Galsworthy's Fraternity: The Closed Door and the Paralyzed Society

283 GALSWORTHY'S FRATERNITY : THE CLOSED DOOR AND THE PARALYZED SOCIETY By Harold Ray Stevens (Western Maryland College) I have seen a vision of fraternity. A barren hillside in the sun, and on it a man of stone talking to the wind. I have heard an owl hooting in the daytime; a cuckoo singing in the night. John Galsworthy commented in his preface to Fraternity (1909) that many people had labelled him a socialist, in part because he wrote the novel. Galsworthy disagreed, arguing that his purpose was to record, by presenting his characters in a "negative , quasi-satiric way," "that life presents but the ebbings of the tides of inequality, with floods again to follow." Problems of society are too deep to be solved either by the philosophy of socialism or that advocated by the visionary Mr. Stone, whose prescriptions for Universal Brotherhood go,unheeded. Happiness, Galsworthy continues, is the goal of life. But in Fraternity, which was originally entitled Shadows, human happiness is as inaccessible to the upper middle class world as it is to the world of the poor who shadow it, As Hilary and Bianca Dallison are unable and unwilling to confront the realities of their married life, so are they also unable to confront the realities of their responsibilities to society because they cannot free themselves from convention, social pressures, and the desire for comfort. Stephen and Cecilia Dallison, brother and sister of Hilary and Bianca, on the other hand, have made a comfortable if uninspired commitment to each other in married life; consequently they are able to make a relatively comfortable if uninspired and innocuous commitment to society, freely accepting the tightly structured world to which the upper middle class confines itself. Galsworthy thus suggests that marital harmony or the lack of it distinctly correlates to one's ability to live meaningfully in the larger social context. Perhaps the main difference between the upper middle classes represented by the Dallisons and the lower classes living in their shadow is that the Dallisons wish to see in abstract and general terms those who purportedly do not touch them. To a lesser degree than Stephen and Cecilia, Hilary and Bianca do not wish to be associated with anything "destructive of comfort" (p. 317)·" Inevitably , as the Dallisons pursue their interests, however, shadows intervene, causing great discomfort. In the uptight world that Galsworthy creates, the metaphor of the closed door consistently appears to symbolize both the surface frustration and the inner turmoil that forecloses on the possibility of happiness. Hilary and Bianca live, as Hilary explains it oxymoronically, in the discomfort that comes with "married celibacy" (p. 201). They close their doors to each other at night, and they speak to each other only through 284 strained, tightly smiling lips. The lower class world of Hound Street, on the other hand, is open and matter-of-fact; but this open life, like the Dallisons' purportedly closed life, is presented in metaphors suggesting strained frustration. The open doors of Hound Street lead to the destitute Hughs and to Ivy, the model who poses for Bianca's painting. Ivy's partially open lips in turn convey the frustration of her life and the suggestion of the inevitable life of prostitution that will follow. Galsworthv associates the cheap surface sexuality of Ivy with the sublimated sexuality of Bianca, which in turn causes the main tensions that shape Fraternity. The tensions permeating the world of the Dallisons correspond to the tensions of authorship that Galsworthy wrestled with as he attempted to present to respectable London society, in metaphors that he and the Dallisons might accept comfortably, a novel filled with the implications of the interaction of private sexual frustration and public social commitment. The extent to which both Galsworthy and the Dallisons succeed is the subject of this study. Hilary and Bianca Dallison, author and dilettantish painter respectively, are the focal characters of Fraternity. Representing the more advanced and liberal aspects of upper middle class society, they might be expected to live enlightened lives that inspire others. In fact, they are victims of the paralysis of their own creation.^ Married some eighteen years, presumably at the top of their aesthetic and...