs can only announce entry into a ‘shapeless north’ (Davidson 30). They evade spatial specificity, offering instead an obscure and ‘vast’ topography, as Ellman describes it (101), that affirms Read’s—and indeed Bowen’s—experience of venturing into a great ‘Unknown’ (Read qtd. in Morley 312).6 Emmeline’s correspondingly vague but determined declaration (‘We’re going north’ [Bowen 2016, 296]) confirms this experience, calling to mind a wealth of literary references, for as Davidson notes,
To say ‘we leave for the north tonight’ brings immediate thoughts of a harder place, a place of dearth: uplands, adverse weather, remoteness from cities. . . . In an English-language fiction, the words ‘we leave for the north tonight’ would probably be spoken in a thriller, a fiction of action, of travel, of pursuit over wild country. (Davidson 11)
14To the North is a fitting example of this; by announcing that they are ‘going north’ (Bowen 2016, 296), Emmeline calls on these established connotations that Bowen’s readers would have been familiar with, allowing the atmosphere of the novel’s final car journey to suddenly acquire a sinister tone and foreshadowing the narrative’s tragic ending.
15Markie is the first to notice one of these prominent signs: ‘He saw “THE NORTH” written low, like a first whisper, on a yellow A.A. plate with an arrow pointing’ (Bowen 2016, 298). Shortly after, however, the narrative perspective shifts:
Like a shout from the top of a bank, like a loud chord struck on the dark, she [Emmeline] saw: ‘TO THE NORTH’ written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow. . . . An immense idea of departure—expresses getting steam up and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert—possessed her spirit, now launched like the long arrow. (304)
16For Markie, who is the reluctant passenger on this journey, any indicator of their potential destination is dwarfed by the fear experienced in response to Emmeline’s reckless driving: ‘The car hardly holding the road seemed to him past her control. Recalling his face in the taxi in Paris, she [Emmeline] saw he was very frightened’ (298–299). The ‘north’ towards which Emmeline drives offers Markie no real, concrete destination and so the sign appears to him unobtrusively, perhaps hoping to go unnoticed while simultaneously luring him into submission with a ‘whisper’ (298). Moreover, the arrow he observes appears only to point, but to point nowhere in particular. It indicates neither motion nor destination; rather, its navigational silence betrays Markie’s own wish to stop the car: ‘He said urgently: “Listen: turn back. Come back to the flat”’ (297).
17For Emmeline, on the other hand, this sign is the pivotal plot-point towards which the novel has been motioning from its very title and which affirms her sense of being finally in control. Unlike Markie’s ‘low . . . whisper’ (Bowen 2016, 304), this second sign appears like a ‘shout from the top of a bank’ (304), a reverberating sonic boom that instantly draws Emmeline’s—and the reader’s—attention to their presumed destination. Emmeline’s ‘north’ is significantly more prominent than Markie’s and the disparity in their perception of the road signs clearly marks this difference. Moreover, this loudly visible sign affirms for Emmeline the immense size of this imagined ‘north’ and announces the expansive length of their possible journey: ‘[r]unning dark under their wheels the miles mounted by tens’ (304). Unlike Markie’s, Emmeline’s ‘long arrow’ (304) offers her a sense of endurance, encouraging her to reject his appeal and to carry on driving endlessly northwards. Drawing attention to the paradox of an ‘immovably flying arrow’ (304), Bowen’s novel captures the contradiction inherent in Emmeline’s own kinetic experience and confirms her ceaseless potential for movement, both physically and metaphorically. Ultimately, the novel reveals Emmeline to be perpetually caught between a yearning for movement (made clear when she delineates what this ‘immense idea of departure’ truly entails for her [304]), and an opposing desire for eternal, ghostly stillness (marked by the death of her brother, Henry). In this final, climactic scene, Emmeline thus embraces the possibility of being both still and in motion, alive and dead; enclosed in a rapidly moving motorcar, she herself remains ‘fixed, immovable with excitement’ (302), driving onwards ‘to the north.’
18While the importance of the north as a destination (albeit an ephemeral one) is made explicit from the opening scene of Bowen’s To the North, my interest in this paper was to examine the wider connotations implied through her use of this cardinal motif as an organising metaphor for movement in this unusually active novel. As I have demonstrated in the preceding sections, the idea of the north in Bowen’s text not only initiates the narrative’s sense of motion, but also seals the fate of the novel’s protagonist. In fact, it is not only Bowen’s characters who are in perpetual motion to the north; rather, the north itself is presented as an ever-receding horizon, such that the novel’s titular car-ride ‘to the north’ remains open-ended and undefined. Ultimately, Emmeline’s unconfirmed death in the novel’s closing scene is a function of her own, cold ‘northerness’, associated with her embryonic relationship with her dead brother, Henry, and his lingering, phantasmal presence in her homosocial bond with Cecilia, her widowed sister-in-law. Through her figurative adoption of the historical and cultural tropes of the north, Bowen’s To the North espouses a narrative trajectory whereby the protagonist actively propels herself towards an undefined site characterized by a paradox of motion and stillness and, in turn, of life and death.
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